The Cuban Missile Crisis was a pivotal moment in the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war. In October 1962, the U.S. discovered that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from the U.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba, or the Caribbean Crisis, was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in the United Kingdom, Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from 16 to 28 October 1962. The confrontation is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war.