What was outcome of cuban missile crisis

Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev and John Fitzgerald Kennedy made all the critical decisions: the decisions that led to the crisis, the decisions that shaped the crisis, and the decisions that ended the crisis—peacefully.

Fidel Castro played a significant, but decidedly secondary, role. The crisis reached its apogee on Saturday, October 27, three days after the U. Navy deployed an armada of nearly ships along a blockade arc miles north of Havana. By this time—five days after Kennedy's speech—it was apparent to Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Castro that the military activities of each passing day exponentially increased the danger of an incident escalating out of control.

Along with potential clashes on the quarantine line, tension had been increased by the well-publicized buildup of U. The three contending leaders became acutely aware, and worried at least Khrushchev and Kennedy were , that at any moment events could slip from their control. Over the past week, Castro had become increasingly enraged, apparently beyond worry.

Well informed about U. In response to Kennedy's speech, he ordered general mobilization and commanded his antiaircraft batteries to shoot down U. Certain that he could do little to prevent an assault, he became grimly fatalistic, determined to confront the inevitable head-on regardless of the consequences.

If "the imperialists invade Cuba with the goal of occupying it," he wrote to Khrushchev that night, "the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it. Castro's letter struck Khrushchev as yet another warning following the unauthorized destruction of the U-2 that the situation in Cuba was slipping out of control. Desperate to avoid Armageddon, or anything approaching it, he was, nevertheless, determined not to remove his missiles without receiving a quid pro quo.

Moreover, he considered the blockade an illegal, outrageous act of war. It was "outright banditry. The folly of degenerate imperialism.

He appeared determined then to dare the Americans to sink a Soviet vessel. But now, three days later, circumstances changed his tone, and he anxiously remained in his office throughout the night. He was 9, miles from Havana but only 32 minutes from an intercontinental missile launched from the United States. Kennedy, too, had been roiled for days by conflicting emotions. At times he was not sure if he was being too cautious, too aggressive, too flexible, too rigid, or simply too worried.

Like Khrushchev, Kennedy wanted a peaceful resolution, but he too had a bottom line: the Soviet missiles must be removed from Cuba. Kennedy and Khrushchev were enemies, ideological and military adversaries, who blundered into a dangerous confrontation that neither wanted nor anticipated. Each was aware that an accident, or even a misinterpretation, could set off a nuclear conflagration. Yet the circumstances of their political and international obligations, as well as their personal interests, compelled them to press their goals despite their recognition that nothing they could achieve was worth the consequences of a nuclear war.

Yet, by this night, they had nudged each other so close to the edge of the nuclear precipice that terror had entered their calculations. The first was to combine an earlier public pledge that the United States would not attack Cuba with a secret U. The second initiative was to accept Rusk's suggestion to contact Secretary General of the United Nations U Thant and ask him to propose a missile swap dismantling of the Jupiter missiles in exchange for the removal of the Soviet missiles.

Kennedy would accept the offer, allowing him to avoid his commitment to the Joint Chiefs to begin military actions. But Khrushchev had looked deeper into the abyss on Saturday night, and fearful that the ally he was seeking to protect was on the verge of starting a war, he precipitously ended the crisis on Sunday with a surprise announcement over Radio Moscow.

This time we really were on the verge of war. The most dangerous part of the crisis was over. What remained were negotiations related to the removal of associated weapons systems and inspection agreements which Castro refused to accept. Looking back at the Cuban Missile Crisis from the perspective of 50 years, it is clear that the dangers were greater than contemporaries understood: that most of the advice the President received would have led to war and that Khrushchev and Kennedy entered the crisis as adversaries seeking advantages but quickly became partners in search of a peaceful resolution.

In all of this, good luck was an indispensable ingredient. Five decades of research also reveals why, absent revision, history petrifies into myth. The crisis was the transformative event in U. It not only assured Castro's survival the putative aim of the Soviet deployment , but it reset the unstated rules of the U. Nuclear deterrence could no longer be viewed as a stable condition that allowed governments to brandish nuclear weapons for diplomatic advantage.

The crisis had exposed deterrence's fragilities, requiring that it be managed openly as a delicately balanced process. Kennedy had made the essential point in his October 22 address:. Or, was it the 20 months from the debacle of the Bay of Pigs in April to November , when the last of the Soviet missiles and bombers left Cuba?

