John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis

The direct results of this contentious standoff, which brought about new global developments that undoubtedly made the world safer

This essay was written by Miles Dinger: a student from New York, USA

On a sunny day in October 1962, American boots hit the bright sunny beaches of Cuba. This is their first step towards disabling the Medium Range Ballistic Missiles and the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles that the Soviet Union placed on the island. Then suddenly, a missile launches. Within minutes, Washington D.C. is vaporized. To retaliate, the United States launches hundreds of missiles at the Soviet Union, sparking all out nuclear war.

Thankfully, President John F. Kennedy was able to navigate the United States and the Soviet Union away from the brink of potential nuclear armageddon, but in the decades following the crisis, historians have constantly reevaluated Kennedy’s actions in the face of clear and present danger. James A. Nathan, a professor of International Policy at Auburn University, criticized the decisions of Kennedy and his administration in his 1975 article, “The Missile Crisis: His Finest Hour Now.” Conversely, Graham T. Allison, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans for the Clinton Administration and the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government praises Kennedy’s actions during the missile crisis in his 1971 book Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, while Barton J. Bernstein, a Professor emeritus of History at Stanford University believes that Kennedy mishandled the crisis by placing Jupiter Missiles in Turkey.

According to Max Frankel, former executive editor of The New York Times and Pulitzer prize winner, the Cuban Missile Crisis all started when Nikita Khrushchev was strolling the banks of the Black Sea as defense minister Rodin Malinovsky lamented over the American nuclear bases in Turkey. Khrushchev thought that he could gain a strategic advantage over the United States by secretly deploying Medium Range Ballistic Missiles and Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles to Cuba both quickly and inexpensively, believing that the Americans would initially object to the missiles and then accept a new reality. Therefore, with this goal in mind, the Soviet regime outfitted a fleet of eighty-five vessels to make multiple trips between the Soviet Union and Cuba to assemble a brand new nuclear army.

In May 1960, during the Eisenhower Administration, a U-2 Spy Plane had been shot down over Soviet airspace, greatly inflaming relations between the two powers. As a result of the “U-2 Affair,” once the United States noted the presence of Soviet SAMs in late August, the White House stopped all flights over Cuba to avoid increasing tensions with the Soviets. The question on everyone in the Kennedy Administration’s mind in the early fall of 1961 was if the shipments they had been monitoring from the Soviet Union to Cuba facilitating a military buildup on the island would result in the deployment of nuclear missiles as well. Finally, on October 14th the Administration reversed its previous restraint on the U-2s. The first flight over Cuba found two to three medium range missile launch sites under construction.

After obtaining the evidence of the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba, the Pentagon began to flex its muscles through amphibious exercises in the Caribbean, leading Cuba to think that the United States was preparing for invasion, however, Kennedy’s top aides claim that it was never the intention of the Administration to invade Cuba. Kennedy also ordered rigorous surveillance of the new missile sites, ensuring that the United States would know exactly how many missiles were present in Cuba, but he required that the discovery be kept a secret.

To advise him during the Crisis, Kennedy assembled a group of his top advisors, cabinet officials, and experts into what was known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExCom. From the first deliberations of this group, two policy proposals came forth. An airstrike of all Soviet and Cuban planes, airfields, guns, and missile sites followed by an invasion of Cuba either without warning, or with warning so that the Soviets had time to negotiate was one option. The other was simply conducting only an airstrike on the missile sites. As the days passed, U-2 flights continued to uncover rapid progress on the Medium Range Ballistic Missiles sites and the presence of Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles in Cuba. In light of these new developments, ExCom began to shift their preferred action away from a direct military strike towards a blockade of Cuba. Because a blockade is considered an act of war, however, Kennedy had to choose his words carefully, classifying the blockade as a quarantine and obtaining approval for this action from the Organization of American States to go forward with the quarantine.

On October 21, 1962, in a televised speech to the world, Kennedy announced the presence of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba as well as the United States’ quarantine of the island. After the announcement of the quarantine, five Soviet ships bound for Cuba suspected of carrying weapons turned back towards the Soviet Union. After several days of tense negotiations between the two superpowers, Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed that the Soviet Union would dismantle their missiles and bring them home as long as the United States pledged to not invade Cuba and secretly dismantle their missile bases in Turkey.

