Part 1 of Essay
was the closest the world ever came to thermonuclear war. "Nuclear catastrophe was hanging by a thread…and we weren't counting by days or hours, but minutes." 1 The United States was at its highest readiness state ever and the Soviets were ready to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield to defend an island off the coast ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... exiles, trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and armed with U.S. weapons, at the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) on the coast of Cuba. Castro's army quickly stopped the exiles that hoped to find local support. Ninety of the invader's were killed and twelve hundred captured. This failure was a big embarrassment to the Kennedy administration. As of 1962 the Soviet Union was loosing a desperate arms race, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev conceived an idea of placing intermediate-range cruise miss ....