“The Cold War was cold only for the rich and privileged places of the planet.”
–Nadeem Aslam
Depiction of Cold War aggression by the
USSR and US heads of States.
At the height of the Cold War, one incident that brought USSR (now Russia) and the US to the brink of a nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The two superpowers plunged into one of their biggest Cold War confrontations after the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane making a high-altitude pass over Cuba on October 14, 1962, photographed a Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile being assembled for installation.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had gambled on sending the missiles to Cuba with the specific goal of increasing his nation’s nuclear strike capability. The Soviets had long felt uneasy about the number of atomic weapons that were targeted at them from sites in Western Europe and Turkey, and they saw the deployment of missiles in Cuba as a way to level the playing field. Another critical factor in the Soviet missile scheme was the hostile relationship between the U.S. and Cuba.
During the crisis, the Americans and Soviets had exchanged letters and other communications. Due to intense dialogue and diplomacy, the crisis drew to a close. While, people thought that with fall of Berlin Wall, the Cold War was gone, however, we are witnessing Cold War 2.0 between the old rivals in Syrian civil war.