The Cuban Missile Crisis How the event unfolded that nearly led to nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union bbc com afrique monde-63359684 Jose Carlos Cueto BBC News World Photo credit BBC On the evening of October 22 1962 US President John F Kennedy appeared on television looking serious Millions of people eagerly await his speech Military marching music foreshadows the seriousness of the announcement Good evening my dear fellow citizens launches the president His calm voice does not hide his concern A few days ago his advisers told him that in Cuba 90 miles off its coast the Soviets and the Cubans are building ballistic components for nuclear missiles The danger of an atomic war between the great powers of the time seems imminent and the time has come to address the world 1 15 Any missile launched from Cuba against a nation in the Western Hemisphere will be considered an attack by the Soviet Union against the United States which will require a full response against the Soviet Union Kennedy warned Americans Cubans and Soviets are preparing for a confrontation that has been believed to be inevitable for several days Terror seized the citizens Supermarkets were overcrowded and shelves emptied with panic buying Those who could afford it rushed to build shelters and fill them with the supplies they deemed necessary to survive an atomic impact Never have so many millions been so close to instant mass annihilation because of the rivalries between Washington and Moscow between capitalism and communism The October Crisis of 1962 also known as the Cuban Missile Crisis was the high point of the Cold War Sixty years on BBC World looks back on the days of terror when the world was on the brink of World War III in an unprecedented nuclear conflict The pre-crisis After World War II the United States and the USSR which were victorious allies against fascism engaged in a geopolitical competition for world domination This rivalry also led to an atomic arms race in which the United States had the upper hand In 1962 the United States had installed in Turkey a series of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads called Jupiter capable of striking Soviet territory in a few minutes in the event of a confrontation Several countries have become involved more or less directly in the struggle between Washington and Moscow Cuba was one of them After the triumph of Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959 the island drew closer to the USSR and began to be seen by the United States as an ideological threat influenced by its biggest rival right under its nose 2 15 Photo credit Getty Images image caption The socialist revolution led by Fidel Castro quickly put Cuba and the United States at odds Relations between Havana and Washington are deteriorating at a rapid pace In the early 1960s the Castro government carried out a wave of industrial nationalizations that hurt big American companies The United States under the administration of Dwight Eisenhower responded by offering to overthrow the socialist regime including through a strong economic embargo and the financing of counter-revolutionary armed groups In 1961 the failed invasion of Cuba through the Bay of Pigs led by an army of exiled Cubans trained by the CIA led the United States to redouble its efforts against the Cuban revolution The United States created Operation Mongoose which was intended to create an insurgent situation in Cuba that would bring the country to the brink of disaster but it became apparent that the chances of an internal movement causing the collapse of the revolution were practically nil Oscar Zanetti a researcher at the Cuban Academy of History told BBC Mundo “Thus in March 1962 the option of direct American intervention with the use of all necessary military means was imposed ” adds Zanetti 3 15 Tiny Cuba needed to defend itself against the threat of the most powerful country in the world and the USSR then under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev was ready to support it The protection of Cuba became a matter of national security for the USSR If Cuba had been invaded and the USSR had done nothing the Soviets would have been considered unreliable allies of the third world explains to BBC Mundo Philip Brenner US foreign policy expert and specialist in Cuba-US relations Photo credit Getty Images image caption Cuba and the USSR quickly allied under the same ideology in the early 1960s So in the summer of 1962 Moscow and Havana began secretly installing dozens of missile launch platforms brought from the USSR The secret lasted until October 14 That day an American reconnaissance plane flying over Cuba noticed a different landscape than usual Among the palms were assembled missile launch pads capable of hitting Washington and other American cities and causing similar or worse death and destruction than Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 The October Crisis had just unfolded 14-22 o ctober the world against a background of nuclear conflict 4 15 That October 14 1962 was certainly a peaceful Sunday for most Americans but not for pilot Richard Heyser He was piloting the U-2 spy plane over Cuba in the early hours of that morning Its mission was to verify US suspicions and information