Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a thirteen-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1962, triggered by the Soviet Union's secret deployment of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba within striking range of most of the continental United States. President John F. Kennedy responded not with an air strike or invasion but with a naval quarantine of Cuba, while back-channel negotiations between Washington and Moscow searched for a way out of the standoff. The crisis was resolved when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles under United Nations verification in exchange for a public American pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret undertaking to remove American missiles from Turkey, and it left behind a direct Moscow-Washington hotline meant to prevent a future crisis from escalating through miscommunication. It is widely regarded as the moment the Cold War came closest to turning into a nuclear war between the two superpowers. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/