Only the gravest threat to the security of the United States could justify such a challenge, as was indeed the case in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Vietnam is not Cuba; and there is no conceivable American interest at stake in Indochina today as there was in Cuba to warrant the risk - and the escalation - the President has so clearly undertaken.

The result of the Cuban Missile Crisis showed how one country, namely Russia, could be prevented from achieving a desired aim through its failure to be able to deploy a credible naval force in distant waters.

When we think back through all those long periods - the blockade of Berlin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Wall, they are all engraved on the minds of all of us who have lived through this period - the cold war was a fact.

Miss Schlafly went on to recall the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fact that, despite a promise by Gromyko to President Kennedy that the Soviets would not send nuclear missiles to Cuba, a sortie by a U2 plane revealed that they had done so.

It lasted approximately 20 years, it may be said to have peaked in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, to have waned at the time of the Czechoslovak invasion and now, finally - as my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Goodhew) said yesterday - to have been extinguished by recent experiences in the Far East.

Following the disastrous events of 1962 as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Khrushchev had to write a couple of humiliating letters to President Kennedy, the Russians were determined that they would never be put in that position again.

This threat has developed and increased, as the Government have admitted in White Paper after White Paper since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, particularly at sea.

Properly handled, there is an African and Western opportunity, enjoying the full moral support of China, to inflict a reverse on Russia in Southern Africa comparable almost with that it suffered over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was a gamble that cost Mr. Khrushchev his job and reaffirmed for the Russians that the best policy in all military affairs was caution rather than risk taking.

There can be very few people who would wish to return to the situation that obtained at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Mr. Khrushchev said so graphically that the smell of burning hung in the air.

I was interested to hear the Foreign Secretary yesterday refer to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

In an extraordinary comment the Foreign Secretary said:There can be very few people who would wish to return to the situation that obtained at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Mr. Khrushchev said so graphically that the smell of burning hung in the air".

Does any hon. Member seriously want to risk a return to the situation at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The Minister asked whether we want to return to the Cuban Missile Crisis and said "Of course not".

I might add that we start the decade in the worst international climate since the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I remember so well as I was serving in West Berlin at the time.

I do not believe that many hon. Members who were present in 1960 - when President Eisenhower was President of the United States, when the Cuban Missile Crisis had not even taken place, when the Minister was chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association and when the Parliamentary Secretary would have to wait another year before he moved into that warm seat which his right hon. Friend would leave - would have predicted those sorts of changes.

As I have said before, the key issue affecting that dominance was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

The incident that was perhaps more important than anything else was the Cuban Missile Crisis which constituted a major and severe defeat for the Soviet Union.

We do not often debate the affairs of the Caribbean basin these days, but it is worth recalling that 20 years ago the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

The precedent for the use of peaceful military action is the Cuban Missile Crisis and the use of a naval blockade.

It was to the great credit of President Kennedy in his diplomacy in the Cuban Missile Crisis that he was prepared to see some face-saving gestures.

As to negotiations, a tribute has always been paid to the late President Kennedy over the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

It is not clear whether my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was referring to the normal arrangements which have been in existence for over 30 years or whether there have from time to time been circumstances - I am thinking, for example, of the Cuban Missile Crisis or the threat by Mr. Bulganin in 1956 to deploy rockets against this country - of such a critical nature that the higher level of joint decision ought, one might think, to have been invoked.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is now considered a classic example of cool rationalism in foreign policy.

We did not have notice of cruise missiles being brought into the country or of incidents such as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy paid no attention to the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Such a quarantine was imposed by President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and would represent legitimate pressure under the terms of the United Nations charter.

It is worth remembering that in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis it was President Kennedy who announced a unilateral moratorium on atmospheric testing.

It would have been a pipedream for the service men of that generation and for those who entered the House at the time of the spine-chilling Cuban Missile Crisis.

I have been recalling what happened over the Cuban Missile Crisis, the second Cuban crisis.

With President Kennedy's solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis, as on all such great occasions in history, the objective was to allow President Khrushchev to save face.

The cold war prevented the United Nations from working in the way that we wanted, not least because of the Vietnam war, Brezhnev doctrine, Cuban Missile Crisis, and many other incidents.

I happened to be serving in the Berlin garrison at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Cuban Missile Crisis and the middle east conflict in 1973 showed that the United Nations can work as a positive power to reduce international tension.

For example, earlier this year, the CIA issued a publication on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

He was strong in standing with President Kennedy over the Cuban Missile Crisis; but he was also strong in standing up against the American view when he thought it right to do so, as over Laos and the provision of a seat at the United Nations for China.

Nobody who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis could do anything other than welcome the Bill, and we hope that the comprehensive test ban treaty will soon be ratified.

Is he further aware that the world now faces the greatest danger of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis, that such a war between India and Pakistan almost took place in 1994, and that there was a danger of a war only last week?

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept the analysis of the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) that not only is this a most critical situation and the worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis, but there is a real risk that the events of the past week have given the impression that we might have been extremely close to nuclear conflict of some sort?

