Fallout

In June 1953, a thirteen-year-old Brooklyn paperboy named Jimmy Bozart dropped his weekly collection money in a stairwell. One of the nickels cracked open, revealing a tiny piece of film bearing columns of five-digit numbers. Bozart showed the coin to his father, and it reached a detective who turned it over to the FBI. Agents identified the coin as an espionage tool, but code breakers could not decipher the message. Bozart had unknowingly stumbled into the hidden machinery of the Cold War, the superpower rivalry that would bring the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

The coin's maker was Rudolf Abel, the highest-ranking Soviet spy in America. In 1948, Abel swore an oath at the KGB, the Soviet intelligence and secret-police service, and traveled to New York under false identities to expand Soviet espionage. Abel, who had worked undercover behind German lines in World War II, met Lona Cohen, a Soviet agent, at the Bronx Zoo and began building a spy network. By 1949, the Soviets had tested their own atomic bomb, and President Harry Truman announced the pursuit of the hydrogen bomb. When British authorities arrested physicist Klaus Fuchs for passing atomic secrets, the Cohens were ordered to flee, leaving Abel alone in Brooklyn, where he posed as a painter and crafted spy gadgets.

At Los Alamos, physicists Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam solved the design problem for the hydrogen bomb, a weapon harnessing nuclear fusion. In 1952, the U.S. tested the first such weapon; it was 500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The Soviets matched this capability. The consequences proved horrifying: In 1954, the crew of a Japanese fishing boat witnessed a test at Bikini Atoll from eighty miles away; radioactive fallout caused severe radiation sickness and one death.

After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev, considered roughly the fifth most powerful figure in Stalin's inner circle, outmaneuvered rivals and emerged as the new Soviet leader. Born into poverty, Khrushchev was determined to prove the Soviet system superior. Abel, meanwhile, received a disastrously incompetent partner from Moscow: Reino Hayhanen, who accidentally spent the hollow nickel containing Abel's coded message, sending it into Bozart's hands. The film used one-time pad encryption, impossible to crack, leaving the FBI at a dead end.

The CIA recruited 26-year-old Air Force pilot Francis Gary Powers to fly the U-2, a top-secret spy plane that photographed Soviet installations from 70,000 feet. Flights over the Soviet Union began in 1956, producing invaluable intelligence. In 1957, Hayhanen defected in Paris, exposing Abel, who was arrested and convicted. That same year, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Abel's lawyer, James Donovan, argued against the death penalty, suggesting Abel might someday be traded for an American prisoner.

Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959 and met President Dwight Eisenhower at Camp David, raising hopes for peace and planning a summit in Paris. Eisenhower approved U-2 flights until May 1, 1960, and the final mission fell to Powers. A Soviet missile struck his plane over the Ural Mountains. Powers parachuted down, choosing not to use a poison needle hidden in a hollow silver dollar. Khrushchev let Eisenhower issue a false cover story before revealing that the Soviets had the wreckage and the living pilot. The summit collapsed. Powers was tried in Moscow and sentenced to fifteen years.

John Kennedy won the 1960 election, but his early months proved disastrous. In April 1961, a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, carried out by fourteen hundred anti-Castro exiles, failed when Kennedy refused air support, unwilling to escalate to open American involvement. That same month, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. At a Vienna summit in June, Khrushchev bullied Kennedy over Berlin, where East Germans were fleeing to the West. Kennedy left shaken, telling aides Khrushchev treated him "like a little boy" (157). On August 13, East Germany sealed the border with barbed wire and concrete, creating the Berlin Wall. East Berlin resident and competitive cyclist Harry Seidel escaped by swimming the Spree River and began digging tunnels under the wall to bring others to freedom.

Meanwhile, Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in Soviet military intelligence, offered to spy for the West. British businessman Greville Wynne, recruited by MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, arranged Penkovsky's travel to London for debriefings. In Moscow, Penkovsky photographed classified missile documents and passed film to Janet Chisholm, wife of the MI6 station chief. His intelligence gave Kennedy a window into Soviet military capabilities.

In 1962, Khrushchev secretly deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba to counter American missiles in Turkey and protect Fidel Castro's government. Four submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes also departed for the Caribbean, their commanders authorized to fire if out of contact and under attack. On October 14, a U-2 photographed Soviet missile sites in Cuba, confirmed using Penkovsky's intelligence.

Kennedy assembled his advisers into ExComm, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. The group debated an air strike versus a naval blockade. Kennedy chose the blockade, which bought time for diplomacy, and announced the crisis on October 22. The U.S. Strategic Air Command, the nuclear bomber force, went to DEFCON 2, the second-highest military alert level, for the first time in history.

Over the following days, the crisis deepened. Soviet ships approaching the blockade turned back, but missiles in Cuba remained operational. Accidents nearly triggered war: A U-2 pilot strayed into Soviet airspace; a bear tripped a radar alarm, nearly launching nuclear-armed jets; a Soviet commander shot down a U-2 over Cuba without authorization, killing U-2 pilot Rudolf Anderson. Beneath the Caribbean, submarine B-59, pounded by American depth charges in suffocating heat, seemed trapped. Captain Savitsky, convinced war had begun, ordered the nuclear torpedo loaded. Vasili Arkhipov, the brigade's chief of staff aboard B-59, refused to authorize the launch, arguing the Americans could have sunk them if they intended to. Savitsky relented. Arkhipov's refusal likely prevented a full-scale nuclear exchange.

Kennedy accepted Khrushchev's proposal: missiles out of Cuba in exchange for a pledge not to invade. His brother Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general, secretly promised Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the U.S. would quietly remove its Turkish missiles within months. On October 28, rattled by false intelligence, Khrushchev dictated an acceptance and ordered it broadcast on Radio Moscow. An aide raced to the radio center, got stuck in an elevator, and slid the pages through a crack in the doors. The crisis was over.

Its aftershocks rippled for years. Penkovsky was arrested and executed in May 1963. Seidel was imprisoned by the East German secret police and eventually freed. Powers, traded for Abel in February 1962, was publicly blamed for his capture but posthumously awarded the Silver Star in 2012. Kennedy and Khrushchev signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Khrushchev was ousted by Soviet leaders in 1964. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The global nuclear stockpile declined from over sixty-nine thousand weapons to about thirteen thousand. Former officials later revealed how much closer the world had come to destruction than anyone knew. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concluded: "At the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war."