60 years of the Cuban Missile Crisis

It’s been 60 years since the world was closer to nuclear war: Cuban Missile Crisis. On October 14, 1962, American spy planes took pictures showing the construction of launchers for long-range missiles in Cuba, just 200 kilometers from the United States.

This discovery unleashed a crisis and The direct confrontation between the two superpowers At that time, the United States and the Soviet Union, and their leaders at that time: John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.

Those images reached the hands of the newly appointed Kennedy and in a 17-minute televised address he announced to his country the decision he had made: sea ​​fence Around the island, quarantine. Just a day later, American warplanes and ships were deployed to the Caribbean to enforce an air and sea blockade.

The revenge did not satisfy the Russian president, who considered the movement an aggression against the Soviet Union. Cuba prepared for a possible invasion The United States and Fidel Castro asked the Soviet Union to launch a preemptive attack, but Khrushchev remained calm and put a solution on the table: the missiles would leave Cuba if the United States took its missiles from Turkey.

13 days of negotiations averted a nuclear war. Under pressure from the United Nations, the United States and the USSR came to an agreement, and Kennedy lifted the quarantine and promised not to invade Cuba if the Soviet missiles left. It has succeeded. What happened to the ones the United States faced in Turkey? There was another deal, but unofficially and they also ended up being broken up. That was the moment we came close to a nuclear war.