National Security Archive For the Havana conference, which took place during the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuban president Fidel Castro and former US secretary of defense Robert McNamara discussed newly declassified documents showing that US president John F. Kennedy, in meetings with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's son-in-law Adzhubei in January 1962, compared the US failure at the Bay of Pigs to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The Budapest conference of 1996, carried out by the Archive's "Openness in Russia and East Europe Project" in collaboration with Cold War International History Project and Russian and Eastern European partners, focused
Cuban Missile Crisis 3,600) and in the technology required for their accurate delivery. The US also led in missile defensive capabilities, naval and air power; but the Soviets had a 2–1 advantage in conventional ground forces, more pronounced in field guns and tanks, particularly in the European theater. In 2017, in "The Putin interviews" with the Director Oliver Stone, the Russian president Vladimir Putin said that the placement of Russian missiles in Cuba was a Russian reaction to the earlier stationing of American missiles in Turkey in 1961-62 (PGM-19 Jupiter). It was Khruschev's attempt to achieve a balance of power. In May 1961,