Operation Anadyr the bear’s footprints in America

Abstract

The Cuban Missile Crisis, which took place 60 years ago, put the world one step away from a nuclear war, whose outcome included the direct participation of the president of the United States of America (USA), John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Nikita Khrushchev. The complex operation for the strategic displacement of a Soviet contingent with strategic and tactical nuclear capabilities to Cuba, which received the military designation of Operation Anadyr, had more than 44 thousand military personnel and required about 80 ships for transport, constituting the first and only time that an effective of this scale of the USSR was deployed in the Americas, and is considered the spark of the conflict. In this sense, to better understand the Cuban Missile Crisis and identify possible lessons learned for the current moment, this article sought to recall the events of October 1962, shedding light on lesser-known aspects of the decision-making process, strategy development, and the preparation, deployment, and execution of Operation Anadyr, in addition to seeking to identify US actions developed to counter Soviet threats, as they were perceived at the time.