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Cuban missile crisisThe Cuban missile crisis was the clash between the USSR and the USA over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis began on October 15, 1962 and lasted for thirteen days.
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Nikita Khrushchev had devised the plan in May of 1962, and by late July over sixty Soviet ships were en-route to Cuba, with some of them carrying military material. John McCone[?], director of the CIA, warned Kennedy that some of the ships were probably carrying missiles but a meeting of John and Robert Kennedy, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara decided that the Soviets would not try such a thing.
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Picture of one of the Soviet missile sites in Cuba |
A number of unconnected problems meant that the missiles were not discovered by the Americans until a U-2 flight of October 14 clearly showed the construction of an SS-4 site near San Cristobal[?]. By October 19 the then almost continuous U-2 flights showed four sites were operational. Initially, the US government kept the information secret, telling only the fourteen key officials of the executive committee. Britain was not informed until the evening of October 21.
There were a number of issues with the naval blockade. There was legality - as Fidel Castro noted, there was nothing illegal about the missile installations; they were certainly a threat to the US, but similar missiles aimed at the USSR were in place in Britain, Italy and Turkey. Then there was the Soviet reaction to the blockade - would a conflict start out of escalating retaliation?
Kennedy spoke to the US people (and the Soviet government) in a televised address on October 22. He announced the naval blockade as a quarantine zone of 500 miles around the Cuban coast, warned that the military was "prepare[d] for any eventualities", and condemned the Soviet "secrecy and deception". The US was surprised at the solid support from its European allies and also from much of the remaining international community.
The case was conclusively proved on October 25 at an emergency session of the UN, during which US ambassador Adlai Stevenson showed photographs of Russian missile installations in Cuba, just after Soviet ambassador Zorin had denied their existence.
The Soviets had delivered two different deals to the American government. On October 26, they offered to withdraw the missiles in return for a US guarantee not to invade Cuba or support any invasion. The second deal was broadcast on public radio on October 27, calling for the withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey in addition to the demands of the 26th. The crisis peaked on October 27, when a U-2 was shot down over Cuba and another U-2 flight over Russia was almost intercepted. At the same time, Soviet merchant ships were nearing the quarantine zone. Kennedy responded by publicly accepting the first deal and sending Robert to the Soviet embassy to accept the second in private - the small number of Jupiter missiles in Turkey would be removed. The Soviet ships turned back. "We went eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked".
America military commanders were not happy with the result either. Curtis LeMay told the President that it was "the greatest defeat in our history" and that they should invade today. But the event brought much needed stability to the US-USSR strategic relationship.
The events of the Crisis are dramatized in the movie Thirteen Days (2000), directed by Roger Donaldson[?] and starring Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood[?] and Steven Culp[?].
IMDB entry for Thirteen Days (http://www.imdb.com/Title?0146309)
See also: Cold War
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