DAY 12: The Herald continues its look back at how the paper covered the Cuban Missile Crisis, which unfolded 55 years ago this month.

IT came to be known as Black Saturday. The crisis was acquiring a logic and momentum of its own, author Michael Dobbs would later write. Armies were mobilizing, planes and missiles were being placed on alert, generals were demanding action. The situation was changing minute by minute. The machinery of war was in motion. The world was hurtling towards a nuclear conflict.

Soviet and Cuban troops on Havana were bracing themselves for an American invasion. The White House learned that five medium-range missile sites were operational and that it would not be long before the sixth was, too. Kennedy asked how many Americans would be killed if one Soviet missile landed near a US city and was told, ‘Six hundred thousand’.

The pilot of a US spy plane, Major Rudolf Anderson jnr, was killed when his plane was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile.

Then another letter from Khrushchev raised the stakes: he said he would withdraw the Cuban missiles if Kennedy withdrew U.S. rockets from Turkey. Kennedy’s Ex Comm – Executive Committee – met three times on the Saturday, deciding to ignore the letter and respond to an earlier, more conciliatory, one from the Soviet premier.

Writes Dobbs: “In the absence of government action, ordinary Americans were left to fend for themselves. Waves of panic buying swept through some cities but bypassed others.” There was panic-buying in Miami and Washington; there was a marked increase in gun sales in Texas and Virginia.

In Glasgow, Maria Fyfe – later a Labour MP, then a 23-year-old employee at the Scottish Gas Board HQ on George Square – feared the worst. She recalled: “Many of us in that Cold War period were learning First Aid, and the government was handing out leaflets about sheltering under a table if the four-minute warning was heard. So when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted, we really feared this was it.

“In those days office workers did a Saturday morning shift, but none of us were doing any work that day. We were glued to radios that people had brought in. The day wore on with tension mounting. When I went to bed that night I heard a siren go off in the distance. I remember thinking, is this the four-minute warning starting? What should I do with maybe only four minutes left to live? I did nothing, just lay there thinking. It transpired later the siren was a fire alarm going off some distance away.”

She asked her brother Jim, who worked in the aircraft industry in the States, why the Americans were so het up about missiles in Cuba, when they themselves had missiles placed all over Europe pointing at Russia, and Turkey for example was nearer to Moscow than Cuba was to Washington. He said replied, "Most Americans don't know where Turkey is, but no President can survive backing down on missiles pointed at American territory."

Later that day, Robert Kennedy met in secret with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. They reach an understanding that the Soviets would withdraw the Cuba missiles under UN supervision in exchange for an American promise not to invade Cuba. Additionally, there secret understanding that the US would eventually remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

Sources: One Minute to Midnight (Michael Dobbs); JFK Presidential Library and Museum.

TOMORROW: Radio Moscow releases the text of another Khrushchev letter.