The Cold War confrontation between the United States
and the Soviet Union reached frightening levels during
the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1959, a left-wing revolutionary
named Fidel Castro (b. 1927) overthrew the Cuban
dictator Fulgencio Batista and established a Sovietsupported
totalitarian regime. After the utter failure of a
U.S.-supported attempt (the “Bay of Pigs” incident) to
overthrow Castro in 1961, the Soviet Union decided to
place nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Kennedy administration
was not prepared to allow nuclear weapons within
such close striking distance of the American mainland,
despite the fact that it had placed nuclear weapons in
Turkey within easy range of the Soviet Union, a fact that
Khrushchev was quick to point out. When U.S. intelligence
discovered that a Soviet fleet carrying missiles was
heading to Cuba, Kennedy decided to blockade Cuba
to prevent the fleet from reaching its destination. This
approach to the problem had the benefit of delaying confrontation
and giving the two sides time to find a peaceful
solution. In a conciliatory letter to Kennedy, Khrushchev
agreed to turn back the fleet if Kennedy pledged
not to invade Cuba:
We and you ought not to pull on the ends of the rope in
which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the
two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment
may come when that knot will be tied too tight that
even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it. . . .
Let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the
rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready
for this.4
The intense feeling that the world might have been
annihilated in a few days had a profound influence on
both sides. A communication hotline between Moscow
and Washington was installed in 1963 to expedite rapid
communication between the two superpowers in time of
crisis. In the same year, the two powers agreed to ban nu-
clear tests in the atmosphere, a step that served to lessen
the tensions between the two nations.
World History