Despite titling his 1975 article detailing the Cuban Missile Crisis, “The Missile Crisis: His Finest Hour Now,” James A. Nathan thoroughly critiques the actions of Kennedy and his administration during the fateful October of 1962. Nathan fully questions why the Kennedy Administration decided to act in order to force the removal of the missiles from Cuba. He quotes Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as saying, “A missile is a missile. It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile from the Soviet Union or from Cuba.” Nathan claims that there was no change to the balance of global power as a result of the Soviet Union’s actions, because it does not matter where a nuclear missile is launched from, the result, a vaporized city, will be the same. Furthermore, Nathan quotes Henry Kissinger as stating that “the bases were of only marginal use in a defensive war. In an offensive war their effectiveness was reduced by the enormous difficulty of coordinating a first strike between the Soviet Union and Cuba.” Nathan believes that the actions of the Soviet Union were only to gain the appearance of nuclear parity with the United States, and that the missiles placed in Cuba were merely symbolic, holding no strategic value.

Graham T. Allison in his book Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, argues that these missiles held more than simply symbolic value. Allison states that as a result of the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the U.S.’s warning of a nuclear attack would be cut from fifteen minutes to only three, much of the American bomber force would become vulnerable to an attack, and the first strike capability of the Soviet Union would be doubled. While Henry Kissinger did say that the difficulty of coordinating a first strike between the Soviet Union and Cuba was tremendous, it does not mean that such an attack was impossible, and thus the missiles posed at least some strategic risk to the United States.

Allison also argues that these missiles did more than simply pose a new threat to America. The placement of missiles on a launch platform ninety miles from Florida allowed the Soviets, who were falling behind in a missile race, to position their medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles that could only reach Alaska from Soviet territory in a way that they could now strike practically all of the continental United States, all without having to develop any new missiles. Allison believes that throughout the 1950s the development of rockets to directly target the United States from the Soviet Union was not a key goal of the Kremlin, leading to the overproduction of unnecessary Soviet Medium Range Ballistic Missiles and Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles. When Soviet leadership began to realize their growing disadvantage in missile capabilities, however, the strategic placement of their existing missiles in Cuba allowed them to repurpose the missiles to threaten the United States.

As a result of these new strategic challenges facing Kennedy and his administration, Allison justifies Kennedy’s forceful response, stating that such a response to the discovery of nuclear missiles in Cuba was necessary in order to maintain the trust of the American people. Nathan, on the other hand, quotes President Kennedy as stating that he knew the Soviet Union was not “intending to fire [the missiles in Cuba], because if [the United States and the Soviet Union] were going to get into a nuclear struggle, they [had] their own missiles in the Soviet Union.” While this assertion from President Kennedy can be taken as fact at the time, Soviet information released after the Crisis shows that the Soviet Union possessed between twenty and forty-four Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles capable of striking the continental United States from the Soviet Union, much less then the seventy-five that the United States believed the Soviets possessed, according to an article written by Barton Bernstien for the Arms Control Association. As a result of the inflated metrics Kennedy was given, the President did not have a full understanding of the Soviet’s situation, as they most likely would resort to using the missiles stationed in Cuba to supplement their lack of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, as Allison asserts, discrediting Nathan’s claim.

