ROSS SIMPSON
The U.S. State Department angrily accused the Soviet Union of
shooting down an unarmed American jet that strayed into East
German airspace. Three U.S. officers aboard the plane were
killed in the incident. The Soviets responded with charges that
the flight was a “gross provocation,” and the incident was an
ugly reminder of the heightened East-West tensions of the Cold
War-era.
The occupants of the aircraft were Lieutenant Colonel Gerald K. Hannaford, Captain Donald Grant Millard and Captain John F.
Lorraine.
According to the U.S. military, the jet was on a training flight over
West Germany and pilots became disoriented by a violent storm
that led the plane to veer nearly 100 miles off course.
Memorial at the crash site near Vogelsberg.
North American T-39A Sabre Liner USAF.
The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-19S "Farmer" at the National
Museum of the United States Air Force.
In a televised speech of extraordinary gravity, President John F.
Kennedy announces on October 22, 1962 that U.S. spy planes
discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba. These missile sites—
under construction but nearing completion—housed medium-
range missiles capable of striking a number of major cities in
the United States, including Washington, D.C.
Kennedy announced that he was ordering a naval “quarantine”
of Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from transporting any more
offensive weapons to the island and explained that the United
States would not tolerate the existence of the missile sites
currently in place. The president made it clear that America
would not stop short of military action to end what he called a “clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace.”
CIA reference photograph of a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile in Red Square, Moscow.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between
the United States and the Soviet Union, when American
deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were
matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba.
The crisis lasted from October 16 to October 28, 1962. The
confrontation is widely considered the closest the
the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear
war.
Cuban Missile Crisis, map of immediate-threat areas.
On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union inaugurated the "Space Age"
with its launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for "satellite,"
was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch
base in the Kazakh Republic. Sputnik had a diameter of 22 inches
and weighed 184 pounds and circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. Traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, its elliptical orbit had
an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 584 miles and a perigee
(nearest point) of 143 miles.
Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset, Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be
picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States
with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the
beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day.