Remembering the Cuban Missle Crisis

Fifty years have now passed since the Cuban missile crisis. In some ways I feel that it couldn’t have been that long ago. Yet it still plays in my mind that the world almost found itself in a full nuclear war and that it would have affected everyone in the world.
Our home had only a black and white television. Yet almost daily NBC with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley in their report and Walter Cronkite on CBS, we watched in fascination as the United States and Russia seemed to be inching their way to war.
Adlai Stevenson who was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, perhaps is best remembered that during the missile crisis demanded of the Soviet representative a yes or no answer to the question if his country was installing missiles in Cuba. With no answer coming from the representative Stevenson stated "I am prepared to wait for my answer until Hell freezes over”. It summed up the blunt talk between the two super powers.
And on the television, we watched as the US sent its navy to sea, presenting a blockade of the Cuban country. The Soviet Union kept their supply ships moving to Cuba.
The United States army, marines and air-force were deployed to Florida.
Pictures of missile launchers were shown on the beaches of Florida and all the way to the Florida Keys.
As grade 7 students we were sure that war was imminent. And we didn’t know what that would mean for our futures. Stories about what a nuclear war would mean filled pages of newspapers and magazines like Time and Newsweek, and radio stations kept us up to date with the latest developments in the creep to war.
Today we know that the Soviet Union had already placed nuclear warheads on the Cuban Island. We know that it could have been possible for the launchers to be ready within 72 hours to fire missiles back at the United States.
We now know that both the President of the United States John Kennedy and the Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev were both working back channels of diplomacy to get themselves and their nations from blundering into war. The two both realized the huge catastrophe that could unfold on the world.
As a 12 year old, I didn’t know any of this nor did my classmates. We just wondered about our future, not in years, but in the immediacy of days. We were scared.
The crisis only lasted for 13 days, until the Soviet Union turned their supply ships around and announced the removal of missiles from Cuba. Not known was that in order to get that agreement from the Soviet Union, the United States agreed to remove their obsolete missiles from Turkey.
And then Khrushchev and Kennedy created the “Red Phone” or “Hot Line” that created direct communications between the two nuclear powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. During the crisis it had taken the United States 12 hours to receive and translate the document from the Soviet Union. Both nations understood that direct communications between the two nations were imperative.
The hot line continues to this day, although the original “red phone” has been replaced.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher