One thing that I cannot find a second citation for but really intrigued me is that there is apparently some kind of parallel-narrative around the double agent Oleg Penkovsky - at first glance he gave information to the west about the situation in Cuba, but on closer inspection some of his antics may be too good to be true (he apparently made it in and out of the Soviet Union alive despite being rumbled). Peter Wright in Spycatcher says that Penkovsky's assessments data of Soviet ICBM accuracy often didn't line up with satellite imagery of their missile testing ranges.
Ultimately we'll never know but its fascinating just how much we don't know about the cold war.
"I wouldn't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor."
The US's version was written by the white house's journalist. It is not objective and lots has been refuted from calls leaked by the soviets after the fact, and a few of the advisors too.
TruTV/Adam Ruins Everything has a take on it [0] (not saying that's the objective history but they raise some eyebrows).
Some facts we do know though:
1. JFK rode on an anti-communist wave to beat his opponent into office
2. The US moved missiles first
3. The military was following orders from the top
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5wc9V7ggVg
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EDIT: on some reflection, I think I actually just proved your point. If that was just left to the military then cooler heads may not have prevailed
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-mi...
For extra nightmare fuel "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25663779-the-doomsday...
The latter book literally gave me nightmares.
"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.
I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html
"A hundred Holocausts" - that has haunted me ever since I first read it.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almo...
