5. Kennedy and Khrushchev at the Vienna summit, June 1961.
Behind Khrushchev’s belligerent challenge to the West lay a ticking time bomb for the Soviet bloc: the alarming rate of East German defections. Between 1949 and mid-1961, approximately 2.7 million East Germans fled to the West—equivalent to the entire population of the Republic of Ireland—most of them utilizing the Berlin escape hatch. That embarrassing problem gravely undermined the viability of Moscow’s East German client state and its hardline leader, Walter Ulbricht. As the defections daily grew more numerous through the midsummer of 1961, the East Germans suddenly began to construct a barbed wire barrier to separate the Soviet sector of the former German capital from the Western sectors. The temporary barrier of 13 August soon became a permanent wall, replete with armed guards, an ugly and ominous symbol of Europe’s division into Western and communist blocs. War was averted, to be sure, and Khrushchev was able to provide a form of life-support to the German Democratic Republic, but those achievements came at a high political and propaganda cost for the Soviet Union and East Germany. ‘It’s not a very nice solution’, mused a pragmatic Kennedy, ‘but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.’ Fortunately for the American president, he never had to confront the fundamental question of whether Berlin was worth a war that would almost certainly have claimed tens of millions of lives.
Other international flashpoints also competed for the attention of policy-makers in Moscow and Washington during this crisis-filled period, many emanating from the ever-turbulent Third World. Although the end of empire in Africa proceeded relatively smoothly, with sixteen nations acquiring independence in 1960 alone, the messy denouement of Belgian rule in the Congo that year generated yet another full-blown superpower confrontation. When the Soviets dispatched military equipment and technicians to support the fledgling regime of Patrice Lumumba, the Americans dispatched an assassination team in an unsuccessful attempt to dispose of the embattled Lumumba, an ardent nationalist whom they wrongly tagged as a wild-eyed radical and Russian stalking horse. In 1961, pro-American Congolese forces murdered Lumumba, accomplishing what the CIA itself had failed to do; at the same time, Joseph Mobuto, America’s favoured candidate, emerged as the dominant figure in a new Congo government. The United States thus managed temporarily to thwart Soviet ambitions in central Africa, if at the cost of imposing Cold War geopolitics on an impoverished, strife-torn former colony.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Indo-China also flared once more into a major hot spot. In South Vietnam, the American-backed regime of Ngo Dinh Diem was combating a broad-based insurgency directed by the National Liberation Front that, under the direction of communist North Vietnam, threatened its survival. In 1961–2, Kennedy significantly increased US military assistance to Diem, dispatching well over 10,000 US advisers in an effort to help crush the so-called ‘Viet Cong’ guerrillas, who, by then, controlled about half of the territory and population of South Vietnam. Meanwhile, the communist-led Pathet Lao in neighbouring Laos, with logistical support from North Vietnam and the Soviet Union, seemed on the verge of shooting their way to power in Vientiane. In December 1960, Eisenhower instructed president-elect Kennedy during a White House transition meeting that Laos was ‘the present key to the entire area of South East Asia’. He warned ominously that US combat troops might be needed in the near future to block a Pathet Lao victory.
Eyeball to eyeball: the Cuban Missile Crisis and its consequences
But the most worrisome area of all for the United States at this time proved the island-nation of Cuba, lying just 90 miles off the southern tip of Florida. A home-grown revolutionary, the fiery and charismatic Fidel Castro, had fought his way to power in Havana from his initial guerrilla base in the rugged Sierra Maestra mountains. Having toppled and forced into exile the unpopular dictator and long-standing US ally Fulgencio Batista by New Year’s Day 1959, Castro immediately launched an ambitious revolutionary programme designed to free Cuba from its historic economic and political dependence on the United States. From the outset, the Eisenhower administration viewed the bearded young radical warily and resisted with vigour the Cuban revolution’s assault on US property interests. Partly to counter US hostility, and partly because of his own ideological affinities, Castro turned to the Soviet Union, welcoming its diplomatic and economic support. Khrushchev, for his part, leaped at what appeared a windfall opportunity to challenge his principal rival in its own backyard. In the summer of 1960, following the establishment of close diplomatic and trade links between Havana and Moscow, the Eisenhower administration imposed a trade embargo on Cuba, suspended Cuban sugar’s favoured access to the US market, and hatched plots through the CIA to assassinate Castro. Eisenhower also approved the arming and training of a group of Cuban exiles for possible use as a future invasion force.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy hammered away persistently at the Cuba problem. He called Castro a ‘source of maximum danger’ and excoriated Eisenhower and Vice-President Richard M. Nixon, the latter his principal opponent, for permitting a ‘communist satellite’ to spring up on ‘our very doorstep’. Following Kennedy’s victory in the November election, Eisenhower encouraged JFK to expand the exile programme. In retaliation for the Castro regime’s nationalization of American businesses and its deepening ties to the Soviet Union, the lame-duck Eisenhower administration formally broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961.
