THE COLD WAR IN THE 1960s

Cold War tensions and fears continued to dominate in the early 1960s. The fear of the bomb continued unabated; movies such as Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove explored a world where an “accident” with the bomb might occur. Both the United States and the Soviet Union openly tested nuclear weapons during 1961 and 1962.

A plan to liberate Cuba from Castro had actually been formulated during the Eisenhower administration; by this plan the CIA would train Cubans living in America to invade Cuba, and the United States would provide air cover. This operation, called the Bay of Pigs, took place in April 1961 and was a complete fiasco, with virtually the entire invasion force killed or captured by Castro’s forces. The Bay of Pigs was a major embarrassment for the Kennedy administration in their first months in office.

In Berlin, refugees from the East continued to try to escape to West Berlin on a daily basis; in August of 1961 the East Germans and the Soviets constructed the concrete Berlin Wall, dividing the two halves of the city. The issue that almost brought the world to World War III was not in Europe, however; it was in Cuba. In mid-October of 1962 American reconnaissance flights over Cuba indicated Soviet-made missile sights under construction. In the Cuban Missile Crisis President Kennedy established a naval blockade of Cuba and told Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles from Cuba. Khrushchev backed down and removed the missiles, averting the potential of world war. It is known now that if American forces had landed in Cuba, Soviet authorities were seriously contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons against them. Luckily, effective diplomacy prevented the outbreak of a potentially catastrophic crisis. Shortly afterward the United States and the Soviet Union signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty, and a “hot line” was installed, connecting the White House and the Kremlin so that future crises could be dealt with quickly.