Don’t Blink: The Cuban Missile Crisis and Brinkmanship | BRIdge from the Past
The world watched as the US and Soviet Union squared off for thirteen days during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. So, was the Cold War really World War III? In this BRIdge from the Past video, Mary explores this question by looking at two political cartoons on the Cuban Missile Crisis.
0:00 welcome to another episode of bridge from the past art across u.s history i’m mary and this series is for students like you to get ahead in your u.s history class just by looking at pictures because believe it or not historical images have a lot to say today we’re looking at two political cartoons on the cuban missile crisis the cuban missile crisis is the classic
0:21 example of brinkmanship or willingness to go to the brink or the very edge of war kind of like a staring contest but this staring contest could have started a nuclear war on the surface this was just one of many showdowns between the united states and the soviet union during the cold war but it makes me wonder was the cold war
0:41 really world war three let’s jump in and find out before we look at our political cartoons we need a little bit of context and i’m going to do that with a super short timeline you always have to look at a historical image text whatever in the context from which it comes so
1:03 first of all the cuban missile crisis is going to take place in the context of the cold war as i said before so the cold war is this rivalry for world dominance between the united states and the soviet union that really starts as world war ii is ending so by the late 1950s 1960s when our 1962 when our crisis is going to take place it’s been going on for a while and it’s
1:24 the united states and the soviet union are the two major players in this conflict but other countries throughout the world are kind of going to have to pick a side it’s going to be very hard to stay neutral so keep that in mind as we look at our images so in 1959 cuba has a revolution and fidel castro a communist comes to power now the united states of course doesn’t
1:45 like the idea of communism the soviet union is communism and in 1961 the cia actually launches a counter-revolution called the bay of pigs and it is a complete failure so there’s definitely no love between cuba and the united states in 1962 in october of 1962
2:06 an american spy plane catches images of medium-range ballistic missiles mrbm if you’re not up on your missile lingo being built on the island of cuba so cuba is only 90 miles from the coast of florida so any missile that’s launched from cuba could easily hit major cities
2:27 on the u.s eastern seaboard so this is a huge deal both the united states and the soviet union at this point have nuclear capabilities so when president john f kennedy meets with his security council and his defense team on october 16th he’s basically given three options we can try diplomacy with castro and khrushchev who’s the premier the leader
2:49 of the soviet union at this time we can do a naval quarantine around the island of cuba to make sure no missiles or any accompanying materials come or go from the island or we can do an air attack of the missile sites so again both united states and the soviet union and cuba now have this capability for nuclear weapons so he doesn’t want to launch
3:10 an attack he doesn’t want that you know loss of life so we’re gonna go with option two and we’re careful to call it a quarantine because if it was a blockade technically that’s an act of war on october 22nd things are getting even more tense the president addresses the country on tv and he says there is quote unmistakable evidence of a missile threat on the island of cuba and he
3:30 calls on khrushchev to take down missiles now you have several days of back and forth between jfk and khrushchev over what’s going to happen and on the 28th khrushchev agrees to dismantle the missiles so the crisis is diffused but how close did we get to nuclear war let’s take a look at our images
3:51 so this is our first cartoon and this actually appeared in the daily mail which is a british paper and it is by a welsh cartoonist leslie ailingsworth so right away what strikes me about this cartoon is that i’ve got jfk on one side and i’ve got khrushchev on the other and it’s pretty obvious who
4:12 they are it looks like jfk it looks like khrushchev it doesn’t really seem to be a caricature of either man and they are arm wrestling and i can see the energy radiating off of their arms like they’re really struggling to see you know who’s gonna win and they’re also they’re both sweating so they both have you know they’re exerting themselves
4:32 in this contest so i said that brinkmanship is this willingness to go to the very edge or like a staring contest or you could also think of it as an arm wrestling match we’re really struggling to see you know who’s going to come out on top and in this image right here they seem to be dead locked in the center so it’s not clear who is going to win
4:53 the other thing i immediately noticed is that both men are sitting on a missile and i know that these missiles can carry nuclear weapons so the stakes of this arm wrestling contest are quite high and the other thing that’s really interesting about this image is both khrushchev and kennedy have their fingers just
5:14 inches away from the detonator button to launch these missiles so the stakes are really high this cartoon was published on october 29 1962 so this was just one day after khrushchev agreed to remove all of the missiles so the crisis has been diffused by this point what this cartoon shows me
5:35 is that the threat that you know nuclear annihilation where this close from it is still like very much palpable and it’s not just the united states and the soviet union and cuba that’s like experiencing this people in great britain and i would assume other countries are watching this too
5:55 here’s our second cartoon so this cartoon appeared on october 30th so following day from our previous cartoon also just two days now after khrushchev agrees to dismantle the missiles and it is from an american paper and it says this hurts me more than it hurts you is what it’s captioned and again i have
6:16 khrushchev i don’t have jfk but i do have castro and both of these men are i would say kind of grotesque right now khrushchev looks pretty sinister and castro definitely looks sinister he’s got these massive fang-like teeth but it looks like these teeth are actually
6:36 missiles so khrushchev is going to pull the missiles from castro with these pliers and he’s saying it’s going to hurt me more than it hurts you so this is really interesting again cuba’s sort of caught in the crossfire in a way between the united states and the soviet union so it’s
6:57 khrushchev that was losing face according to this artist because he has to take he has to back down he has to remove the missiles and again you have this really awful way of to pull a tooth even with you know modern dentistry is a pretty awful thing so he is just taking a plier and going to yank them out so it’s almost this bloody gory awful sort of thought that the artist is
7:20 using to compare dismantling missiles and you know dentistry but it’s almost as this is more i would say like he’s gloating like you backed down khrushchev you look bad you have to pull your missiles so clearly this was a win for the united states
7:42 so here we have the two images side by side so again you have this idea of this exertion of the two men we’re so close to a horrible catastrophe versus you know focusing more on khrushchev backing down and removing the whistle the missiles so this is the same event but you have two artists in two different places and giving it their own sort of spin so it’s
8:04 interesting and worth remembering that different people can view or depict an event in very different ways so now i’m going to toss it back out to you with my original question we think of the cold war we think united states versus the soviet union is that fair or should we broaden what we call the cold war to world war three
8:25 i would really like to know what you think you can let me know by leaving a comment below that’s all we have time for on today’s episode if you like this video if you learned something please like it subscribe to our channel we’re back with a new primary source every other thursday you can also find us on instagram facebook twitter all the places we’d love to hear from you and we’d love
8:46 for you to get involved with us so until next time take care you
