...The Cuban Missile Crisis was a thirteen day confrontation between The United States and The Soviet Union that was arguably the closest the two countries ever came to a nuclear war during The Cold War. On October 14, 1962, photographs taken by United States reconnaissance planes showed that nuclear missile sites were being built in Cuba. Bypassing private, diplomatic procedures, Kennedy went on national television on October 22 and revealed to the public that nuclear missiles had been found in Cuba and were within range of the continental United States. Kennedy also announced in his speech that the United States would enact a naval blockade on Cuba by putting a ring of ships around Cuba. Kennedy placed this "quarantine," as he called it, to...
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...Hesbon ogeka LA history &politics 4/12/2013 The Cuban Missile The Cuban Missile Crisis remains an example of one of the most terrifying events in history for the people of the world. A very real threat existed for the crisis to escalate and create World War III, which would include the annihilation of countries and cause unimaginable damage from the use of nuclear weapons by the United States and the former Soviet Union. The conflict had historical roots in the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union, as well as in the history of relations between the United States and Cuba. The strife between the United States and Cuba culminated when Fidel Castro overthrew a government publicly supported by the United States, although political and military officials in the United States secretly welcomed the events. However, it soon became clear that the takeover of Cuba by Castro would result in escalating conflict between it and the United States, something that quickly became more evident in the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose; both designed to eliminate Castro from the political field in Cuba. The Soviet Union supported Castro’s regime and Cuba’s stand, and forced its hand with the placement of nuclear missiles on the island. The United States countered, and the two countries played out their hands to determine the fate of the world. In the end, the United States and the Soviet Union came to an agreement, both sides attempting to avoid a nuclear...
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...Introduction The Cuban Missile Crisis originated because of a number of different issues, stemming from the ongoing struggle between The United States of America and The Soviet Union and between Capitalism and Communism. There were various events and circumstances which caused this standoff. Firstly, the decision to place missiles on Cuban soil was taken by the Soviets as a means to offset their strategic inferiority. The second main cause was the fact that America felt threatened by a Castro lead Communist Cuba. Their continued efforts to oust Castro, was a significant factor in creating a very real fear in Castro of a US invasion of Cuba. This led him to form strong bonds with the Soviets and subsequently allowing them to place missiles in Cuba. We also look at Americas failed attempt to remove Castro with their ‘Bay of Pigs’, invasion of Cuba, in 1961. A final factor in the cause of the crisis is the possibility of the Soviets using the missiles as a means of strengthening their power, with regards to negotiating with America in matters outside of Cuba. The first aspect to look at when dealing with this question is Soviet insecurity and strategic inferiority with the US. The Soviets had many reasons to feel insecure or threatened in the period directly preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev had long known that the Soviets had a disproportionally lower amount of missiles than the Americans, however it was not until after events surrounding the building of the Berlin...
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...p81 The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Limits of Crisis Management. RICHARD M. PIOUS. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Academy of Political Science Nowhere do the constitutional prerogatives of the president seem greater than in the midst of national security crises; nowhere do we invest in the president greater resources of command. Although in the past half century presidents have surrounded themselves with a vast national security apparatus, consisting of intelligence agencies and the National Security Council, it is not at all clear that presidents have been effective as crisis managers. They often lack crucial information, use incomplete or misleading analogies to understand crisis situations, find it difficult to micromanage events, and are unable to project force effectively. Even when they are successful, it is often in spite of, rather than because of, the resources of the institutionalized presidency at their disposal. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 provides a case study of how John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev almost blundered into a nuclear war through the crisis management approaches of their advisory systems, but then managed to extricate themselves using personal diplomacy and old-fashioned political horsetrading. They did so without revealing to the world how they had defused the crisis, a decision to maintain confidentiality with far reaching consequences for subsequent presidential crisis decision making. The illusion that presidential crisis management can...
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...discovered Soviet missiles which were under construction. The next day President John F. Kennedy was informed of the discovery and the President formed a group of twelve advisors to plan and handle the crisis. The advisors met for seven days to plan a strategy on how to handle the crisis and on October 22, 1962, President Kennedy revealed the crisis to the American public and of his decision to surround and blockade Cuba. President Kennedy also made the announcement that the Soviets would need to remove their missiles from Cuba and any missiles fired from Cuba would be considered a direct threat to and attack on the United States. President Kennedy and the advisory group received a letter from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on October 26, 1962, detailing a proposal that had the Soviets removing all offensive missiles from Cuba and in return the United States would not invade Cuba. The very next day, October 27, 1962, a United States U-2 bomber was shot down over Cuba and Khrushchev sent a second letter to President Kennedy with another proposal, making this day the worst day thus far in the crisis. The Soviets demanded that the United States remove all their missiles from Turkey and the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba. Attorney General Robert Kennedy suggested that the United States ignore the second letter and to only respond to the first letter. On October 28, 1962, Khrushchev announced that the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba and after...
