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“We went Eyeball to eyeball and I think the other fellow just blinked”
The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
- 90 miles off Florida
- Place for rich and mobs where all the Casino used to be
- American's supported a corrupt regime under Fulgencio Batista until the Cuban revolution in 1959
- Fidel Castro took over
- Alligned with the Soviets
- The Bay of Pigs (Failed invasion of Cuba)
- 1962 Soviets begin to put Nuclear weapons into Cuba (Noticed by U2 spy planes)
The Crisis
- US had 3 options:
- Diplomatic solution (negotiation)
- A conventional attack - air attack followed by invasion (destroying all the missiles) but had to make sure to destroy ALL the missiles
- A naval blockade
- Robert Kennedy, attorney general, convinced Security Council to go with blockade
- Ships turn around at the quarantine
- 2 Letters sent from Krushchev to Kennedy
- Brinkmanship ensues (U.N. gets involved)
- Russians pull out of Cuba in exchange for a removal of missiles in Turkey at a later date
- Directly resulted in the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1962
Summary
The Cuban missile crisis was a 13-day confrontation between the Soviet Union and Cuba on one side, and the United States on the other, in October 1962. It is one of the major confrontations of the Cold War, and is generally regarded as the moment in which the Cold War came closest to turning into a nuclear conflict.