When given the opportunity to write a term paper on any topic in American history from 1890 to 1980 one has innumerable options: World War One and Two, the War in Vietnam, the Korean conflict, and the great depression to name but a few. However, I have chosen a brief period of two weeks during which the very existence of the United States was seriously threatened.

To most of my generation the Cuban missile crisis is nonexistent. My generation spends so much time looking to the future, and does not seem to realize that the future comes from the past. If the successes and failures of past generations are not properly analyzed we will be ignorant as to what should be done in the future. The anxiety and emotions felt by 200 million Americans as the U.S. was on the brink of nuclear war has since been forgotten. These emotions have been replaced by a news byte: the November, 1962 cover of Time magazine, which shows Soviet submarines turning around just off the Cuban coast.

Munich. Pearl Harbor. The Iron Curtain. The Berlin Blockade. Korea. McCarthyism. Suez-Hungary. Sputnik. The aforementioned are all shorthand references to incidents in which the United States

On August 14, 1961 the world woke up to find that a barbed-wire fence divided the Eastern sector of Berlin from the Western sectors to prevent East Germans from fleeing to the West as more than three million had since the war.

had failed. Munich and appeasement became synonyms for failure to stand firm in the face of aggression. Pearl Harbor's losses are self-evident. Sputnik represented Soviet superiority in space and questioned whether the United States had equal spacecraft building skills. President John F. Kennedy realized that the United States had failed in so many international missions that it was a necessity that the United States not only avert war with the Soviet Union but emerge as the clear victors.

Detzer, David The Brink: Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Crowell, 1979

The Cuban missile crisis is an important facet of American history for many reasons. When Eisenhower yielded the presidency to Kennedy the gross yield of all U.S. weapons probably equaled about one million times that of the bomb that had obliterated Hiroshima. We must pay close attention to these figures because, in October 1962 the United States was on the brink of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union; we must realize just how close we came to death and how close we may come in the future.

There are those who believe that the United States should have bombed out the missile sites and the Castro government. The simplicity of such a course is attractive, but the results would have been questionable. The missiles would have been removed but thousands of soviet technicians might have been killed. Because it sometimes reacts instinctively, the Kremlin might have responded with a direct military counterblow.

The blast of an atomic bomb is measured in thousands of tons of TNT, in contrast the blast of a hydrogen bomb which is measured in millions of tons of TNT. The Hiroshima bomb was ten feet long, weighed almost 5 tons, and required a crew of experts days to load. In contrast, by the time of the missile crisis, bombs twenty times more powerful were three feet long and could be strapped to an ordinary bomber. The public learned how toxic nuclear weapons were when Strontium-9

Some common words found in the essay are:
Soviet Union, Vietnam Korean, Berlin German, President Kennedy, Union MRBM's, TNT Hiroshima, John Kennedy, Americans Russians, MRBM Cuba, Kennedy Soviets, soviet union, missile crisis, nuclear war, cuban missile crisis, cuban missile, war soviet, war soviet union, weapons cuba, president kennedy, brink nuclear war, united bombed, stockpiling weapons, berlin german, nuclear war soviet, soviet union placed,
Approximate Word count = 1491
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)