The history of the Cuban Missile Crisis Matthew A Jordan TED-Ed

The US had no plan for a response in place because it had never expected that the Soviets would install nuclear missiles on Cuba. On 16 October, President Kennedy notified Attorney General Robert Kennedy that he was convinced the Soviets were placing missiles on Cuba, that it was a legitimate threat and that the possibility of nuclear destruction by two world superpowers had become a reality. Although he provided no direct reports of Soviet missile deployments to Cuba, technical and doctrinal details of Soviet missile regiments that had been provided by Penkovsky in the months and years prior to the crisis helped NPIC analysts to identify the missiles in U-2 imagery. The R-12 was a medium-range ballistic missile capable of carrying a thermonuclear warhead.

Leading Soviet figures failed to mention that only the Cuban government could agree to inspections of the territory, and continued to make arrangements relating to Cuba without Castro’s knowledge. Kennedy had no intention of keeping these plans secret, and with an array of Cuban and Soviet spies present Khrushchev was made aware of them. The Soviets had shown no indication that they would back down and had made public media and private inter-government statements to that effect. He was persuaded to wait and continue with military and diplomatic pressure.

How America Jump-Started Iran’s Nuclear Program

Khrushchev lost power and was airbrushed out of the story and Cuba was no longer portrayed as a heroic David against the American Goliath. He defused the seemingly intractable situation, which risked re-escalating the crisis, on 22 November 1962. Anastas Mikoyan had the task of negotiating with Castro over the missile transfer deal to prevent a breakdown in relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union. The resulting war might have led to the deaths of over 100 million Americans and over 100 million Russians.

• In these calls, Kennedy revealed that he thought the crisis would result in the two superpowers being “toe to toe” in Berlin by the end of the following month and expressed concern that the Soviet setback in Cuba would “make things tougher” there.
• The Cuban missile crisis was a major confrontation in 1962 that brought the United States and the Soviet Union close to war over the presence of Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Cuba.
• For nearly the next two weeks, the president and his team wrestled with a diplomatic crisis of epic proportions, as did their counterparts in the Soviet Union.
• He also informed his predecessors that he had rejected the public Soviet offer to withdraw from Cuba in exchange for the withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey.
• It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

Key events in the Cuban Missile Crisis

Placing nuclear missiles on Cuba would have created a balance of mutual assured destruction. If the US tried to bargain with the Soviets after it became aware of them, Khrushchev could demand a trade of the missiles for West Berlin. Soviet nuclear capability in 1962 placed less emphasis on ICBMs than on medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) which could strike American allies and most of Alaska from Soviet territory, but not the contiguous United States.

The Cuban leadership was further upset when on 20 September, the US Senate approved Joint Resolution 230, which stated that the US was determined “to prevent in Cuba the creation or use of an externally-supported military prabhu bet capability endangering the security of the United States”. A later confirming source for Keating’s information may have been the West German ambassador to Cuba, who had received information from dissidents inside Cuba that Soviet troops had arrived in Cuba in early August and were seen working “in all probability on or near a missile base”. He charged the Kennedy administration with covering up a major threat to the US, thereby starting the crisis. With important Congressional elections scheduled for November, the crisis became enmeshed in American politics. As early as August 1962, the US suspected that the Soviets were building missile facilities in Cuba.

In 1961 the Soviets had four R-7 Semyorka intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); by October 1962, some intelligence estimates indicated a figure of 75. When Kennedy ran for president in 1960, one of his key election issues was an alleged “missile gap” with the Soviets. In January 1962, US Air Force General Edward Lansdale described the plans to overthrow the Cuban government in a top-secret report, addressed to Kennedy and officials involved with Operation Mongoose.