1 An enraged Nikita Khrushchev instructed Soviet ships to ignore President Kennedy's naval blockade during the Cuban missile crisis, but the order was reversed just hours before an inevitable confrontation, according to a new book.
2 James G. Blight and David A. Welch of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government say that 'if this order had held, war between the superpowers would probably have commenced at sea, shortly after 10 o'clock on Wednesday morning, Oct. 24, 1962, several hundred miles off the coast of Cuba.'
3 Anastas Mikoyan, then Soviet first deputy premier, was the catalyst for the reversal of Khrushchev's order, according to the authors.
4 Mikoyan 'preempted Khrushchev's order to run the blockade and ordered Soviet ships to stop just short of the quarantine line,' they say.
5 But Blight and Welch said at a news conference Wednesday that it remains unclear whether Mikoyan reversed or circumvented the decision on his own or convinced Khrushchev of its perils.
6 Welch said the order was reversed just hours before Soviet ships reached U.S. forces.
7 The book, 'On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis,' is based largely on two 1987 conferences sponsored by Harvard -- one that featured top Kennedy advisers and U.S. scholars and a second in which three Soviets joined the Americans.
8 The book will serve as a backdrop for a third conference scheduled for Jan. 27-29 in Moscow featuring, for the first time, Soviet, American and Cuban officials who participated in the crisis, which was triggered when Soviet troops began installing missiles in Cuba capable of reaching the United States.
9 Secret correspondence between Kennedy and Khrushchev concerning the missile crisis is expected to be released at the conference, according to Harvard officials.
10 The book said Khrushchev's order to ignore the blockade was disclosed in a largely unknown work by dissident Soviet historian Roy Medvedev.
11 The Harvard authors said much of the information has been confirmed independently by Mikoyan's son, Sergo, who was an aide to his father during the crisis.
12 The authors also conclude that the missiles in Cuba probably did not have warheads.
13 Their theory that the warheads were blocked by the quarantine is at odds with a recent disclosure by Aleksander Alekseev, the former ambassador to Cuba, who said in a recent Soviet magazine that 42 medium-range missiles were fully operational.
14 But the authors suggested that Alekseev, along with others in the Soviet diplomatic corps, were not receiving accurate information from Moscow about the missiles.

Mikoyan " preempted Khrushchev ' s order to run the blockade and ordered Soviet ships to stop just short of the quarantine line , " they say .
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