Because of the inaccuracy of Kennedy’s information, however, Nathan critiques Kennedy's response. He states that the President risked escalating the situation on account of the American people's frustration over Cuba, while acting in opposition to his intelligence reports, and his own notion that Russia would not invade. Nathan further critiques Kennedy citing a Gallup Poll as evidence that ninety percent of Americans were opposed to an armed intervention in Cuba. Supported by the statistics of the Gallup Poll, Nathan is promulgating the idea that the American people were opposed to any escalation to conflict with the Soviets over Cuba, and therefore were prepared to leave the missile sites alone. While the poll suggests that Americans did not want to send troops into Cuba, it does not prove that they were willing to live their lives with nuclear weapons only ninety miles from Florida, ready to vaporize practically every American city. This belief was confirmed in an interview with my grandfather, Henry Smith, who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He claims that after President Kennedy’s announcement of the missile installations, the fears of nuclear war grew even further, and the American people felt that there was a true threat of the Soviet Union launching a nuclear missile at the United States. Nathan’s implied claim that Americans were prepared to live with nuclear missiles pointed directly at them is inherently false. Since the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine, America has held dominance over the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, America’s location in North America, isolated from the other great world powers provided the American people with a sense of safety. Never, during two deadliest wars in human history, did the conflict spill into the continental United States. Therefore, the placement of nuclear missiles right in America’s backyard frightened the public as they had never been so close to enemy weapons in recent memory. Even if the missile build-up in Cuba did not present a real challenge to American nuclear superiority, as Nathan claims, there certainly was a psychological impact of Cuban missiles, forcing Americans to feel the heat of nuclear weapons that could strike them in minutes, thus warenting Kennedy’s energetic demands for their complete removal.

In his article “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Trading the Jupiters in Turkey?” published in 1980, Barton J. Bernstein meticulously assesses John F. Kennedy’s actions through the lens of the American Jupiter Missiles stationed in Turkey, providing a nuanced analysis of Kenndy’s decisions.

Prior to the discovery of missiles in Cuba, Bernstein points to a National Security Council memo that identified the possibility of equating possible missile sites in Cuba with the American nuclear missiles pointed at the Soviet Union from Turkey. These missiles, Bernstein argues, were completely useless because they were liquid-fueled Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles, meaning they took hours to fire and were quite inaccurate. The United States also openly deployed these missiles, thus making them extremely vulnerable to Soviet attacks, so they were only useful militarily in a first strike operation, only serving to further provoke the Soviet Union. Nathan concurs with Berstien’s assessment of the missiles’s uselessness, claiming that a Soviet marksman with a high powered rifle could take out the Jupiters. Furthermore these missiles obtained their launch orders via a cumbersome dual-veto system, blurring the lines of which nation, America or Turkey, really controlled the missiles. The weaknesses and provocative nature of the Jupiters only served to antagonize the Soviets, and increased their incentive to render the Jupiters inoperable. These missiles, simply put, were more likely to draw a Soviet attack than effectively participate in a nuclear attack launched by NATO.

In light of the Jupiters’ shortcomings, a quick fix option was available. The United States could withdraw the provocative missiles and replace them by deploying Polaris submarines to the area, as suggested by the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. These submarines would be completely under U.S. control, were capable of holding sixteen nuclear missiles, and would be concealed beneath the waves, serving to better protect Turkey, the United States, and NATO at large. Furthermore, the submarines could be deployed to Turkish waters at approximately the same time that the construction of the Jupiters would be completed. As a result, the submarines would serve as a much stronger retaliatory force in the event of a nuclear war than the Jupiters.

Allison claims that Kennedy ordered the removal of the Jupiter missiles twice prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but those in his administration, notably high ranking officials of the State Department, were never able to get it done. Robert F. Kennedy, the President’s brother and Attorney General recounts the same sequence of events in his 1969 book 13 Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, highlighting the inability of the State Department to come to an agreement with the Turkish Government on the deactivation of the Jupiters. Allison attempts to let Kennedy off the hook, claiming that it was not his fault that the machinery of government below him was failing to carry out the orders of the Commander-in-Chief.

