The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba, or the Caribbean Crisis, was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from 16 to 28 October 1962. This confrontation is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war.
Francis Gary Powers was an American pilot who served as a United States Air Force officer and a CIA employee. Powers is best known for his involvement in the 1960 U-2 incident, when he was shot down while flying a secret CIA spying mission over the Soviet Union. Powers survived, but was captured and sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet prison for espionage. He served 21 months of his sentence before being released in a prisoner swap in 1962.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers (premier) from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev stunned the communist world with his denunciation of his predecessor Joseph Stalin and embarked on a policy of de-Stalinization with his key ally Anastas Mikoyan. He sponsored the early Soviet space program and enacted reforms in domestic policy. After some false starts, and a narrowly avoided nuclear war over Cuba, he conducted successful negotiations with the United States to reduce Cold War tensions. In 1964, the Kremlin circle stripped him of power, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier.
Brinkmanship or brinksmanship is the practice of trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict. The maneuver of pushing a situation with the opponent to the brink succeeds by forcing the opponent to back down and make concessions rather than risk engaging in a conflict that would no longer be beneficial to either side. That might be achieved through diplomatic maneuvers, by creating the impression that one is willing to use extreme methods rather than concede. The tactic occurs in international politics, foreign policy, labor relations, contemporary military strategy, terrorism, and high-stakes litigation.
On 1 May 1960, a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defence Forces while conducting photographic aerial reconnaissance deep inside Soviet territory. Flown by American pilot Francis Gary Powers, the aircraft had taken off from Peshawar, Pakistan, and crashed near Sverdlovsk, after being hit by a surface-to-air missile. Powers parachuted to the ground and was captured.
The Cold War was a period of global geopolitical tension and struggle for ideological and economic influence between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, that started in 1947, two years after the end of World War II, and lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term cold war is used because there was no direct fighting between the two superpowers, though each supported opposing sides in major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. Aside from the nuclear arms race starting in 1949 and conventional military deployment, the struggle for dominance was expressed indirectly via psychological warfare, propaganda campaigns, espionage, far-reaching embargoes, sports diplomacy, and technological competitions such as the Space Race.
Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev was a Soviet-born American engineer and the second son of the Cold War-era Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev with his wife Nina Petrovna Khrushcheva. He moved to the United States in 1991 and became a naturalized American citizen.
The nuclear arms race was an arms race competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War. During this same period, in addition to the American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles, other countries developed nuclear weapons, though no other country engaged in warhead production on nearly the same scale as the two superpowers.
The Cold War (1953–1962) refers to the period in the Cold War between the end of the Korean War in 1953 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was marked by tensions and efforts at détente between the US and Soviet Union.
Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, codenamed Hero and Yoga was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, including the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing missiles in Cuba before most of them were operational. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed, valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war.
Ivan Alexandrovich Serov was a Soviet intelligence officer who served as Chairman of the KGB from March 1954 to December 1958 and Director of the GRU from December 1958 to February 1963. Serov was NKVD Commissar of the Ukrainian SSR from 1939 to 1941 and Deputy Commissar of the NKVD under Lavrentiy Beria from 1941 to 1954.
The International Spy Museum is an independent non-profit history museum which documents the tradecraft, history, and contemporary role of espionage. It holds the largest collection of international espionage artifacts on public display. The museum opened in 2002 in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and relocated to L'Enfant Plaza in 2019.
Llewellyn E. "Tommy" Thompson Jr. was an American diplomat. He served in Sri Lanka, Austria, and for a lengthy period in the Soviet Union, where his tenure saw some of the most significant events of the Cold War. He was a key advisor to President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A 2019 assessment described him as "arguably the most influential figure who ever advised U.S. presidents about policy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War."
The Vienna summit was a summit meeting held on June 4, 1961, in Vienna, Austria, between President of the United States John F. Kennedy and the leader of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev. The leaders of the two superpowers of the Cold War era discussed many issues in the relationship between their countries.
The Missiles of October is a 1974 docudrama made-for-television play about the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The title evokes the 1962 book The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman about the missteps amongst the great powers and the failed chances to give an opponent a graceful way out, which led to World War I.
Sergo Anastasi Mikoyan was a Russian historian. He was a leading specialist in the foreign policies of the Soviet Union and the United States in Latin America. He was the son of Anastas Mikoyan, an Old Bolshevik and high level Soviet statesman who served as a close advisor to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Roots of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a 48-minute 2001 Cold War documentary by New Line Home Video with "film footage from the era [and] newly created interviews covering U.S./Soviet relations from post-WWII Europe through the end of the crisis". The documentary is a "Beyond the Movie feature" on the infinifilm DVD for the movie Thirteen Days and synthesizes archival footage and still photography, interviews, Trinity and Beyond documentary scenes, and Thirteen Days movie scenes and sequences.
Sergei Ivanovich Safronov was a senior lieutenant and fighter pilot in the Soviet Air Defence Forces. Safronov was shot down by a friendly surface-to-air missile after attempting to intercept Gary Powers' reconnaissance Lockheed U-2 near Sverdlovsk.
Sergei Mikhailovich Kudryavtsev was a senior Soviet intelligence officer who served as the Soviet Ambassador to Cuba from August 22, 1960 to May 30, 1962. Kudryavtsev did not speak Spanish, nor did he have connections with the Cuban government. As a result, Alexander Alexeyev, who had been in Cuba since 1959, served as his cultural advisor for the duration of his appointment. Kudryavstev was expelled from Cuba in 1962 by Fidel Castro for open and excessive political activities, and was replaced by Alexeyev.
The state visit of Nikita Khrushchev to the United States was a 13-day visit from 15–27 September 1959. It marked the first state visit of a Soviet or Russian leader to the US. Nikita Khrushchev, then First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Council of Ministers, was also the first leader of the Soviet Union to set foot in the Western Hemisphere. Being the first visit by a leader of his kind, the coverage of it resulted in an extended media circus.
