One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war

by Michael Dobbs

  Khrushchev's approach to international relations was shaped by his awareness of Soviet weakness. While his public persona was that of the blustering bully, he felt far from confident in the summer of 1962. The Soviet Union was surrounded by American military bases, from Turkey in the West to Japan in the East. America had many more nuclear missiles targeted on the USSR than vice versa. An ideological schism with China threatened Soviet preeminence in the worldwide Communist movement. For all the boasts about the coming utopia, the country was still struggling to recover from World War II.

  Khrushchev had done his best to disguise the fact that the Soviet Union was the weaker superpower with spectacular public relations feats. He had launched the first man into space and tested the world's largest nuclear bomb. "America recognizes only strength," he told associates. His son Sergei was taken aback when Khrushchev boasted that the Soviet Union was churning out intercontinental rockets "like sausages." A missile engineer himself, he knew this was not true.

  "How can you say that when we only have two or three?" Sergei protested.

  "The important thing is to make the Americans believe that," his father replied. "That way, we prevent an attack." Sergei concluded that Soviet policy was based on threatening the United States with "weapons we didn't have."

  As the number two superpower, the Soviet Union had to constantly threaten and bluster in order to be heard. "Your voice must impress people with its certainty," Khrushchev told his Presidium colleagues in January 1962. "Don't be afraid to bring it to a white heat, otherwise we won't get anything."

  There was a big difference, however, between deliberately bringing international tensions to a boiling point and permitting the pot to boil over. The purpose of the missile deployment, Khrushchev kept emphasizing, was not "to start a war" but to give the Americans a taste of "their own medicine."

  Although Khrushchev initially preferred the Democrat Kennedy to the Republican Eisenhower, he had come to regard the two presidents as made from "the same shit." Spending the summer at his villa in Sochi, on the shores of the Black Sea, he seethed with resentment over the presence of American nuclear warheads just across the water in Turkey, five minutes' flying time away. He would hand visitors a pair of binoculars and ask them what they could see. When the mystified guests described an endless vista of water, Khrushchev would grab the binoculars and announce angrily: "I see U.S. missiles, aimed at my dacha." But he was cheered by the thought of the surprise he was about to spring.

  "It's been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy," Khrushchev told a mystified U.S. secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, in Sochi back in September. "Now we can swat your ass."

  4:00 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22

  It was, thought Kennedy, the "best kept secret" of his administration. A group known as the ExComm, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, made up of the president and twelve of his most trusted aides, had been debating the mounting crisis in Cuba for six days, without any leaks to the press. The White House had done everything possible to keep the story out of the newspapers. At one point, nine ExComm members had piled into the same car to avoid the spectacle of a long line of official limousines arriving for a crisis meeting at the White House. Distinguished cabinet officers like Bob McNamara and John McCone were reduced to sitting in each other's laps.

  State Department officials whose responsibilities had nothing to do with the Soviet Union or Cuba were ordered to arrive at the White House in the biggest limousines they could find. The assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, Averell Harriman, spent hours in an empty West Wing office on Sunday morning, serving as a decoy for reporters assembled in the lobby. "How long do I have to sit here?" he grumbled.

  By Sunday evening, reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post had pieced together much of the story. The president called the publishers of the two newspapers to ask them to hold back. With some reluctance--JFK had made a similar request prior to the Bay of Pigs, the greatest fiasco of his presidency--they agreed. The headlines in the Monday morning edition of the Post barely hinted at what the reporters really knew:

  Major U.S. Decision

  On Policy Is Awaited;

  Moves Kept Secret.

  Rumors Are Many

  As Top Defense,

  State Aides Confer.

  By Monday afternoon, the secret was almost out. At noon, Marines began evacuating civilians from the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, escorting 2,810 women and children to waiting warships and planes. Urgent messages were dispatched to vacationing congressional leaders telling them to return to Washington immediately. A military helicopter located Democratic house whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, and dropped him a note in a bottle. "Call Operator 18, Washington. Urgent message from the President." Soon, Air Force jets were whisking Boggs and other congressional leaders to the capital.

