Armageddon Letters: A New Look at the Cuban Missile Crisis
October 16, 2012
Still from "Be Kruschev," one of a series of short films that helps tell the Armageddon Letters story.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, a 13-day nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union and Cuba. The Armageddon Letters, a transmedia project that grew out of collaborative research begun at the Institute, explores some of the lingering lessons and puzzles of those days in October 1962.
The Armageddon Letters, based at Waterloo University in Canada, combines a book, graphics, short films, podcasts and blogs to share fresh analysis of the crisis and publicize information contained in newly unclassified documents. The project is intended, in part, to "draw in generations for whom the event is something of a non-event."
To this end, the Institute-based Choices Program has prepared a short activity using the project's materials. This material expands the Choices Program's full-length curriculum unit on the topic.