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...iTHE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS Module prepared for CIAO By Richard Ned Lebow August 2000 The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 is generally regarded as the most serious military confrontation of the Cold War. American destroyers deployed along a picket line to intercept Soviet ships transporting missiles and nuclear warheads to Cuba while American air, ground and naval forces prepared for air strikes against Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba and a follow-up invasion. The Strategic Air Command was put on an unprecedented state of alert – “DEFCON II,” only one step away from “war is imminent.” On Saturday morning,October 27, President Kennedy and his advisors were pessimistic about their ability to preserve the peace. Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother and Attorney General of the U.S., had “the feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling.”1 In Moscow, the tension was “phenomenal.” On Sunday morning, General Secretary Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and his advisors worried “that Kennedy intended to declare war, to launch an attack” against the Soviet Union.2 That same day, the two leaders reached an accommodation that, in retrospect, turned out to be one of the key turning points of the Cold War. 1 OVERVIEW The “Caribbean crisis,” as it was known in the former Soviet Union, was attributed to the Kennedy administration’s unwillingness to accept the status quo in Cuba. Unalterably...
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...The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading the Lessons Correctly Author(s): Richard Ned Lebow Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 431-458 Published by: The Academy of Political Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2150497 Accessed: 10/11/2008 23:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aps. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Academy of Political Science is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve...
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...The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading the Lessons Correctly Author(s): Richard Ned Lebow Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 431-458 Published by: The Academy of Political Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2150497 Accessed: 10/11/2008 23:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aps. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Academy of Political Science is collaborating with JSTOR to...
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...The Cuban Missile Crisis The world was at the edge of a third world war. This was the result of a variety of things: the Cuban Revolution, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, US anti-communism, insecurity of the Soviet Union, and Cuba's fear of invasion all made causes for war. However, war was not the result due to great cooperation from both President Kennedy and President Khrushchev and each of the decisions made by the leaders was crucial in the outcome of The Crisis. Kennedy's choice to take action by means of quarantine instead of air-strike and Khrushchev's decision to abide by the quarantines were perhaps the two most significant decisions made by the leaders in order to prevent war. The Cuban Missile Crisis showed the world that compromising and discussion can in-fact prevent war. As Khrushchev said in 1962, "They talk about who won and who lost. Human reason won. Mankind won." 1 The world had almost seen another world war, the effects of which would have been devastating because of the weapons involved. Humanity, indeed, was the prevention of the war. The Cuban Revolution was a background cause to the crisis. On January 1st, 1959 a Marxist regime in Cuba would have seemed unlikely. To the communist party in Cuba, Fidel Castro appeared tempestuous, irresponsible and stubbornly bourgeois. In 1943 President Batista appointed a communist to his Cabinet, as he used communists as leaders of the labor unions. Batista started to fail the Cuban communists and their...
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...The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred from 13th October – 26th October 1962, was a diplomatic conflict between America and Russia, which moved the world to the edge of a nuclear precipice and World War Three. The United States (US), led by then President J. F. Kennedy, had to suppress the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union (SU), who had secretly stationed nuclear missiles in Cuba – within 90 miles of the US – in order to deter any future US attempts to attack Cuba and to equalize the nuclear strategic balance of power. (Cimbala, 1999). The Movie, Thirteen Days (2000), directed by Roger Donaldson, depicts the tension that the crisis provoked and illustrates how foreign policy was made, which ultimately ended with SU’s withdrawal and removal of the nuclear missiles in Cuba. Thirteen Days began with the discovery that Russia had deployed nuclear missiles on Cuba, with evidence from the U2 photographs captured. This was an impermissible security threat; and the outcome of responses to that threat could lead to a nuclear holocaust. The main thesis of the movie is that, strategic decisions are not made individually or based exclusively on a rational deliberation of evidence, but is embedded in a web of complex organizational undertaking. US Response to the SU emplacement of missiles in Cuba The sequence of action unfolds over a course of 12 days and is illustrated through the three major models of decision-making in the field of Organizational Theory – the Rational Actor...
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...In writing Essence of Decision, Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow attempt to produce not only a comprehensive academic assessment of the Cuban missile crisis, and explain the rationale that defined the shape and outcome of that event, but to challenge the conventional method of studying international relations through a single conceptual “lens,” the Rational Actor Model (RAM). The major assumptions that underlie the RAM, that states consider all available options and choose rationally in order to maximize the utility of each choice, is presented as flawed. Many facts and behavioral nuances must be ignored for the sake of fitting such an analysis within the RAM framework. Allison and Zelikow argue that it is necessary to analyze events through different conceptual lenses focused on a trio of decision-making bodies: the RAM, the Organizational Behavior Model, and the Governmental Politics model. Through each of these lenses, the authors analyze what they propose to be the three primary questions requiring resolution for a broad understanding of the crisis: “Why did the Soviet Union decide to place offensive missiles in Cuba?” “Why did the United States respond to the missile deployment with a blockade?” “Why did the Soviet Union withdraw the missiles?” (Allison and Zelikow, 1999, p. 77-78). Under the RAM, dubbed Model 1 by Allison and Zelikow, governments are recognized as the primary actors in decision making and are rational in that they consider a set of objectives, evaluate...
