The final, signed, page of the Quarantine Proclamation or Interdiction of the Delivery of Offensive Weapons to Cuba. Officially designated the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm), its members were assembled at the President's request on Tuesday morning, October 16, after National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy informed him that a U-2 had photographed the "unmistakable evidence" that he referred to in the first paragraph of his speech. The blockade of Cuba, and the other responses detailed in the President's dramatic 20-minute speech, had been devised by a select group of advisers during the previous week in secret meetings that often lasted late into the night. "We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth," he said, but warned, "neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced." And he added that any missile launched from Cuba would be considered to have originated from the Soviet Union and would require "a full retaliatory response" upon the USSR. ![]() He said the United States was demanding that all the offensive missiles be removed from Cuba forthwith-or else-and announced that a "quarantine" of Cuba (calling it a blockade would have represented it as an act of war) was only the first step toward forcing the removal of the offending weapons. Kennedy went on to explain that Soviet officials had repeatedly lied about the buildup. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." "Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. Kennedy began in what has to be counted as the scariest presidential address of the Cold War. "This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba," President John F. The public learned that nuclear war was an imminent possibility on Monday, October 22, 1962, at 7 p.m. JFK Tells the Nation: Nuclear War Possible But that ending was far away on a portentous autumn evening when President Kennedy gave the speech "heard around the world." The terrifying realization in 1962 that nuclear armageddon was merely a stumble away profoundly influenced Cold War behavior for the next 27 years, until the collapse of a wall in Berlin ushered in a second nuclear age. Why the Cuban Missile Crisis ended peacefully, and what were its consequences, remain relevant questions for historians even 50 years later.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |