Events

Cuban Missile Crisis

The Contemporary World

Citation Formats

General Reference

History Atlas. "Cuban Missile Crisis." Accessed September 1, 2026. https://dev-history.interactiveatlas.org/events/cuban-missile-crisis.

APA Style

History Atlas. (n.d.). Cuban Missile Crisis. Retrieved September 1, 2026, from https://dev-history.interactiveatlas.org/events/cuban-missile-crisis

BibTeX

@misc{historyatlas-cuban-missile-crisis,
  author = {History Atlas},
  title = {Cuban Missile Crisis},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-history.interactiveatlas.org/events/cuban-missile-crisis},
  note = {Accessed September 1, 2026}
}

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a thirteen-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1962, triggered by the Soviet Union's secret deployment of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba within striking range of most of the continental United States. President John F. Kennedy responded not with an air strike or invasion but with a naval quarantine of Cuba, while back-channel negotiations between Washington and Moscow searched for a way out of the standoff. The crisis was resolved when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles under United Nations verification in exchange for a public American pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret undertaking to remove American missiles from Turkey, and it left behind a direct Moscow-Washington hotline meant to prevent a future crisis from escalating through miscommunication. It is widely regarded as the moment the Cold War came closest to turning into a nuclear war between the two superpowers.

Facts

Year

1962 1

Event Date

1962-10-16 1

Location

Cuba, with the confrontation centered on Washington and Moscow 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Cuba

Additional Source Wikipedia: Cuban Missile CrisisLead section (location)

Caused By

Cuban Revolution

Why this is disputed. Historians debate the relative weight of Cuba's post-revolutionary alignment with the Soviet Union among the crisis's several causes (Turkey/Italy missile parity, the Bay of Pigs aftermath, Cuban-Soviet alignment); this edge records one contributing cause, not the sole one.

Additional Source Wikipedia: Cuban Missile CrisisLead section (Soviet motivations)