by M. Dobbs
The activation of the radar systems coincided with the discovery of a major change in the organization of Cuban air defenses. NSA analysts noticed that Cuban call signs, codes, and procedures were replaced by Soviet ones in the early hours of Saturday morning. Commands were issued in Russian rather than Spanish. It looked as if the Soviets had taken over and activated the entire air defense network. Only the low-level antiaircraft guns remained under Cuban control.
There was only one possible conclusion: the rules of engagement had suddenly changed. From now on, American planes flying over Cuba would be tracked and targeted.
2:00 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (11:00 A.M. BAIKONUR, KAZAKHSTAN)
Nine time zones to the east, it was already midmorning on the Soviet missile testing range at Baikonur, in the arid plains of southern Kazakhstan. Boris Chertok was late getting up. The rocket designer had been working for weeks preparing the Soviet Union's latest space spectacular, a probe to Mars. He had been awake most of the night, worrying about the project. One launch had already failed after a rocket engine misfired. A second attempt was planned for October 29.
When he got to the rocket assembly hall, he could scarcely believe his eyes. Heavily armed soldiers had taken over the building, and were carefully checking the identities of anyone entering and leaving. Nobody was paying any attention to the Mars rocket. Instead, engineers were swarming around an unwieldy five-engined monster previously covered with tarps. Nicknamed the Semyorka ― "the little seven" ― the R-7 had won worldwide fame as the rocket that launched Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin into orbit. But it was fast becoming obsolete. All that it was good for now was to deliver a 2.8-megaton nuclear warhead to wipe out New York, Chicago, or Washington. The Soviets had so few intercontinental ballistic missiles in service that they had to make use of every single rocket in the inventory, outdated or not.
The Mars probe was off, explained Anatoly Kirillov, commander of the Baikonur launch site, when Chertok finally caught up with him. Orders had arrived from Moscow to get a pair or reserve Semyorkas ready for launch. One missile had already been checked out, fueled, and mated with its warhead. It was standing on a launch pad at the other end of the cosmodrome. The second Semyorka would be ready to go as soon as the warhead was delivered from the special storage depot. When that happened, all civilian personnel would be "sent away," in case the rocket exploded on takeoff, as had happened before.
Chertok did a quick mental calculation. A 2.8-megaton weapon would destroy everything within a seven-mile radius of the blast, and spew radiation over a much larger area. There was nowhere safe to go near Baikonur. He had known Kirillov for many years and got on well with him, but he was disturbed by what was happening. He wanted to call Moscow and speak to someone in the leadership, even Khrushchev personally. The launch site director brushed him aside. It was impossible to reach Moscow on a regular phone. All communication lines were reserved for the military, in case the order came to go to war.
The rocket designer found himself wondering if his friend was ready to push the button, if ordered by Moscow. A nuclear conflict was going to be very different from the last war in which they had both fought.
"We aren't talking just about the death of a hundred thousand people from a specific nuclear warhead. This could be the beginning of the end for the entire human race. It's not the same as in the war, when you were commanding a battery and someone shouted 'Fire.'"
Kirillov thought about this for a moment.
"I am a soldier and I will fulfill my orders, just as I did at the front," he replied eventually. "Somewhere or other, there is another missile officer, not called Kirillov, but something like Smith, who is waiting for an order to attack Moscow or this very cosmodrome. So there is no need to poison my soul."
The Baikonur cosmodrome was just one island in a vast nuclear archipelago stretching across the Soviet Union. In the seventeen years since America exploded the world's first atomic bomb, the Soviets had made a frantic effort to catch up. Matching the United States nuclear weapon for nuclear weapon and missile for missile was the supreme national priority. The nuclear bomb, plus the ability to deliver it, was both the symbol and guarantor of the Soviet Union's superpower status. Everything else ― the country's economic well-being, political freedoms, even the promised Communist future ― took second place to the nuclear competition with the rival superpower.
In their pursuit of nuclear equality, Stalin and his successors had transformed large parts of the country into a military-industrial wasteland. The Soviet Union was dotted with top secret nuclear installations, from the uranium mines of Siberia to the nuclear testing grounds of Russia and Kazakhstan to the rocket factories of Ukraine and the Urals. But despite some impressive achievements, the Communist superpower remained a long way behind the capitalist superpower in both the number and the quality of deliverable nuclear weapons.
