Americans watch Kennedy's televised address.
October 28, 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis ends.
The Cuban Missile Crisis marked the highest point of tension between the United States and USSR during the Cold War. After President Kennedy ordered a “quarantine” of Cuba on October 22, declaring in an address that the United States would regard any missile attacks from Cuba “as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
Four days later, the crisis reached a stalemate; the Soviet Union had not displayed any signs of backing down, and the United States could not possibly allow the missiles to remain where they were, less than 100 miles from Florida. The Strategic Air Command was ordered to DEFCON 2, the highest state of military readiness before imminent nuclear war (the first and only time during the entire Cold War). The crisis was finally ended by secret negotiations conducted between President Kennedy’s Cabinet and Soviet officials. Khrushchev would remove his missiles from Cuba, and the United States pledged never to invade Cuba and also to remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, a promise that was fulfilled by April of 1963.
Because of the secretive nature of these negotiations, the USSR came out of the crisis as the weaker party, even though both countries had been forced to compromise. To the public, however, it seemed as though the USSR had completely succumbed to American pressure, and Khrushchev’s removal from office two years later may have been in part caused by the embarrassing aftermath of the event. After this close brush with nuclear war, the Soviet Union and United States established the Moscow-Washington hotline (the “red telephone”), which provided a clearer and more direct means of communication between the two nations.