Animals have a long history of being used as diplomatic gestures. Chinese leader Mao Zedong sent a pair of pandas to the US in 1972 after president Nixon's visit to Beijing. When South Korean president Kim Dae Jung met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, they exchanged their respective national dogs: Jindo and Poongsan. Furthermore, a little known fact about the Cold War era is that Nikita Khrushchev and US president John F. Kennedy corresponded regularly and also exchanged gifts; one of them being a dog named Pushinka, whose mother (Strelka) was one of the first dogs to fly into space and return alive.  At the time, the Soviet Union was ahead in the space race. President Kennedy, after writing a thank-you letter to Khrushchev on June 21, 1961, pledged to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, which was successfully accomplished by the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. But in October 1962, shortly after the delivery of Pushinka, the US and the Soviet Union found themselves on the brink of nuclear war (the Cuban missile crisis) after the US captured photographs that proved Russian nuclear missiles were stationed in Cuba. The Resolution? Communication between the two leaders, including gifts such as the dog, had a huge impact on the resolution of the crisis. Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missiles and ship them back to the Soviet Union. In return Kennedy promised the US would not invade Cuba and would lift the naval blockade imposed on the island.