The Cuban missile crisis of 50 years ago is often cited as the closest the world came to a nuclear conflagration during the Cold War. In the U.S., it is generally perceived as the time the two sides went, in the often-quoted words of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow blinked." It is worth reflecting, however, why the crisis occurred and whether the results should be reconsidered.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was a volatile and unpredictable personality who by 1962 had already encountered serious domestic opposition to his reforms in agriculture and the Soviet bureaucracy. In March 1962, during a visit to Bulgaria, he decided to install nuclear missiles on Cuba, together with launch pads and almost obsolete IL-28 bombers. Washington had some evidence of the missiles as early as Aug. 31, 1962. By Oct. 14, a U2 flight over Cuba confirmed U.S. suspicions.
From Khrushchev's perspective, little had gone right during the three years leading up to the Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev had failed to remove the Americans and their allies from the divided city of Berlin in 1959 and 1961, finally giving in to the request of his East German allies to build a wall to prevent a further exodus to the West. He had tried to browbeat the young U.S. president at a summit in Vienna in June 1961.
