Cuban Missile Crisis

Fidel Castro (Cuba)

Cuban socialist leader who overthrew a dictator in 1959 and established a Marxist socialist state in Cuba (born in 1927)

Organization of American States (OAS)

Founded in 1948 by 21 nations at the Ninth Pan-American Conference

Batista

Cuban dictator overthrown by Fidel Castro. Originally a sergeant in the military. Very corrupt leader with mobsteres during his reign --he was anti-communist

Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961)

An unsuccessful action by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba

U2 spy plane

built in the 1950s to help watch the soviet union as a surveillance plane only

Anatoly Dobrynin

Soviet Ambassador to the USA during the Cuban Missile Crisis

ICBM

Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles

MRBMs

Medium Range Ballistic Missiles

ExComm

The Executive Committee of the National Security Council (commonly referred to as simply the Executive Committee or ExComm) was a body of United States government officials that convened to advise President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Coup d'etat

A sudden overthrow of the government by a small group

Khruschev's first letter

Would take missiles out in exchange for US not invading Cuba

Khruschev's second letter

Would take out missiles in exchange for US taking Jupiter missiles out of Turkey. Confused US because it was different than the first. Suspected that Khruschev had been overthrown.

Washington-Moscow Hotline

Teletype in the white house that connects to Moscow in Russia. Used to avoid nuclear war.

Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty 1963 (PTBT)

Bans all testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere

Third World Nations

term used to describe countries that did not fit into the first two categories of the "three-world" approach and were all economically underdeveloped and deprived