Soviet History Archives - Page 2 of 2

American Zionism and Soviet Jews

During the early 1960s American Jews began realizing the severity of the anti-Semitic policies under which the 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union were living. This sparked an organized effort across American Jewish communities to raise awareness about the human rights violations being faced by Soviet Jews. Throughout the decade the White House frequently received letters from Jewish organizations and leaders requesting that the President use his influence to persuade the Soviets to rethink their anti-Semitic policies. Jewish organizations also wrote directly to the Soviet government pleading for it to ease its discriminatory policies targeted at Jewish culture and religious practices. Letters sent to the Kremlin were often asking the Soviet government to merely follow its own laws, citing cultural freedom as a right that was granted to all Soviet citizens in the 1917 Declaration of Rights. Another common request sent to the Soviet government was that Soviet Jews, who had been separated from family members as a result of the Holocaust, be allowed to reunite. Many organizations, especially those with an underlying Zionist agenda, used such arguments with the Soviets (and the White House) in hopes that it would provide a convincing pretense for a mass emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel.

In response to Zionist efforts to use the discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union as an opportunity to increase the population of Israel, Jewish anti-Zionists leaders began writing to the White House expressing their concerns. During his time in office, President Johnson, a strong and vocal supporter of Jewish causes, received numerous letters from anti-Zionist rabbis and Jewish organizations asking him to take their views and solutions into consideration. These letters were primarily aimed at explaining to the Johnson administration that Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism, thus supporting a Zionist approach in the Soviet Union should not be thought of as supporting a Jewish approach. These letters often point out that the vast majority of the American Jewish community at that time was either not supportive of the Zionist movement or outright anti-Zionist.

Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Via Wikipedia.

One letter in particular, sent to President Johnson by The American Council For Judaism, an organization of Anti-Zionist, reform rabbis, was quite explicit in expressing opposition to Zionism. In this letter the Council attempts to draw the White House’s attention to the fact that Zionism is not the humanitarian rescuing of the Jews, nor should it be viewed as a movement that is particularly inline with the tenets of Judaism as a religion. The letter explains to the president that, from the Council’s perspective, the aim of Zionism is not to create a Jewish state, but a Zionist state, emphasizing ethnicity over religion.

The letter goes on to point out that Zionists have worked hard to make it so that criticism of Israel (especially by non-Jews) has become synonymous with criticism of Jews as a whole, and sometimes unjustly labeled anti-Semitism. According to the Council this is an intentional way to not only deflect criticisms of Zionist ideologies, but also to make criticism of the State of Israel and its legitimacy completely off limits. As a result of this, many American Jews and non-Jews shied away from speaking out against the Johnson administrations’ whole hearted support of Zionism and the solutions it offered in efforts to ease the plight of Soviet Jews.

As the decade progressed, Jewish special interest groups would continue to work with the White House in the battle to end the state imposed hardships on Soviet Jewry. Ultimately the Israeli voice would prevail, and during the 1970’s a noticeable trickle of Soviets emigrants to Israel would begin. This is perhaps to be expected, as every Prime Minister Israel has ever had was either born in the Russian Empire or born to parents born in the Russian Empire, thus the connection to the region’s Jewish population runs deep among Israel’s elites. Over the next several decades more than a million Jews would leave the USSR (and the post-Soviet territories) to settle in Israel.

The documents cited in the essay are held in the LBJ Library and Museum, “White House Central File; RM (Religious Matters) Box #7. They include a letter from the American Council For Judaism to Jack Valentini on December 18,1963, a letter from the American Council For Judaism to President Johnson on January 25, 1967, a letter from the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America to Bill Moyers on December 8, 1966, a letter from Richard Korn (president of the American Council For Judaism) to President Johnson on June 16,1966, and a letter from the Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum and Rabbi S. A. Berkowits to President Johnson on September 23,1966.

Remembering Chernobyl

By Michael Dorman

In the early morning hours of April 26th, 1986, Chernobyl reactor number four experienced a series of explosions that resulted in the world’s most devastating nuclear disaster to date. The local population did not believe that a nuclear accident could happen in the Soviet Union, so no one living or working in the affected areas had been properly prepared or trained to respond to a nuclear accident. Soviet authorities at all levels of government were largely uninformed as to the procedures and precautionary measures that should have taken place. Local officials in Kiev waited a full 40 hours to receive orders from their superiors in Moscow. It took another two days for them to publicly acknowledge that the accident had occurred. On the Saturday morning following the explosion children went to school, men went fishing in the reactor’s cooling ponds, and, with the exception of those called to help at the reactor, the daily lives of those in the contaminated areas continued as usual. The reactions of party members and plant workers in the hours and days following the accident were characterized by fear, confusion, and an overall lack of understanding of the severity of the accident. Outside of the circles of upper level Soviet officials, no one would know that Belarus had received an amount of radioactive fallout equivalent to 350 nuclear bombs until 1989.

