<P> President Kennedy immediately called a series of meetings for a small group of senior officials to debate the crisis . The group was split between a militaristic solution and a diplomatic one . President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade around Cuba and all military forces to DEFCON 3 . As tensions increased, Kennedy eventually ordered U.S. military forces to DEFCON 2 . This was the closest the world has been to a nuclear war . While the U.S. military had been ordered to DEFCON 2, reaching a nuclear war was still a ways off . The theory of mutually assured destruction seems to put the entry into nuclear war an unlikely possibility . While the public perceived the Cuban Missile Crisis as a time of near mass destruction, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union were working behind the sight of the public eye in order to come to a peaceful conclusion . Premier Khrushchev writes to President Kennedy in a telegram on October 26, 1962 saying that, "Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot ." It is apparently clear that both men wanted to avoid nuclear war due to mutually assured destruction which leads to the question of just how close the world was from experiencing a nuclear war . </P> <P> Eventually, on October 28, through much discussion between U.S and Soviet officials, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would withdraw all missiles from Cuba . Shortly after, the U.S. withdrew all their nuclear missiles from Turkey in secret, which had threatened the Soviets . The U.S.'s withdrawal of their Jupiter Missiles from Turkey was kept private for decades after, causing the negotiations between the two nations to appear to the world as a major U.S. victory . This ultimately led to the downfall of Premier Khrushchev . </P> <P> By the 1970s, with the cold war entering its 30th year with no direct conflict between the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union entered a period of reduced conflict, in which the two powers engaged in trade and exchanges with each other . This period known as détente . This period included negotiation of a number of arms control agreements, building with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in the 1950s, but with significant new treaties negotiated in the 1970s . These treaties were only partially successful . Although both states continued to hold massive numbers of nuclear weapons and research more effective technology, the growth in number of warheads was first limited, and later, with the START I, reversed . </P> <P> In 1958, both the U.S. and Soviet Union agreed to informally suspend nuclear testing . However, this agreement was ended when the Soviets resumed testing in 1961, followed by a series of nuclear tests conducted by the U.S. These events led to much political fallout, as well as the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 . Something had to be done to ease the great tensions between these two countries, so on October 10, 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) was signed . This was an agreement between the U.S., the Soviet Union, and the U.K., which significantly restricted nuclear testing . All atmospheric, underwater, and outer space nuclear testing were agreed to be halted, but testing was still allowed underground . An additional 113 countries have signed this treaty since 1963 . </P>

Who won the arms race between usa and ussr