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

by Michael Dobbs

  Finally, late in the afternoon, McNamara authorized a cautiously worded statement. "Some of the Bloc vessels proceeding toward Cuba appear to have altered course. Other vessels are proceeding toward Cuba. No intercepts have yet been necessary."

  Soon, Walter Cronkite, dubbed by opinion polls "the most trusted man in America," was delivering a special report on CBS News in his rich baritone. He, too, stalled for time. "It was beginning to look this day as though it might be one of armed conflict between Soviet vessels and American warships on the sea-lanes leading to Cuba. But there has been no confrontation as far as we know."

  Correspondents were standing by at the United Nations, the White House, the Pentagon. None of them knew very much. "There is still considerable belief that the confrontation in the Caribbean could come tonight," reported George Herman from outside the White House. "Everybody's lips are sealed," said Charles Von Fremd at the Pentagon. "We are under what amounts to a wartime censorship system."

  "There is not a great deal of optimism tonight," concluded Cronkite, his tiredness visible in the heavy lines under his eyes.

  Castro exuded calm resolve when he arrived at Soviet military headquarters at El Chico. Dressed in a combat jacket and peaked cap, he shook hands briskly with his hosts. He then spent an hour and a half listening to their reports, jotting down notes on a memo pad, and asking questions through an interpreter. He struck one of the Soviet generals present as "purposeful and completely unruffled, as though war were not imminent and his life's work not at risk."

  The comandante en jefe wanted to coordinate future military action between the two armies, and make sure they could communicate with each other. He quickly agreed with the Soviets on a plan to redeploy his antiaircraft weapons. The most powerful guns in the Cuban arsenal were two 100mm artillery pieces, with nineteen-foot barrels, capable of hitting targets eight miles away. Fidel would send one of the big guns to guard the Aleksandrovsk at the port of La Isabela and the other to protect Colonel Sidorov's R-12 regiment near Sagua la Grande, which had made the most progress toward getting its missiles ready for launch. Other missile positions would be protected by one 57mm gun and two 37mm guns.

  It was difficult for Castro to know whether the Soviets would ever use the nuclear warheads that remained under their tight control. He knew what he would do if the decision was up to him. If he had learned anything from his exhaustive study of revolutionary movements and his own experiences as a revolutionary, it was that it was suicidal to wait for the enemy to attack. From the capture of the Bastille onward, fortune had always favored the bold. "A force that remains in its barracks is lost," Castro had concluded, after witnessing the failure of an antigovernment insurrection in Colombia in 1948.

  Fidel would not just wait for the Americans to invade. He would find a way to seize the initiative.

  10:30 P.M. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24 (9:30 P.M. HAVANA)

  President Kennedy dined at the White House that evening with a small group of intimates that included Bobby and Ethel Kennedy and his journalist friend Charles Bartlett. At one point, Bartlett suggested a toast to celebrate the turnaround of the Soviet ships, but Kennedy was not in the mood. "You don't want to celebrate in this game this early."

  Bundy popped in and out with news from the quarantine line. "We still have twenty chances out of a hundred to be at war with Russia," Kennedy muttered.

  His dark forebodings were reinforced by a rambling, toughly worded message from Khrushchev that began churning out of State Department teletypes late that night. The Soviet leader accused the president of everything from "outright banditry" to "pushing mankind to the abyss of a nuclear war." He pointed out that the United States had "lost its invulnerability" to nuclear attack. The Soviet Union would neither withdraw its missiles nor respect the American quarantine.

  "If someone tried to dictate similar conditions to you, the United States, you would reject them. And we also say 'Nyet,'" Khrushchev wrote. "Naturally, we will not simply be bystanders with regard to piratical acts by American ships on the high seas. We will be forced to take the measures we deem necessary and adequate to protect our rights."

  Perusing the message after his guests had gone home, Kennedy picked up the phone and called Bartlett. "You'll be interested to know that I got a cable from our friend," he told the reporter. "He said those ships are coming through."

  Had Kennedy known what was happening in Cuba that night, he would have been even more alarmed. Special emissaries had fanned out across the country to deliver top secret targeting data to the three R-12 missile regiments. Rehearsals were being held under cover of darkness to make sure that the missiles were ready for launch. The R-12 missile had a longer range than American intelligence analysts believed. In addition to reaching Washington, Soviet targeteers operated on the assumption that they could also hit New York. The CIA had informed Kennedy that New York was beyond the range of the R-12.