Map of Soviet Union - Administrative Divisions, 1989. Via Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas Libraries.

Map of Soviet Union Administrative Divisions, 1989. Belarus is colored green in the top left corner. Via Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas Libraries.

The Chernobyl nuclear energy facility in Ukraine was located just 16 km from the Belarusian border. As a result the radioactive rain (or “back rain”) that followed in the wake of the accident dispersed 70% of the total fallout on Belarus. This left 23% of the republic’s territory contaminated with cesium-137 and 80% contaminated by radioactive iodine. It is thought that many of the thyroid diseases that occurred immediately following the accident were caused by iodine 131, as the effects of the other forms of radiation that fell on Belarus would have taken much longer to manifest.

Since the catastrophe, 2.3 million Belarusians, including 700,000 children, have been affected by Chernobyl. In Gomel, Belarus’s second largest city, congenital deformities have increased 250 percent and birth defects have increased by 200 percent. The incidents of thyroid cancer in the Gomel region are 10,000 times higher than prior to the accident. With 2.1 million people currently living on contaminated land (just over one fifth of the population), it has been in the governments interest to downplay the effects of Chernobyl whenever possible. According to the NGO “Hope To Children In Trouble,” since the accident the deaths of 160 children in Belarus have been “black listed” in order to hide their causes of death and to deflate statistics regarding the birth defects and congenital diseases in republic. In Voices From Chernobyl, Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich includes an interview from the mother of (at the time) “the only child in Belarus to have survived being born with such complex pathologies.” The mother describes the body of her newborn daughter as being without an anus, vagina, and left kidney. This family was from a village that had initially been marked for evacuation but due to lack of government funds was left in place. Additionally, many birth defects that are life threatening in Belarus would require mere outpatient operations in most western countries. Cleft pallets, tonsillectomies, minor heart defects, and the likes can be fatal in Belarus due to the lack of advancements in the Belarusian medical system. Thus the seriousness of Chernobyl-related birth defects are greatly heightened due to the poor state of Belarusian health care.

In the latter days of the Soviet Union Belarus already had over 100 non-government organizations (NGOs) working within the republic to aid in the Chernobyl clean up and minimize the impact of the fallout on the children born in the contaminated areas. The idea of large scale problems being solved by non-government organizations rather than government agencies was a foreign concept in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. This skepticism of NGOs has largely carried over into independent Belarus. The tendency among government officials has been to treat NGOs with suspicion while looking to Moscow to provide funding (even after 1991), as accepting help from western organizations contradicts decades of deeply engrained Soviet values. Since the mid 1990’s, many of the NGOs operating in the Republic of Belarus have either left or found themselves operating under hostile regulatory conditions. Currently in Belarus, 114 NGOs continue to operate; however, their projects must stay apolitical in nature, avoiding the temptation to encourage a more democratic civil society in the republic. Additionally, while many of these NGOs have spent millions of U.S. dollars renovating and building facilities to provide various forms of care for those affected by Chernobyl, their stories are completely absent from Belarusian media.

Nearly 25 years after the collapse of communism, the debate over the scope of the devastation Chernobyl caused in Belarus continues, with many western organizations such as the United Nations and World Health Organization dismissing the effects of the accident and attributing the rise of all health problems, with the exception of those related to thyroid diseases, to “radiophobia.” Since the accident, Chernobyl’s visibility in Belarusian media has steadily declined, finally reaching its present state of virtual nonexistence. As Olga Kuchinskaya points out in The Politics of Invisibility, “those who should worry most, or at least more, often appear to be the least concerned; the experience of living with increased radiation danger does not necessarily bring out more anxiety.” This observation not only disputes the idea that radiophobia is a legitimate issue in Belarus, but most importantly points to the fact that the dangers of radiation and the gravity of Chernobyl’s effects have been extirpated from the national consciousness of Belarusians.

Sources and Further Reading

Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl. Cambridge, Massachusettes: MIT, 2014. Print.

