October 14, 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis begins.
One of the defining and tensest moments of the Cold War, “the ultimate exercise in nuclear brinkmanship”, began on this day in 1962, when an American U-2 aircraft obtained images of Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba. By placing missiles a mere hundred miles or so off the shores of the United States, the Soviets hoped to counter any American attempts to oust the communist regime in Cuba and play out its role as a leader against Western imperialism; however, the move was also one that Khrushchev stated“would equalize what the West likes to call ‘the balance of power’”. Some - including President Kennedy - interpreted Khrushchev’s challenge as a prelude to a planned Soviet takeover of West Berlin.
After much deliberation and considering options ranging from nothing to full-scale invasion, the U.S. decided to “quarantine" Cuba through a naval blockade, also warning that it would "regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union". At the same time, an ExComm memorandum noted that the presence of these missiles on Cuba did not significantly upset the pre-existing balance of power. In an interview conducted 25 years later, Robert McNamara stated that U.S. demands that the missiles be removed were politically, not militarily, motivated. The crisis and diplomatic stalemate continued over the following weeks. On October 26, the Strategic Air Command was ordered to DEFCON-2: the alert state signifying a hyper-alert state of military readiness preceding possible nuclear war. DEFCON-2 had never before been ordered, and was thereafter never ordered again, reflecting the widely-held belief that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the highest point of tension between the United States and the Soviet during the Cold War, and that for two weeks, the world sat on the brink of nuclear war.
That situation of worldwide catastrophe was avoided through accords that involved the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, the removal of American missiles from Turkey and Italy, and an American guarantee to respect Cuba’s territorial sovereignty.