Cuban Missile Crisis: The Showdown

Published: Oct. 26, 2012, 8:50 a.m.

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Fifty years ago, the USA and the Soviet Union were poised to go to war over nuclear weapons in Cuba.

The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev finally offered to withdraw the missiles as the crisis came to a head.

His son Sergei remembers those fraught few days.

Photo: Courtesy of Sergei Khrushchev.

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