49 Fun Facts About Cuban Missile Crisis

Which Kevin Costner film dramatises the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Thirteen Days. The title counts the crisis's length and matches Robert Kennedy's memoir, but the makers bought the rights to The Kennedy Tapes, transcripts of the meetings the president had secretly recorded.

What do Russians call the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The Caribbean Crisis. Cubans know it as the October Crisis and remember its ending bitterly: Khrushchev settled with Kennedy without consulting Castro, who then refused to let inspectors in.

Which American nuclear missiles stood in Italy and Turkey, within range of Moscow, during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Jupiter. Washington already thought them obsolete and meant to retire them, which let Robert Kennedy quietly promise their removal so long as it stayed out of the public settlement.

Which code name, borrowed from a river in Russia's far east, hid the Soviet missile shipments to Cuba?

Anadyr. Secrecy ran so deep that the whole plan was written out by hand, so that not even a secretary would see it; Khrushchev approved the handwritten text in July 1962.

What were Soviet troops sailing for Cuba in 1962 issued, to disguise where they were headed?

Parkas and other winter kit. The men were told only that they were bound for a cold region, while the missile specialists flew in posing as farm experts and machine operators.

Soviet planners believed which Cuban landscape feature would hide their missiles from spy planes?

Palm trees. The secret held for about a month after the first missiles landed, until a U-2 spy plane photographed the launch sites under construction, in plain view from the air.

Which Cuban leader flew to Moscow in late August 1962 and argued the missile deal should be made public?

Che Guevara. Khrushchev overruled him and insisted on secrecy, so when a U-2 found the missiles weeks later Kennedy could charge Moscow with repeated false assurances.

Which Soviet foreign minister told Kennedy the arms in Cuba were purely defensive, unaware Kennedy had already seen the U-2 photographs?

Andrei Gromyko. Kennedy gave nothing away at their Oval Office meeting; he simply read out his own public warning that the gravest consequences would follow if offensive weapons reached Cuba.

Which Soviet colonel, a spy for the CIA and MI6, leaked missile secrets that helped analysts read the photographs from Cuba?

Oleg Penkovsky. The KGB arrested him on 22 October 1962, the very day Kennedy told the world about the missiles, and Moscow announced his execution the following May.

In his televised address, Kennedy said the missiles in Cuba could strike Washington, the Panama Canal and which capital?

Mexico City. Kennedy also named Cape Canaveral, then announced a naval quarantine of Cuba and called on Khrushchev to halt and eliminate what he called a reckless threat to world peace.

Which acronym named the committee of advisers Kennedy convened to manage the Cuban Missile Crisis?

EXCOMM. The Executive Committee of the National Security Council had been meeting in secret for six days before Kennedy formally created it, on the day he went on television.

Which New York senator warned in August 1962 that the Soviets were 'in all probability' building a missile base in Cuba?

Kenneth Keating. He spoke six weeks before the U-2 photographs bore him out, and in 1964 he lost his Senate seat to Robert Kennedy.

Why did Kennedy call the naval blockade of Cuba a 'quarantine'?

A blockade is legally an act of war. The gentler word also helped win the backing of the Organization of American States, whose vote gave the operation its legal footing.

In his 22 October 1962 address, Kennedy said he had that day evacuated military families from which American base?

Guantánamo Bay. Families on the base were ordered out that day with one suitcase each, and told to tie up their pets in the yard and leave the house keys on the table.

To which alert level was US Strategic Air Command raised during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

DEFCON 2. It is the step short of nuclear war: B-52s loaded with nuclear weapons were kept in the air around the clock, while the rest of the armed forces stayed at DEFCON 3.

At the UN in October 1962, which US ambassador demanded that Soviet ambassador Zorin admit the missiles in Cuba existed?

Adlai Stevenson. When Zorin stalled, he said he was prepared to wait for an answer 'until hell freezes over', then set up an easel and showed the Security Council the U-2 photographs.

The destroyer that boarded the freighter Marucla during the Cuban quarantine was named after which relative of President Kennedy?