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...Introduction The Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the most complicated conflicts in the history that faced two superpowers of the world, the United States and the Soviet Union. The discussions and negotiations on the various issues that directly or indirectly affected the crisis will be evaluated in detail in the discussion section; but it should primarily be said that the crisis period was very dense and it longed only 13 days. The negotiating styles, interests and communication efficiency of the parties that are concerned, were well enough to reach a wise agreement in a very short time relative to the conflict. All the parties’ interests, even the ones which demanded by the indirectly affected parties; such as Turkey, were taken into consideration; and a resolution that pleased almost every sides of the crisis. Avoiding a world war, which would possibly include nuclear weapons, is a fact that will show the succession of the negotiations during the crisis. Discussion There are several parties that concerned by the Cuban Missile Crisis directly or indirectly. The significant ones are the United States and the Soviet Union which were directly involved in the crisis and actively participated in the negotiations. Additionally, Cuba and Turkey concerned by the crisis because of their role of holding the missiles of the Soviet Union and the United States in their own soil; and Germany was indirectly concerned because of the possible attack of the USSR to Berlin (1). At the outbreak...
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...Leadership Style John Vicciardo LDR/531-Organizational Leadership August 18, 2014 Dr. Patricia Anderson Abstract This paper will analyze the leadership style of John F. Kennedy and compare it to historical and contemporary leadership theories. It will review JFK’s leadership characteristics, compare them to my specific leadership style and discuss areas of future personal focus. The discussion includes specific examples that feature Kennedy’s ability to take risks, create and articulate a vision, identify the needs of followers and be responsible for his decisions. The paper will outline a leadership discussion with my mentor in which the traits of JFK and how they apply to my style are discussed. Table of Contents Introduction4 The Leadership Style of JFK4 Bay of Pigs4 The Cuban Missile Crisis5 Man on the Moon5 Personal Leadership evaluation6 Conclusion6 References8 Leadership Style Introduction There are several different theories for understanding leaders and what enables them to be successful. The theories: leader-member exchange, transformational leadership, charismatic leadership, trait theory, contingency theory and behavioral theory (Robbins & Judge, 2013), are interdependent and most leaders will exhibit characteristics of all of these theories at different times in their roles. John F. Kennedy was a great political leader that I admire and his leadership style showcases the need for leaders to be born with some attributes while...
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...Alexandra Roach Dr. Fiddner PLSC World Politics 101 006 October 8, 2015 Cuban Missile Crisis Analysis Due to the Cold War, in October 1962, tensions were high between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis began on October 14, 1962. This was by far the most significant event to happen in the Cold War. The Soviets had been using Cuba as a place to set their missiles from which they would be able to launch a nuclear attack at any time on almost anywhere in the Southeastern parts of the United States, this including places like Washington D.C., New York City, New Orleans, and other major cities in the United States. Photographers were able to capture pictures of these missiles with high-altitude U-2 spy planes giving evidence that the missiles were 90 miles off the American costal line. Although it seems as if the Cuban Missile Crisis happened at a blinding pace, this crisis actually was a culmination of a much longer process. In this essay I will be focusing on the events that led up to the terrifying 14 day event of the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as looking at the crisis from an individual level of analysis and from a realist point of view. In order to fully understand the Cuban Missile Crisis, we must first take a look at all of the events that had lead up to the crisis. Among many of the factors leading up to the nuclear standoff between the countries, one of the factors, of course, was the genuine concern of defense of each leader, John...
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...to provide the United States with the flexibility to respond to communist expansion. The President believed that the expansion of communism would become a direct threat to the United States and Europe. While Truman and Eisenhower created policies that were mainly based on containing communism in Europe and the Middle East, President Kennedy’s doctrine’s differed from his predecessors in that his doctrine focused on Latin America, especially leading up to and after the Cuban Revolution. President Kennedy believed that the United States should contain the spread of communism by using other alternative means. During President Kennedy’s term in office there were several diplomatic crises that challenged his foreign policy doctrine. The challenges included; The Bay of Pigs in 1961, The Vietnam War in 1962, and The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Although The Bay of Pigs and the United States involvement in Vietnam were seen as major efforts that supremely impacted U.S. foreign policy, it was the Cuban Missile Crisis that almost brought the United States to the brink of a nuclear disaster and clearly solidified President Kennedy’s doctrine as a success. Some pundits suggest that the chance of the conflict escalating to war was between 1 in 3. The entire conflict was brought on because the United States and the Soviet Union were entangled in a seemingly competitive arms race with each other. Because the Soviet Union began to fall behind in the arms...
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