  The targeting cards contained detailed instructions for launching the missile. The most important variables were elevation, azimuth, range, length of time the rocket was under power, type of explosion, and size of the nuclear charge. The cards were the product of weeks of painstaking geodesic research and complicated mathematical calculations. In contrast to a cruise missile, which is powered throughout its flight, a ballistic missile is only powered for the first few minutes after takeoff. It then follows a trajectory that can be calculated with varying degrees of accuracy. Mechanical gyroscopes kept the R-12 missile to its assigned path.

  To aim the rockets properly, the Soviet targeteers had to know the exact location of the launch sites, including height above sea level. Detailed geodesic surveys had never been done in Cuba, so they started almost from scratch, building a network of towers across the country to gather topographic data. They laboriously adjusted the Soviet system of coordinates to the American system to make use of the old 1:50,000 American military maps that Castro had inherited from Batista. For precise astronomical observations, they needed a clock that was accurate to 1/1,000 of a second. Since the signal from Moscow was too weak, they made use of American time signals.

  With only primitive computers and calculators, most of the mathematical work had to be done by hand. The calculations were checked and rechecked by two targeteers, working independently. Each R-12 missile regiment had twelve targets: an initial volley of eight missiles, plus four in reserve for a second round. Just when the targeteers thought they had finished their work, they realized that the target assigned to one of the missile sites was out of range. It took more than a week--and several nights without sleep--to reassign the targets and redo all the calculations.

  Major Nikolai Oblizin was responsible for bringing the targeting cards to Colonel Sidorov's regiment, 150 miles east of Havana. As deputy head of the ballistic department, he had spent most of the last three months at the El Chico headquarters. He had been billeted in a former brothel, complete with swimming pool and luxurious beds.

  During his three months in Cuba, Oblizin had formed a strong bond with his Cuban hosts. They greeted him with cries of "companero sovietico" and impromptu renditions of the Internationale or "Moscow Nights." Driving to Sagua la Grande with the targeting cards, he was reminded that not all Cubans were happy about the Soviet presence. A group of counterrevolutionaries opened fire from the hills on the armored vehicles escorting the targeteers to the missile site. But they were too far away to do any damage.

  Designed by Mikhail Yangel, the R-12 was mobile and easy to launch, at least by the standards of the early sixties. The missile used storable liquid propellants and could be kept fully fueled on a launch pad for up to a month, with a thirty-minute countdown time. The pre-surveyed firing positions were built around a 5-ton concrete slab anchored to the ground with bolts and chains. The slab served as the firing stand for the missile. It had to be firm and flat, or the pencil-shaped rocket would topple over. Once the slabs were in place, it took only a few hours to move the missile from one site to another. Yangel's "pencil" be
came the most reliable Soviet ballistic missile of its time.

  Once they had the target cards, Sidorov's men could practice aiming and firing the missiles. The layout of the missile sites was very similar to sites in the Soviet Union. Launching the missiles successfully required split-second timing and everybody knowing precisely what they had to do. Before the missiles could be fired, they had to be brought from Readiness Condition 4 (Regular) to Readiness Condition 1 (Full). Officers timed every step with stopwatches to ensure that all the deadlines were met.

  The missile crews waited until night before starting the dress rehearsal, to avoid being seen by American reconnaissance planes. When the alert sounded, the crew on duty had exactly one minute to reach their assigned positions.

  The real warheads were stored in an underground bunker near a small town called Bejucal, fourteen hours by car from Sagua la Grande. The missile crews practiced with cone-shaped dummies. Soldiers unloaded the dummy warheads from specially designed vans, and placed them on docking vehicles. They then pushed the docking vehicles into long missile-ready tents.

  Inside the tents, technicians swarmed around the rockets, checking out the electronics. Cables led from each tent to electric generators and water vans. It took thirty minutes to mate the warhead. Engineers connected electric cables and a series of three metallic bolts, which were programmed to burst in flight at a preset time, separating the warhead from the rest of the missile. The missiles were now at Readiness Condition 3, 140 minutes from launch.

  A tractor-trailer pulled a missile out of its tent, dragging it several hundred yards to the launch pads. Soldiers attached metal chain pulleys to the top of the erector on which the missile was lying. The tractor then winched the erector plus missile up to the firing position, a few degrees off vertical. The launch pads were oriented north-south, in the direction of the United States.

  The next step was targeting. Engineers aligned the missile with the target, according to the instructions on the targeting card. For maximum precision, they used an instrument called a theodolite, which rotated the missile on the firing stand, measuring azimuth and elevation. The targeting procedures had to be carried out prior to fueling, as it was difficult to move the missile once it was fully fueled.

  The missiles were pointed at the night sky, glistening in the moon-light, like stouter versions of the palm trees all around. Instead of feather-like leaves, the rockets sprouted sharpened cones, like the top of a pencil. Rain beat down on the soldiers as they completed the final preparations for launch. Trucks with fuel and oxidizer roared up to the launch positions, and connected their hoses to the rockets.

