U.S., Russia Again Worry of Nuclear War 60 Years After Cuban Missile Crisis

Sixty years ago today, the discovery of planned Soviet missile sites in Cuba by a CIA U-2 spy plane sparked a series of events that would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war. On October 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the Communist-led island located just 90 miles south of Key West, Florida, an island which he had unsuccessfully attacked using allied rebels a year and a half earlier. Soviet Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev threatened to defy the so-called U.S. military “quarantine,” and Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, fearing an imminent invasion,…