Cuban Missile Crisis established a naval blockade on October 22 to prevent further missiles from reaching Cuba; Oval Office tapes during the crisis revealed that Kennedy had also put the blockade in place as an attempt to provoke Soviet-backed forces in Berlin as well. The US announced it would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba and demanded that the weapons already in Cuba be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union. After several days of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between US President John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and
37th Tactical Missile Squadron alert using its complement of 24 IM-99B BOMARC surface to air antiaircraft missiles. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the full squadron stood alert for 27 days. The squadron was tied into a Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) direction center which could use analog computers to process information from ground radars, picket ships and airborne aircraft to accelerate the display of tracking data at the direction center to quickly direct the missile site to engage hostile aircraft. As the strategic bomber threat to the United States diminished, so did the need for the BOMARC missile and the squadron was inactivated on