Cliodhna Russell, “Column: How My Trip to a Children’s Mental Asylum in Belarus Made Me Proud to Be Irish.” TheJournalie. N.p., n.d. Web. Nov. 30, 2015.

Vladimir Tsalko, “Mineral Resources.” Brill’s New Pauly (n.d.): n. pag. Web. Dec. 5, 2015.

David R. Marples, Belarus: From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Print.

David R. Marples, “Chapter 8.” The Long Road to Recovery: Community Responses to Industrial Disaster. Tokyo: United Nations UP, 1996. 183-230. Print.

Chernobyl Heart: The Dark Side of Nuclear Power. Dir. Maryann DeLeo. 2003. Youtube.

“STRANGLING THE NGO COMMUNITY.” Human Rights Watch. N.p., 1997. Web. Dec. 6, 2015.

Valentina Pokhomova, “Belarusian Victims of Chernobyl – Hope to Children in Trouble.” Belarusian Victims of Chernobyl – Hope to Children in Trouble. N.p., 2015. Web. Dec. 6, 2015.

“Belarusian Civic Organizations Database – En.ngo.by.” Belarusian Civic Organizations Database – En.ngo.by. N.p., n.d. Web. Dec. 7, 2015.

“Map of Chernobyl Fallout.” Http://www.nuclearfreeplanet.org/, n.d. Web. Dec. 4, 2015.

The First Rule of Flight Club

By Elizabeth Fullerton

In July 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 went down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. In October 2015, Russian passenger plane KGL9268 plummeted to the earth over the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 passengers and crew. In November, a Russian warplane flying along the Syria-Turkey border fell from the sky. The world was shocked by these events as it soon became evident that all three planes had been intentionally destroyed. Two were shot down, and one was bombed. What makes these situations even worse was the blame game that ensued, deeply affecting international relations. No one has admitted to shooting down Flight 17. Multiple militant organizations have claimed responsibility for the downing of Flight 9268. Both Russia and Turkey insist that the other is at fault for the warplane’s demise.

In this region of the world, the mysterious destruction of aircraft is not an entirely new occurrence. On December 14, 1965 another aircraft went missing and to this day there remains speculation about its fate. The plane in question was an American RB-57, a highly specialized military aircraft designed specifically for reconnaissance missions. The plane had departed from a base in Incirlik, Turkey and was engaged in a routine training flight. After failing to return from its exercise, the United States Air Force launched search operations. According to a document dated December 15, 1965, wreckage from the missing RB-57 was sighted in the Black Sea, 90 miles from the Soviet Union. As the plane had not violated the Soviet border, officials did not assume Soviet involvement in the incident.

RB-57F Rivet Chip 63-13296 of the 58th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron at Webb AFB, Texas on 8 March 1965. Via Wikipedia.

A Turkish newspaper caught on to the story, but boldly claimed that the American plane was likely to have been shot down by Russian aircraft. Moreover, the story asserted that Russians captured the pilots. Other documents in the government file, however, dispute this claim. A telegram from the day after the incident states, “Early reports (now discounted) indicated the possibility of Soviet fire responsible.” Until nine days later, most people interested in the case were satisfied that the plane had simply crashed.

Foy D Kohler. Via Wikipedia

Only one report, the latest dated document in the file, questions involvement of the Soviet Union. The Ambassador to the USSR, Foy D. Kohler, recounts the statement made by Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, Vasily Kuznetsov:

“It is known that flights of American aircraft for [the] purpose [of] conducting reconnaissance against [the] Soviet Union have already repeatedly led to serious incidents… [It] should also be recalled that in connection with such incidents [the] American side has given assurances that it… was taking steps to prevent such incidents in [the] future… However, as facts show, American aircraft continue to make reconnaissance flights which are fraught with danger of new serious incidents and complications for Soviet-American relations… [The] Soviet government directs serious attention [to the] US government to [the] danger… and warns that all responsibility for their possible consequences rests on [the] American side.”

During the same meeting Kuznetsov clarifies that he was not discussing an act of border violation, but the issue of reconnaissance flights against the Soviet Union. He then refuses to give further information other than the official statement. Ambassador Kohler concludes the report with his own assertion: “Kuznetsov’s careful statement and refusal to be drawn beyond its text leads me to suspect that RB-57 was downed in some fashion by Soviet action over international waters, and that [the] Soviet government believes that we are equally aware of circumstances surrounding [the] incident.” This document is dated December 24, 1965. Merry Christmas indeed.

