Cuban Missile Crisis
October 1962 confrontation between the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre), or the Caribbean Crisis (Russian: Карибский кризис, romanized: Karibskiy krizis), was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in the United Kingdom, 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.
In 1959, the US government deployed Thor nuclear missiles in England, an initiative known as Project Emily. In 1961 the US put Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. All were within range of Moscow. The US had also trained a paramilitary force of Cuban expatriates, for a CIA-led attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow its government in April 1961. Starting in November of that year, the US government engaged in a violent campaign of terrorism and sabotage in Cuba, referred to as the Cuban Project, which continued throughout the first half of the 1960s. The Soviet administration was concerned about a Cuban drift towards China, with which the Soviets had an increasingly strained relationship. In response to these factors the Soviet and Cuban governments agreed, at a meeting between leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in July 1962, to place nuclear missiles on Cuba to deter a future US invasion.
The public source identifies “Cuban Missile Crisis” as october 1962 confrontation between the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cuban, Missile and Crisis.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q128160. The Library of Congress control number is sh85034624. Authority coordinates are 23.117, -82.388. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1959 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cuban Missile Crisis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.