Il 27 October of the 1962 was the decisive day for the solution of the Cuban missile crisis, the episode that more than any other - in the second half of the last century - risked triggering the war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Many had the feeling that they were one step away from the abyss, because a possible Third World War would have been fought by the two superpowers with atomic weapons.
In Cuba, about a year after the unsuccessful American landing at Bay of Pigs, the USSR began the installation of some launch bases for nuclear missiles. When, in October 1962, the bases were discovered by American spy planes, the president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, ordered a naval blockade around the island to prevent Soviet ships from landing with military supplies on board.
The crisis reached its peak on October 27, when a US plane was shot down over Cuba and another flying over Russia was almost intercepted. At the same time, Soviet merchant ships were approaching the quarantine zone: forty years later it was learned that the possibility of launching a missile with a nuclear warhead was being considered on a military escort submarine.
Eventually, however, Moscow's number one, Nikita Khrushchev agreed dismantle the missile bases in exchange for an American commitment to refrain from military action against Cuba. The US also agreed to remove the nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles installed in Turkey and Italy. Satisfied with the dismantling of Soviet warheads, Kennedy ordered an end to the naval blockade around Cuba on November 20.
The compromise opened a new phase of relaxation between the two superpowers, to the point that in 1963 the USA and the USSR signed a treaty to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere. Not only that: the two countries also agreed to install a direct line between the Kremlin and the White House, the purpose of which was to avert the danger of starting a war For error. It wasn't a real telephone connection, but it still went down in history as the "Red line".
