Editing First strike (nuclear strategy) (section)

=== Cuban Missile Crisis ===
This escalating situation came to a head with the [[Cuban Missile Crisis]] of 1962. The arrival of Soviet missiles in [[Cuba]] was conducted by the Soviets on the rationale that the US already had nuclear missiles stationed in [[Turkey]], as well as the desire by [[Fidel Castro]] to increase his power, his freedom of action, and to protect his government from US invasion, such as had been attempted during the [[Bay of Pigs Invasion]] in April 1961. During the crisis, [[Fidel Castro]] wrote Khrushchev a letter about the prospect that the "imperialists" would be "extremely dangerous" if they responded militarily to the Soviet stationing of nuclear missiles aimed at US territory, less than 90 miles away in Cuba. The following quotation from the letter suggests that Castro was calling for a Soviet first strike against the US if it responded militarily to the placement of nuclear missiles aimed at the US in Cuba:

<blockquote>If the second variant takes place and the imperialists invade Cuba with the aim of occupying it, the dangers of their aggressive policy are so great that after such an invasion the Soviet Union must never allow circumstances in which the imperialists could carry out a nuclear first strike against it. I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists' aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous, and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba&mdash;a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law&mdash;then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.<ref>
{{cite web
|url=http://www.jfklibrary.org/jfkl/cmc/cmc_castro_khrushchev.html
|title=Letter to Nikita Khrushchev from Fidel Castro regarding defending Cuban air space
|access-date=2008-07-10
|author=Castro, Fidel
|author-link=Fidel Castro
|date=1962-10-26
|format=Orig. paper, converted to HTML
|work=The World On the Brink: John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis
|publisher=John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
}}
</ref></blockquote>

The [[Cuban Missile Crisis]] resulted in [[Nikita Khrushchev]] publicly agreeing to remove the missiles from Cuba, while [[John F. Kennedy]] secretly agreed to remove his country's missiles from Turkey. Both sides in the Cold War realized how close they came to nuclear war over Cuba, and decided to seek a reduction of tensions, resulting in US-Soviet [[détente]] for most of the 1960s and 1970s.

Nonetheless, this reduction of tensions only applied to the US and the USSR. Recently{{when|date=December 2024}} declassified interviews with high level former Soviet nuclear and military–industrial planners reveal that Fidel Castro continued to favour nuclear options, even during the later Cold War – according to former Soviet General Andrian Danilevich, "(...in the early 1980s...) Cuban leader Fidel Castro pressed the USSR to take a tougher line against the United States, including possible nuclear strikes. The Soviet Union, in response, sent experts to spell out for Castro the ecological consequences for Cuba of nuclear strikes on the United States. Castro, according to the general, quickly became convinced of the undesirability of such outcomes."<ref name="Castro-FirstStrike">{{cite web|url=http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb285/doc02_I_ch3.pdf|title=An Analytical Comparison of U.S.-Soviet Assessments During the Cold War|author1=Hines, John |author2=Mishulovich, Ellis M. |author3=Shulle, John F. |date=1995-09-22|work=Soviet Intentions 1965–1985, Volume I|publisher=BDM Federal, Inc., contractor to Federal Government, United States of America|page=24|access-date=2009-09-23|location=The National Security Archive, George Washington University}}</ref>