While Allison makes a fair point, as Kennedy cannot be expected to possess an in-depth understanding of every action that his government takes, Bernstein argues that Kennedy still should be blamed for their presence, namely because his administration deployed the missiles. He states that while the Eisenhower Administration came to an agreement with the Turkish Government to deploy nuclear missiles on Turkish soil, it was Kennedy’s administration that fulfilled this promise. The Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy urged on February 11, 1961, after Kennedy had taken office, that the construction of Jupiters in Turkey should not commence, and on March 29th, in a National Security Council meeting, the President created a special committee to review the question of the deployment of Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles to Turkey. This committee then produced a report that suggests that missiles had not yet been deployed by early summer. On June 22, 1961 an official from the State Department urged McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s special assistant for national security, that no action should be taken to delay the projected deployment of missiles to Turkey. The President's poor performance at the summit with Khrushchev in Vienna a few weeks earlier meant that a delay or cancellation of the missile shipment to Turkey could be seen as a sign of American weakness. The President obviously headed the advice of the State Department, authorizing the installation of missiles in Turkey to prevent offending a key ally, ignoring the Department of Defense’s reservations that missiles in Turkey would only serve to provoke the Soviets

Despite his criticism of Kennedy’s actions, Bernstein does provide a possible explanation for the President’s decision to send the missiles to Turkey. Because the missiles were visible they provided Turkey with a tangible prestige. Had the United States cancelled the missile program, Turkey would have lost that prestige, an event that many feared could lead to a coup to overturn the present government, staged by one of Turkey’s many powerful generals. In this context, Kennedy’s actions make sense. What if the cancellation of the missile deployment antagonized a Turkish general to stage a coup and join the Warsaw Pact, providing the Soviets with easy access to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus Strait? Although government organizations such as the National Security Council had warned of the possibility of the Soviets retaliating against the Jupiters with missiles of their own in Cuba, maintaining the political stability of a key ally in the short term was more important than a possible crisis in the future. While John F. Kennedy could have averted the Cuban Missile Crisis by preventing the deployment of Jupiter Missiles to Turkey, when looked at through the global situation of the time, his actions are justifiable.

Nathan further critiques Kennedy’s administration’s lack of diplomacy as he and ExCom instead pursued a resolution to the crisis, through military channels. Nathan claims that ninety percent of ExCom meetings were spent debating various uses for troops, bombers, and warships to bring an end to the crisis while the idea of straightforward diplomatic negotiation was barely floated and economic pressures were never discussed. Nathan believes that Kennedy and his advisors only devised military solutions because they believed that Khrushchev’s actions were a test of America's resolve. Therefore, he critiques Kennedy’s statements that he would not consider compromises or concessions until the end of the crisis to prevent showing any evidence of American weakness, while escalating the situation.

Nathan further criticizes Kennedy because of his response to the discovery of missiles. Kennedy decided to reveal to the Soviets that the missiles had been discovered only hours before Kennedy appeared on television, informing all of America and the world of the destructive capability that had been placed in Cuba. Nathan claims that this address was counterproductive because now that the administration had made the discovery of the missiles public information, their withdrawal also had to be a public event, humiliating the Soviets in the process. In all fairness to Kennedy, however, there was not much he could have done to avoid this situation. The Washington Post and The New York Times had already deduced that there was some issue stemming from Cuba because of the actions of various officials in Washington. The President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of State had cancelled public engagements, while lower level officials fled their own birthday parties in order to get back to the office. It took the pleading of the President himself to prevent these newspapers from publishing stories revealing the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba until after his televised address on October 22nd, according to Frankel. While Kennedy was able to delay the papers from breaking the news temporarily, it would have been nearly impossible to prevent The Post, The Times, and every other national newspaper from suppressing the news for days until Kennedy and Khrushchev could negotiate a diplomatic agreement for the removal of the missiles. Therefore, even if Kennedy had not addressed the nation, the same Soviet humiliation would still have been necessary, because American newspapers would simply report their presence of the missiles to the public.

While ExCom’s decision to move forward with a quarantine was not a direct attack on Cuba, they were unable to stray from military based actions, as the implementation of a “quarantine” was technically a blockade, and therefore an act of war in all aspects but name. Nathan criticizes Kennedy’s necessity to prevent concessions from taking place immediately in order to display the strength and resolve of both himself and the United States. Bernstein agrees with Nathan’s criticism. He claims that since the Medium Range Ballistic Missiles sites had been operational and able to vaporize Washington D.C. or any other Southeastern American city since the quarantine was announced, President Kennedy should have been going through all possible channels to remove the missiles, even if that meant trading away the useless Jupiters, in order to preserve American security.

