Cuban Missile Crisis controversy?

D

doglover

New member
involving Kennedy? I'm writing a paper on Kennedy, specifically what he did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm working on a thesis, but I'm confused as to what is controversial. My teacher is very vague every time I ask him, so does anyone know what was controversial about Kennedy's role in the Cuban Missile Crisis?
 
The US trained and armed 1300 Cuban insurgents to try to overthrow Castro. When things got going touch Kennedy refused to back them up with US flyovers. They lost and the Cold War was greatly escalated,
 
controversial ? Nothing was controversial about it.

The USSR had started building missiles sites in Cuba, Kennedy told the USSR that this would not tolerated.

Kennedy ordered a blockade stop the ships that were carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba.

This engagement is though to be the closest the US and USSR came to all out nuclear war.

I don't know why anyone would call this incident "controversial."
 
The US trained and armed 1300 Cuban insurgents to try to overthrow Castro. When things got going touch Kennedy refused to back them up with US flyovers. They lost and the Cold War was greatly escalated,
 
In September 1962, after some unsuccessful operations by the U.S. to overthrow the Cuban regime (Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose), the Cuban and Soviet governments began to surreptitiously build bases in Cuba for a number of medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) with the ability to strike most of the continental United States.

Kennedy had proposed all out nuclear war with Cuba if the missiles were not removed. He also planned to bomb and invade Cuba. The world had never been closer to nuclear war.

The U.S. announced that it would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba and demanded that the Soviets dismantle the missile bases already under construction or completed in Cuba and remove all offensive weapons.

Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a U.S. public declaration and agreement to never invade Cuba. Secretly, the U.S. agreed that it would dismantle all U.S.-built Thor and Jupiter IRBMs deployed in Europe and Turkey.
 
It was controversial because the sloppy attempt by Kennedy to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs prompted Castro to approve of Soviet missiles becoming based in Cuba. With the failure of the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev interpreted that failure as a sign of weakness by Kennedy, this encouraged him to arrange for Russian ICBMs to be secretly shipped to Cuba. So, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a direct result of Kennedy's fumbling of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought us within a breath of nuclear war. ...... During the standoff, a US Navy ship had considered firing a dummy torpedo at a Russian submarine as a warning. The US officer had second thoughts, decided not to fire because the Russian would have no way of knowing the torpedo to be a dud. Years later, the Russian officer told a interviewer, had he been the target of a US torpedo, he would have responded immediately with a nuclear weapon. We came very close.........
A article about the Bay of Pigs fiasco....................
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1765.html
 
The potential consequences in facing down the Soviets over their installation of offensive missiles pointed towards the US. Had the Soviets not capitulated, it would have meant war between the two super powers. Many in America felt the risk was too great a gamble, when diplomacy might have been the way to go.

Diplomacy under Nikita Kruschev was non existent. This was the diabolical shoe banger who would insult our president publicly. Kennedy knew that dealing with the Soviets under Kruschev would take a line in the sand, thus the naval blockade in 1961. Kennedy won and Kruschev was ousted as the Soviet leader.
 
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