The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation in October 1962 between the United States and the Soviet Union over Soviet ballistic missiles deployed in Cuba. The crisis started on October 14 1962. It played out on television worldwide and was the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full scale nuclear war.
In response to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, and the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey against the USSR with Moscow within range, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to agree to Cuba’s request to place nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter future harassment of Cuba. An agreement was reached during a secret meeting between Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in July and construction on a number of missiles sites started later that summer. These missile preparations were confirmed when an Air Force U-2 spy plane produced clear photographic evidence of medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missile facilities.
The United States established a military blockade to prevent further missiles from entering Cuba. It announced that they would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba and demanded that the weapons already in Cuba to be dismantled and returned to the USSR.
After a period of tense negotiations an agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement never to invade Cuba without direct provocation.
The image shown here is from a Ministry of Foreign Affairs file related to Political Affairs in Cuba – archway.archives.govt.nz/ViewFullItem.do?code=20768076
The pages shown relate to correspondence between the NZ Mission to the United Nations in New York and the Minister of External Affairs about a meeting which took place detailing the United States response to the crisis.
This file is open access and can be seen in the Wellington Reading Room. For further enquiries please email Research.Archives@dia.govt.nz
Material from Archives New Zealand — Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 — License: CC BY-SA 2.0
The Central Narrative: A Tapestry of Revolution and Rebirth
The story of the 1960s is not one single narrative but a collage of interconnected upheavals that reshaped societies from the ground up. These movements, though geographically distant, often shared a common spirit of challenging authority and demanding a new future.
The Winds of Independence: Decolonization Reshapes the Map
The most significant geopolitical shift of the decade was the acceleration of decolonization. In Africa, leaders like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and Patrice Lumumba of Congo became symbols of a continent throwing off the yoke of European rule. The process, however, was rarely peaceful. The Algerian War for independence from France, a brutal conflict that concluded in 1962, left deep scars on both nations. In Congo, the assassination of Lumumba in 1961 plunged the nation into a crisis that became a major Cold War flashpoint. Later in the decade, the Nigerian Civil War (or Biafran War) from 1967 to 1970 resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe, highlighting the immense difficulties of post-colonial nation-building along arbitrary borders drawn by former European powers. Across Africa and Asia, the 1960s was a decade of creating flags, writing constitutions, and forging new national identities in the shadow of imperial history.
The Cold War’s Flashpoints: From Cuban Missiles to the Jungles of Vietnam
The ideological battle between capitalism and communism continued to ignite conflicts across the globe. The decade opened with the world holding its breath during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a 13-day standoff that brought the U.S. and USSR to the very brink of nuclear war. While disaster was averted, the event solidified Cuba’s position as a key Soviet ally in the Western Hemisphere and inspired revolutionary movements throughout Latin America. Che Guevara, a central figure in the Cuban Revolution, became a global icon of rebellion before his death in Bolivia in 1967.
Nowhere was the Cold War more tragically “hot” than in Vietnam. The conflict, which had roots in Vietnamese struggles against French colonialism, escalated dramatically in the mid-1960s with massive American military intervention. For the United States, it was a fight to contain communism. For North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, it was a war for national liberation and unification. The war’s brutality, brought into living rooms globally via television, galvanized an international anti-war movement and had a devastating impact on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos that would last for generations.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: China’s Upheaval
While students in the West were protesting, an even more radical youth movement was being unleashed by the state in the People’s Republic of China. In 1966, Chairman Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, a campaign to purge capitalist and traditional elements from society and reassert his ideological control. Millions of young people, organized into the Red Guards, were encouraged to challenge all forms of authority—teachers, intellectuals, and even their own parents. Ancient temples were destroyed, historical artifacts smashed, and countless individuals were publicly humiliated, persecuted, or killed. The Cultural Revolution threw the world’s most populous nation into a decade of chaos, isolating it from the rest of the world and leaving a legacy of deep trauma that still affects Chinese society today.
Youthquake: A Generation Challenges the Old Order
A remarkable feature of the 1960s was the synchronous eruption of student-led protests around the world. In 1968, this “youthquake” reached its zenith. In Paris, the May ’68 events saw students and workers unite in a general strike that nearly toppled the French government. In the United States, protests against the Vietnam War and for civil rights rocked university campuses. But this was not just a Western phenomenon. In Prague, a period of liberal reform known as the “Prague Spring” offered “socialism with a human face” before being brutally crushed by Soviet tanks. In Mexico City, just days before the city hosted the Summer Olympics, government forces massacred hundreds of student protesters at Tlatelolco. In Tokyo, students protested against the U.S.-Japan security treaty and the Vietnam War. Though their specific goals varied, these movements shared a common language of dissent against entrenched power, war, and social injustice, creating a sense of a truly global generation.
