The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba, or the Caribbean Crisis, was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from 16 to 28 October 1962. The confrontation is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war.
Image: Jupiter on its launch pad
Image: Soviet R 12 nuclear ballistic missile
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) and Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) in Vienna, Austria in May 1961
Fifteen US-built PGM-19 Jupiter missiles, with the capability to strike Moscow with nuclear warheads, were deployed in Turkey in 1961.
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. It was a successor state to the Russian Empire that was nominally organized as a federal union of fifteen national republics, the largest and most populous of which was the Russian SFSR; in practice both its government and economy were highly centralized until its final years. As a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it was a flagship communist state.
Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union and the leader of the Bolsheviks
Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army and a key figure in the October Revolution
Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution
Dissolution of the elected Russian Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks on 6 January 1918