Answer:

Cuba was an ally of the Soviet Union and received diplomatic and financial aid from it. In April 1961, leaders of the USSR were worried that the United States of America would invade communist-ruled Cuba and overthrow its President Fidel Castro.

In 1962, the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, placed nuclear missiles in Cuba for converting it into a Russian base.

Three weeks later, Americans became aware of it. The US President John F. Kennedy and his advisers tried to find a solution to avoid full-scale nuclear war. But they were determined to get Khrushchev to remove the missiles and nuclear weapons from Cuba.

Kennedy ordered American warships to intercept any Soviet ships heading to Cuba as a way of warning the USSR. This clash between the USA and the USSR came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. It made the whole world nervous.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a high point which came to be known as the Cold War. It refers to the competition, the tensions and a series of confrontations between the United States and Soviet Union.

Cold War

The Cold War was the war of ideologies. The US followed the ideology of liberal democracy and capitalism while the USSR backed the ideology of socialism and communism.

The Second World War (1939-1945) came to an end with the defeat of the Axis powers led by Germany, Italy and Japan by the Allied forces led by the US, Soviet Union, Britain and France.

It marked the beginning of the Cold War. The Second World War ended when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, causing Japan to surrender.

This decision of the US was both criticised and supported. But the consequence of the end of the Second World War was the rise of two new powers on the global stage.

The United States and the Soviet Union became the greatest powers in the world with the ability to influence events anywhere on Earth.

But the Cold War inspite of being an intense form of rivalry between great powers, remained a ‘cold’ and not hot or shooting war. It was due to the ‘logic of deterrence’.

The ‘logic of deterrence’ means when both sides have the CAPACITY to respond against an attack and to cause so much DESTRUCTION that NEITHER can AFFORD to INITIATE war.

The two superpowers and their allies were expected to behave as rational and responsible actors.