except to accelerate the arms race. Khrushchev’s
most daring attempt to redress America’s geo-
graphical advantage in its confrontation with the
Soviet Union came to grief in the seas surround-
ing the island of Cuba. America’s allies on the
borders of the Soviet eastern empire provided
bases from which missiles could hit Soviet cities;
the Soviet Union at this time could threaten only
America’s European allies and had no reliable
missiles with which to attack the US.
Rebuffed by the US in 1960, Castro had
turned to Russia for aid, and agreements to pro-
vide credit to Cuba and to purchase its sugar crop
were concluded in 1960. The failure of the CIA’s
Bay of Pigs landing of Cuban exiles to overthrow
Castro in April 1961 convinced the Cuban leader
that the US was determined to subjugate his
country and drove him deeper into Russia’s arms.
Khrushchev promised to defend the island and
accused the US of banditry. In the following year,
1962, Khrushchev decided to install nuclear mis-
siles in Cuba and to build a Soviet base there. This
daring Soviet move, which would bring the US
within range of many more Soviet missiles, was
carried out secretly. The Cuban missile crisis
that followed appeared to bring the Soviet Union
and the US to the brink of nuclear war. But
Khrushchev was obliged to withdraw. For the
Soviet Union this perceived failure marked a great
setback, less in its relations with the West, which
soon improved again, than with its standing in the
socialist camp. The Chinese took due note: the
Soviet Union too had proved a paper tiger.
Finally, any hope the Kremlin might have had of
overawing the West in future negotiations over
Berlin or Germany lay in ruins. But the world
beyond the two superpowers could breathe again,
relieved that sanity had prevailed and that ideo-
logical fanaticism had not this time as in 1939
plunged the world into unimaginable devastation.484 THE COLD WAR: SUPERPOWER CONFRONTATION, 1948–64
Two leaders: Mao Zedong has difficulty smiling; he despises Krushchev’s revisionism. Krushchev characterises
Mao’s revolutionary ardour as the ravings of a madman. © Bettmann/Corbis