Conversely, Allison actually praises Kennedy’s actions during the beginning stages of the crisis. Prior to his announcement revealing the missiles in Cuba, Congressional leaders were briefed on the situation and the actions ExCom had decided on to address the issue. Almost every single one of these leaders desired the United States to forcefully respond with either an airstrike or an invasion, opposing Kennedy’s decision of a quarantine. According to Allison, Kennedy and the rest of ExCom had initially considered a “surgical” airstrike, which they envisioned to be a few American planes flying over Cuba and dropping conventional bombs, swiftly disabling the missile sites. What the Air Force had in mind was completely different, however, consisting of over 500 individual flights, resulting in immense collateral damage in order to remove any unacceptable risk to American success. Allison claims that political leaders do not usually thoroughly examine the details of war plans, and thus praises Kennedy because he probed the proposal of the Air Force, discovering that approval of such a plan would only serve to escalate the conflict further. Therefore, Allison is praising Kennedy for not caving to the leaders in Congress, going down the route he believed was the least likely to escalate the crisis to all out nuclear war, despite the shaky position of the Democratic Party with the midterm elections quickly approaching. If Kennedy had resorted to negotiation tactics that Congress would have viewed as even weaker than a quarantine, such as offering Khrushchev a missile trade, as Nathan and Bernstein suggested, Robert F. Kennedy believed that his brother could have been impeached. Allison further supports Kennedy’s choice to move forward with a quarantine because it forced Khrushchev and the Soviets to make the next move. By flexing the muscles of their conventional weapons, the United States was able strike a middle ground between protecting its interests, by preventing any more missile equipment from entering Cuba, and escalating the situation, as the quarantine was not a direct military attack. Allison’s praises of Kennedy’s decisions during the crisis seem to be warranted. While Kennedy did not end the crisis immediately by requesting to trade the Jupiters for the Cuban missiles, as Nathan and Bernstien claimed he should have, Kennedy was able to prevent the crisis from becoming a conflict by having the strength not to cave to Congressional leaders and his own advisors.

Despite Allison’s claims that a quarantine was Kennedy’s best option to diffuse the missile crisis, he criticized Kennedy and his Administration for not having full control over the Navy as they carried out the operations of the quarantine. The President had ordered that he hold direct oversight over the quarantine to prevent reckless subordinates or needless incidents to escalate the crisis further, but Allison claims that this was not the case. He states that once Kennedy had given the order to carry out the quarantine, the British Ambassador to the United States recommended that the Navy position its ships closer to Cuba providing the Soviet ships more time to turn around. Kennedy agreed, according to Allison, and told Secretary of Defense McNamara to direct the Navy accordingly, but the Navy did not listen. The first Soviet ship to be stopped and boarded as a result of the quarantine was stopped along the originally established quarantine line. Nathan also criticizes Kennedy as his control over the quarantine was far from complete. Nathan agrees with Allison as he claims the ships remained at the original 800 mile quarantine line, in opposition to the orders of the President. Both Allison and Nathan also agree that when Secretary McNamara confronted the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral George Anderson in the Naval Operations Center, Anderson was unable to answer McNamara’s questions regarding the placement of ships, only saying that he trusted his officers to effectively run the blockade. Nathan uses McNamara’s conversation with Anderson to criticize Kennedy for his lack of control over his only visible response to the missiles, the Navy, to prove that Kennedy was not the master of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but rather a beneficiary of pure luck. Because the Navy lacked a total understanding of the negotiations the President was undergoing, they easily could have escalated the situation into World War III. For example, the Navy had begun to force Soviet submarines to the surface, prior to Presidential authorization. Nathan asserts that if one submarine refused to surface, the situation could have escalated out of the President’s control.

