Welcome to the 2nd part. Here we go.
I left a burning question for you guys yesterday. What prompted Khruschev to place MRBMs in Cuba? Well, the US had missiles in Turkey and Italy at the time, and the logic was to strengthen the Soviet Union’s position globally.
Kennedy immediately calls EXCOMM (Executive Committee of the National Security Council) to discuss how to react to this move by the Soviets. Now there was an inside story about these meetings. It turned out President Kennedy was secretly recording these meetings, for reasons undisclosed officially so far. Anyway, on October 22, despite protests for airstrikes and invasions, Kennedy decided on a third option: quarantine, a naval blockade to block any incoming Soviet ships. His public announcement caused fear in the public, and all homes and schools practiced nuclear cover drills, fallout shelters reopened, and the whole country was in a state of panic. It did, however. turn out to be a genius move initially, as by October 24, Soviet ships began to slow down and even head back, bringing a big relief to America. However, things were done yet. The show was just reaching its climax.
October 25 came. At the UN Security Council, the USSR Ambassador Valerian Zorin denied any claims that the Soviets had planted missiles in Cuba. Enraged, the US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson outright threw the photographs of the Soviet missiles in Cuba onto the scene, and demanded Valerian Zorin to answer a simple yes or no question: did they have missiles in Cuba or not? He famously even refused to wait for the translation; he asked Zorin directly to answer yes or no. What Stevenson didn’t realize at the time was the USSR hadn’t struck just yet.
The big blow was just coming. Stay tuned.
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