The quarantine came into effect on 22 October at 10:00 am. Most of the ships stopped, including all of the ones that the Americans suspected of carrying missiles.
This however was not the end of the crisis, because there were already missiles on Cuba being prepared, and the Americans still needed to eliminate this threat. In order to put pressure on the Russians (who, up to this point had denied that they had been placing missiles on Cuba) so at the UN summit, the US secretary of state showed pictures of the missile sites. This put the USSR into a problem, because they finally had to admit to what they were doing.
Even though the facts were out in the open, the threat for a full invasion of Cuba, and a nuclear war still remained. Both sides were now looking for a peaceful solution to the problem without seeming to back down to international pressure.
President Khrushchev of the USSR was the first to crack. He sent a letter to the Americans, stating that he would remove the missiles from Cuba as long as the Americans promised never to invade Cuba. The Americans were suspicious at first, but before they could decide whether or not to accept the deal, another letter was sent with different terms of the deal. This time it said that they would remove the missiles if America promised not to invade Cuba and if they removed their nuclear missiles from northern Turkey.
At first President Kennedy didn’t know how to deal with this, but eventually he decided to reply the first letter and act as if the second had never been sent. The Americans had been planning to remove their missiles from Turkey anyway because they were old and inadequate, so they said that they would remove the missiles in 6 months time when nobody would connect it with the Cuba crisis.
The Russians agreed and the Crisis was over. Even though neither side seemed to gain anything from the crisis, Khrushchev appeared to have backed down under pressure, while Kennedy was made to look like the winner.
A hotline was set up between the American and Russian presidents as a result of the crisis so that they would be able to talk to one another immediately without delays as there were with letters. There was never another crisis as threatening as the Cuba crisis all the way up to the end of the cold war when the Communist government in Russia was overtaken by a democratic one in the late 1980’s.