Cuban Missile Crisis

Cuban Missile Crisis
Part of the Cold War
Soviet R-12 ballistic missile
Date 16 October 1962 - 28 October 1962 Location Cuba, United States and the Soviet Union Result Peace memorandum between the United States and Cuba in which the United States would not ever invade Cuba without direct provocation and Cuba will not aim missiles again at the USA without direct provocation.
Belligerents
Cuba	United States
Commanders and leaders
Fidel Castro Juan Almeida Bosque Che Guevara Efigenio Ameijeiras Raúl Castro Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado	John F. Kennedy Curtis LeMay Alexsys Soriano Maxwell Taylor Lyndon B. Johnson Robert Kennedy Robert McNamara
Units involved
Brigada Movil de Tropas Especiales	United States Army
Strength
123,000	180,000

The Cuban Missile Crisis was an event that happened in 1962. It was a serious confrontation between the Soviet Union, the United States, and Cuba during the Cold War. In Russia, it is known as the Caribbean Crisis. Cuba calls it the October Crisis.

The crisis started because the Soviet Union was building sites for ballistic missiles in Cuba, so that they could target the United States. This caused the United States and the Soviet Union to create a proxy conflict directed at Cuba, causing them to indirectly attack each other because of Cuba.

Together with the earlier Berlin Blockade, this crisis is seen as one of the most important confrontations of the Cold War. It may have been the moment when the Cold War came closest to a nuclear war.^[1]

There was a coup in Cuba in 1959. A small group led by Fidel Castro took power in this Cuban Revolution. The new government took over American businesses. The American government refused to import anything from Cuba after that. This U.S. embargo against Cuba began February 7, 1962. In 1962, the American government was worried that the USSR would attack America from Cuba, because Cuba is near enough that the missiles could reach almost any city in America. Cuba was seen by the U.S. as a communist country, like the Soviet Union.

In October 1962, American ships did not let Soviet ships carrying missiles go into Cuba. The Soviets and Cubans agreed to take away the missiles if America did not attack Cuba. During the crisis, the United States secretly agreed to remove their Jupiter missiles from Turkey if all the Russian nuclear weapons were taken out of Cuba.

1. ↑ B. Gregory Marfleet (2000). "The Operational Code of John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis: A Comparison of Public and Private Rhetoric". Political Psychology. 21 (3): 545. doi:10.1111/0162-895X.00203. ISSN 0162-895X.