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In October 1962 American spy planes photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites being built in Cuba, whose coast lies about 150 kilometres from Florida. For 13 days the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war, until Moscow agreed to take the missiles away.

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A U-2 spy plane photographed the first site on 14 October, and President John F. Kennedy was shown the pictures on 16 October, the first of the thirteen days. Instead of bombing the sites, he ordered a naval 'quarantine', a blockade to stop Soviet ships bringing more weapons. Tension peaked on 27 October, when an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba and its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, was killed. The next day the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced that the missiles would be removed. In public the United States promised not to invade Cuba; in secret it also agreed to withdraw its Jupiter nuclear missiles from five sites near Izmir in Turkey, which were gone by April 1963. In August 1963 the two powers opened a direct Moscow–Washington hotline, a teleprinter link rather than the red telephone of legend.

Türkçe oku
Ekim 1962'de Amerikan casus uçaklarının çektiği fotoğraflar, Sovyetlerin Florida'ya 150 kilometre kadar uzaklıktaki Küba'da nükleer füze rampaları kurduğunu ortaya çıkardı. ABD ile Sovyetler Birliği on üç gün boyunca nükleer savaşın eşiğinde kaldı; kriz, Moskova füzeleri geri çekmeyi kabul edince sona erdi.

İlk rampa 14 Ekim'de bir U-2 casus uçağından fotoğraflandı. Başkan John F. Kennedy fotoğrafları 16 Ekim'de gördü; on üç günlük kriz böyle başladı. Kennedy rampaları bombalatmak yerine, “karantina” adını verdiği bir deniz ablukası başlattı: Amaç, daha fazla silah taşıyan Sovyet gemilerinin Küba'ya ulaşmasını önlemekti. Gerilim 27 Ekim'de doruğa çıktı; Küba üzerinde bir Amerikan U-2 uçağı düşürüldü ve pilotu Binbaşı Rudolf Anderson öldü. Ertesi gün Sovyet lideri Nikita Kruşçev füzelerin söküleceğini açıkladı. ABD de Küba'yı işgal etmeyeceğine açıkça söz verdi. Gizli tutulan bir başka taahhüt ise doğrudan Türkiye'yi ilgilendiriyordu: ABD, İzmir çevresindeki beş mevzide bulunan Jüpiter nükleer füzelerini de geri çekecekti. Bu füzeler Nisan 1963'e kadar kaldırıldı. Ağustos 1963'te Moskova ile Washington arasında doğrudan bir hat kuruldu. Bu hat, sanıldığı gibi kırmızı bir telefon değil, bir teleks bağlantısıydı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Cuban Missile Crisis
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The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BC. When the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it, around 450 BC, it was already more than 2,000 years old.

The pyramid was the tomb of Khufu, whom the Greeks called Cheops, a king of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty. Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC, was told that 100,000 men had worked on it in three-month shifts: ten years to build the causeway for hauling the stone, and twenty for the pyramid itself. He even reports an inscription recording what was spent on radishes, onions and garlic for the workers. Modern digs tell a different story. Workers' settlements at Giza, and a workers' cemetery found there in 1990, point to thousands of conscripted labourers rather than slaves. In 2013, at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, archaeologists found the Diary of Merer, the logbook of an inspector whose crew of about 40 men shipped limestone from the Tura quarries to Giza. It is the oldest known papyrus with writing on it.

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Woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean off north-eastern Siberia, until about 4,000 years ago. By then Egypt's Great Pyramid had already stood for several centuries.

On the mainland, the last woolly mammoths died out around 10,000 years ago, as the Ice Age ended and the cold grasslands they lived on shrank. Two island populations held on much longer: one on St Paul Island in Alaska until about 5,600 years ago, and one on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, around 2000 BC. Rising seas had cut Wrangel off from Siberia, leaving some 300 to 1,000 animals alone there for thousands of years. These dates come from radiocarbon dating of bones and tusks, which measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon is left in them. Genetic studies show that the population was inbred but stayed stable for thousands of years, so its end seems to have come suddenly. What finally killed the last mammoths is still unknown.

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Oxford was teaching students more than three centuries before the Aztec Empire existed. Teaching there is recorded from 1096; the empire began around 1428, when three city-states in the Valley of Mexico, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, joined forces as the Triple Alliance.

Oxford has no founding date. There is evidence of teaching there in some form by 1096, and it grew quickly after 1167, when Henry II barred English students from the University of Paris. In 1209, after clashes with the townspeople, some scholars left for Cambridge and started the university there. The popular claim that Oxford is older than the Aztecs usually uses 1325, the year the Mexica people founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, where Mexico City stands today. But the Mexica became an imperial power only in 1428, when, together with Texcoco and Tlacopan, they defeated Azcapotzalco, the city that had dominated the valley. The empire lasted less than a century: Hernán Cortés and his Indigenous allies took Tenochtitlan in 1521.

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In AD 476 the Germanic general Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West. The Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, lasted almost a thousand years longer, until the Ottomans took the city in 1453.

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Around 1259 BC, Ramesses II of Egypt and the Hittite king Hattusili III made peace after generations of rivalry over Syria. Egypt carved its copy on temple walls, the Hittites kept theirs on clay tablets, and both survive.

The rivalry peaked in 1274 BC at the Battle of Kadesh, on the Orontes River in today's Syria, where neither side won outright. About fifteen years later came the treaty, sometimes called the Treaty of Kadesh, although it never mentions the battle. Both kings promised not to attack each other, to help each other against outside enemies and rebels, and to hand back each other's political refugees. The Egyptian version is carved in hieroglyphs at Karnak and the Ramesseum in Thebes. The Hittite version, written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the day, was found in 1906 at Hattusa, the Hittite capital, near today's Boğazkale in Çorum province. Two of its tablets are in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and a copy hangs at United Nations headquarters in New York.

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