22 October 1962: President Kennedy goes on prime-time TV and announces a blockade around Cuba to prevent more Soviet missiles reaching the island. But US sailors call the so-called ‘quarantine’ nothing but ‘grand theatrics.’ Not a single Soviet ship is stopped by the US Navy. What was going on?

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15 October 1962: Soviet nuclear missile sites are discovered. It’s only three weeks before the mid-term elections. Kennedy decides that to negotiate publicly with Khrushchev would be a disaster at the polls; as would ignoring them which is what his allies advise him to do. So, as Noam Chomsky puts it, the President chooses ‘to play Russian Roulette with nuclear missiles.’

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The Cuban Missile Crisis begins not because Castro is a dangerous communist but because he is NOT. Khrushchev tells his ruling council: ‘The only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there’ - not only to prevent an American invasion, but also to keep Fidel Castro sweet.

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1959: The first country the new revolutionary president of Cuba visits is the United States of America. And he’s a big hit. The students at Princeton carry him on their shoulders. Castro wants a trade deal with the American government. So why does Kennedy fight the presidential election of 1960 on getting tougher than the Republicans with Cuba?

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We have the memo to President Kennedy dated Day 2 of the crisis with his own security chiefs clarifying that 'these missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power.' So why does October 1962 develop into the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war?

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We complete our exploration of the dark shadows in the background of Cecil Beaton’s sunny photograph. The laws of the time made it perfectly possible to prevent Edward VIII from marrying Wallis Simpson. Then there wouldn’t have been any point in abdicating. But nobody even tried. Did the yet-to-be-crowned king himself manufacture the crisis? Or had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, by never revealing the private letters he had from Wallis Simpson, carried off a very British palace coup?

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As the newly appointed king, but not yet crowned, Edward VIII secretly told the Nazis he admired, that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself…. Who is king here? Baldwin or I?’ Did Prime Minister Baldwin get rid of the King because he was too pro-Nazi, as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, maintained? Or was there another reason?

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2 May 1937. Cecil Beaton photographs for American Vogue the twice-divorced American heiress soon to marry the ex-King Edward VIII. Wallis Simpson wears a Schiaparelli ‘waltz dress’ with a Salvador Dali red lobster down her skirt. The setting is a French chateau belonging to the American businessman who a few months later will mastermind the Windsors’ honeymoon tour of Germany. But what – other than Wallis Simpson - connects all these people?

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Who won the Battle of Britain? For good strategic reasons Churchill claimed victory. But the Germans, who saw the eight months of the Blitz as part of the same campaign, achieved much of what they intended.

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The Battle of Britain was never as close as the popular story has it. The RAF was too well organised and supplied. But is that why the Luftwaffe switched to bombing London? Or was there another reason?

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