Editing Fidel Castro (section)

====The [[Cuban Missile Crisis]]====
Castro, who had been in regular contact with the [[KGB (Soviet Union)|KGB]] since 1956 and who used Soviet arms during his guerilla war, welcomed the presence of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba to deter an American attack. This decision precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis, a major confrontation in the [[Cold War]] that nearly resulted in the cataclysmic death of millions. According to Guevara: "If the Soviet nuclear rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York." [[Nikita Khrushchev]] wrote that, according to Castro, "we needed to immediately deliver a nuclear missile strike against the United States a proposal that placed the planet on the brink of extinction." Fidel Castro admitted: "I would have agreed to the use of nuclear weapons." On October 26, 1962, the USS Beale had tracked and dropped signaling depth charges (the size of hand grenades) on the B-59, a Soviet Project 641 (NATO designation Foxtrot) submarine which, unknown to the U.S., was armed with a 15 kiloton nuclear torpedo. Running out of air, the Soviet submarine was surrounded by American warships and desperately needed to surface. Captain Valentin Savitsky ordered his crew to prepare the use of a nuclear torpedo against the Americans, but crew member Vasili Arkhipov stepped in and quite literally saved the world.