Cuban Missile Crisis Trivia
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49 free Cuban Missile Crisis trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Cuban Missile Crisis trivia quiz covers the thirteen days in October 1962 that are widely considered the closest the Cold War came to nuclear war. It begins with the background: the American Thor and Jupiter missiles in Britain, Italy and Turkey, the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose, the real state of the 'missile gap', Operation Anadyr and the Soviet troops issued with ski boots for a trip to the tropics, and the U-2 flight over San Cristóbal on 14 October that found the launch sites. The heart of the quiz follows the crisis day by day: EXCOMM's options, why Kennedy called the blockade a 'quarantine', the 22 October television address, DEFCON 2 and the B-52s on airborne alert, Adlai Stevenson confronting Zorin at the UN, the boarding of the Marucla, the ABC reporter and the KGB station chief, Khrushchev's two very different letters, Rudolf Anderson's U-2 shot down over Banes, the depth charges dropped on submarine B-59 and the officer credited with saving the world, and Robert Kennedy's secret deal with Dobrynin over the Jupiters. It closes with the aftermath: the hotline, the Test Ban Treaty, Curtis LeMay's verdict and Khrushchev's fall. Questions range from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia article on the Cuban Missile Crisis.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Kevin Costner film dramatises the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Thirteen Days
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.
Q 02What do Russians call the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The Caribbean 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.
Q 03Which American nuclear missiles stood in Italy and Turkey, within range of Moscow, during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Jupiter
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.
Q 04Which code name, borrowed from a river in Russia's far east, hid the Soviet missile shipments to Cuba?
Anadyr
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.
Q 05What were Soviet troops sailing for Cuba in 1962 issued, to disguise where they were headed?
Parkas and other winter kit
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.
Q 06Soviet planners believed which Cuban landscape feature would hide their missiles from spy planes?
Palm trees
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.
Q 07Which Cuban leader flew to Moscow in late August 1962 and argued the missile deal should be made public?
Che Guevara
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.
Q 08Which Soviet foreign minister told Kennedy the arms in Cuba were purely defensive, unaware Kennedy had already seen the U-2 photographs?
Andrei Gromyko
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.
Q 09Which Soviet colonel, a spy for the CIA and MI6, leaked missile secrets that helped analysts read the photographs from Cuba?
Oleg Penkovsky
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.
Q 10In his televised address, Kennedy said the missiles in Cuba could strike Washington, the Panama Canal and which capital?
Mexico City
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.
Q 11Which acronym named the committee of advisers Kennedy convened to manage the Cuban Missile Crisis?
EXCOMM
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.
Q 12Which New York senator warned in August 1962 that the Soviets were 'in all probability' building a missile base in Cuba?
Kenneth Keating
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.
Q 13Why did Kennedy call the naval blockade of Cuba a 'quarantine'?
A blockade is legally an act of war
Q 21What threw a U-2 pilot off course over the Arctic and into Soviet airspace during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The northern lights
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.
Q 22Which officer aboard Soviet submarine B-59 is credited with refusing to fire its nuclear torpedo?
Vasily Arkhipov
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.
Q 23What did US destroyers drop on the Soviet submarine B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis to force it to surface?
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.
Q 14In his 22 October 1962 address, Kennedy said he had that day evacuated military families from which American base?
Guantánamo Bay
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.
Q 15To which alert level was US Strategic Air Command raised during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
DEFCON 2
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.
Q 16At the UN in October 1962, which US ambassador demanded that Soviet ambassador Zorin admit the missiles in Cuba existed?
Adlai Stevenson
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.
Q 17The destroyer that boarded the freighter Marucla during the Cuban quarantine was named after which relative of President Kennedy?
His elder brother
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.
Q 18ABC reporter John Scali was approached in October 1962 by 'Aleksandr Fomin', the Washington station chief of which organisation?
The KGB
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.
Q 19How did Kennedy handle the tougher second message Khrushchev sent him on 27 October 1962?
Replied to the first letter instead
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.
Q 20What brought down Major Rudolf Anderson's spy plane over Cuba, making him the crisis's only combat death?
A surface-to-air missile
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.
Practice depth charges
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.
Q 24Who said during the Cuban quarantine, 'We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked'?
Dean Rusk
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.
Q 25To whom did Robert Kennedy secretly promise, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that US missiles would leave Turkey?
Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin
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.
Q 26How did Khrushchev deliver his acceptance of Kennedy's terms, ending the Cuban Missile Crisis?
By broadcast on Radio Moscow
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.
Q 27How did Washington verify that Soviet missiles had left Cuba?
Inspection at sea
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.
Q 28Which remaining Soviet weapons in Cuba kept the US quarantine in force until 20 November 1962?
Jet bombers
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.
Q 29What did Castro urge Khrushchev to do, in a letter of 26 October 1962, if the United States invaded Cuba?
Launch a nuclear first strike
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.
Q 30Which general told Kennedy that the peaceful end of the Cuban Missile Crisis was 'the greatest defeat in our history'?
Curtis LeMay
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.