His elder brother. The USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. honoured the navy pilot killed in 1944, and a young Robert Kennedy had once served aboard; her boarding party checked the cargo and let the freighter pass.

ABC reporter John Scali was approached in October 1962 by 'Aleksandr Fomin', the Washington station chief of which organisation?

The KGB. 'Fomin' was the cover name of Alexander Feklisov, who told Scali that war seemed about to break out and asked him to sound out the State Department on a deal.

How did Kennedy handle the tougher second message Khrushchev sent him on 27 October 1962?

Replied to the first letter instead. In public Kennedy accepted its offer of a no-invasion pledge; in private his brother Robert promised that the second message's demand would be met as well.

What brought down Major Rudolf Anderson's spy plane over Cuba, making him the crisis's only combat death?

A surface-to-air missile. It was Soviet-supplied, and Kennedy's advisers pressed him to bomb the launch site at once; he refused to act unless a second plane was attacked.

What threw a U-2 pilot off course over the Arctic and into Soviet airspace during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The northern lights. Their glare spoiled the star sightings Charles Maultsby was steering by on a flight to the North Pole; he strayed over Chukotka with MiGs in pursuit, ran out of fuel and glided back to Alaska.

Which officer aboard Soviet submarine B-59 is credited with refusing to fire its nuclear torpedo?

Vasily Arkhipov. In the best-known account, firing needed all three senior officers to agree and he alone refused; a year earlier he had been irradiated helping to save a submarine with an overheating reactor.

What did US destroyers drop on the Soviet submarine B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis to force it to surface?

Practice depth charges. The grenade-sized charges were only a signal, but the captain, out of touch with Moscow for days, took them for an attack and by one crewman's account readied his nuclear torpedo.

Who said during the Cuban quarantine, 'We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked'?

Dean Rusk. The secretary of state was recalling a staring game from his Georgia boyhood when word came that Khrushchev had ordered his most exposed ships to stop or turn around.

To whom did Robert Kennedy secretly promise, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that US missiles would leave Turkey?

Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Robert Kennedy paired the promise with an ultimatum that work on the missiles in Cuba must stop at once, and both sides kept the bargain secret for more than a decade.

How did Khrushchev deliver his acceptance of Kennedy's terms, ending the Cuban Missile Crisis?

By broadcast on Radio Moscow. An announcer read out that orders had gone out to dismantle, crate and return the weapons; the secret promise he had won on Turkey went unmentioned.

How did Washington verify that Soviet missiles had left Cuba?

Inspection at sea. Castro refused to let UN inspectors onto the island, so the departing Soviet freighters uncovered the missiles on deck for American planes and ships to look over as they left.

Which remaining Soviet weapons in Cuba kept the US quarantine in force until 20 November 1962?

Jet bombers. Castro, furious at being bypassed, refused for weeks to give up the Ilyushins he had been handed; the day Khrushchev agreed to withdraw them, Kennedy lifted the quarantine.

What did Castro urge Khrushchev to do, in a letter of 26 October 1962, if the United States invaded Cuba?

Launch a nuclear first strike. The message is now known as the Armageddon Letter; asked about it in 2010, Castro said that knowing what he knew now, it had not been worth it.

Which general told Kennedy that the peaceful end of the Cuban Missile Crisis was 'the greatest defeat in our history'?

Curtis LeMay. The Air Force chief had pressed for an invasion from the start and never recanted: 25 years on he still said America could have driven the Communists out of Cuba as well.

Which Cold War safeguard was installed in 1963 as a direct result of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The Moscow-Washington hotline. All through the crisis the two leaders had struggled to read each other's intentions, and the link was meant to stop that happening again; within a year they had also signed a nuclear test-ban treaty.

Who replaced Khrushchev as Soviet leader when his colleagues ousted him two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Leonid Brezhnev. Because the deal over the missiles in Turkey stayed secret, Khrushchev seemed simply to have backed down, a humiliation widely believed to have helped his rivals remove him in October 1964.

What name did Kennedy's 1960 campaign give its charge that America had fallen behind Moscow in the arms race?

