Search Results for: missile crisis
When discussing presidents who displayed “uncommon courage,” Obama identified JFK. “During the Cuban Missile Crisis, facing intense pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and congressional leaders to bomb and invade Cuba, John F. Kennedy stood firm. With his determined leadership and his calm, rational judgment, he forged a strong path to peace that used aggressive diplomacy
“At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis…it had been relatively easy to stand up to the Soviets: Our nuclear weapons outnumbered theirs almost 10 to one; the Soviets took their missiles out of Cuba and Khrushchev backed down. But the balance of power had all been changed by the early 1980s. The Soviet Union
“In the 1960s we met the Soviet challenges in Berlin, and we faced the Cuban Missile Crisis. And we sought to engage the Soviet Union in the important task of moving beyond the Cold War and away from confrontation. And in the 1970s three American presidents negotiated with the Soviet leaders in attempts to halt
“The most dangerous moment of the 45 year history of the Cold War took place in the early 1960s when we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. Where the Soviet Union threatened to move nuclear weapons into Cuba and President Kennedy recognized that that was totally unacceptable to the United States and he communicated that very
“In his announcement of the incursion into Cambodia, he compared himself to Kennedy who, in his finest hour, had sat in the identical room in the White House and made the great decision that removed the missiles from Cuba. Later Nixon used the Missile Crisis to justify his failure to consult Congress over Cambodia. “I
“The challenge we face in [Vietnam] today is the same challenge we have faced with courage and that we have met with strength in Greece and Turkey, in Berlin and Korea, in Lebanon and in Cuba.” Lesson: Soviet aggression and expansionism was at the heart of the Cuban Missile Crisis and future crises during the
“Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost 10 times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in
“The great concern of Kennedy and the great concern probably of Khrushchev, too, was the issue of command and control – that somewhere down the line, someone might act on his own. The issue of command and control was so desperately important, and Kennedy understood this and took every precaution to make sure that nothing
The fiftieth anniversary of the Crisis offers a great opportunity for teachers and students to learn about the fundamentals of the Cold War and how, over two weeks, the world came to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. This section provides resources for educators interested in conducting a class on the Missile Crisis and making it
What was the Cuban Missile Crisis? What was the Cold War? Who were the American and Soviet leaders during the Cuban Missile Crisis? What was EXCOMM? Who was Fidel Castro? Why was Castro’s Cuba hostile to the U.S.? What is NATO? What was the Warsaw Pact? What was the Berlin Blockade of 1948? What was