  Kennedy stuck with his scheduled appointments, spending forty-five minutes discussing African economic development with the prime minister of Uganda. At 4:00 p.m., he held a cabinet meeting, telling startled cabinet secretaries that he had decided on a naval blockade of Cuba to counter the deployment of Soviet missiles. P-hour--code word for the presidential address to the nation--was still three hours away.

  In the meantime, the State Department had launched a vast logistical operation to inform governments around the world of the blockade, which would be termed a "quarantine" in order to sound less threatening. Most foreign governments, including the Soviet one, would hear the news at 6:00 p.m. Washington time, an hour before Kennedy went on television. A few close allies, such as Britain, Germany, and France, received advance notice from special presidential emissaries.

  Former secretary of state Dean Acheson was ushered into the study of French president Charles de Gaulle in Paris after flying all night from Washington. Normally mistrustful of American assurances, the general dismissed Acheson's offer to produce photographic proof of Soviet missile deployment in Cuba with a magisterial wave of his hand. "A great nation like yours would not act if there were any doubt about the evidence," he announced. Of course, France would support its ally. It was only later that he agreed to examine the U-2 pictures with the help of a magnifying glass.

  "Extraordinaire," the old soldier muttered.

  4:39 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22

  The air defense commanders participating in the conference call from NORAD headquarters could scarcely believe their ears. General John Gerhart, commander in chief of the North American Defense Command, wanted them to install nuclear weapons onto fighter-interceptor jets and dispatch them to dozens of airfields in remote locations. The order was to be carried out immediately.

  Within minutes, worried commanders were flooding the Combat Center in Colorado Springs with calls. Surely there must be some mistake. Strict safety regulations governed the movement of nuclear weapons. The F-106s that Gerhart wanted dispersed were single-seater jets, whose mission was to destroy incoming Soviet bombers. To load these planes with nuclear weapons and send them across the country violated the "buddy system," a sacrosanct Air Force doctrine that required at least two officers to be in physical control of a nuclear weapon at all times. In the words of a shocked nuclear safety officer, Gerhart's order meant that a single pilot, "by an inadvertent act, would have been able to achieve the full nuclear detonation of the weapon."

  The only exception to the buddy system was in time of war, when an enemy attack was considered imminent. While the newspapers were full of rumors about a crisis brewing over Cuba or Berlin, there was no evidence that the Soviets were about to strike.

  Many Air Force officers were skeptical about the safety of the nuclear weapon that was to be loaded aboard the fighter-interceptors. Hailed by the Pentagon as a wonder weapon, the MB-1 "Genie" was an air-to-air missile equipped with a 1.5-kiloton warhead, one-tenth the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Some pilots considered it "the dumbest weapons system ever purchased." Rather than hitti
ng a target, the unguided missile was designed to explode in midair, destroying any planes that might be in the vicinity through the sheer force of the blast.

  The purpose of a dispersal operation was to prevent U.S. Air Force fighters and bombers from becoming sitting targets for Soviet bombers. To have the capability of responding to a Soviet attack, the U.S. war-planes had to take their weapons with them, even if this meant flying over heavily populated areas to airfields that lacked adequate nuclear storage facilities.

  The officers in Colorado Springs checked with their superiors. The reply came back moments later. The dispersal order stood. Soon nuclear-armed F-106s were "booming off the runway" at Air Force bases all across the country without local commanders understanding what was going on.

  5:00 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22

  During the first week of the crisis, Kennedy and his advisers had the luxury of being able to consider their options without feeling the need to respond immediately to the pressure of public opinion. By keeping the deployment of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba a tightly held secret within the government, they gained a few days of reflection, which proved enormously valuable. They avoided alarming the Kremlin, and did not have to explain themselves constantly to Congress and the press. Had JFK been obliged to make a snap decision on how to respond to Khrushchev the day he found out about the missiles, events could have taken a very different course.

