The Cuban Missile Crisis October 1962.
A brief synopsis.
In order to make his political opponents, the
Eisenhower administration, look weak on defence,
prior to his election, Kennedy claimed that the Soviet Union had superiority in the number of nuclear missiles.
This was termed "
the missile gap".
The truth was that the US had superiority in numbers and some time after the election,
the Kennedy administration made true this fact in a press conference.
Faced with the embarrassment of the Soviet Union looking vulnerable and combined with
the fact that there were US nuclear missiles in Turkey, Khruschev got Castro agree to
place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.
The US had already attempted to overthrow the Castro government with
the
Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961 and both Castro and
Khruschev were convinced the US would attempt a larger scale invasion.
When the US learnt of the missiles through
aerial reconnaissance, they placed a naval
embargo on the island. What the US administration did not know at the time was that many
of the missiles had already been fitted with thermonuclear warheads.
In addition to the
R-12 missiles that could strike much of the continental US, the Soviets
had also deployed tactical nuclear missiles and the authority to launch the later had been
given to a Soviet field commander in Cuba in the event of a US invasion.
On October 27 1962, a U-2 spy plane commanded by
USAF Major Rudolf Anderson was shot
down over Cuba by a Soviet S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missile system. Anderson was killed.
This was the U-2 that was depicted being shot down in the movie "Thirteen Days".
Video segment -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL98MLL15n0
We examined the wing of that U-2 at La Cabaņa in Havana, along with artefacts from the
Cuban Missile Crisis such as an R-12 missile and S-75 Dvina surface to air missile system.
Later in the trip we drove in the locales in the west of Cuba were the missiles had been deployed.