Saturday, May 7, 2011

The Cuban Missile Crisis


The Cold War stated in 1945, it was not a regular war. This war was an armed race between the west and the Soviet Union. The west was afraid that the Soviet Union wanted to spread communism and the Soviet Union feared that the west wanted to destroy it. So both sides put huge amount of money in making weapons to secure themselves. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was a major part of Cold war. It brought the United States and the Soviet Union closer to nuclear war. 

Since 1898, most of the Cuba's economy was under U.S. control but when Fidel Castro took over in 1959, he upsets the United States because his new government took control of all the industry and businesses which were mostly owned by Americans. The United States decided to overthrow Castro. To achieve this goal, the U.S. got Cuban exiles, their plan was to march inland and gathering support as they make their way inland but surprisingly nobody joined them or supported them so it was a disaster and this plan was known as "Bay of Pigs". Castro made friend with the Khrushchev (Soviet Union), the enemy of the United States. To the communist party in Cuba, Castro was irresponsible, furious and stubborn. When Castro came in power, his first action was to reduce the rent on the island, and in 1960 he pushed the Cuba to the left forced Cubans to left. 

Basically, this crisis began on October 14, 1962, when United States U-2 spy planes flew over Cuba and photographed Soviet nuclear missiles being build.


Cuba was just 93 miles away from Florida's coast so it was obvious that the United States felt threatened. So President Kennedy called out executive meeting which included 13 advisers. After concluding that they had to take an action, they had 3 options: One was to air strike to destroy the missile bases even before they are held out to attack. The second proposal was to invade Cuba; And the last proposal was to "Put a naval blockade around Cuba to stop Soviet ships from delivering missiles" which seemed like the best option because it was not guaranteed that all the missiles will be destroyed by the air strike and invading Cuba didn't seemed like the best option because of Soviet Union.  Some committee members thought that Kennedy was being soft and it was a weak response. 

On October 24, U.S. blocked the soviet ships from entering Cuba and to their surprise the soviet ships went back without questioning. On October 26, Khrushchev (Soviet leader) wrote letter to Kennedy saying that he was willing to remove the missiles from Cuba if he guaranteed that the United States would not invade Cuba. Before Kennedy could answer the first letter he received the second which was asking to remove the U.S. missiles from turkey but Kennedy ignored that letter and responded to the first one. Kennedy agreed to not invade Cuba and on October 28, Khrushchev announced that he would be removing the missiles from Cuba. This ended the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thanked to Khrushchev for backing down because it save the world from having another nuclear war.



 

Following year, President Kennedy negotiate/compromised with Soviet for nuclear arm reduction. They signed Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on July 25, 1963, which ended the nuclear tests underwater or in the air.  

2 comments:

  1. great job! it has very useful information which can help us understand what was The Cuban Missile Crisis about.

    ReplyDelete