Cuban Missile Crisis

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 14, 1962 and lasted for 38 days until November 20, 1962. It is regarded as the moment when the Cold War was closest to becoming nuclear war, and which could have turned into World War III. The Russians refer to the Cuban Missile Crisis as the "Caribbean Crisis" and the Cubans refer to it as the "October Crisis".

Aftermath

The compromise satisfied no one, though it was a particularly sharp diplomatic embarassment for Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, who were seen as backing down from a situation that they had created, whilst, if played well, it could have looked like just the opposite; the USSR gallantly saving the world from nuclear holocaust by not insisting on restoring the nuclear equilibrium. Khrushchev's fall from power a few years later can be partially linked to Politburo embarrassment at both Khrushchev's eventual concessions to the US and his ineptness in sparking the crisis in the first place.

Related Topics:
Politburo - Khrushchev's

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U.S. military commanders were not happy with the result either. Curtis LeMay told the President that it was "the greatest defeat in our history" and that the U.S. should invade immediately.

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For Cuba, it was a betrayal by the Soviets whom they had trusted, given that the decisions on putting an end to the crisis had been made exclusively by Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Related Topics:
Kennedy - Khrushchev

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Author and former Cuban military intelligence officer Servando Gonzalez has advanced a controversial but well-supported hypothesis that there were never any nuclear warheads in Cuba at all--that the crisis had been an unintended consequence of a May 1962 plan hatched by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev as a means of getting the United States to invade Cuba in order to depose Castro, whom the Soviets were beginning to see as an unstable and troublesome ally, one who was fast becoming a major political and financial liability to the Kremlin.

Related Topics:
Nikita Khrushchev - Kremlin

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In early 1992 it was confirmed that Soviet forces in Cuba had, by the time the crisis broke, received tactical nuclear warheads for their cruise missiles, artillery rockets, and IL-28 bombers http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_11/cubanmissile.asp, though General Anatoly Gribkov, part of the Soviet staff responsible for the operation, stated that the local Soviet commander, General Issa Pliyev, had predeligated authority to use them if the U.S. had mounted a full-scale invasion of Cuba. Gribkov misspoke: the Kremlin's authorization remained unsigned and undelivered.

Related Topics:
Anatoly Gribkov - Issa Pliyev

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The short time span of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the extensive documentation of the decision-making processes on both sides makes it an excellent case study for analysis of state decision-making. In the Essence of Decision, Graham T. Allison and Philip D. Zelikow use the crisis to illustrate multiple approaches to analyzing the actions of the state. The intensity and magnitude of the crisis also provides excellent material for drama, as illustrated by the movie Thirteen Days (2000), directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp.

Related Topics:
Essence of Decision - Graham T. Allison - Philip D. Zelikow - Drama - Movie - Thirteen Days - 2000 - Roger Donaldson - Kevin Costner - Bruce Greenwood - Steven Culp

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In October 2002, McNamara and Schlesinger joined a group of other dignitaries in a "reunion" with Castro in Cuba to continue to release classified documents and further study the crisis. It was during the first meeting that Secretary McNamara first discovered that Cuba had many more missiles than initially expected, and what McNamara refered to as 'rational men' (Castro and Khruschev) were perfectly willing to start a nuclear war over the crisis.

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