It is up to the reader to interpret these governmental interactions, but it must be said that regardless of the circumstances, the official statement given by the Soviet Union leaves much to be desired. It is possible the Minister Kuznetsov was bluffing, intentionally provoking the Americans who wanted answers. Conversely, it is possible that Kuznetsov’s statement, without blatantly lying, confirmed that the Soviets were involved. Even fifty years later, there are still many missing pieces to this puzzle, and it seems likely that the corresponding government file still has omitted documents of the incident. Still, the seemingly deliberate lack of information surrounding missing aircraft in this part of the world – be it military or civilian passenger planes – is disturbing.

The documents mentioned in this essay were all accessed from:

Box 229, Folder USSR RB-57 Incident. National Security File. Papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas. 18 Sept. 2015.

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, by William Burrows (1998)

The Soviet Union appeared handily ahead in space. They launched the first successful satellite, put the first man and woman in space, performed the first space walk, and sent the first satellites out of earth’s gravitation and to the moon. And yet the United States still “won” the Space Race. How could that be? In This New Ocean, William E. Burrows grapples with this and other questions, illuminating widespread political manipulation in the process, and chronicling the first space age.

Cold War tension, exacerbated by the Soviet Union’s new nuclear capabilities, and the upcoming 1957-58 International Geophysical Year initiated the Space Race – the Cold War competition between the US and Soviet Union to achieve superiority in spaceflight. The US and Soviet governments were eager to fund military ventures for national security; both countries poured billions of dollars into space and rocket agencies. National security was the foundation of the world’s public space frontier, which Burrows dutifully records from the US acquisition of German personnel (notably former Nazi, Wernher von Braun) and V-2 rocket onwards.

Burrows contends it is a misconception to perceive Soviet dominance at the outset of the Space Race. The US never truly lagged behind the Soviet Union in space capabilities. Upon learning about the successful launch of Sputnik 1, President Eisenhower actually felt mild relief, contrary to the American public’s fear of inferiority at the time. As Sputnik 1 orbited over American soil, Eisenhower’s personal fear of infringing on restricted airspace by orbiting above another country dissipated. Despite employing Sergei Korolyov, lead rocket engineer and Wernher von Braun’s Soviet counterpart, funding and morale for the Soviet space program dwindled following notable accidents and poor planning. The leadership regularly used outdated technologies in an effort to save money. They also put Korolyov and his team in competition with another Soviet program planning a manned Moon landing. Many in the leadership questioned the goal itself – why spend increased capital putting humans in space who require life support systems when robots were cheaper and might obtain similar results?

The Chief Designer Sergei Korolev (left) and the Chief Theoretician Mstislav Keldysh (right). In the centre- Igor Kurchatov, 1956

Following the initial Soviet rocket achievements, notably Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 spaceflight, President Kennedy looked to quell the American public’s fear of inferiority by investing heavily in space. Noticing the monetary influx, politicking scientists secured government funding. Burrows scrutinizes projections justifying project funding given to the government, exposing their unrealistic claims. For example, although the space shuttle project was an enormous financial undertaking, scientists justified the seemingly high cost by emphasizing the shuttle’s reusability, overstating the number of executable missions, and downplaying turnaround time. The cost per mission looked good on paper, but the figures rested on misleading data. The shuttle program could never live up to such deceptive expectations.

Along with chronicling Soviet and American achievements ranging from Sputnik 1 to the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Burrows also covers both US and Soviet program failures. These include Project Vanguard (America’s little known unsuccessful first attempt to place a satellite in orbit), a fatal American ground test fire, fatal Russian spacecraft electrical malfunctions, and space shuttle Challenger’s O-ring catastrophe. Each failure dealt a blow to the two superpowers’ morale, inviting the public to question its nation’s technological prowess.

Saturn V carrying Apollo 11 rises past the launch tower camera

A new space age has now begun. Private companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are slowly taking the helm in the universe’s largest frontier. New questions arise: should space exploration be financed by centralized governments? How does one justify financing space exploration? If we choose to return to the Moon, land on Mars, or explore any facet of space, our technology will be rooted in the work of von Braun, Korolyov, Robert Goddard, and the other early rocket pioneers. The story of humanity’s very first space age, exploring This New Ocean, is inspiring, gripping, and encouraging.

