Travel back in time together with TimeGhost

In October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world one launch code away from full on nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. This documentary series will cover that crisis one day at a time.

This series follows the Cuban Missile Crisis day, by day. In this initial prologue we explore some of the background to the crisis. During the 1950s the ideological divide between totalitarian Communism and democratic capitalism pits the USSR against the US as both super powers try to expand their sphere fo influence. In parallel a series of misunderstandings and false assumptions heats up the nuclear arms race and sees the US pull further ahead of the USSR in military dominance. The increasing pressure on both sides eventually brings them head to head during several covert operations, proxy wars and, direct confrontations including the Berlin Crisis and eventually the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For 13 days in October 1962 the world came closer to nuclear holocaust than ever before, but the Cuban Missile Crisis didn’t start in Cuba - it had its roots in Berlin, Italy and Turkey, the domestic political situation in the US facing the newly elected President John F Kennedy, and in the USSR, where Premier Nikita Khrushchev had taken leadership of the Soviet through a harsh four year power struggle after Stalin’s death in 1953 .

This is what would happen if you would drop Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated, over Paris. Nuclear arms are insane! In October and November the TimeGhost chronological documentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis covers the weeks in October 1962, when humanity came terrifyingly close to nuclear holocaust

Hi, I’m Indy Neidell, writer and host of The Great War, the first ever global real time interactive documentary. Together with Spartacus Olsson, who started The Great War series with me and produced the first two seasons, I'm now setting off on a huge new adventure to make even more awesome historical content, even while I continue with the Great War.

We’ve always had to rely on the support of a big network to create content... which was great, but now we want to be able to decide independently what content, how much content, and what projects we do- together with you, our viewers, our fans.

Some new stuff coming up and most of all... thank you, thank you, thank you. Thanks for subscribing, thanks for liking the Cuban Missile Crisis and, special thanks to all of you that are already supporting us on Patreon!

On October 22, 1962 US President John F. Kennedy addressed the nation to tell them about Soviet missiles on Cuba and, that the US was about to initiate a blockade Cuba. It was the first television announcement of an international military crisis in history and, plunged the world into fear of World War III and all out nuclear war between the superpowers USA and USSR.