regarding the presence of Soviet weapons on the island Six minutes of flight were enough to take the first 928 photos which made it possible to verify the constitution of the weapons The following day the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center began a rushed analysis of the images identifying medium-range ballistic missile components in a field in San Cristobal Pinar del Rio province west of the island Photo credit Getty Images image caption Medium-range ballistic missile base in Cuba photographed by the US Air Force in October 1962 Other reconnaissance flights have confirmed other assembly locations The first thing Kennedy did upon learning of this on October 16 was to convene a select group of advisers known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council Excomm to decide on a strategic response 5 15 His Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara presented him with three options the policy of 'reaching out to Castro and Khrushchev' a naval blockade of Soviet ships carrying arms to Cuba and 'military action directed directly against Cuba' explains Peter Kornbluh director of the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project Photo credit Getty Images image caption Kennedy's group of advisers devised various strategies to deal with the discovery of the missiles in Cuba The President decides to proceed with the second option in order to gain time and negotiate a solution with Khrushchev and a clandestine rapprochement with Castro Had he chosen to attack Cuba experts say the nuclear conflict would have been triggered For a week the world was virtually oblivious to the danger and the Washington-HavanaMoscow negotiations on which millions of lives depended October 22 Kennedy makes the crisis public On October 22 Kennedy sits down in front of the cameras and seems ready to respond forcefully to any attack but many analysts say that behind this facade is a flexible man whose goal is to avoid armageddon 6 15 He speaks with determination and fortitude but also with caution A badly chosen word can be misinterpreted lead to an accident and cause a disaster Thus when he announced that he would intercept any new delivery of arms to Cuba from the USSR he described the operation as a strict quarantine rather than a blockade Photo credit Getty Images “Although what he was doing was a de facto blockade he uses the word quarantine because a blockade is considered an act of war ” Brenner explains Kennedy also makes public his orders to continue and increase surveillance of Cuba to consider any attack on a Western Hemisphere nation as an attack on the United States to reinforce the Guantánamo naval base and to call a meeting of the UN Security Council Finally the president also urged his counterpart Khrushchev to stop and eliminate this clandestine reckless and provocative threat to world peace The same day of his speech Kennedy sends a letter to Khrushchev in which he declares that the United States will not authorize the sending of new weapons to Cuba and asks the Soviets to dismantle the missile bases already in place or in progress of construction and to return to the USSR all offensive weapons The days that followed were the darkest of the crisis October 23-26 The world prepares for conflict 7 15 On October 24 the naval blockade was put in place to prevent the arrival of several Soviet ships That same day Khrushchev replied to Kennedy that the blockade was an act of aggression and that he would order the ships not to stop On October 24 and 25 however some ships came out of the quarantine line Others were stopped by US naval forces but were unarmed and allowed to proceed Photo credit Getty Images image caption After Kennedy made the missile crisis public the United States Cuba and the USSR were ready for further escalation Meanwhile new American reconnaissance flights showed that the Soviet missile bases in Cuba were close to reaching their operational phase If no missile is ready on October 14 the next 12 days see a rapid build-up As of October 28 12 missiles were operational and it is planned to install around thirty medium-range missiles and around thirty intermediate-range missiles specifies Mr Brenner At the time Castro warned the Cuban people of the risk of invasion and some 300 000 armed men were mobilized 8 15 Photo credit Getty Images image caption After Kennedy's public announcement the Castro government prepared some 300 000 soldiers for a conflict that seemed inevitable For the first time in its history the United States declared DEFCON Defense Condition Level 2 the highest alert before a nuclear confrontation On October 26 Kennedy told his advisers that it seemed only an American attack on Cuba could dismantle the missiles but he insisted on giving more time to diplomatic channels The crisis appeared to have stalled when a twist occurred later that evening ABC US correspondent John Scali reports to the White House that a Soviet agent slipped him the possibility of the Soviets withdrawing the missiles from the Caribbean island if the United States promises not to invade Cuba As the White House weighed the validity of this leak Khrushchev sent a moving letter to Kennedy He told her about the tragedy of the nuclear holocaust and offered her a