President Kennedy responded by blockading the island, claiming that the presence of missiles in Cuba presented a serious threat to the strategic status quo . The following two weeks the world was holding its breath in anticipation of a full-scale nuclear war. The firm US stance eventually led the Russians to concede and dismantle their missile base.
The missile crisis was a tremendous shock to the two superpowers, unlike the Korean war of 1950 - 53, the confrontation this time was not between substitutes, but between the Americans and the Soviets themselves, who were both looking at the prospect of having each other's nuclear missiles bearing down on themselves. It is this near apocalyptic prospect of a full-scale nuclear war that made the two superpowers realise that an arms race was not a prerequisite for ensuring mutual survival. During the height of the crisis, the Soviet ambassador in Washington had to send an urgent cipher message using the American Western Union telegraph office, which was actually collected by a messenger on a bicycle . The means of communication used during the crisis appear quite absurd when considering the high drama and imminent peril both powers found themselves in at the time, and it was these set of circumstances that bought home to the USA and the USSR the need to find a different modus vi!.
vendi, an alternative means of survival other than the arms race.
The Cuban paradox led the two superpowers to reach a number of limited agreements that would set the pace for a period of thawing' in the Cold War. In 1963 an agreement in Geneva provided for the establishment of a hot line' , a direct telephone link between the White House and the Kremlin, and was designed for use in emergencies such as the Cuban missile crisis. In 1963 Britain, America and the Soviet Union signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, limiting the testing of nuclear arms to underground.