Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962)
60 years ago: The Cuban Missile Crisis; October, 1962
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict. The crisis was unique in a number of ways, featuring calculations and miscalculations as well as direct and secret communications and miscommunications between the two sides. The dramatic crisis was also characterized by the fact that it was primarily played out at the White House and the Kremlin level with relatively little input from the respective bureaucracies typically involved in the foreign policy process.
60 years ago: The Cuban Missile Crisis; October, 1962
For thirteen days in October 1962 the world waited—seemingly on the brink of nuclear war—and hoped for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. President Kennedy did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles. He met in secret with his advisors for several days to discuss the problem...
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict...
While on a high-altitude reconnaissance flight over Cuba in early autumn of 1962, a United States Air Force U-2 surveillance aircraft made a remarkable discovery. Reconnaissance photos showed what appeared to be nuclear-capable Soviet MRBMs (medium-range ballistic missiles) in addition to Soviet military support personnel, based on the island nation - just 90 miles south of the continental United States. Further analysis confirmed their presence, and with an approximate range of 1,000 miles, most of the eastern half of the U.S. was effectively vulnerable to Soviet missile attack...
President John F. Kennedy’s radio and television address to the nation regarding the former Soviet Union’s military presence in Cuba - October 22, 1062
Date(s) of Materials: 22 October 1962
Description: Audio recording of President John F. Kennedy’s radio and television address to the nation regarding the former Soviet Union’s military presence in Cuba. In his speech President Kennedy reports the establishment of offensive missile sites presumably intended to launch a nuclear offensive against Western nations. The President characterizes the transformation of Cuba into an important strategic base as an explicit threat to American security, and explains seven components to his proposed course of action: quarantine all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba, increase the degree of surveillance, regard a possible attack launched from Cuba as a Soviet attack, reinforce the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, call for a meeting of the Organ of Consultation, call for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, and demand that Premier Nikita Khrushchev cease his current course of action. In his speech the President famously states, “Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right- not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this Hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world.”
https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/address-during-the-cuban-missile-crisis#:~:text=We%20will%20not%20prematurely%20or,time%20it%20must%20be%20faced.
https://www.azquotes.com/author/7900-John_F_Kennedy/tag/nuclear-war
Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable .. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
= John F. Kennedy; Address to the United Nations General Assembly, delivered 25 September 1961
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/442861
On October 14, 1992, the Public Broadcasting System aired a one-hour documentary titled, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: At The Brink." ?The program looked back at the event thirty years earlier that nearly led to nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
https://www.docsonline.tv/cuban-missile-crisis-at-the-brink/
JFK on Nuclear Weapons and Non-Proliferation
But to halt the spread of these terrible weapons, to halt the contamination of the air, to halt the spiraling nuclear arms race, we remain ready to seek new avenues of agreement, our new Disarmament Program thus includes the following proposals:
First, signing the test-ban treaty by all nations. This can be done now. Test ban negotiations need not and should not await general disarmament.
Second, stopping the production of fissionable materials for use in weapons, and preventing their transfer to any nation now lacking in nuclear weapons.
Third, prohibiting the transfer of control over nuclear weapons to states that do not own them.
Fourth, keeping nuclear weapons from seeding new battlegrounds in outer space.
Fifth, gradually destroying existing nuclear weapons and converting their materials to peaceful uses; and
Finally, halting the unlimited testing and production of strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, and gradually destroying them as well."
https://carnegieendowment.org/2003/11/17/jfk-on-nuclear-weapons-and-non-proliferation-pub-14652
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962 or the Missile Scare, was a 35-day (16 October – 20 November 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, which escalated into an international crisis when American deployments of missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of similar ballistic missiles in Cuba.
Despite the short time frame, the Cuban Missile Crisis remains a defining moment in US national security and nuclear war preparation.
The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
The Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis Are Actually Pretty Useless Right Now;
The possibility of nuclear war over Ukraine has everyone talking about 1962—but today’s conflict has little in common with the famous U.S.-Soviet standoff.
So there’s the first difference between Cuba 1962 and Ukraine 2022. Khrushchev was looking for a way out; once the U.S. detected that he was installing missiles, he knew that he would have to give in. By contrast, it now seems plain, in retrospect, that Putin had no interest—and still has no interest—in backing down...
Kennedy and Khrushchev were so stunned by how close they came to Armageddon that, in the months after the crisis ended, they took steps toward ending the Cold War—setting up a hot line, negotiating a limited nuclear test-ban treaty, and preparing several other disarmament forums...
