provided conventional military assistance to Cuba to deter an American invasion. Neither nuclear warheads nor MRBMs nor IRBMs were needed if Khrushchev's only objective was Cuban defense. As Allison put it, "the Soviet Union assumed risks manifestly out of proportion to the needs of Cuban defense." Over the opposition of parts of the military and the Party, Khrushchev had sponsored a major buildup of strategic nuclear forces (at the expense of conventional forces) and had used the Soviet Union's growing prowess in rocketry to support his foreign policy. However, by 1962 he had little to show for his efforts. His hopes of stabilizing the arms race with the United States and thereby releasing more funds to revive the stagnant Russian economy stalled after he himself scuttled the May 1960 Paris summit in the wake of the Soviet shootdown of Gary Powers' U-2. Khrushschev's repeated threats to alter the status of West Berlin had been repeatedly stymied. Although JFK had implicitly acquiesced in the construction of the Berlin Wall in
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