50 Years Later – The Cuban Missile Crisis

October 22, 2012 PBS Wisconsin Leave a Comment

To many public television viewers the events that occurred fifty years ago this week may be all too familiar. Some of you likely have memories of practicing nuclear disaster drills in grade school. For others, the Cuban Missile Crisis may simply be something you studied in school, just a note in the chapter on JFK’s presidency. Whatever your knowledge is of the subject, chances are the two specials scheduled for Tuesday night will hold your attention and possibly even reveal something new about the time when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war.

Watch both of these exciting specials beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 23.

The Cuban Missile Crisis: Three Men Go To War – first major feature documentary on the subject – brings to life the three central characters – Kennedy, Castro and Khrushchev – and explores how the world’s most powerful men fell into an abyss of their own making and outlines the courage and luck it took to climb out again.

And Secrets of the Dead “The Man Who Saved the World” explores the dramatic and little-known events that unfolded inside a Soviet B-59 submarine in the waters off the coast of Florida. While politicians desperately sought a solution to the standoff between Russia, the U.S. and Cuba, no one was aware of what was happening beneath the waves. The story of Vasili Arkhipov, the man who refused to fire the nuclear missile, was hidden for decades, only emerging in Russia in recent years. The program combines tense drama with eyewitness accounts and expert testimony about a critical event during the Cold War.

PBS Wisconsin Public Television Vasili Arkhipov Cuban Missile Crisis