Source+C

Communism on the march
Khrushchev was eager to maintain the forward progress of communism in the Western Hemisphere. By the spring of 1962, he had already sent many advisors and arms to Cuba. The Soviet investment in the island was substantial. Cuba's locale was a logistic dream for Khrushchev and a nightmare for the United States. Khrushchev fumed over the fact that U.S. **missiles** with nuclear warheads were openly located in Turkey, Italy, and the United Kingdom, within easy striking distance of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev admitted that those warheads scared the Soviets. The Soviets had never placed nuclear weapons outside their country's boundaries, because the weapons positioned inside the Soviet Union had the capability of annihilating Western Europe and reaching the United States. Nevertheless, Khrushchev knew that if he stationed nuclear weapons in Cuba, only 90 miles from the U.S. coastline, it would cause Americans a great deal of anxiety. When approached with the idea, **Castro** was not convinced that he wanted his island to be an outpost of Soviet nuclear weapons. But he soon agreed, and sent his brother Raúl and a **Cuban** military delegation to Moscow to work out the details. **Castro** wanted the **missiles** openly placed on Cuba, with the full knowledge of the international community. He hoped this would raise his status among Latin American leaders. But Khrushchev insisted on secrecy; he believed that once the **missiles** were in place, the United States could not act without the possibility of provoking war. So in secrecy the Soviets planned to install forty **missile** launchers in Cuba. Of the forty, twenty-four would be SS-5 medium-range ballistic **missile** (MRBM) launchers, each armed with two **missiles**. Each **missile**, armed with a nuclear warhead, had an explosive power equal to 1 million tons (907,000 metric tons) of TNT. At the end of World War II (1939–45), the city of Hiroshima, Japan, had been leveled in minutes by the equivalent of 13,000 tons (11,791 metric tons) of TNT. The MRBMs had a range of 1,100 miles (1,270 kilometers), so Washington, D.C.; Dallas, Texas; and all the southeastern states were at risk. The other sixteen **missile** launchers would be long-range, capable of sending **missiles** northward to Canada and south into Latin America. Calculations showed that the only major U.S. city they could not reach was Seattle, Washington. In July 1962, Soviet ships sailed toward Cuba with their cargo of **missile** equipment. Also headed for Cuba was the latest Soviet military equipment plus over forty thousand Soviet troops. Soviet fighter planes known as MiG's, some bombers to be assembled in Cuba, and surface-to-air **missiles** (SAMs) to protect the nuclear **missile** sites all moved across the Atlantic Ocean to Cuba. The size of the undertaking was enormous. All the while, the Soviet government consistently assured the United States that the arms buildup in Cuba was purely defensive in nature—that the Soviet Union had no need to station **missiles** outside its own territory. These assurances would soon prove to be lies.