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Have you ever been this scared in your life? It’s October 1962, and the Soviet Union has missiles in Cuba. That island nation is just 90 miles from Florida!
President Kennedy is on TV. He says more Soviet missiles are headed to Cuba. But he won’t let a communist country keep terrible weapons that close to the United States. It seems like the whole world is afraid a nuclear war is going to start. Fortunately, it doesn’t. About a week later, the Soviet Union agrees to take its missiles out of Cuba.
A crisis is a very difficult or dangerous situation. In the 1960s, the Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the hardest things the U.S. had ever faced. However, it was just one of the decade's many challenges. The U.S. faced many changes then. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson had to decide how to deal with them.
