History of Cuba 20 April, the brigade surrendered and was publicly interrogated before being sent back to the US. Recently inaugurated president John F. Kennedy assumed full responsibility for the operation, even though he had vetoed the reinforcements requested during the battle. The invasion helped further build popular support for the new Cuban government. The Kennedy administration thereafter began Operation Mongoose, a covert CIA campaign of sabotage against Cuba, including the arming of millitant groups, sabotage of Cuban infrastructure, and plots to assassinate Castro. All this reinforced Castro's distrust of the US, and set the stage for the Cuban missile crisis. Tensions between
Cuban Missile Crisis had 170 ICBMs and was quickly building more. It also had eight - and ballistic missile submarines, with the capability to launch 16 Polaris missiles, each with a range of . Khrushchev increased the perception of a missile gap when he loudly boasted to the world that the Soviets were building missiles "like sausages" but Soviet missiles' numbers and capabilities were nowhere close to his assertions. The Soviet Union had medium-range ballistic missiles in quantity, about 700 of them, but they were very unreliable and inaccurate. The US had a considerable advantage in total number of nuclear warheads (27,000 against