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The Cuban Missile Crisis was a tense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis began on October 16, 1962 and lasted for thirteen days. It is regarded by many as the moment when the Cold War was closest to becoming nuclear war.1 Prelude
1.1 Soviet Strategy
The Soviet government determined in 1959 that any future war would be largely nuclear and would probably be a world wide war and in that same year the Strategic Rocket Forces were founded. The Soviet government became increasingly militaristic in the face of Kennedy's rearmament program. The Soviets decided to install nuclear weapons in Cuba, a Caribbean nation off the coast of Florida whose government had become Communist as a result of the Cuban Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power; Cuba's government sought Soviet support after the collapse of its relations with the U.S. due to the expropriation of U.S. properties in Cuba and a subsequent CIAThis article is about the foreign intelligence service of the United States of America. For other uses of the term CIA see CIA (disambiguation . The Central Intelligence Agency CIA is the United States' foreign intelligence agency, responsible for obtaini-backed attempt of invasion of Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs InvasionThe Bay of Pigs Invasion (also known in Cuba as La Playa Giron after a beach in the Bay of Pigs where the landing took place) was a United States planned and funded landing by armed Cuban exiles on southern Cuba in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban social. Soviet reasoning was two-fold -- first, to defend this new Communist state from American or American-sponsored invasion, and second, to shift the nuclear balance of power away from the U.S.
1.2 American missile sites in Turkey
The U.S. had recently begun to deploy fifteen Jupiter IRBMThe Jupiter Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM first tested in 1957, was the United States' second IRBM ( Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile). Given the designation PGM-19, it was a liquid-fueled ( LOX and RP-1) rocket, with one engine producing (intermediate-range ballistic missiles) missiles near IzmirIzmir ( Turkish spelling Izmir contraction of its former name Smyrna in Greek), the second-largest port (after Istanbul) and the third most populous city of Turkey is located on the Aegean Sea near the Gulf of Izmir. It is the capital of the Izmir Provinc, TurkeyTurkey (officially the Republic of Turkey Turkish Turkiye is a country located in Southwest Asia with a small part in southeastern Europe. Until 1922 the country was the center of the Ottoman Empire. The Anatolian peninsula, between the Black Sea and the, which directly threatened the western sections of the Soviet Union. Soviet technology was well developed in the field of medium-range ballistic missiles ( MRBMMRBM stands from Medium Range Ballistic Missiles such as the SS1. See also ICBM, SRBM.s), as opposed to ICBMs. The Soviets did not believe they could achieve parity in ICBMs before 1970, but saw that a certain kind of equality could be quickly reached by placing missiles in Cuba. Soviet MRBMs on Cuba, with a range of 2,000 km (1,200 statute miles), could threaten Washington, DC and around half of the U.S. SAC bases (of nuclear-armed bombers) with a flight time of under twenty minutes. In addition, the U.S. radar warning system was oriented towards the USSR and would provide little warning of a launch from Cuba.
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.
