Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis was an event that occurred in late 1962 during the Cold War. Until the aftermath of the Virtuous Mission and Operation Snake Eater, it was the event that brought the world the closest to nuclear war.

Prelude
On October 14th, a U2 spy plane had uncovered photographic evidence that the Soviets had been deploying Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles in one of their allied countries, Cuba. Cuba had earlier underwent a revolution in 1959.

Crisis
Two days later, the president at the time, John F. Kennedy, received word of the Soviet's actions, and demanded for the Soviets to disarm and dismantle the nukes at the site. He also arranged for a naval blockade at Cuba at the same time to prevent further missile shipments to Cuba. The Soviet Premier at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, refused to back down and ordered for the Soviet forces to enter secondary alert, and had their Soviet transport ships continue on their way to their destination. As a result, both the U.S. and the Soviet forces were placed onto alert for an all-out nuclear war. In addition, frantic negotiations ended up conducted through the United Nations's Emergency Security Council and unofficial channels between Kennedy and Khrushchev were utilized in an attempt to end the stand-off. At some point during the crisis, a Russian sub commander had been ordered to launch a nuke at an American destroyer, but the commander had refused. On October 28, 1962, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, although only under the condition that the United States do something for the Soviet Union in return.

Aftermath
Because of the deal the United States had to make with the USSR to halt the crisis, they were forced to allow the Soviets to retrieve a defecting Soviet rocket scientist named Nikolai Stepanovich Sokolov, who had only made it to Berlin three weeks before the crisis. Because of this, the CIA agent in charge of the operation, David Oh, was forced to let the Soviets retrieve Sokolov while the latter was screaming for Oh to save him. The United States, as part of their cover up of the true nature of the deal, leaked to the various intelligence agencies that they had dismantled their Jupiter IRBMs in Turkey, which had actually been obsolete and the US had planned to get rid of them anyways. At the time, the United States did not know why Khrushchev was willing to forego installing nuclear missile launch sites at Cuba to get Sokolov back.

In large part because of their failure to create a launch base at Cuba, the Soviets were forced to search for another site, one that was not likely to be discovered. Two years later, they eventually found the site in the form of the San Hieronymo Peninsula at Colombia in South America, and developed the base with the aid of a Marxist revolutionary group called FARC. The United States Department of Defense and the CIA suspected Soviet involvement in the creation of the base since shortly after the crisis, with the latter group also being suspected of having known since even earlier. The same year, the CIA discovered some details about why Khrushchev was willing to pull out of Cuba just to get Sokolov back: Namely, a new weapon that would have shifted power during the Cold War had been in development. Convinced of this, the CIA sent the then-unofficial unit FOX to be dispatched in their first mission. The FOX unit itself had been created by David Oh, going by the codename of Major Zero, as a direct response to his failure of aiding Sokolov in defecting from the USSR, intending to have a second chance at ensuring his defection. The result of the mission, known as the Virtuous Mission, was a colossal failure due to the (later revealed to have been faked) defection of an American soldier, The Boss and, thanks to the actions of the rogue GRU colonel Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin, resulted in the world nearly entering a nuclear war before the crisis was quelled with Operation Snake Eater.

Over time, due to detente, and in large part due to the theft of half of the Philosophers' Legacy in 1964, the development of the Soviet missile base at San Hieronymo was halted before construction could begin. However, it resumed after the FOX unit, by that time led by Gene, went renegade and nearly caused another nuclear war by launching a stolen weapon at Washington D.C. and frame the Soviets for it.

Six years later, t the man responsible for the success of Operation Snake Eater, Big Boss (formerly known as Naked Snake), quelled the revolt at San Hieronymo. Four years afterwards, Big Boss, now a leader of a private military group known as the Militaires Sans Frontieres, reflected that had the Cuban Missile Crisis never occurred, Operation Snake Eater would not have happened, and thus he wouldn't have had to kill his mentor, The Boss. Hot Coldman, the leader of Peace Sentinel and a disgraced former CIA Director, also noted that the Russian sub commander's earlier decision made him a hero in hindsight. The KGB agent Vladimir Alexandrovich Zadornov also planned for a similar event to the Cuban Missile Crisis by having a nuke launched at Cuba from an experimental self-defense system and then framing the United States to ensure Communism overran the West and thus the Soviets won the Cold War, but his actions, due to Coldman's madness, resulted in another instance of all-out nuclear war.

Behind the scenes
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a real life event that was used in the Metal Gear franchise. It was considered an important plot point for the Big Boss era of games (Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker), and to some extent the entire Metal Gear series due to the events overall immediately stemming from the event.