John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Abstract

In mid-October 1962, US intelligence analysts, using photographs taken a few days earlier by two U-2 aircraft flying over Cuba, determined that the Soviet Union was installing middle-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) on the island with the capability to deliver nuclear warheads. After discussing the new information with his advisors for two full days, President John F. Kennedy decided that the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba posed a direct threat to the national security of the United States and, thus, that they had to be removed. To achieve this objective, the president and his advisors narrowed their options to either launching a conventional airstrike on the missile sites followed by an invasion or implementing a naval quarantine on the delivery of offensive weapons. They agreed that were the president to authorize the set up of a blockade, shortly thereafter he might have to order the launching of an invasion followed by an air strike. On Monday, October 22, Kennedy announced on television that he had ordered the US Navy to set up a quarantine around Cuba and had called the premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, to ask him to “halt and eliminate [the] clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.” That same day, Kennedy authorized the Pentagon to redeploy US military forces toward the southern parts of the United States in preparation for a direct attack on the Cuban island in case Moscow were not to act as he had insisted. Fourteen days after the discovery of the Soviet missiles, the crisis ended.