Complicated and tension-filled negotiations between the United States and
the Soviet Union finally result in a plan to end the two-week-old Cuban
Missile Crisis. A frightening period in which nuclear holocaust seemed
imminent began to come to an end. 

Since President John F. Kennedy’s October 22 address warning the Soviets
to cease their reckless program to put nuclear weapons in Cuba and
announcing a naval “quarantine” against additional weapons shipments
into Cuba, the world held its breath waiting to see whether the two
superpowers would come to blows. U.S. armed forces went on alert and
the Strategic Air Command went to a Stage 4 alert (one step away from
nuclear attack). On October 24, millions waited to see whether Soviet
ships bound for Cuba carrying additional missiles would try to break
the U.S. naval blockade around the island. At the last minute, the vessels
turned around and returned to the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev                Castro                                 Kennedy

On October 23, 2002, about 50 Chechen rebels storm a Moscow theater,
taking up to 700 people hostage during a sold-out performance of a
popular musical.

The second act of the musical “Nord Ost” was just beginning at the
Moscow Ball-Bearing Plant’s Palace of Culture when an armed man
walked onstage and fired a machine gun into the air. The terrorists—
including a number of women with explosives strapped to their bodies,
identified themselves as members of the Chechen Army. They had one
demand: that Russian military forces begin an immediate and complete
withdrawal from Chechnya, the war-torn region located north of the
Caucasus Mountains.

Russian special forces officers make their way toward the theater
seized by Chechen rebels.

MIKE GRACIA

On this day in 1962, President John F. Kennedy went on radio and television to inform the United States about his order to send U.S.
forces to blockade Cuba. The blockade was in response to the
discovery of Soviet missile bases on the island.

Aerial view of missile launch site at San Cristobal, Cuba.

View of anti-Vietnam war protestors around the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool on 21 October 1967

In Washington, D.C. nearly 100,000 people gather to protest the American war
effort in Vietnam. More than 50,000 of the protesters marched to the Pentagon
to ask for an end to the conflict. The protest was the most dramatic sign of
waning U.S. support for President Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Polls
taken in the summer of 1967 revealed that, for the first time, American
support for the war had fallen below 50 percent.

Outside the Pentagon during the 1967 demonstrations.

A scuffle between the military police and protesters outside the
Pentagon (above & below).