What was remarkable about the discoveries made by the U-2 plane flying over Cuba on October 14, 1962, was not the pictures of Soviet missiles being placed there, but rather the fact that Americans had previously been unaware of their existence. The missiles had traveled by sea to Cuba along with 42,000 troops and technicians to service and protect them.

The missiles were sent in part to cement the Soviet Union’s alliance with Castro’s Cuba, and as part of Nikita Khrushchev’s pledge to protect Cuba from US invasion, but, more importantly as a response to the deployment of Jupiter missiles in Turkey Having made an issue of the “missile gap” (the fabricated claim that the Soviet Union was ahead in the arms race) in his election campaign, and having been embarrassed the previous year by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy could not merely recognize the Soviet act for what it was and agree to remove the Jupiters. Instead, Kennedy heightened tensions immediately demanding in a nationwide television address that the Soviets withdraw their missiles. He further warned that if a missile were fired from Cuba, Americans would respond by launching a missile attack on the Soviet Union. Acting in this way placed Khrushchev in a position from which he could not back down without considerable loss of political capital. For six days he refused to remove the missiles.

Kennedy’s advisors were divided about whether to stick with the blockade they had established and wait out Khrushchev, or to bomb the missiles with the likelihood of killing numerous Russians. Letters were sent from Khrushchev to Kennedy the first of which agreed to withdraw Soviet missiles in exchange for a no-invasion pledge from the US Government. This was immediately followed by another letter which demanded that Kennedy also remove the Jupiter missiles; the President would not agree to this demand.

Fortunately Robert Kennedy suggested that Americans should accept the first letter and ignore the second. Agreement was reached on October 27, but not before Americans came to the brink of bombing Cuba, triggering a missile attack on the US. Moreover, the fact that the Soviets were not fully in control of the missiles on the ground in Cuba created an extremely volatile situation. The agreement had both a public and private dimension. The public agreement fitted the terms of the first letter; but privately the Kennedy administration agreed to withdraw the Jupiter missiles, which had triggered the crisis in the first place.

Kennedy salvaged the prestige he had lost since the Bay of Pigs, but at great cost.

People around the world were fully aware of their proximity to nuclear annihilation, and, while many Americans were happy that Kennedy had not blinked, others believed that he had overreacted. More significantly Khrushchev, who had been pushing for reforms in the aftermath of Stalin’s regime, lost much of his credibility as a result of the crisis and was later removed from power by Soviet hardliners led by Leonid Brezhnev. The Cold War would get colder still. The fears of annihilation that the crisis produced filtered into American culture in the ubiquitous private and public nuclear shelters, the bikini swimsuits (named after the atoll in which nuclear testing occurred), the movie Dr.

Strangelove (1964) and in a growing fascination with horror movies.