Fifty years ago, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought not only the United States but the entire world to the brink of nuclear war. In October 1962, a U.S. spy plane caught the Soviet Union attempting to introduce nuclear missiles into Cuba, 90 miles off the U.S. coast. Kennedy, determined on that action, could not bear it. The crisis is generally regarded as the moment when the Cold War came closest to turning into a nuclear conflict. For fourteen days in October 1962, the world held its breath as John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, then leaders of the Soviet Union, tried to reach an agreement and avoid nuclear war. In 1959 Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. A year after Castro took Cuba, Cuba allied itself with the Soviet Union and its policies. Cuba becomes a communist country. The United States was not very happy about this, so it broke off all relations with Cuba. President Kennedy announces that the United States will not try to overthrow Castro. In April 1961, a group of Cuban exiles, supported by the United States, attempted to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The invasion fails and more than a thousand rebels are captured by Castro's forces. Months after the invasion fails, Russian leader Khrushchev and President Kennedy meet in Vienna, Italy. The leaders of the two superpowers discuss many issues in the relations between their countries. A year later, Castro announced that he would take measures that would make any direct U.S. attack on Cuba the equivalent of a world war. Castro claims that the Soviet Union would defend his country. In August 1962, CIA Director John McCone sent a memo to President Kennedy expressing his belief that Soviet ballistic missiles had been deployed in Cuba. Days later Senator Keating tells the Senate that... halfway through the document. .. there is no action that can lead to the killing of a Russian. Khrushchev had apparently decided to abandon his demand for repatriation from Turkey after learning that a Soviet anti-aircraft missile in Cuba had shot down a U.S. U-2 plane, killing the pilot. . Both Kennedy and Khrushchev recognized that once blood had been spilled, it would be terribly difficult to bring any crisis under control. However, Khrushchev, faced with the armed might of the United States and its allies, had very little choice to get out of the difficult situation in which he and his country found themselves. John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not take advantage of the advantage that the strength of military service and the United States and its allies had given him. Therefore, the Soviet leader was ready to peacefully liberate his nation from this very serious conflict.