Recordings: Kennedy saw nuclear test ban as Cold War thaw

Former President John F. Kennedy saw a proposed ban on aboveground nuclear tests as a way to thaw U.S.-Soviet relations after the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to recordings released Thursday. “If it does represent a possibility of avoiding the kind of collision that we had last fall in Cuba, which was quite close, and Berlin in 1961, we should seize the chance,” Kennedy said in a July 1963 meeting with top government scientists.

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