They became known as the Defense Intellectuals. This ran against his personality—as LeMay approached almost everything in his life with a feeling of self-doubt, he was actually surprised when things worked out well. Here he saw the opposite—inexperienced people coming in absolutely sure of themselves and ultimately making the wrong decisions with terrible consequences.
The picture left is one of those taken from the spy plane and clearly shows missile transporter trailers and tents where fuelling and maintenance took place. In Russian missiles were inferior to American missiles and had a limited range. This meant that American missiles could be fired on Russia but Russian missiles could only be fired on Europe. Stationing missiles on Cuba the only western communist country meant that Russian missiles could now be fired on America.
The Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, welcomed the Russian deployment since it would offer additional protection against any American invasion like the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in The group remained on alert and met continuously but were split between those who wanted to take military action and those that wanted a diplomatic solution. On October 22nd Kennedy made the news of the installations public and announced that he would place a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent Russian missiles from reaching the bases.
However, despite the blockade, Russian ships carrying the missiles remained on track for Cuba. Additionally the second letter which was much more demanding and aggressive in tone did not offer a solution to end the conflict. Attorney General, Robert Kennedy suggested that the best solution was for the second letter be ignored and that the US reply to Kruschev accepting the terms of the first letter.
A letter was duly drafted and sent. On Sunday 28th October Kruschev called a meeting of his advisors. The Russians were aware that President Kennedy was scheduled to address the American people at 5pm that day. Fearing that it could be an announcement of war Kruschev decided to agree to the terms and rushed a response to reach the President before 5pm. The crisis was over. The Russians duly removed their bases from Cuba and as agreed US missiles were quietly removed from Turkey some months later.
Result of the Cuban Missile CrisisIn the summer of , negotiations on a treaty to ban above ground nuclear testing dominated the political world. The treaty involved seventeen countries, but the two main players were the United States and the Soviet Union. Throughout the s, with the megaton load of nuclear bombs growing, nuclear fallout from tests had become a health hazard, and by the s, it was enough to worry scientists.
Kennedy, in particular, was pushing for a ban and was optimistic about succeeding. It never happened. The result of the Cuban Missile Crisis was an increasing buildup of nuclear weapons that continued until the end of the Cold War. LeMay did not see any military advantage for the U. He doubted the countries would come to an agreement and felt vindicated when the talks deadlocked by the end of the summer. The agreement was ultimately signed the following spring, though, and remains one of the crowning achievements of the Kennedy Administration.
Completely unnoticed that summer was the sailing of Soviet cargo ships bound for Cuba. With the U. But these particular ships were part of a larger military endeavor that would bring the two powers to the most frightening standoff of the Cold War. Sailing under false manifest, these cargo ships were secretly bringing Soviet-made, medium range ballistic missiles to be deployed in Cuba.
Once operational, these highly accurate missiles would be capable of striking as far north as Washington, D. An army of over 40, technicians sailed as well. Because the Soviets did not want their plan to be detected by American surveillance planes, the human cargo was forced to stay beneath the deck during the heat of the day.
They were allowed to come topside only at night, and for a short time. The ocean crossing, which lasted over a month, was horrendous for the Soviet advisers. The first unmistakable evidence of the Soviet missiles came from a U-2 reconnaissance flight over the island on October 14, , that showed the first of twenty-four launching pads being constructed to accommodate forty-two R medium range missiles that had the potential to deliver forty-five nuclear warheads almost anywhere in the eastern half of the United States.
Kennedy suddenly saw that he had been deceived by Krushchev and convened a war cabinet called ExCom Executive Committee of the National Security Council , which included the Secretaries of State and Defense Rusk and McNamara , as well as his closest advisers. At the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs began planning for an immediate air assault, followed by a full invasion. Kennedy wanted everything done secretly. He had been caught short, but he did not want the Russians to know that he knew their plan until he had decided his own response and could announce it to the world.
Kennedy shared his decision to pursue negotiation and a naval blockade of Cuba while keeping the option of an all-out invasion on the table with the Joint Chiefs on Friday, October But that impression may have come from his demeanor, his candor, and perhaps his facial expressions, since he was not the most belligerent of the Chiefs. Shoup was crude and angry at times.
LeMay differed from Kennedy and McNamara on the basic concept of nuclear weapons. Back on Tinian, LeMay thought the use of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, although certainly larger than all other weapons used, were really not all that different from other bombs. He based this on the fact that many more people were killed in his first incendiary raid on Tokyo five months earlier than with either atomic bomb. But McNamara and Kennedy realized that there was a world of difference between two bombs in the hands of one nation in and the growing arsenals of several nations in Upon entering office and taking responsibility for the nuclear decision during the most dangerous period of the Cold War, Kennedy came to loathe the destructive possibilities of this type of warfare.
McNamara would sway both ways during the Cuban Missile Crisis, making sure that the military option was always there and available, but also trying to help the President find a negotiated way out.
His proportional response strategy that would come into play in Vietnam in the Johnson Administration three years later was born in the reality of the dangers that came out of the Cuban crisis.
As a political officer in the Red Army during the worst of World War II, at the siege of Stalingrad, the Soviet leader understood what could happen if things got out of hand. Castro, on the other hand was quite different in his response. There was also a feeling of letdown among the Joint Chiefs.
They thought the U. They also did not trust the Russians to stand by their promise to dismantle and take home all the missiles. The Soviets had a long track record of breaking most of their previous agreements. LeMay considered the final negotiated settlement the greatest appeasement since Munich. It was a hollow gesture as they were scheduled to be removed already, but it allowed Krushchev to save face internationally.
Castro continued to be a thorn in the side of the United States. But ultimately, he was mostly inconsequential. This plan was part of his broader theory that came to be known as the Nixon Doctrine. Nixon and Henry Kissinger first as national security adviser and then secretary of state agreed on the need to accept the world as it was—conflicted and competitive— and to make the most of it. In a multipolar world—comprising the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Europe, and Japan—America could work even with communist countries as long as they promoted global stability, the new core of U.
The Nixon Doctrine contained three parts:. Gone was the Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy understanding that a loss of freedom anywhere was a loss of freedom everywhere. Naval Academy. He suggested that U. But the president spent much of his speech on what he really thought was important: making his kind of realism the basis for American foreign policy in general and Cold War policy in particular. Because there were limits to what America could achieve and because U.
In four years, the Nixon administration reduced American forces in Vietnam from , to twenty-four thousand. Spending dropped from twenty-five billion dollars a year to less than three billion. In , the president abolished the draft, eliminating a primary issue of the anti-war protestors.
At the same time, he kept up the American bombing in North Vietnam and added targets in Cambodia and Laos that were being used by Vietcong forces as sanctuaries, while seeking a negotiated end to the war. An impatient Congress and public pressed the administration for swifter results and accurate accounts of the war.
President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had been guilty of making egregiously false claims about gains and losses in Vietnam. Escalation of the war produced widespread student protests, including a tragic confrontation at Kent State University, where four students were killed by inexperienced members of the Ohio National Guard.
On June 24, the Senate decisively repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which had first authorized the use of U. Nixon tried to exploit the open differences between the Soviet Union and Communist China, reflected in the armed clashes in March along the Sino-Soviet border.
Nixon warned the Kremlin secretly that the United States would not take lightly any Soviet attack on China. 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. A closer look at the nuclear stockpiles of the world's two superpowers as the Cuban Missile Crisis began.
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Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option. Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended in Konev of the Soviet Union.
Other international disputes followed. In the early s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north.
However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a year conflict. Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon began to implement a new approach to international relations. To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in , began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. In , he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty SALT I , which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.
Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.
Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned. In , every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
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