Question

What led to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962? How was it resolved?

Answer 1

President Kennedy admitted to lack of missile gap unlike Eisenhower. He said that the US was way ahead of the Soviets in the developing missiles. This made Khrushchev (The Soviet leader) look bad. And this angers Cuba a lot especially, after our failed attempt with the Bay of Pigs. Castro starts to buddy up with the Soviets a lot more. Khrushchev doesn't want to see the US take Cuba down. So he offers to arm Castro with weapons. The US had the Soviet Union surrounded with missile sites and the Soviets wanted at least one site near the US. If they could get Cuba they would have their "one place". A U2 planes discovered installation sites being built in Cuba by the soviets. Kennedy called together the National Security Council, DOD, etc. to discuss what to do with this. We came up with three options. 1)Invade Cuba-Bay of pigs was a failure. 2) Air Strike- were afraid if we did do that ,t hey would shoot our planes3) Leave it alone. No one was really satisfied with those three option so we decided to Quarantine AKA Blockade Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis scared everyone to death; we were on the verge of nuclear war. In 1963 the US and the Soviet Union Signed a nuclear Test Ban Treaty which banned the testing of atomic weapons. A hotline was also set up between Moscow and Washington D.C.
The Soviets publicly balked at the U.S. demands, but in secret back-channel communications initiated a proposal to resolve the crisis. The confrontation ended on October 28, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy and United Nations Secretary-General U Thant reached a public and secret agreement with Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a U.S. public declaration and agreement to never invade Cuba. Secretly, the U.S. agreed that it would dismantle all US-built Thor and Jupiter IRBMs deployed in Europe and Turkey.
Only two weeks after the agreement, the Soviets had removed the missile systems and their support equipment, loading them onto eight Soviet ships from November 5-9. A month later, on December 5 and 6, the Soviet Il-28 bombers were loaded onto three Soviet ships and shipped back to Russia. The quarantine was formally ended at 6:45 pm EDT on November 20, 1962. Eleven months after the agreement, all American weapons were deactivated (by September 1963). An additional outcome of the negotiations was the creation of the Hotline Agreement and the Moscow-Washington hotline, a direct communications link between Moscow and Washington, D.C.