William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (Random House: 1998)

After WWII: George Kennan’s “Long Telegram”

by Mark A. Lawrence

During the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union formed a powerful partnership to defeat Nazi Germany. Their alliance did not, however, extend to a shared vision of the postwar world order. While U.S. leaders envisioned an open global economic system that would assure American access to markets and resources around the world, leaders in Moscow wanted to clamp down on parts of Europe and Asia in order to prevent the reemergence of hostile nations along the Soviet Union’s borders. In the closing phases of the war and especially in the first tumultuous months following the end of the fighting, U.S. and Soviet leaders increasingly clashed over a range of issues, especially the status of eastern Germany, Poland, and other parts of eastern Europe. The prospect of a new and dangerous geopolitical rivalry so soon after ending the fascist threat caused anger and anxiety among American leaders, who struggled to understand Soviet motives.

The Soviet Union after WWII (via Wikimedia Commons)

In February 1946, officials in Washington asked the U.S. embassy in Moscow why the Soviet government was failing to cooperate with American plans for the postwar international order. On the receiving end was George Kennan, a career foreign service officer who had risen to be the second-ranking American official in Moscow. Kennan replied with an extraordinary 5,300-word cable later dubbed the “long telegram.” Kennan drew on his long experience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to lay out a distinctive view of Russian history and culture. You can read excerpts of his message below:

George F. Kennan, 1947

At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.

Soviet poster “Comrade Lenin cleans the Earth from scum”, November 1920 (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

It was no coincidence that Marxism, which had smoldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin’s interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability….

Soviet poster titled “American freedom”, 1950 (Via Wikimedia Commons)

In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history. Finally, it is seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendenciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived. This is admittedly not a pleasant picture. Problem of how to cope with this force [is] undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face…. I cannot attempt to suggest all answers here. But I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve – and that without recourse to any general military conflict. And in support of this conviction there are certain observations of a more encouraging nature I should like to make:

(1) Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventurist. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw – and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.

(2) Gauged against western world as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depend on degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which western world can muster. And this is factor which it is within our power to influence.

(3) Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another…. We here are convinced that never since termination of civil war have mass of Russian people been emotionally farther removed from doctrines of Communist Party than they are today. In Russia, party has now become a great and – for the moment – highly successful apparatus of dictatorial administration, but it has ceased to be a source of emotional inspiration. Thus, internal soundness and permanence of movement need not yet be regarded as assured.

(4) All Soviet propaganda beyond Soviet security sphere is basically negative and destructive. It should therefore be relatively easy to combat it by any intelligent and really constructive program.

Image of US Embassy in Moscow (Via Wikimedia Commons)

The Cuban Missile Crisis

by Priya Ramamoorthy, Kavya Ramamoorthy, Smrithi Mahadevan and Maanasa Nathan
Westwood High School
Senior Division
Group Website

Over thirteen tense days in October, 1962, nuclear conflict nearly broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union. These global superpowers were engaged in a bitter standoff over the appearance of Soviet nuclear missiles on the newly communist island of Cuba, just 90 miles south of Florida. Fortunately, after days of diplomacy and negotiation, tensions cooled and neither side deployed their nuclear arsenal. According to Stacey Bredhoff, Curator of the Kennedy Library, those terrifying two weeks, later dubbed The Cuban Missile Crisis, “was certainly the most dangerous episode in human history.”

A map of the Cuban missile positions (Getty 50th Anniversary Gallery)

Westwood High School students Priya Ramamoorthy, Kavya Ramamoorthy, Smrithi Mahadevan and Maanasa Nathan won first place in the Senior Group Website category at Texas History Day with their digital report on this infamous moment in world history. The site explores the political context of the crisis, the individuals involved, key events and its aftermath. You can explore their award winning site, “The Cuban Missile Crisis” here.

“Danger off our shores: This newspaper map shows the distances from Cuba to various cities on the North American continent.” – (Bettmann/CORBIS, TIME Magazine)

The group concludes that it was a seminal moment in not only American history but global history:

The crucible of the Cuban Missile Crisis captured the attention of President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev and forced them to prioritize world stability over national rights. This culminated in an increased understanding of each political adversary’s perspective. The crisis proved that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is an unreliable deterrent. Although fifty years have passed, its lessons remain relevant. As more nations develop nuclear weapons with each passing year, the risk of a devastating exchange increases. To prevent nuclear war diplomacy must be prioritized at all times. While exercising their sovereign rights, countries must consider the bigger picture of global stability.

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