Cuban missile crisis

A period of almost two weeks during the John F. Kennedy administration, in October of 1962, during which the United States discovered that the Soviet Union was installing ICBM's in Cuba. The U.S. insisted on the withdrawel of the missiles and blockade?d Cuba. Concrete proof of the existance of the missiles was provided by the U2 spy plane. The Soviet Union wanted the U.S. to remove its missiles from Turkey. The Soviet Union backed down about the Cuban missiles, and the US removed the missiles from Turkey some time later. The blockade was called a "quarantine" because declaring a "blockade" would be a declaration of war.