  The pace of the crisis quickened dramatically as it moved into the public phase. The change became apparent as soon as congressional leaders filed into the Cabinet Room to receive a private presidential briefing two hours before Kennedy was due to go on television. The onetime junior senator from Massachusetts now had former congressional colleagues looking over his shoulder, second-guessing his decisions. Soon they would be joined by every political pundit in the country.

  "My God," gasped Senator Richard B. Russell, at the news that at least some of the Soviet missiles on Cuba were "ready to fire."

  The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee could barely contain himself as he listened to the president present his plan for a naval blockade around Cuba. He felt that a much tougher response was required: an air strike followed by invasion. Giving the Communists "time to pause and think" was pointless because it would only allow them to get "better prepared." Russell agreed with General LeMay. War with the Soviet Union was all but inevitable, sooner or later. The time to fight it was now, while America was strong.

  "It seems to me we're at the crossroads," the senator said. "We're either a world class power or we're not."

  Kennedy tried to reason with Russell. He wanted the congressional leadership to understand how he had arrived at his decision. A blockade was risky enough: it could lead to war "within twenty-four hours" in Berlin or some other trouble spot. But the risks would be magnified many times by a surprise attack on the missile sites. "If we go into Cuba, we have to all realize that we are taking a chance that these missiles, which are ready to fire, won't be fired.... That is one hell of a gamble."

  The Senate's intellectual oracle, former Rhodes Scholar William Fulbright, spoke up in support of his fellow Southern Democrat. He had opposed the Bay of Pigs adventure, but now wanted an "all-out" invasion of Cuba "as quickly as possible."

  The criticism from his former colleagues stung the president. "If they want this job, fuck 'em," he exploded, his eyes flashing with anger, as he went up to the residence to prepare for the television address. "They can have it. It's no great joy to me."

  6:00 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22 (1:00 A.M. TUESDAY, MOSCOW)

  Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, was summoned to the State Department at 6:00 p.m. He knew nothing about the missiles on Cuba, having been kept in the dark by his own government. His normally jovial face went ashen as the secretary of state handed him a copy of the president's speech and a private warning to Khrushchev not to underestimate American "will and determination." Dean Rusk thought that the envoy seemed to age "ten years" in the few minutes he spoke with him. To Dobrynin, Rusk himself was "clearly in a nervous and agitated mood although he tried to conceal it."

  "Is this a crisis?" the reporters yelled, as Dobrynin emerged from the State Department clutching a large manila envelope.

  "What do you think?" the ambassador replied grimly. He waved the envelope at the reporters as he got into his black Chrysler limousine.

  Seven time zones away in Moscow, Richard Davies, the political counselor at the U.S. Embassy, delivered identical documents to the Soviet Foreign Ministry. They were in Khrushchev's hands fifteen minutes later. The news was not as bad as he feared. The president was demanding the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, but had not set a deadline. "This is not a war against Cuba, but some kind of ultimatum," was Khrushchev's immediate reaction.

  His mood, always changeable, now shifted from despair to relief. "We've saved Cuba," he announced ebulliently.

  Kennedy's decision to impose a naval blockade effectively halted the supply of Soviet military equipment to Cuba. Khrushchev was pleased to learn that the three R-12 medium-range missile regiments had already reached the island, along with most of their gear. Only one of the eighteen ships used to transport the regiments was still at sea. The 11,000-ton Yuri Gagarin, loaded with missile fueling equipment, was approaching the Bahamas, two days' sailing time from Havana. Most of the headquarters staff for one of the R-12 regiments were also on board.

