In 1962 U-2 reconnaissance photographs revealed Soviet missile installations in Cuba, triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fixed-wing surveillance aircraft supplied evidence that shaped one of the most dangerous confrontations of the Cold War. The crisis brought the world close to nuclear war.

The episode made the aerial photograph a document of existential dread. Cold War poets and dramatists wrote under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, a shadow partly cast by aircraft that made hidden threats visible.