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A U-2 pilot finds a Soviet missile base being built in Cuba. Cuba is 90 miles away from the Florida coast.
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The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis, starts on October 16, 1962 and ends on October 28, 1962.
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Another U-2 plane finds more bases and 16 to 32 more missiles.
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Soviet Froeign Minister Andrei Gromyko visits President Kennedy saying that Soviet aid to Cuba is purely defensive and doesn't represent a threat to the United States.
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While President Kennedy leaves for Ohio, his advisors continue the debate of what they should do.
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President Kennedy and his advisors make the decision to create a blockade around Cuba.
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President Kennedy meets with General Walter Sweeney of the Tactical Air Command. He tells Kennedy that an air strike couldn't guarantee the destruction of all the missiles.
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Kennedy announces what is happening on live television. He shows the evidence of Soviet missiles in Cuba and says that a naval quarantine will be put around the island until the Soviet Union agrees to take apart the missiles.
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Soviet submarines threaten the quarantine by going into the Caribbean. Freighters filled with military supplies stopped. The only ship that kept moving was the oil tanker Bucharest.
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Chairman Khrushchev relies to President Kennedy's letter from October 23.
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President Kennedy knows that some of the missiles are ready to be launched so he personally writes a letter to Premier Khrushchev to ask him stop.
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Khrushchev makes an offer: the removal of the missiles in exchange for lifting the quarantine and a promise that the U.S. will not invade Cuba.
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A second letter from Moscow was sent to Washington with harder terms. An American U-2 plane was shot down by a Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile. The pilot, Major Rudolph Anderson, is killed.
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The Soviet Union has accepted the solution and Khrushchev sends a letter affirming that the missiles will be removed in exchange for a non-invasion pledge from the United States.
