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Tuesday, May 18, 2010
JOHN F. KENNEDY ON THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
Those damn Russians and Cubans, trying to disrupt the peace in my country with their nuclear bombs. We are in the middle of the cold war and our world is on the brink of world war 3, only this time with nuclear weapons, which are much much more powerful. The Cubans are working with the Russians to build bases that have short and intermediate ranged nuclear missiles. In the beginning when we first found out about these missiles we had a couple of ideas on how to deal with them. Do nothing about them, use diplomatic pressure to get them to move their missiles, air attack on the missiles, full military invasion, make a naval block of cuba making them quarantined. Our only hope was to invade with full military force so we can retrieve the missiles and destroy them before they are able to be used.
Luckily for the sake of our military and their militaries the strikes never happened. We never invaded Cuba thinking they might fire one of their missiles at us once they know that we are coming. We had a stand still for a while neither side knowing exactly what to do. When Castro put the whole project into Khrushchev's hands. He threatened to make fire a missile at us and we were on edge for a long time. The world was at the brink of nuclear war because of a crazy man who wanted to blow us up. It was a standstill though, they never fired any missiles at us.
After all of these terrible plans, with the world almost coming to an end with the firing of multiple nuclear weapons, we came to a fair agreement. The Soviet Union knew that we had short range and intermediate range missiles, like they do, in Turkey and Italy. These two countries are extremely close to Russia and they were not comfortable with this. They wanted us to take out all of our nuclear missiles from our army bases in Italy and Turkey, and then they would remove all of their missiles out of Cuba. We thought long and hard about this, we were not sure if Russia would hold up their end of the deal, and we were not sure how the people of America would take it. The people might think we are giving in to Russia and leaving our self defenseless.
After a while of thinking, we finally came to the decision to agree to the Soviet Union. We took out all of our missiles in secret. When we started this project we found out our answer to if Russia would hold up their end of the deal, and they did. Khrushchev made a speech over the radio giving a new order, “Dismantle the weapons.” The world had become so close to blowing it self up with a nuclear war, but in the end no battles were fought, and we found a peaceful and sensible solution to this problem.
My plan to make the deal secret of taking out the bombs was a huge success, it made Khrushchev and the Soviet Union look horrible. No one knew that we had also removed all of our weapons, the world only knew that the weapons in cuba had been dismantled and removed from the country. The deal we made with the Soviet Union was made in total secrecy, so the Soviet Union looked like they lost the war and surrendered to the Americans by removing their weapons. Also from this crisis, Cuba and Soviet relations have been seriously hurt. They are no longer close allies together so they wont be able to join up again to harm us.
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