By Pentagon calculations, the Soviet Union possessed between 86 and 110 long-range ballistic missiles in October 1962, compared to 240 on the American side; in fact, the real figure on the Soviet side was 42. Six of these missiles were antiquated Semyorkas, which were so large and unwieldy that they had little military utility. Soaring 110 feet into the air, the R-7 relied on unstable liquid propellants. It took twenty hours to prepare for launch and could not be kept on alert for more than a day. Too bulky to be stored in underground silos, the Semyorkas were an easy target for an American attack.
The most effective long-range Soviet missile was the R-16, which used storable propellants. The slim, two-stage missile was designed by Mikhail Yangel, the inventor of the medium-range R-12 missile that had made its appearance in Cuba. Never has a missile system had a less auspicious beginning. The first R-16 to be tested, in October 1960, blew up on the launch pad at Baikonur, killing 126 engineers, scientists, and military leaders who had come to witness Yangel's moment of triumph over his rival, Sergei Korolev. The victims included the chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin. But the disaster was hushed up and the problems ironed out. The Soviet Union began to mass-produce the R-16 two years later. A total of thirty-six had been deployed by the time of the missile crisis and were on fifteen-minute alert. All but ten of these missiles were based in silos.
The "missile gap" against which Kennedy had campaigned during the 1960 presidential election did indeed exist. But it was in America's favor, not Russia's ― and it was even wider than American experts believed.
3:00 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (2:00 A.M. HAVANA)
In Havana, it was still the middle of the night. Soviet generals and Cuban comandantes were at their command posts waiting for news of a U.S. airborne landing, which was expected from hour to hour. At Soviet military headquarters in El Chico, officers sat around talking, smoking cigarettes, and exchanging the occasional mordant joke. A report arrived after midnight that U.S. naval ships had been sighted east of Havana. Machine guns were distributed, but it was a false alarm. In the heavy autumn mist, a lookout mistook some Cuban fishing boats for an American invading force.
Fidel Castro was also wide awake, as was usual for him at this hour in the morning. As the minutes ticked by, he became ever more pessimistic about the chances of avoiding an American invasion. The historical analogy that troubled him most was Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Stalin had received numerous intelligence reports about a Nazi invasion, but he ignored them all. Fearing a provocation to trap him into an unwanted war, he refused to mobilize the Soviet armed forces until it was too late. Such shortsightedness had "cost the Soviets millions of men, almost all their air force, their mechanized units, enormous retreats." The Nazis reached the gates of Moscow and Leningrad. The homeland of world socialism was almost wiped out. Analyzing the state of the world that Saturday morning, Castro worried that "history would repeat itself." He was determined to ensure that Khrushchev did not make the same mistake as Stalin. He would send a personal message to Khrushchev to alert him to the danger and encourage him to stand firm. At 2:00
a.m., he had President Dorticos telephone Ambassador Alekseev to tell him he was coming over for "an important meeting."
The Soviet Embassy was located in the Vedado section of Havana, a leafy enclave of turn-of-the century mansions, Art Nouveau villas, and Art Deco apartment buildings expropriated from the Cuban elite. The neoclassical two-story mansion on the corner of B and 13th streets that now housed the embassy had previously belonged to a family of sugar barons who left Cuba shortly after the revolution. In addition to their offices, the ambassador and several of his top assistants also had apartments in the complex. Vedado was particularly magical at night when the dim streetlights cast long shadows through vine-covered porticoes and the scent of almond trees hung in the air.
The Cuban leader's jeep pulled into the sweeping driveway of the embassy, behind wrought-iron gates covered in wisteria. Castro asked the ambassador to take him to the bomb shelter beneath the embassy, saying he feared an imminent American air strike, even an invasion. He paced up and down, waving his long, bony hands in the air. A yanqui attack was "inevitable," he insisted. "The chances of it not happening are five in one hundred." He was calculating the odds, just like JFK.