The missile gap. It ran the other way: by 1962 the Soviets had only a few dozen intercontinental missiles, of unreliable design, while America held a commanding nuclear lead.

Khrushchev once boasted that Soviet factories were turning out missiles like which food?

Sausages. It was a bluff: Soviet missile numbers were nowhere near his claims, but the boast fed American fears of falling behind in the arms race.

What was the US sabotage campaign against Cuba begun in late 1961, timetabled by Edward Lansdale, called?

Operation Mongoose. Kennedy authorised it in November 1961, and its timetable hoped for open revolt against Castro in the first half of October 1962, the very weeks the Soviet missiles were found instead.

Which Cuban landing site gave its name to the failed CIA-backed invasion of April 1961?

The Bay of Pigs. Castro's forces crushed the CIA-trained exiles within days, and the fiasco convinced both him and Khrushchev that a full American invasion would follow, which the missiles were meant to deter.

Besides shielding Cuba, Khrushchev hoped his missiles there would help him push American, British and French garrisons out of which city?

Berlin. Kennedy named West Berlin in his televised address, pledging to meet any hostile move against it, and feared that bombing Cuba would hand Moscow its excuse to seize it.

What excuse did the White House give when Kennedy cut short a campaign trip to Chicago during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

He had a cold. Kennedy and his doctor made up the diagnosis so that he could fly home without alarming anyone; two days later he went on television to reveal the missiles.

CIA director John McCone guessed in August 1962 that missiles were coming to Cuba because the Soviets were first installing what?

Anti-aircraft defences. McCone reasoned they could have only one purpose, to stop U-2s from seeing what came next, and went on pressing the point by cable from his honeymoon.

Days after the first missiles reached Cuba, which news agency announced that Moscow had no need to send any there?

TASS. Its denial went out on 11 September 1962, three days after the first missiles had docked at a Cuban port; about a month later a U-2 photographed the launch sites being built for them.

Who was Kennedy's vice president during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Lyndon Johnson. He sat in on the crisis meetings, yet he was among the many advisers never told of the secret promise to pull American missiles out of Turkey that helped to end it.

Which Kennedy adviser argued, against the Joint Chiefs, that Soviet missiles in Cuba barely changed the strategic balance?

Robert McNamara. The defense secretary held that a few dozen more missiles could not dent America's huge lead, yet forty years on he said the world had come far closer to nuclear war than anyone knew.

Which American columnist proposed in print, two days before Khrushchev did, trading the US missiles in Turkey for those in Cuba?

Walter Lippmann. His syndicated column ran on 25 October 1962; Khrushchev made the same offer in public two days later, and Kennedy, while refusing it openly, accepted it in secret.

Submarine B-59's near-launch of a nuclear torpedo only became widely known at a 2002 conference in which city?

Havana. American, Soviet and Cuban veterans of the crisis met there forty years on, and what they heard led one American to sum up the gathering: 'We're damn lucky to be here.'

Which Soviet envoy talked Castro out of keeping about 100 tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba in November 1962?

Anastas Mikoyan. In a tense four-hour meeting he invoked a Soviet law, which did not in fact exist, forbidding the transfer; the weapons were crated and shipped home that December.

Which pope, who had offered to mediate during the Cuban Missile Crisis, issued the encyclical Pacem in terris six months later?

John XXIII. Already ill with cancer, he addressed Pacem in terris to 'all men of good will' and not only to Catholics, and died two months after finishing it.

Which war broke out in Asia on 20 October 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The Sino-Indian War. China attacked across the Himalayas two days before Kennedy's televised address, and once the crisis was over Beijing mocked Khrushchev for giving way to the Americans.

What newly created decoration was Rudolf Anderson, the U-2 pilot shot down over Cuba, the first person to receive?

The Air Force Cross. It ranks second only to the Medal of Honor, and Kennedy ordered it awarded after Anderson's death; Cuba returned his body, and he was buried in his home state of South Carolina.

Which British prime minister did Kennedy telephone almost daily during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Harold Macmillan. His ambassador in Washington, David Ormsby-Gore, was so close a friend of the Kennedys that he sat in on White House discussions of how to end the crisis.