Welcome to Foreign Affairs Summer Reads. For the next three months, we’re sharing some of our favorite essays from the archives that shed light on secret histories and untold stories in international affairs. First up is Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok’s 2023 essay on what a trove of newly released top-secret Soviet documents reveal about the blunders Moscow made in the lead-up to the most hair-raising of Cold War confrontations: the Cuban missile crisis.

Detailing the revelations hidden in hundreds of pages of recently declassified documents, Radchenko and Zubok disclose the true story about why the Soviets’ massive operation to station ballistic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil in 1962 failed so spectacularly. “Far from being an impressive display of Soviet cunning and power,” they write, the mission “was plagued by a profound lack of understanding of on-the-ground conditions in Cuba.” The defining event of the nuclear age—13 frightening days when “the world stood on the brink of nuclear war”—was brought about by “a small coterie of high officials” who, “acting in extreme secrecy, drew up a sloppy plan for an operation that was doomed to fail and never allowed anyone else to question their assumptions.”

The revelations, Radchenko and Zubok write, “have special resonance at a time when, once again, a leader in the Kremlin is engaged in a risky foreign gambit, confronting the West as the specter of nuclear war lurks in the background.” Russia, it seems, “still has not learned the lesson of the Cuban missile crisis: that the whims of an autocratic ruler can lead his country into a geopolitical cul-de-sac—and the world to the edge of calamity.”