Dylan Thomas Connolly U.S. History 14 December 2015 The Cuban Missile Crisis In October of 1962 the U.S. entered a conflict called the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is arguably the closest the U.S. has ever come to nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union resulting from the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis was considered the climax of the Cold War, a period lasting from about 1947 to 1991, in which a political rivalry between Eastern and Western Allies surfaced. The Soviet Union was being run by Joseph Stalin, who wanted to expand communism through Eastern Europe and make a group of united communist countries, while the Western Allies favored capitalism and …show more content…
During this period Americans were especially distrustful of communism. People such as Joseph McCarthy, led investigations into the U.S. State Department and had people tried for Soviet subversion. Fear of communism led to the Cuban Missile Crisis because Americans became afraid and paranoid at the thought of Soviet missiles 90 miles off the coast of the U.S. The hostility and mistrust that defined the relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union “was all the more intense because it pitted not only two great powers against each other, but two clashing ideological systems—communism and capitalism” (Fogarty) . Americans wanted to keep communism cloistered in the Soviet Union and used containment to stop the expansion of the Soviet Union. The U.S. associated communism directly with the Soviet Union and therefore when the Soviet Union moved missiles to Cuba, the paranoia advanced the crisis. Even though the U.S. fear of communism was exaggerated, fear of nuclear war was perfectly justifiable. The following passage discusses how fear misinterpreted the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis, “Fear of nuclear weapons is rational, but its extension to terrorism has been a vehicle for fear-mongering that is unjustified by available data. And the historical record shows that the war risk is real. The Cuban Missile Crisis and other …show more content…
Without Cuba, the Soviet Union would not have moved nuclear missiles 90 miles off the coast of the U.S. Another cause was Americans fear and distrust of communism, this caused paranoia and only served to advance the conflict further. The most critical cause, however, was the Soviet Union transporting and building nuclear missiles in Cuba and these events together caused the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had fault in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but after a 13-day deadlock both sides ended up being able appease the other and thankfully the conflict ended without any military confrontation and the crisis was