Berlin – In 1961, Yuri Gagarin was the first person to fly into space, and the Soviet Union triggered the largest human-made detonation to date with the “Tsar” hydrogen bomb. President John F. Kennedy declared the policy of racial segregation in the USA to be over and tried to prevent communism in Cuba by invading the Bay of Pigs. That failed.
Soon after, the USSR stationed missiles on the island. US missiles aimed at the east were already in place in Italy and Turkey. With the Cuban Missile Crisis, the first direct nuclear confrontation, the Cold War reached a new global dimension. A turning into a hot war seemed possible eleven years after the Second World War. The Germans had just cleared away rubble; now they lived on the dividing line between two hostile systems.
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