13 days in October 1962 were probably the most tense in the ongoing confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Popularly known as the Cuban Missile Crisis in the West, it implied that the Soviet plan to place medium- and short-range ballistic nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba was a bold gamble on the part of the Kremlin and Khrushchev. Dino A. Brugioni states: “On October 15 (1962), interpreting a U-2 mission flying over Cuba…, the NPIC discovered two medium-range ballistic missile sites under construction…”1 This discovery triggered a drama that would make so that the whole world takes its breath for almost two weeks. The outcome of the crisis is public knowledge. How President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, while negotiating the terms of missile withdrawal with Soviet Premier Khrushchev. The Pentagon advised President Kennedy on three possible courses of action. One of them was containment, using a naval blockade. He chose this path. The second was an airstrike aimed at destroying missile launch sites. Third, there was an all-out invasion of Cuba to destroy the missile sites and second, as an afterthought, to oust Cuban revolutionary communist leader Fidel Castro. What would have been the outcome of the third option, with the United States choosing to invade mainland Cuba in order to secure its interests and destroy Soviet missile sites? Would the invasion of a protectorate and a Soviet ally have degenerated into a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union? Was the Soviet Union ready for all-out war? Was the Cuban missile launch an ambitious gamble that might have paid off if the United States was unwilling to act? This article attempts to answer these questions and det...... middle of article ......into a nuclear war? », History News Network, http://hnn.us/article/149233.Bibliography Brugioni, Dino. The invasion of Cuba, cited in Robert Crowley, The Cold War: A Military History (Random House Publishing Group, NY, 2006), 211, 227. Bernstein, Barton. “Reconsidering the Perilous Cuban Missile Crisis 50 Years Later,” Arms Control Association, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2012_10/Reconsidering-the-Perilous-Cuban-Missile-Crisis-50-Years-Later. Dr. Swedish, Eric. Interviewed by Jonny O'Callaghan, What if the Cuban Missile Crisis had Turned into Nuclear War?, July 22, 2013, http://www.historyanswers.co.uk/interviews/41312/what-if-the-cuban -missile-crisis-degenerated-into-nuclear-war/.Dr. Swedish, Eric. “The Ultimate Hypotheses of the Cuban Missile Crisis: What if There Had Been a Nuclear War?” », History News Network, http://hnn.us/article/149233.