John F Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis

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• 1. The 'gravest issues'
• 2. The ExComm and the secret tapes
• 3. Quarantine
• 4. A Berlin crisis, not a Cuba crisis
• 5. Dreadful days
• 6. Finessing the Turkish missiles issue
• 7. Resolution
• 8. Find out more
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The 'gravest issues'

Early on Tuesday 16 October 1962, John F Kennedy's national security assistant, McGeorge Bundy, brought to the President's bedroom some high-altitude photographs taken from U-2 planes flying over Cuba. They showed Soviet soldiers hurriedly and secretly setting up nuclear-armed missiles.

For some time previously the Soviets had openly been sending weaponry to Cuba, including surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles (SAMs). To deflect any criticism about this from the Republicans, who were busy campaigning for the November congressional elections, Kennedy had said he would not protest about such defensive weaponry being installed in Cuba, but warned that if the Soviets ever introduced offensive weapons, 'the gravest issues would arise.'

'The 'gravest issues' were at hand.'

Since Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had promised repeatedly not to send offensive weapons to Cuba, and America's top intelligence analysts had predicted that he would keep his word, Kennedy felt safe in voicing this warning. The U-2 photographs, however, showed that Khrushchev had been lying. The 'gravest issues' were at hand.

The United States at the time had more than 25,000 nuclear weapons in their arsenal. The Soviet Union had not quite half as many. Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had calculated in 1960 that, if a crisis led either side to fire nuclear weapons, all humans in the northern hemisphere could perish. 'Gravest issues' indeed.

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Published: 2001-03-01