234 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
On October 15, 1962, American intelligence officials
discovered that the Soviets were constructing missile
sites in Cuba, just ninety miles off the Florida coast.
One week later, President Kennedy made these
actions public; he then engaged in several days of
diplomatic brinksmanship with the Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev. It was the most dangerous
confrontation of the Cold War, and the closest the
world has come to nuclear war.
The long and fraught relationship between
the United States and Cuba stretched back to the
Spanish–American War at the turn of the century.
The Americans liberated Cuba from Spanish control
but retained the right to intervene for decades
thereafter. When a nationalist revolution in Cuba
brought the Marxist revolutionary Fidel Castro to
power in 1959, the Caribbean became a crucial
geopolitical arena of the Cold War. As a candidate
for president the next year, Kennedy pointedly
criticized the Eisenhower administration for failing
to prevent the Cuban revolution. Once inaugurated,
Kennedy became even more preoccupied with
Castro, authorizing an invasion and coup that failed
disastrously at the Bay of Pigs. It was Kennedy’s hard
line against communism in Cuba that contributed to
the missile crisis of 1962.
The Soviet Union began to send military aircraft to
Cuba in the summer of 1961, ostensibly to defend the
country against the United States. In early October
1962 the Soviets stationed bombers at the far western
military base of San Julián, signaling their intent
to develop Cuba’s offensive capacity. The Central
Intelligence Agency responded by increasing its
aerial surveillance, and Kennedy warned Khrushchev
that any attempt to construct military bases in Cuba
would be treated as a direct threat. Soviet shipments
continued, partly in response to Kennedy’s recent
TO THE BRINK OF NUCLEAR WAR
Aerial photograph of Cuba, annotated
map of Cuba, and map of missile range
from Cuba, 1962
deployment of fifteen Jupiter nuclear missiles
in Turkey. No doubt Khrushchev aimed to give
the Americans a taste of their own medicine by
demonstrating how it felt to live so close to
offensive weaponry.
On October 14, an American U-2 plane
photographed unusual activity in San Cristóbal,
sixty miles west of Havana. The next day the National
Photographic Interpretation Center concluded that
these images revealed the presence of offensive
weapons in Cuba. This photograph at right captured
one of several medium-range ballistic missile launch
sites around the island; three long-range missiles
sites were also under construction. With these
photographs and other evidence of military bases
and Soviet aircraft, the president and his advisers
spent days debating how to proceed.
The map of Cuba shown on the next page was
annotated during these tense days of deliberation.
It shows the number and location of Soviet MiG
fighter jets, helicopters, and—crucially—the
squadron of offensive Il-28 bombers at the far
western base of San Julián.
The second and even more terrifying map shown
on the next page depicts the range of missiles
that had been photographed just days earlier. The
central ring marks the capacity of the medium-range
ballistic missiles, which could reach both Mexico City
and Washington, D.C. within twenty minutes. The
outer ring—reaching Hudson Bay and Lima, Peru—
marked the geographical capability of the long-
range missiles, which had arrived in Cuba but were
still unassembled. (The missile-range map identifies
the major cities in North and South America that
could be reached by the Soviet weapons, but why was
the small town of Oxford, Mississippi, included?
Two weeks earlier, Attorney General Robert Kennedy
had dispatched federal marshals to Oxford to
quell the riots that had broken out to protest the
integration of the University of Mississippi. During
the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Attorney General
mischievously asked whether the missiles might
reach Oxford, prompting its appearance on the map
as a kind of macabre joke.)