He was full of complaints about General Pliyev and his staff. He told Alekseev that Soviet commanders lacked basic information about the American military buildup. They had only found out the details of the naval blockade a day after it came into force. They were accustomed to the classic rules of war, such as they had known in World War II, and did not understand that this was going to be a very different kind of conflict. The short distance between Cuba and America meant that U.S. planes would be able to destroy the Soviet missile sites with very little warning, even without using nuclear weapons. There was little Soviet and Cuban air defenses could do to prevent a devastating strike.
The way Castro saw it, a conventional war was likely to escalate very quickly into a nuclear exchange. As he later recalled, he "took it for granted that it would become a nuclear war anyway, and that we were going to disappear." Rather than submit to an American occupation, he and his comrades "were ready to die in the defense of our country." He had no problem authorizing the use of tactical nuclear weapons against American invaders, even if it meant poisoning Cuba for generations to come. He and other Cuban leaders understood very well that "we would have been annihilated" in the event of nuclear war. They would perish "con suprema dignidad."
As usual with Fidel, it all came back to dignidad. But there was also an element of political calculation in his preoccupation with death and sacrifice. His entire geopolitical strategy was based on raising the cost of an invasion of Cuba to the point of unacceptability to the United States. Accepting the unacceptable and thinking the unthinkable were key to his survival strategy. Nuclear war was the ultimate game of chicken. If Castro could convince Kennedy and Khrushchev that he was willing to die for his beliefs, that gave him a certain advantage. Since he was the weakest of the three leaders, stubbornness, defiance, and dignidad were his only real weapons.
It was impossible to tell with Castro where dignidad ended and political calculation took over. His overriding goal was ensuring the survival of his regime. This was the reason why he had accepted Soviet missiles in the first place. He had long since concluded that the United States was implacably opposed to his vision for Cuba. The Bay of Pigs was merely the forerunner of more serious attempts to get rid of him. His best hope of deterring an invasion was to place Cuba under the Soviet nuclear umbrella. Once nuclear missiles were installed and operating in Cuba, the yanquis would never dare invade.
On the other hand, Castro did not want to appear too indebted to the Soviet Union or leave the impression that Cuba was incapable of defending itself. So he wrapped his decision to accept Khrushchev's offer of nuclear missiles in a high-sounding justification. He informed Soviet envoys that he would accept Khrushchev's offer not because he was desperate for the protection provided by the missiles but to "strengthen the Socialist camp." In other words, he was doing Moscow a favor rather than the other way round.
Alekseev knew Castro better than any other Soviet official or foreign diplomat. Nicknamed "Don Alejandro" by the Cubans, he enjoyed extraordinary access to Fidel, first as a KGB agent and later as Soviet ambassador. But the Cuban leader remained for him an enigma.
On a personal level, Alekseev was under Fidel's spell. He regarded Castro as the reincarnation of his childhood political heroes who had ensured the triumph of the Russian Revolution. He admired his single-mindedness and enjoyed his easygoing informality. But he also knew from personal experience that the Cuban leader was quick to take offense. He would seize on a tiny detail and make a huge issue out of it. The idea of Communist Party discipline, which was everything for an apparatchik like Alekseev, mattered little to an autocrat like Castro. In dispatches to Moscow, the ambassador attributed Castro's "very complex and excessively sensitive" personality to "insufficient ideological preparedness." The Cuban leader was like a willful child, easily swayed by his emotions. Alekseev was unaccustomed to revolutionaries who hung crucifixes on their walls and invoked the power of the Virgin Mary.
Like his political masters in Moscow, Alekseev was willing to overlook Castro's ideological idiosyncrasies. Just as Fidel needed the Soviets, the Soviets needed Fidel. They had not protested in the slightest earlier that year when Castro purged a group of orthodox pro-Moscow Communists led by Anibal Escalante. Ideological purity was less important than the reality of political power. The way Alekseev saw it, Castro was "the main political force" in Cuba and the personification of the revolution. Without Castro, there probably would have been no revolution. "Therefore, we should fight for him, educate him, and sometimes forgive him his mistakes."
Alekseev, whose Spanish was good but not perfect, struggled to keep up with the torrent of thoughts pouring out of Castro in the predawn hours of Saturday morning. One of his assistants jotted down a few phrases in Spanish and handed the paper to another aide for translation into Russian. But they had to begin all over again after Castro expressed unhappiness with the draft.
