The Cuban Missile Crisis

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to find local support. Ninety of the invader's were killed and twelve hundred captured. This failure was a big embarrassment to the Kennedy administration.
As of 1962 the Soviet Union was loosing a desperate arms race, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev conceived an idea of placing intermediate-range cruise missiles in Cuba. This deployment would double their strategic arsenal as well as act as a deterrent to a potential U.S. attack. Ever since the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Fidel Castro was also looking for a way to prevent what he felt was an inevitable second attack. In the summer of 1962, the Soviet Union quickly worked to build its secret missile installations in Cuba.
The crises began for the U.S. on October 15, 1962 when reconnaissance photographs revealed the Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba. October 14, 1962, Richard Heyser, a veteran pilot, flew a U2 spy plane over Cuba. He had no idea that this routine flight wasn't "routine". The pictures ...

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Donald Wilson, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Edwin Martin, and Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Charles Bohlen. President Kennedy chaired the Executive Committee.
On the night of October 17, 1962, during another U-2 flight, the military discovered intermediate range SS-5 nuclear missiles (IRBMs). These could reach anywhere in the continental United States except for the Pacific Northwest. At this point the Soviets did not yet know that the United States had knowledge of the missiles in Cuba. The big concern was that if the Soviets found out that America knew about the missiles, they might hide them or even launch them immediately. So the issue ...

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