What was the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation that took
place in 1962 between the United States and the Soviet Union over the Soviet Union's
sending of nuclear missiles to Fidel Castro (1926– ), the Communist leader of Cuba, an
island nation 90 miles south of Florida. (Communism is a system of government in which
the state controls the economy and only one political party holds power.) On October 14,
1962, an American U-2 spy plane photographed the missile sites the Soviets were building
on Cuba. Some 40,000 Soviet soldiers were on the island, as were 20 missiles tipped with
nuclear warheads. Such missiles would be able to reach the continental United States.
The belief was that the Soviet Union and the United States were on the brink of nuclear
war. U.S. President John Kennedy (1917–1963) demanded that the Soviets remove the
missiles from Cuba, and he ordered a naval quarantine (forced confinement) of the
country. American ships would stop any incoming vessels and search them for weapons
before allowing them access to Cuba. Kennedy negotiated with Soviet premier (leader)
Nikita Khrushchev pronounced (1894–1971), who also wanted to resolve the crisis short of
nuclear war. The Soviet Union agreed to move its missiles from Cuba in return for a U.S.
pledge that it would not attack Cuba. Secretly the United States also agreed to remove
missiles from Turkey, although Kennedy had actually ordered their removal prior to the
crisis because the missiles were
outdated.

Further Information:
Broderick, Jim. "Berlin and Cuba, Cold War Hotspots." History
Today. December, 1998, p. 23; Garnett, John. "Face to Face with Armageddon."
History Today. March, 1999, p. 34; Gow, Catherine. The
Cuban Missile Crisis. San Diego: Lucent, 1997; Kort, Michael G. The
Cold War. Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press, 1994; Tegnell, Geoffrey, and
Thomas Ladenburg. Revolution and Intervention: U.S.–Cuban
Relations in the Twentieth Century. Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Education
Consortium, 1992.