领英推荐
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/ukraine-nuclear-war-cuban-missile-crisis.html
Opinion:?The nuclear threat may be graver now than in the Cuban missile crisis:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/12/putin-nuclear-threat-cuban-missile-crisis/
60 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, how to face a new era of global catastrophic risks:
60 years ago, President Kennedy had to reveal formerly classified information - to stop World War 3:
In October of 1962, the USSR was installing intermediate range nuclear tipped missiles in Cuba - that could wipe out any/all eastern US mainland cities...
Of course, Russia would deny this was happening, so JFK worked with intelligence experts to carefully declassify information and photos to prove that the threat was real.
But showing photos - and descriptions of what was in the pictures - to the public obviously revealed some of our sources and methods for knowing about this clandestine armament campaign...
PHOTOGRAPH PXDOD-CMCPHOTOS-PX66(20)(27); AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH OF MEDIUM RANGE BALLISTIC MISSILE LAUNCH SITE TWO AT SAN CRISTOBAL; 11/1/1962; BRIEFING BOARD #27, MRBM LAUNCH SITE 2, SAN CRISTOBAL, 1 NOVEMBER 1962; BRIEFING MATERIALS, 1962 - 1963; COLLECTION JFK-5047: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS BRIEFING MATERIALS; JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY, BOSTON, MA. NAID 193933
https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/DODCMCBM/003/DODCMCBM-003-008
https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cuban-missile-crisis
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security.
The week of October 7, 1962, saw bad weather in the Caribbean, preventing American U-2 surveillance planes from making more reconnaissance flights over Fidel Castro's Cuba, just ninety miles off the Florida coast.
But Sunday morning, October 14, was cloudless, and the U-2 flight got some good photos— pictures that, over the next few days, were analyzed and reanalyzed. They provided positive proof of what the United States had for months suspected: that the Soviet Union was installing medium-range nuclear weapons in Castro's Cuba, capable of striking major U.S. cities and killing tens of millions of Americans within minutes...
13 Days Over Cuba: The Role of the Intelligence Community in the Cuban Missile Crisis
The Forgotten Missiles of the Cuban Missile Crisis (2012 post)
… Earlier, in response to a Soviet supplied military buildup in Cuba in mid-1962, Pentagon planners were refining two operational plans against Cuba: one a massive 500 sortie airstrike against missile and radar sites and MiG airfields; the other a 125,000-strong joint-force invasion. The latter apparently had no contingencies for facing tactical nuclear weapons, as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara revealed in his book In Retrospect, “. . . U.S. invasion forces would not have been equipped with tactical nuclear weapons.”
… and 12 “special” [two kiloton nuclear] warheads for the Lunas, which had a range of 25 miles. And more grimly, the Soviet Minister of Defense Rodion Malinovsky and Matvei Zakharov, chief of the general staff, gave local commanders [Cuban miliary – not the USSR] authority “to make your own decision, and to use the nuclear means of the Luna, Il-28, or FKR-2 as instruments of local warfare for the destruction of the invaders of the Cuban territory and to defend the Republic of Cuba.”
Forty Years After 13 Days - by former USA SECDEF Robert S. McNamara (2000 post)
For many years, I considered the Cuban missile crisis to be the best-managed foreign policy crisis of the last half-century. I still believe that President Kennedy’s actions during decisive moments of the crisis helped to prevent a nuclear war.
But I now conclude that, however astutely the crisis may have been managed, by the end of those extraordinary 13 days—October 16-October 28, 1962—luck also played a significant role in the avoidance of nuclear war by a hair’s breadth.
We were lucky, but not only lucky. I believe we would not have survived those 13 days had not the president shaped and directed the ways in which his senior advisers confronted the crisis. This began within minutes of the moment on Tuesday morning, October 16, when McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, informed the president that we had photographs of Soviet nuclear missile sites under construction across the island of Cuba. These medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which had been deployed not only secretly but also under an elaborate cloak of deception could, if they became operational, deliver nuclear warheads onto all major East Coast U.S. cities, putting 90 million Americans at risk.
We had not anticipated such an action by the Soviets. In fact, we had been told throughout the summer and early autumn of 1962 by various Soviet officials, including Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, that there were no Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, nor would Moscow deploy any such weapons on the island. Because we were reassured in this way, we failed to formulate and debate in advance of their discovery alternative ways of dealing with the deployment…
The Cuban Missile Crisis (2000 post)
…the FKR missiles are cruise missiles with a range of about 100 kilometers.
R. Malinovsky and M. Zakharov, Memorandum on Deployment of Soviet Forces to Cuba, 24 May 1962
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB14/doc18.htm
The Cuban Missile Crisis: A nuclear order of battle, October and November 1962 (2015 publication)