The challenge facing them was to orchestrate their removal without initiating a wider conflict–and possibly a nuclear war. Kennedy Weighs the Optionsįrom the outset of the crisis, Kennedy and ExComm determined that the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba was unacceptable. The Kennedy administration had already launched one attack on the island–the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961–and Castro and Khrushchev saw the missiles as a means of deterring further U.S. Another key factor in the Soviet missile scheme was the hostile relationship between the U.S. The Soviets had long felt uneasy about the number of nuclear weapons that were targeted at them from sites in Western Europe and Turkey, and they saw the deployment of missiles in Cuba as a way to level the playing field. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had gambled on sending the missiles to Cuba with the specific goal of increasing his nation’s nuclear strike capability. and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which up to that point had been dominated by the Americans. If allowed to become operational, the missiles would fundamentally alter the complexion of the nuclear rivalry between the U.S. From that launch point, they were capable of quickly reaching targets in the eastern U.S.

A New Threat to the U.S.įor the American officials, the urgency of the situation stemmed from the fact that the nuclear-armed Cuban missiles were being installed so close to the U.S. 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. President Kennedy was briefed about the situation on October 16, and he immediately called together a group of advisors and officials known as the executive committee, or ExComm. The two superpowers plunged into one of their biggest Cold War confrontations after the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane piloted by Major Richard Heyser making a high-altitude pass over Cuba on October 14, 1962, photographed a Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile being assembled for installation. Released in 2000, the movie's tagline was 'You'll never believe how close we came.' and the Soviets (and their respective allies) were engaged in the Cold War (1945-91), an ongoing series of largely political and economic clashes.ĭid you know? The actor Kevin Costner (1955-) starred in a movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis titled Thirteen Days. Under Castro, Cuba grew dependent on the Soviets for military and economic aid. After seizing power in the Caribbean island nation of Cuba in 1959, leftist revolutionary leader Fidel Castro (1926-2016) aligned himself with the Soviet Union.

Richard reeves kennedy