Determined to eliminate Castro once and for all, Kennedy gave the green light that April for what became the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. The operation was premised on the notion that Castro maintained only very thin support among the populace and that, once the 1,400 CIA-trained commandos landed, the Cuban people would rise up and overthrow the communist autocrat. It proved a farcical plan; within two days, Castro’s forces had routed and rounded up the small band of exiles, dealing Kennedy’s infant presidency an embarrassing political setback. However chastened, the Democratic chief executive still could not reconcile himself to the continued existence of a Soviet beachhead in the Western hemisphere. He subsequently ordered a renewed covert campaign to sabotage and subvert the Castro government, while the CIA, with White House approval, launched a series of ever more bizarre plans to assassinate Cuba’s ‘Maximum Leader’. It is difficult to dispute Castro’s retrospective observation that: ‘If the United States had not been bent on liquidating the Cuban revolution, there would not have been an October crisis.’
The October crisis, or the Cuban Missile Crisis as it is more commonly known, constitutes the most dangerous Soviet–American confrontation of the entire Cold War, the one in which the two superpowers—and the world—came closest to the devastation of nuclear war. The crisis broke on 14 October 1962, when a U-2 reconnaissance plane photographed some intermediate-range missile sites under construction in Cuba (see Figure 6). Two days later, the intelligence community presented the president with incontrovertible photographic evidence that the Soviet Union had placed missiles in Cuba. Those images offered an alarming picture: Cuba had already received between 16 and 32 missiles from the Soviet Union, both Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs), with a striking range of 2,200 miles, and Medium Range Ballistic Missiles (MRBMs), with a striking range of 1,020 miles. The CIA estimated that the missiles would probably be operational within a week and, once mounted with nuclear warheads, be capable of inflicting as many as 80 million casualties if launched against major US cities. Judging this startling development an exceedingly grave threat to US security, Kennedy constituted an Executive Committee, or ExCom, of his National Security Council to provide him with advice and build a consensus behind the agonizing decisions he knew he would soon have to make. The president and his inner circle were agreed, from the first, about the absolute unacceptability of nuclear missiles in Cuba and hence upon the need for their prompt removal. The most daunting question, and the one upon which the virtually round-the-clock meetings of the ExCom pivoted, concerned what means could most relia
bly be employed to achieve that end—without triggering a nuclear conflict.
6. A medium-range ballistic missile site at San Cristobal, Cuba, October 1962.
Why had Khrushchev rolled the dice in so blatantly provocative a manner? Available evidence now suggests that, in May 1962, the Soviet premier decided upon the risky gambit of deploying nuclear missiles to Cuba for several reinforcing reasons. He sought, first of all, to deter a US invasion of Cuba, thereby affording protection to a regime that had cast its lot with the Soviet Union (see Figure 7). By so doing, he could also deflect the challenge posed by an increasingly hostile China and reclaim the Kremlin’s historic position as the military and ideological fountainhead of the world’s socialist revolutionary forces. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, Khrushchev saw in the beleaguered Cuban revolution a fortuitous opportunity to close the wide missile gap between the Soviet Union and the United States. ‘The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you,’ he later mused; ‘we’d be doing nothing but giving them a little of their own medicine.’
7. Khrushchev and Castro embrace at the United Nations, September 1960.
In view of the huge disparity in mid-1962 between the deliverable nuclear warheads possessed by the Americans and those possessed by the Soviets—an imbalance in the order of 17 to 1—Khrushchev’s Cuba missiles, although they would not have altered the overall strategic balance, would have doubled, or possibly tripled, the number of Soviet warheads capable of hitting US targets. Psychologically and politically, if not strategically, those missiles would have altered the dynamics of the superpower relationship to the disadvantage of the United States.
After Cuba agreed to the Kremlin offer in June, the Soviets began clandestinely to insert a substantial military force on the island. In addition to the planned IRBM and MRBM installations, Moscow provided surface-to-air missiles for protection of those sites, 42 light IL-28 bombers, another 42 MIG-21 fighter-interceptors, and 42,000 Soviet troops. Unknown to any American analysts at the time, Soviet forces in Cuba were also armed with tactical, or short-range, nuclear weapons that local commanders had the authorization to use in case of a US invasion. When JFK’s Secretary of Defence Robert S. McNamara learned, decades later, that nine tactical nuclear weapons had been present in Cuba in October 1962, he exclaimed: ‘This is horrifying. It meant that had a U.S. invasion been carried out…there was a 99 percent probability that nuclear war would have been initiated.’
Invasion was, in fact, one of the main options weighed by Kennedy’s ExCom in the early days of the crisis. Although a full-scale US invasion of Cuba had strong proponents, including the joint chiefs of staff, as did the notion of a surgical airstrike designed to obliterate the missiles, JFK chose a more prudent, and considerably less risky, course. He decided to implement a naval blockade, or quarantine, of Cuba to prevent any additional military shipments reaching the island. On 22 October, the president went on national television to explain the gravity of the threat, and outline his quarantine decision, to the American people. If any Soviet missiles were launched from Cuban soil against any targets anywhere in the Western hemisphere, Kennedy emphasized, the United States would regard it ‘as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union’. On 24 October, US policy-makers breathed a collective sigh of relief when Soviet ships halted short of the quarantine line, averting a feared confrontation. Secretary of State Rusk famously quipped: ‘Remember when you report this—that eyeball to eyeball, they blinked first.’