Or, was it the 13 years since August , when the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear weapon? The crisis fits all of those definitions, but as the historical lens is widened, more complexity, more politics, more miscalculations, more unintended consequences, and more understanding enter the narrative. Expanding the boundaries of the 13 days to Castro's revolution and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and respectively explains the circumstances that made room for the crisis but does not deal with its root cause.

The root cause was the central role that nuclear weapons had come to play in the American-Soviet relationship. Disregarding how those weapons were seen and valued by Soviet and U. The alliance structures on both sides of the iron curtain—and the role that nuclear weapons played in maintaining those structures—made the Cuban Missile Crisis a global event, despite how Khrushchev, Kennedy and Castro defined it.

Kennedy immediately replied to Khrushchev that he consiedered the premier s Radio Moscow message an important contribution to peace. It frightened people everywhere. Even a diplomat as experienced as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan found the crisis "the week of most strain I can ever remember in my life. The literal fright that the crisis engendered put an end to serious considerations of limited nuclear war. Having faced the possibility of such an outcome, most nuclear strategists recognized that a limited nuclear exchange would be more analogous to stumbling on a slippery slope than climbing the rungs of an escalation ladder.

That recognition also brought an end to Khrushchev's efforts to eliminate West Berlin as a viable western enclave; it had been made clear that the dangers associated with such an effort could too easily slide out of control. The United Nations, for example, played a far more important role in leading to its resolution than either the U. By providing a world stage, it transformed the crisis into a public international Cold War drama that increased pressure for a peaceful resolution.

The crisis even contributed to Sino-Soviet hostility on the one hand, and on the other, to a readjustment of the ties between the United States and its European allies. The energetic effort to gain the OAS's approval for the blockade gave the nations of Central and South America a sense that they were being taken seriously, perhaps for the first time. It was a unique moment because, in effect, the United States pleaded for the support of its southern neighbors. The effort to enlist the support of the OAS, and the Kennedy administration's choice of the UN as the forum for presenting its evidence of Soviet duplicity—the U-2 photographs—highlighted the importance of the nonmilitary dimension of the Cold War, the contest on both sides of the iron curtain for hearts and minds.

It exposed the limits of what great powers could do alone and demonstrated the influence that small states could exert—whether clients or enemies. Cuba was a major player in every aspect of the crisis, although no U. There was one additional dimension to the crisis that has never received sufficient analytical attention: technology. Not just the technology that gave birth to the nuclear age but the vast array of related technologies that in many ways shaped the history of U.

In important ways these technologies were actors in the Cuban Missile Crisis drama just as surely as any of the participants. It can even be argued that technology took the lead in both creating and resolving the crisis.

It made things possible, and because they were possible, they were attempted. For that reason the Cuban Missile Crisis is a metaphor for modernity. Henry Adams long ago penned that essential point: "Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. Martin J. Even after 50 years, the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis continues to evolve. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is the central depository for researching the American story.

But documents that alter what is generally believed continue to be extracted from government files around the world. Since the end of the Cold War, many Soviet sources describing Khrushchev's decision to ship missiles to Cuba, the details of Operation Anadyr, and the negotiations that concluded the crisis, have become available.

Even Cuban sources, the most difficult to obtain, have enriched our understanding of the role that Castro played and specifics about the actions and activities of the Soviet Anadyr forces in Cuba. And we are all mortal. Visit our online exhibit: World on the Brink: John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Skip past main navigation. JFK in History. Life of John F. Kennedy Life of Jacqueline B. Kennedy on the Economy and Taxes John F. Kennedy and the Press John F.

Kennedy and PT John F. Cuban Missile Crisis. For thirteen days in October the world waited—seemingly on the brink of nuclear war—and hoped for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Identifier Accession. Rights Access Status. Relation Is Part Of Desc.

Subject Geog. Type Category. Format Medium. Format Media Type. Creator Maker. Language ISO Type ARC. Kennedy announced a naval blockade to prevent the arrival of more missiles and demanded that the Soviets dismantle and remove the weapons already in Cuba. The situation was extremely tense and could have resulted in war between the United States and the Soviet Union , but at the last minute, Khrushchev turned the Soviet ships around that were to deliver more missiles to Cuba and agreed to dismantle and remove the weapons that were already there.

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