With no apparent end to the crisis in sight, U. On October 26, Kennedy told his advisors it appeared that only a U. The crisis had reached a virtual stalemate. That afternoon, however, the crisis took a dramatic turn. ABC News correspondent John Scali reported to the White House that he had been approached by a Soviet agent suggesting that an agreement could be reached in which the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba if the United States promised not to invade the island.
It was a long, emotional message that raised the specter of nuclear holocaust, and presented a proposed resolution that remarkably resembled what Scali reported earlier that day. We are ready for this. Although U. The next day, October 27, Khrushchev sent another message indicating that any proposed deal must include the removal of U.
Jupiter missiles from Turkey. That same day a U. U—2 reconnaissance jet was shot down over Cuba. Kennedy and his advisors prepared for an attack on Cuba within days as they searched for any remaining diplomatic resolution. It was determined that Kennedy would ignore the second Khrushchev message and respond to the first one. For 13 days in October , the world appeared to stand on the brink of nuclear war.
This is one of the few examples from the Cold War where the two main superpowers actually came into direct confrontation with the other. Cuba is an island just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Until , it was closely allied to the United States under the leadership of the right-wing dictator, General Batista. A crucial moment in the unfolding crisis arrived on October 24, when Soviet ships bound for Cuba neared the line of U.
An attempt by the Soviets to breach the blockade would likely have sparked a military confrontation that could have quickly escalated to a nuclear exchange. But the Soviet ships stopped short of the blockade. Although the events at sea offered a positive sign that war could be averted, they did nothing to address the problem of the missiles already in Cuba. The tense standoff between the superpowers continued through the week, and on October 27, an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba, and a U.
The year-old pilot of the downed plane, Major Rudolf Anderson, is considered the sole U. Despite the enormous tension, Soviet and American leaders found a way out of the impasse. During the crisis, the Americans and Soviets had exchanged letters and other communications, and on October 26, Khrushchev sent a message to Kennedy in which he offered to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for a promise by U.
The following day, the Soviet leader sent a letter proposing that the USSR would dismantle its missiles in Cuba if the Americans removed their missile installations in Turkey.
Officially, the Kennedy administration decided to accept the terms of the first message and ignore the second Khrushchev letter entirely. Attorney General Robert Kennedy personally delivered the message to the Soviet ambassador in Washington , and on October 28, the crisis drew to a close.
The Cold War was and the nuclear arms race was far from over, though. In fact, another legacy of the crisis was that it convinced the Soviets to increase their investment in an arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.
Start your free trial today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. In the Fall of the United States demanded that the Soviets halt construction of newly-discovered missile bases in The U-2 aerial photographs were analyzed inside a secret office above a used car dealership.
The critical photographs snapped by U-2 reconnaissance planes over Cuba were shipped for analysis to a top-secret CIA facility in a most unlikely location: a building above the Steuart The Suez Crisis began on October 29, , when Israeli armed forces pushed into Egypt toward the Suez Canal after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal, a valuable waterway that controlled two-thirds of the oil used by Europe.
The Israelis were On August 5, , representatives of the United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, underwater or in the atmosphere.
0コメント