Yet the crisis was hardly over. Construction work on the missile sites continued; a potential invasion force of 140,000 troops assembled in south Florida; and Kennedy placed US strategic nuclear forces on high alert. In a letter to Kennedy of 26 October, Khrushchev struck a conciliatory tone. Although condemning the US blockade as an act of naval piracy, the Soviet leader evinced a willingness to remove the missiles from Cuba in return for a US pledge not to invade the island. In a confusing twist, he made public the next day another, more belligerent letter to JFK in which the Russian ruler suddenly raised the price for a settlement, calling not just for a no-invasion pledge but also for the removal of US Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Those missiles, which had become operational earlier in the year, served as a particularly galling symbol to the Soviets of their nuclear inferiority—even though they were considered by US nuclear specialists to be of minuscule strategic value.
On 28 October, at the very moment when the situation appeared to be spinning out of control, American and Soviet negotiators reached a tentative resolution. With the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, playing a key role, the United States offered a compromise settlement, based largely upon Khrushchev’s first letter, that proved acceptable to Moscow. The Soviets thus agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba; for their part, the Americans pledged not to invade the island. Khrushchev immediately revealed the outlines of the agreement in a radio broadcast. In an important addendum, which was not made public at the time, Khrushchev indicated via a personal letter to Kennedy his understanding that the future removal of the Jupiter missiles from Turkey also constituted a basic element of the deal, as Robert Kennedy had earlier promised a Soviet representative. At US insistence, however, the Jupiter removal was not to be tied explicitly to the Cuban imbroglio because the Turkish missiles were technically under NATO, and not American, control.
Over the past six decades, scholars, policy analysts, and former governmental officials have vigorously debated every aspect of this near-catastrophe, often varying sharply in their interpretative judgements. While some have touted Kennedy’s masterful crisis management and remarkable cool under fire, others have blasted the American president for his willingness to court nuclear war, and the almost certain deaths of tens of millions of Americans, Soviets, Cubans, and Europeans, over the emplacement of missiles that did not fundamentally alter the prevailing nuclear balance. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who sat in on the ExCom meetings, later attributed JFK’s Cuban success to ‘plain dumb luck’. That may be the most apt coda for this whole affair, especially when one recognizes how close the world actually came to nuclear war in October 1962. By the same token, one must acknowledge that Kennedy’s instinctive caution and prudence, in the face of fierce pressure from his military advisers for a more aggressive response, was instrumental to the peaceful denouement of an affair fraught with unparalleled danger.
The Cuban Missile Crisis certainly demonstrates—as did the earlier crises over the Taiwan Strait and Berlin—the centrality of the nuclear imbalance at this stage of the Cold War. US decision-makers felt supremely confident that they could force the Soviets to back down in any confrontation; their nation’s overwhelming nuclear superiority served, in this sense, as the ultimate trump card, a fact of atomic age life understood every bit as much in Moscow as in Washington. Yet both sides also realized that the huge American edge in deliverable nuclear warheads was a temporary phenomenon. US experts fully expected the Soviets to achieve relative nuclear parity in the near future; Soviet defence planners, for their part, were determined to close the gap as expeditiously as possible. Reflecting the mix of bitterness and steely resolve pervasive among the Kremlin elite, Deputy Foreign Minister Vassily Kuznetsov warned a US diplomat shortly after the missile crisis: ‘You Americans will never be able to do this to us again.’
That vow proved a prophetic guide to subsequent Soviet policy. Moscow embarked on a concerted effort to build up its nuclear stockpile, augment its bomber fleet, and improve its missile programme in the aftermath of the showdown in the Caribbean. Within a few years, the Soviets had developed a sophisticated new generation of ICBMs that gave them what they had not possessed when Kennedy forced Khrushchev’s hasty retreat from Cuba: the near certain ability to inflict horrific damage on the American homeland in any nuclear exchange.
That accomplishment, confirmed by the mid-1960s, heralded a permanent alteration in the nuclear arms equation, and a consequent change in the nature of the Cold War. Once both sides had the ability to inflict unacceptable damage on the other, or so the thinking of nuclear strategists went, then neither side could afford to risk a nuclear exchange. According to this hopeful logic, soon tagged the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (or MAD), the possession by each superpower of huge nuclear stockpiles actually enhanced global security by rendering nuclear conflict irrationally self-destructive for each.
The Cuban Missile Crisis deserves recognition as one of the Cold War’s critical turning points for other reasons as well. Having peered into the nuclear abyss, US and Soviet leaders recognized the need to avoid future Cuba-type confrontations and began to take some significant steps in that direction. In June 1963, a ‘hot line’ was installed in the Kremlin and the White House to facilitate direct communication in times of crisis. In August 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a limited test ban treaty, eliminating all but underground nuclear tests. Two months later, they also endorsed a UN resolution prohibiting nuclear weapons from space. Even the rhetoric on both sides cooled notably, with Khrushchev applauding Kennedy’s conciliatory speech at American University in June 1963, in which the president said that more attention should be directed ‘to our common interests and to the means by which differences can be resolved’.
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