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Things Fall Apart, a brief history of the Cuban missile war

By Andrew G Reese

William Butler Yeats

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The events that lead up to the Cuban missile war (Also called the Soviet American War , World War Three , or the Nuclear holocaust) started on the 14th of October 1962 when a U2 flying over Cuba detected evidence that the soviets were deploying medium range ballistic missiles or MRBMs in Cuba. However President John F Kennedy was not shown the photos of the sites until the sixteenth of October. Kennedy and the newly formed Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) decided to form a blockade or quarantine of Cuba which went into effect on the 19th of October 1962. While they hoped the quarantine would work at forcing the soviets to remove the missiles , however events on the 27th of October would prove otherwise and start the chain of events that lead to the Monday Exchange.
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