...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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...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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...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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...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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...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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...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 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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...pace means that there was still underlying fear that one nation would use the weapon against the other which highlights that arms race did little to restrain the arm to a partial extent. On one hand, it can seem that both leaders, Khrushchev and Eisenhower felt that the prospect of nuclear war was too terrifying, thus, we can argue that nuclear weapons played as a deterrence as both nations could not condemn their nations to nuclear annihilation. For example, the USA detonated their first hydrogen bomb on the first of November 1952 on Enwetak and this created a cloud of 100 miles and 25 miles high, killing every species near it, this highlights the destructive force of a weapon. The fact that the USA did not intervene during the Hungary crisis in 1956, even though, it would have been an beneficial for them as they would have had a democratic nation in a soviet sphere of influence, this strongly shows the willingness of the USA to not enter a war which uses nuclear weapons with the USSR, thus, demonstrating the USA restraint. However, this argument can be argued to be simplistic to a small extent as other factors could have restrained the USA and the USSR actions, for example , the fact that Khrushchev had a strong believe in the idea that the fall of capitalism will one...
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...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 able to learn new qualities. The Leadership Style of JFK John F. Kennedy (JFK) has several leadership qualities that I would like to improve and incorporate...
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...Doctrine focused on the containment of communism by providing assistance to countries resisting communism in Europe while the Eisenhower Doctrine was focused upon providing both military and economic assistance to nations resisting communism in the Middle East and by increasing the flow of trade from the United States into Latin America. The Kennedy Doctrine was based on these same objectives but was more concerned with the spread of communism and Soviet influence in Latin America following the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power under Eisenhower during the 1950s. Some of the most notable events that stemmed from tenets of JFK’s foreign policy initiatives in regard to Latin America and the spread of communism were: The Bay of Pigs Invasion, April 17, 1961, Increase of U.S. involvement in Vietnam War, 1962, Cuban Missile Crisis, October, 1962, and Ratification of Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, July, 1963. The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful action by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba, with support and encouragement from the US...
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...The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 Throughout 1952- 1959 a right wing dictator called Batista was in power. The Americans supplied him with many resources and had large trading deals. In 1959 Fidel Castro led a revolt again Batista and came into power and began ruling in a communist way. Americans immediately stopped trading with Cuba so Castro looked for help from Kruschev. The Bay of Pigs 1961: The new young president Kennedy decided to launch a CIA plan to contain communism. He sent 1,500 cuban exiles into Cuba hoping to spark a revolt against the new communist regime. This was a fiasco as Kennedy had underestimated the popularity of Castro as well as the strength of the Cuban armed forces, he wanted to contain communism. Castro then asked Kruschev to help him with defend Cuba from any other attacks. The US had missiles in Turkey facing towards the USSR so Kruschev wanted threatening missiles as well. Kennedy sent U2 spy planes in which it was confirmed that the USSR were sending missiles to Cuba and the bases were being made towards the US. Kennedy called upon the committee of the National Security to help him decide how to deal with the situation. A naval blockade was then sent around Cuba to prevent the USSR ships containing the missiles to reach Cuba. The ships turned away when they met the American navy, however the missiles already on Cuba carried on being made. Kruschev sent a letter to Kennedy admitting there were missiles on Cuba but only for defence. Before...
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...During Kennedy’s time in office, two situations that required U.S diplomatic efforts were the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Berlin Crisis of 1961 was when the berlin wall was built in August 1961, dividing many families in the capital of Germany. It caused the international crisis and risk of military conflict. There was going to be a nuclear confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union. According to Taylor (2007), “in 1945 the victors of the Second World War, the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and French, had divided Germany into four zones”. On June 24, 1948, Soviet call off all land and water route of Berlin and the western zone in Germany. This was to force western allies out of Berlin and starve...
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...How far was the U2 crisis a threat to world peace? The U2 crisis in 1960 significantly cause relations between the US and USSR to worsen. It led toi Khrushchev refusing to attend the Paris Summit Meeting in part because Eisenhower refused to publicly apologize for it. This meant that there were problems left unsolved, such as the division of Berlin, and halted the progress the Thaw had made. Khrushchev used it as an excuse to heighten tensions between the USSR and the USA even more, leading to a propaganda victory for him and the USSR. The USSR’s success posed a threat to the US, because of this the US placed its forces on alert, ready for retaliation from the Soviets. This mistrust was part of what caused then Cuban Missile crisis which almost destroyed world peace completely with the threat of a nuclear war. It was not only the USSR who believed the US could not be trusted as a result of this incident. The U2 crisis created mistrust between China and the US, threatening world peace even further. This also led to the accelerated development of the arms race. The US developed new methods and systems for espionage instead (despite Eisenhower’s promise not to) such as the Corona Satellite program and the Lockheed D-21 unmanned drone while the USSR was able to develop a far reaching missile which they tried to place in Cuba in 1962. On the other hand, neither of the superpowers wanted war and were not prepared to take the risks of a nuclear war. Both countries had lost many men...
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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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