For those born before or after 1945, until the coming down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a terrifying potential scenario existed of the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member countries going to war. If such escalated into a nuclear weapon exchange, the result would have been catastrophic: Appalling environmental consequences; the destruction of the world economy as we knew it and millions of deaths amongst belligerent and non- belligerent countries alike.
Such was the horrific nightmare facing humanity fifty years ago, from 12 to 27 October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crises constituted that historical moment when superpower tensions reached their most dangerous levels. American and Soviet leaders, President John Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, contemplated the real and most dread prospect of war between their respective countries.
Today's global community still share dire concerns regarding the potential proliferation of mass destruction weapons to terrorist groups or rogue states. Hence fears surrounding the current sabre-rattling between Iran, Israel and the United States. But now at least, we no longer live under a continuous dread fear for a Third World War breaking out involving nuclear weapon exchanges by big power rivals. But even such must be said with caution: China, India, Pakistan maintain nuclear weapons to guard against one another, Israel has its nuclear arsenal to protect its very existence, while historically-based suspicions are not entirely extinct between the first nuclear armed states: Russia versus its leading former ideological foes; the United States, Britain and France.
The Cuban situation had its origins in the nuclear arms race; an astronomically expensive competition between the USA and USSR dating from 1949, by 1962 completely devoid of any internationally-agreed restraints upon the destructive power or numerical extent of their respective nuclear arsenals. By 1962, there existed formidable numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), intermediate range missiles (IRBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), air-dropped hydrogen bombs and smaller battlefield tactical nuclear weapons. Such were tested atmospherically in the Pacific and Arctic Circle by the USA and USSR respectively, with photos of giant mushroom clouds catching press front pages throughout the world.
However, it was the Americans who easily bested the Soviets in terms of nuclear weapon technology and deployment. Despite the "peaceful co-existence" buzzword in then contemporary international relations, Khrushchev was determined to assert his country as America's equal in military, diplomatic, economic and scientific strength. Besides proving communism as being capitalism's ideological superior. Khrushchev believed that capitalism would ultimately destroy itself and communism would inevitably spread through the emerging Asian and African countries. Post-independence leaders and anti-colonial resistance/liberation movements, including the South African ANC and SACP, would the Soviets believed, come to power by revolution and choose the socialist road.
In 1959, the Cuban Revolution resulted in Fidel Castro's revolutionaries overthrowing the corrupt and despotic American-supported Batista regime. An opportunity now existed whereby Soviet nuclear weapons could be placed in "Uncle Sam's backyard", tilting the strategic nuclear balance away from the USA. The planned clandestine placement of Soviet IRBMs in Cuba, just 90km from Florida, meant the warning time in America to prepare for a nuclear attack would be less than one minute.