The Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear threat in Soviet and American cartoons: one story in two representations

The article aims to explore the imagology of the Cuban Missile Crisis and based on the analysis of political cartoons in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The author employs a constructivist approach which helps her complicate our understanding of the Cold War as the “war of images” between the two superpowers. The focus on the themes of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the nuclear threats allows the author to reveal the repertoires of meanings behind the enemy number one discourses on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as analyze the specific representations of a potential nuclear conflict. Both perspectives reflect the U.S. and the Soviet visions of their missions in the world, framed by the countries’ political cultures and systems, and appealed to long-standing image-constructing traditions. The author concludes that Soviet political cartoonists interpreted the U.S. aggression against Cuba as yet another imperialist policy aimed at suppressing nations in their search for a unique path of development. Furthermore, Soviet cartoons emphasized the role ofthe U.S. in fueling the arms race, while painting the Soviet Union as the stronghold of peace. American cartoonists, on the other hand, focused on the hypocrisy of the USSR policy on disarmament and the image of Nikita Khrushchev as a face of Soviet ideological and nuclear menace. At the same time, they reveal the revisionist take that implied that both superpowers were responsible for the risk of nuclear Armageddon.