  The two R-14 regiments were a different matter. Fourteen ships had been chartered to transport the bigger intermediate-range missiles, which were capable of hitting targets throughout the United States, along with the troops and associated paraphernalia. Only one of these ships had made it safely to Cuba. Two more were less than a day's sailing time away. One was a passenger ship, the Nikolaevsk, with more than two thousand soldiers aboard. The other, the Divnogorsk, was a small Polish-built tanker. The rockets themselves were still in the middle of the Atlantic.

  Most worrying of all to Khrushchev was the Aleksandrovsk, a 5,400-ton freighter crammed with nuclear warheads. Her cargo included twenty-four 1-megaton warheads for the R-14 missile, each one of which contained the destructive force of seventy Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. The explosive power concentrated on board the ship exceeded all the bombs dropped in the history of warfare by a factor of at least three.

  After a sixteen-day voyage from the port of Severomorsk, high above the Arctic Circle, the Aleksandrovsk was approaching the northern coast of Cuba. The ship was still in international waters, nearly half a day's sailing time from the closest Cuban port. She was obviously a prime target for interception by the U.S. Navy. Nuclear-armed submarines had escorted the Aleksandrovsk part of the way across the Atlantic, but she was now practically defenseless, accompanied only by another Soviet freighter, the Almetyevsk. If the Americans tried to board, the captain had orders to open fire with automatic weapons, blow up his ship, and send the equivalent of 25 million tons of TNT to the bottom of the sea. The Aleksandrovsk must not be permitted to fall into enemy hands.

  In addition to the surface ships, there were also four Soviet submarines out in the western Atlantic. Khrushchev had initially planned to build a modern submarine base in Cuba, but had scaled these plans back in late September. Instead of nuclear-powered submarines, which were capable of remaining under the ocean for weeks at a time, he dispatched four Foxtrot-class diesel-electric submarines. The Foxtrots were larger, updated versions of the German U-boats that had harassed Allied shipping in World War II. The difference was that they each carried a small nuclear-tipped torpedo, in addition to twenty-one conventional torpedoes.

  Recovering from his initial shock, Khrushchev began making a series of rapid decisions. He ordered a heightening of alert levels for Soviet military units. He dictated letters to Kennedy and Castro. He drafted a statement denouncing the blockade as "an act of piracy" and accusing the United States of pushing the world to the edge of "thermonuclear war." But his anger was tempered with caution. To r
educe the risk of a confrontation with American warships, he ordered the return of most of the Soviet vessels that had not reached Cuban waters. The recalled ships included the wide-hatch freighters Kimovsk and Poltava, both loaded with R-14 missiles, and the Yuri Gagarin, with equipment for one of the R-12 regiments. Ships with nonmilitary cargoes, such as the oil tanker Bucharest, were authorized to proceed to Cuba. The vessels closest to Cuba, including the warhead-carrying Aleksandrovsk, were instructed to head for the nearest port.

  After earlier considering the idea of authorizing Soviet commanders on Cuba to use tactical nuclear weapons in response to a U.S. invasion, Khrushchev now rejected this option. He also decided against transferring control of Soviet weaponry to the Cubans or announcing a formal defense treaty with Cuba. Instead, he dictated an order to the commander in chief of the Soviet Group of Forces, General Issa Pliyev:

  In connection with the possible landing on Cuba by Americans taking part in exercises in the Caribbean sea, take urgent measures to increase combat readiness and defeat the enemy, through the joint efforts of the Cuban army and all Soviet troop units, excluding the weapons of STATSENKO and all the cargoes of BELOBORODOV.

  Major General Igor Statsenko was the commander of the Soviet missile troops on Cuba; Colonel Nikolai Beloborodov had responsibility for the nuclear warheads. Decoded, the message meant that Soviet troops on Cuba had orders to resist an American invasion, but were not authorized to use nuclear weapons of any kind. Khrushchev was determined to maintain personal control over the warheads.

  Kremlin notetakers struggled to keep pace with a jumble of thoughts and instructions from the first secretary:

  Order the return of the ships (those ships that have not yet arrived).