I remind the Foreign Secretary that he, like me, is old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

I am not sure that I take it kindly to be reminded that I am old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I remember it very well and how glad we were when it was all over.

The hon. Gentleman has given a list of dirty tricks that the Conservatives used to undermine CND - an organisation that reflected the will of the majority of the population, who were worried about nuclear war after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In relation to probability, we ought not to forget that, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy said that he feared he had lost control of events and that the probability of disaster was between one in three and one in two.

In 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the then Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, said:We were eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow just blinked".

He was Secretary of Defence during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

He spoke movingly about how, as a child, he had left his mother to go to school in the morning, wondering whether he would come home because we were in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Given that the period from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs to the Cuban Missile Crisis was 16 years, how confident can we be that it will not be 16 years from the inception of Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons before those countries realise the need for a hotline and a proper relationship to control and manage the fact that there are two nuclear states in that region?

The Berlin blockade in 1948, the Korean war, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam war are a few examples, but British defence policy remained governed largely by the certainties of the cold war.

That created a safety valve, as evidenced by the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world stood at the brink of a precipice.

He has served in the Clerks Department through momentous political events - from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the present day.

Perhaps I may draw to his attention the fact that this is probably the most dangerous situation this country has faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis; that things are moving extremely quickly - literally from day to day everything changes; and that the outcome of the European summit is completely relevant to our discussions during the next few days and indeed it has a very important part to play in them.

Those were the words of an American President in 1962 after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world almost came to grief.

However, the hawks in the United States are in the ascendant, and military action is more likely now than at any time for the past 40 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

People's awareness of global insecurity is probably greater than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s.

The Cuban Missile Crisis spelt out that threat in no uncertain terms for those who had yet to grasp it.

30 pm onSaturday 27 October 1962 - not as a note-taker but as an active participant, advising the President on how to respond to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I am just old enough to remember - I was a student at the time - the genuine fear that permeated the people of this country during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It first became apparent during the demonstrations over the Cuban Missile Crisis and reached its peak during the Vietnam war.

It is not possible to assess the SIs record on the Soviet threat as a poor performance, once the early damage caused by fellow travellers recruited before World War II had been remedied, even if one talks only about the cases that have become public knowledge - for example, the vital contribution of Penkovsky in the Cuban Missile Crisis or Gordievsky in the Reagan era.

The paradox is that we have moved from a bipolar balance of nuclear power - and, I agree, of terror - that was carefully calculated and relatively stable after the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite those new tensions over the deploying of medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe in the 1980s, to a twilight zone in which so much more is unpredictable.

We came very near to nuclear war in 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

While I was there, the Cuban Missile Crisis took place.

That is exactly what happened in America over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There are, perhaps, echoes here of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which tested another new American president, John F. Kennedy.

This week, Robert McNamara, Us Defence Secretary during the Cuban Missile Crisis, died.

It reminds me awfully of the early stages of the Cuban Missile Crisis when people were trying to work out who was going to blink first.

You think of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I am old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Nor did it occur to me at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis that in 2010 we would find ourselves more worried by the acts of Islamic fanatics than by the threat of a nuclear world war.

The draft Emergency Powers (Defence) Bill to which I refer was framed in 1962-63 in the months following the Cuban Missile Crisis and only reached the public domain when it arrived at the National Archives, having been declassified under the 30-year rule in the mid-1990s when the Cold War was over.

The west faces the most profound foreign policy problem since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and for that reason we have to have courage, firmness of purpose and intellectual coherence in facing down this problem.

That was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963, which was resolved when the Soviet Union agreed not to put nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba.

Similarly and interestingly, the hon. Gentleman said, again rightly, that the Cuban Missile Crisis was probably the most dangerous point in the cold war - the point when the possibility of a nuclear exchange was at its highest.

The American ambassador to the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Adlai Stevenson, famously told the Russians that they were in the courtroom of public opinion.

Ever since 1945, with a brief interruption for the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assumption has been that nuclear weapons are so horrible that they will never be used, but I think we could envisage a situation in which Iran, if it had a nuclear warhead, might well use it.

I shall not go back to 1945, because we have had the invasion of Hungary, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the attack on Czechoslovakia.

Indeed; those countries have all been involved in conflicts, and we have come near to the use of nuclear weapons in the case of Korea and in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Designed in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and on the basis of near universality with 189 signatories, the NPT is a global grand bargain, whereby nuclear weapon states commit themselves to disarming, non-nuclear weapon states agree to remain nuclear weapon free, and all have access to civil nuclear power.

My most vivid memory is of a study of unintended East-West escalation produced by the Cabinet Office's Joint Intelligence Committee in the weeks following the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when we truly neared the nuclear rim in a crisis that pretty well came out of the blue - Berlin rather than Havana being the place where we thought the greatest tensions would be played out.

U Thant de-escalated the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President Kennedy said that we were eyeball to eyeball with the Russians, they backed down because they knew that doing otherwise would mean the destruction of their own country as well as the country that they were attacking.