«Italy and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Sources introduced and translated by Leopoldo Nuti)»,

Italy was directly affected by the Cuban missile crisis for a number of reasons. The most important was the fact that together with Turkey, Italy was one of the two European countries which hosted the US IRBM SM 78 Jupiter, which made inevitable a parallelism with the Soviet deployment of the SS 4 and SS 5 in the Caribbean. Italy also played, or tried to, an active diplomatic role in the second phase of the crisis, after President Kennedy’s October 22 TV speech to the nation: its Prime Minister, Amintore Fanfani, was a most energetic and dynamic personality, and he felt it was his duty to work for a peaceful resolution of the crisis, even if the extent of his initiatives still remains to be fully clarified. An overall assessment of the Cuban crisis’ impact on Italy should also take into account two additional aspects, namely that by October 1962 the country was well advanced in an important domestic political experiment, the so-called opening to the left, which affected Italy’s international posture during the crisis and in turn was affected by the crisis’ solution; and finally, that the aftermath of the crisis, with the withdrawal of the US IRBMs from Europe, had lasting consequences for Italy’s nuclear sharing plans inside of NATO.