The Cuban missile crisis

Assembled from 42 blocks · 2 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. For thirteen days the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other over Soviet medium-range nuclear missiles deployed to Cuba under the codename Anadyr. Kennedy convened an advisory group whose deliberations were secretly recorded, rejected the majority preference for air strikes, and announced on 22 October a naval quarantine of the island, which took effect on 24 October. The most dangerous day was 27 October, when a U-2 was shot down over Cuba, another strayed over Soviet territory in the Far East, and an American destroyer group forced a Soviet submarine to surface with practice depth charges. Khrushchev announced the withdrawal of the missiles on 28 October in exchange for a public American undertaking not to invade Cuba and a private, concealed undertaking to remove American Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Later research established two things nobody knew at the time: tactical nuclear weapons were already on the island, and the submarine incident had come closer to a nuclear release than any participant in Washington understood.
3. Knowledge
4. The Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft
5. John F. Kennedy
6. Nikita Khrushchev
7. Cuba
8. The San Cristóbal medium-range missile sites
9. A U-2 photographs missile construction in western Cuba
10. The Cuban missile crisis
11. Connections
12. The Washington–Moscow Direct Communications Link
13. John F. Kennedy
14. Nikita Khrushchev
15. A U-2 photographs missile construction in western Cuba
16. Cuba
17. The San Cristóbal medium-range missile sites
18. John F. Kennedy
19. Nikita Khrushchev
20. The Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft
21. The B-59 submarine incident
22. The Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft
23. The San Cristóbal medium-range missile sites
24. Cuba
25. The Cuban missile crisis
26. The San Cristóbal medium-range missile sites
27. A U-2 photographs missile construction in western Cuba
28. The Cuban missile crisis
29. The Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft
30. Cuba
31. A U-2 photographs missile construction in western Cuba
32. The Cuban missile crisis
33. The Cuban missile crisis
34. The Cuban missile crisis
35. The Cuban missile crisis
36. The Cuban missile crisis
37. The San Cristóbal medium-range missile sites
38. A U-2 photographs missile construction in western Cuba
39. The Cuban missile crisis
40. Evidence
41. Named as the principal declassified-document collection behind this pack's account of the crisis, the B-59 submarine incident and the later disclosures about tactical warheads on the island. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted — nsarchive.gwu.edu is blocked by the environment's egress proxy. Everything this pack says about the crisis is from standing knowledge of the published historiography, and the degree of documentary support for the B-59 account in particular is not established here.
42. Named as the source for the existence and character of a near-verbatim record of the ExComm deliberations, including Kennedy's resistance to the air-strike option and the concealed Turkish missile understanding. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted; no recording or transcript was heard or read in this session and nothing is quoted from them.