Fidel was having difficulty articulating exactly what he wanted Khrushchev to do. At times, it sounded as if he wanted his Soviet allies to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States. At other times, he seemed to suggest that they should use nuclear weapons in self-defense if Cuba was attacked. As one draft followed another into the burn bin, Alekseev went to the code room and dictated a holding telegram:
TOP SECRET.TOP PRIORITY.
F. CASTRO IS WITH US AT THE EMBASSY AND IS PREPARING A PERSONAL LETTER FOR N.S. KHRUSHCHEV THAT WILL BE SENT TO HIM IMMEDIATELY.
IN F. CASTRO'S OPINION, THE INTERVENTION IS ALMOST INEVITABLE AND WILL OCCUR IN APPROXIMATELY 24–72 HOURS.
ALEKSEEV.
3:35 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (10:35 A.M. MOSCOW)
By Soviet standards, the nuclear test planned for the morning of October 27 was a relatively small device, with the explosive power of around twenty Hiroshima-type bombs. Like most Soviet airborne tests, it would be conducted at Novaya Zemlya, high above the Arctic Circle. An appendix-shaped pair of islands roughly the size of Maine, Novaya Zemlya was a perfect spot for atmospheric testing. The native population of 536 Eskimos had been resettled on the mainland after 1955, their places taken by military personnel, scientists, and construction workers.
Both the Soviet Union and the United States had conducted hundreds of nuclear tests since the explosion of the first atomic bomb on July 16,1945. The dawning of the nuclear age had been announced by a flash of brilliant light across the desert of New Mexico followed by the formation of an expanding mushroom cloud. For one eyewitness, it was "the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you." The father of the bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, was reminded of the line in Hindu scripture from the God Vishnu: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Everybody was aware that "a new thing had just been born."
In the seventeen years since that first test, named "Trinity" by Oppenheimer, the secret of Armageddon had spread from America to Russia to Britain to France. More and more countries were clamoring to join the nuclear club. During a presidential election debate with Richard Nixon in October 1960, Kennedy worried that "ten, fifteen, or twenty nations…including Red China" would possess the bomb by the end of 1964. But that fear did not prevent him from vigorously competing with the Soviet Union to develop ever more destructive types of nuclear weapons.
The two superpowers had agreed to a moratorium on nuclear testing in 1958. But Khrushchev ordered a resumption of Soviet tests in September 1961, brushing aside the objections of scientists like Andrei Sakharov who had come to regard atmospheric testing as "a crime against humanity." Every time the Soviet Union or the United States exploded a nuclear bomb above ground, the air was poisoned for future generations. Sakharov pointed out that the radiation released by a big explosion ― around 10 megatons ― could lead to the deaths of a hundred thousand people. Such concerns meant little to Khrushchev, who argued that the Soviet Union was behind in the nuclear arms race and needed to test in order to catch up. "I'd be a jellyfish and not Chairman of the Council of Ministers if I listened to people like Sakharov!" he fumed.
"Fucked again," exploded Kennedy, when he heard the news. He responded by ordering a resumption of American tests in April 1962. By October, the two superpowers were engaged in a frenetic round of tit-for-tat nuclear testing, detonating live bombs two or even three times a week while preparing to fight a nuclear war over Cuba. They had gone beyond mere saber-rattling. Their threats to use the weapons were backed up by weekly ― sometimes daily ― practice demonstrations of their destructive power.
Since the beginning of October, the United States had conducted five tests in the South Pacific. During the same period, the Soviet Union exploded nine nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, most of them at Novaya Zemlya. The weather on Novaya Zemlya had taken a sharp turn for the worse at the beginning of October. There were blizzards and snowstorms practically every day, and only two to three hours of faint daylight, the best time for an airdrop. Technicians had to wade through deep snow-drifts to install cameras and other recording devices prior to a test. They left the equipment in thick metal canisters inside concrete blockhouses a few miles from the epicenter near Mityushikha Bay. When they returned after the test to collect the "samovars," the frozen tundra had become an ashtray, with smoke rising from the blackened rocks.