Furthermore, Nathan also argues that as a result of the Kennedy Administration’s lack of control over the rest of the Armed Forces, they risked escalating the crisis even further. He claims that aside from McNamara’s failure to regain the Administration's control over the Navy, the Air Force sent U-2 Spy Plane flights near the Soviet Union to “excite” the Soviet radar systems at the height of the crisis. On tarmacs across the nation, American fighter jets and bombers were positioned wing to wing against the President’s orders, almost inviting a preemptive Soviet strike. Nathan states that the President needed to take total organizational control over the Department of Defense at the height of the crisis, to prevent escalation.

Allison agrees with Nathan that the Department of Defense along with the rest of the Executive Branch were making it difficult for Kennedy and ExCom to de-escalate the crisis, but he does not place the blame on Kennedy. Both Nathan and Allison claim that the fragility of the situation required Kennedy to have had direct control over the operations of the Navy, but unlike Nathan, Allison states that the actions of the Department of Defense were outside of the Kennedy’s control, dragging the country towards nuclear apocalypse, in spite of the efforts of the President.

Although Nathan critiques the American military buildup in the form of stationing jets and bombers wing to wing, Allison praises these actions. He believes that because no attempt was made to disguise the movement of squadrons of fighters to airports within striking distance of Cuba and the 200,000 man invasion force amassing in Florida, Khrushchev was forced to see that the quarantine was simply an initial step. The quarantine gave the Soviets time to realize that the Americans were intent on ensuring the missiles were withdrawn, and the buildup of an invasion force explicitly warned both Cuba and the Soviet Union that the American military was intent on military action, should the missiles fail to be withdrawn. While Alison makes an interesting point, one is left to wonder if Americans would view the Cuban Missile Crisis as the same triumph of the Kennedy Administration if Kennedy escalated it to the point of all out war with an air strike or invasion.

While Allison’s 1971 work paints a generally praiseworthy view of Kennedy’s actions throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis, as historians began to look back, such as Nathan in 1975 and Bernstein in 1980, they found various shortcomings in the manner in which Kennedy and his advisors handled the Crisis. Contrary to the claims of Nathan, Kennedy was justified to find a way to remove the missiles, because of the military implication of the presence of the missiles, as argued by Allison, and the physiological impact that the missiles had on the American public. While Bernstein argued against the installation of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, Kennedy had to prioritize the short term political stability of a key NATO ally over the distant possibility of Soviet missiles being positioned in Cuba, as Allison stated. Bernstein does, however, make a fair assertion that Kennedy should have worked with the Turkish government to implement submarines in place of the Jupiters to better support the security of NATO. While Bernstien and Nathan criticize Kennedy for not considering diplomatic options to gain the removal of the missiles from Cuba, Allison’s praises Kennedy for keeping his advisors and Congressional leaders in check and not caving to their radical demands for an all out invasion, instead slowly ramping up American military operations to coax Khrushchev towards the missile’s removal. Despite their disagreements, all three historians criticize the same development in their writings, Kennedy’s lack of control over the actions of the Executive Branch. From the Navy’s unresponsiveness to the orders of the President during the quarantine, to the positioning of bombers and fighter jets, to the failure of withdrawing the missiles from Turkey, all three historians critique Kennedy’s lack of control over the actions of the United States Government.

While President Kennedy can be criticized for his decisions in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the benefit of hindsight, the world can clearly see that Kennedy's actions steered the world from the brink of Nuclear War. Despite many shortcomings along the way, Kennedy and ExCom were eventually able to push the Soviet Union to withdraw their missiles from Cuba, maintaining American security in the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, the Cuban Missile Crisis led to the development of a direct “hotline” between Moscow and Washington to improve communications, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, the idea that neither superpower would risk starting a nuclear war because they knew they would also be destroyed. While the actions of President John F. Kennedy in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer than ever to nuclear armageddon, the direct results of this standoff brought about new global developments that undoubtedly made the world safer.

Bibliography

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Smith, Henry O., III. Interview by the author. Rye, New York, United States of America. February 25, 2024.

"To the Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Accessed February 23, 2025. https://www.jfklibrary.org/visit-museum/exhibits/past-exhibits/to-the-brink-jfk-and-the-cuban-missile-crisis#:~:text=Earlier%20that%20fall%2C%20the%20Soviet,in%20less%20than%20five%20minutes.