Cuba Almost Became a Nuclear Power in 1962 - By Svetlana Savranskaya | Foreign Policy
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/10/cuba_almost_became_a_nuclear_power_in_1962
Cuba would have become the first nuclear power in Latin America 50 years ago, if not for the dynamics captured in this remarkable verbatim transcript — published here for the first time — of Fidel Castro’s excruciating meeting with Soviet deputy prime minister Anastas Mikoyan, on November 22, 1962. The document comes from the personal archive of his son, the late Sergo Mikoyan, which was donated to the National Security Archive and which appears for the first time in English this month in the new book, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis.
Long after the world thought the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended, with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s withdrawal of his medium-range nuclear missiles announced on October 28 — and two days after President John F. Kennedy announced the lifting of the quarantine around Cuba — the secret crisis still simmered. Unknown to the Americans, the Soviets had brought some 100 tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba — 80 nuclear-armed front cruise missiles (FKRs), 12 nuclear warheads for dual-use Luna short-range rockets, and 6 nuclear bombs for IL-28 bombers. Even with the pullout of the strategic missiles, the tacticals would stay, and Soviet documentation reveals the intention of training the Cubans to use them.