A U-2 camera finds Soviet missiles ninety miles from Florida
For about six weeks, Senator Kenneth Keating had warned that the Soviets were building something in Cuba, and U-2 flights had already spotted surface-to-air missile sites there. On October 14, 1962, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane flew over San Cristobal, Cuba, and photographed what analysts soon identified as Soviet ballistic missile installations under construction. The film landed in Washington, turning weeks of suspicion into proof. The confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev would run thirteen days.
The photographs forced Kennedy to confront a threat sitting ninety miles from Florida, inside range of nearly every American city east of the Mississippi. The crisis that followed produced the Moscow-Washington hotline, the first direct communication link built specifically to keep a misunderstanding from becoming a war.