solution similar to the one Scali had leaked October 27 Black Saturday Khrushchev's message arrived on the night of Friday October 26 in Washington after midnight in Moscow 9 15 US officials are exhausted They spent exhausted nights sleeping in their offices They are now convinced that the words of the Soviet leader are genuine and that a resolution is in sight But their hopes are short-lived When the Excomm meets on Saturday morning it learns that Khrushchev has set new conditions He now also demands the withdrawal of the Jupiter missiles that the United States maintains in Turkey It looked like a reciprocal agreement but in reality it was an ultimatum Turkey was a NATO ally and the withdrawal of the missiles threatened by the USSR could destroy the alliance explains Mr Brenner Khrushchev's demands made Kennedy's position more palatable The tension was rising again Then as U S officials figure out how to proceed the dreaded miscalculation occurs An American U-2 reconnaissance plane is shot down by Soviet missiles in Cuba Its pilot was killed instantly The only fatality of the missile crisis Photo credit Getty Images image caption American pilot Rudolph Anderson is the only victim of the missile crisis He died when his reconnaissance plane was shot down by Soviet missiles in Cuba 10 15 American generals recommend attacking immediately And the United States was ready He had gathered enough troops in South Florida and enough planes to attack Brenner said Some time later Kennedy's Secretary of Defense McNamara would admit in an interview that he thought that beautiful Saturday afternoon as he walked through the White House lawns would be the last that he would see Senior White House officials have been ordered to shelter with their families in a secret area of ​Maryland to survive in the event of nuclear war Nothing seemed able to prevent the fatal outcome October 28 the end of the nightmare War analysts often define these borderline situations as “escalations to de-escalate” pushing warnings to extremes in order to force agreements But at the time there were many doubts about how to interpret Khrushchev Everyone was desperate and Kennedy and his council believed they had no way out but military confrontation It was then that the former ambassador to the USSR Llewellyn Thompson whose long experience of negotiation with the Communists had given him the ability to anticipate Khrushchev's contradictory movements with precision intervened Thompson tells Kennedy that the Soviet leader is at a crossroads and he must be offered a way out Brenner said Thompson recommends approaching Khrushchev and promising not to invade Cuba in exchange for the withdrawal of the missiles He would also tell him that he would withdraw the missiles from Turkey secretly and without making it public as part of the negotiation 11 15 Photo credit Getty Images image caption The United States is monitoring the removal and dismantling of missile bases in Cuba Attorney General Robert Kennedy then secretly met with the Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin and indicated that the United States planned to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey anyway and would do so soon but that this could not be part of a public resolution to the missile crisis The next morning October 28 Khrushchev publicly declared that the Soviet missiles would be dismantled and removed in the coming weeks 12 15 Photo credit Getty Images The missile crisis is ancient history and the Turkish missile deal was kept secret for 25 years The ability to think empathetically about what Khrushchev needed ended the crisis says Brenner The consequences of the crisis While Kennedy and Khrushchev sold the resolution of the crisis as a diplomatic triumph for the relief of their citizens the Cuban government was disappointed Historian Zanetti reports that Cuba was excluded from the negotiations and its demands were ignored The Cuban government felt that while the agreement removed the danger of nuclear war it did not provide the necessary guarantees for Cuba's security and peace in the Caribbean he said 13 15 Photo credit Getty Images image caption Kennedy and Khrushchev died decades before the end of the conflict which nearly led to an unprecedented nuclear confrontation To this end Castro proposed five points which included the lifting of the economic blockade the cessation of the promotion of subversive activities on the island by the United States and the withdrawal of the Guantánamo naval base adds the academic After this episode Castro himself admitted that relations between Cuba and the USSR were affected for some time Diplomacy between Havana and Washington remains conditioned in part by the turbulent events of the 1960s The economic embargo remains in place as does the socialist government and despite the efforts of the Obama administration bilateral relations seem far from be standardized After the October crisis Washington and Moscow set up a hotline known as the red phone to prevent such tensions from recurring The Cold War lasted until 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 Khrushchev died in 1971 at the age of 77 Neither witnessed the end of the conflict that nearly led the world to catastrophe Editor's Choice 14 15 15 15