  The control officer clicked his stopwatch, and ordered a halt to the exercise. That was enough for one night. There was no point fueling the rockets until the arrival of the live warheads. The missile crew had shown that they could successfully reach Readiness Condition 2, sixty minutes from launch.

  The missiles were hauled back down from the vertical position and dragged back inside the tents. Exhausted soldiers crawled back inside their tents to sleep. The only evidence of the intense nighttime activity was a series of deep ruts in the mud left by fuel trucks and missile trailers driving across the rain-soaked fields.

  The rocket forces commander, Major General Igor Statsenko, had moved to his underground command post in Bejucal. He still did not have a secure landline communication link with Sidorov's regiment at Sagua la Grande. If he received an order to fire from Moscow, he would have to retransmit it by radio, as a coded message.

  Statsenko had reasons for both satisfaction and concern on the night of October 24. He had nearly eight thousand men under his command. Once supplied with nuclear warheads, Sidorov's missiles could destroy New York, Washington, and half a dozen other American cities. The regiment of Colonel Nikolai Bandilovsky, near San Diego de los Banos in western Cuba, would achieve combat-ready status by October 25. The third R-12 regiment, under Colonel Yuri Solovyev, which was stationed closer to San Cristobal, faced a more difficult situation. One of its supply ships, the Yuri Gagarin, had been prevented from reaching Cuba by the blockade. Solovyev's chief of staff was heading back to the Soviet Union, along with most of the regiment's fuel and oxidizer trucks.

  There was only one reasonable solution under the circumstances. Statsenko would have to juggle the equipment that had already arrived in Cuba to allow Solovyev's regiment to become combat-ready as soon as possible. He ordered Sidorov and Bandilovsky to transfer some of their fueling equipment to Solovyev.

  One other problem remained. U.S. Navy planes had flown directly over all three R-12 missile regiments. Statsenko had little doubt the Americans had discovered all the launch sites. He had planned for just such an eventuality. He wrote out another order.

  "Move to reserve positions."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  "Till Hell Freezes Over"

  3:00 A.M. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25 (10:00 A.M. MOSCOW; 2:00 A.M. HAVANA)

  "The Americans have chickened out," chortled Nikita Khrushchev. "It seems that Kennedy went to sleep with a wooden knife."

  The other members of the Presidium were accustomed to the first secretary's colorful turns of phrase. Khrushchev often drew on his Ukrainian peasant heritage to sprinkle his conversation with crude language and aphorisms like "You don't catch flies with your nostrils," "Every sandpiper praises his own marsh," and "All of us together aren't worth Stalin's shit." But this time they were mystified.

  "What do you mean 'wooden'?" asked Deputy Prime Minister Mikoyan, Khrushchev's closest friend in the leadership.

  Like a stand-up comedian whose punch line has fallen flat, Khrushchev had to explain the joke. "They say that when someone goes bear-hunting for the first time, he takes a wooden knife with him, so it is easier to clean his pants."

  Three days into the showdown with the United States, some Soviet officials were wondering who was most in need of a wooden knife: Kennedy or Khrushchev. A Soviet deputy foreign minister told colleagues that Nikita "shit in his pants" when he heard that the Strategic Air Command was moving to DEFCON-2. The head of the KGB would later claim that Khrushchev "panicked" after hearing that the Americans had discovered the Soviet missiles in Cuba, announcing tragically: "That's it. Lenin's work has been destroyed."

  Whatever his true mental state, Khrushchev was certainly disturbed by the latest turn of events. He had witnessed a conventional war up close, and had no desire to experience a nuclear one. As a top commissar at the battle of Kharkov in May 1942, he had seen an entire army wiped out unnecessarily because of the mistakes and stubbornness of political leaders. The Soviet Union had lost some 30 million people during the Great Patriotic War. The dead included Khrushchev's oldest son, Leonid, a fighter pilot shot down in a skirmish with the Luftwaffe. A nuclear war would almost certainly result in even more casualties. The chairman was determined to do everything in his power to avoid plunging his country into another war. But he also understood that there was now a danger of events spinning out of his--and Kennedy's--control.

  Part of the problem lay in his own miscalculation of the likely American response to the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba. Khrushchev had assumed that Kennedy would end up grudgingly accepting Soviet missiles in Cuba just as he himself had accepted U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey and Italy. The Americans would be irritated, even angry, but they would not take the world to the brink of a nuclear war.

  "You don't have to worry; there will be no big reaction from the U.S.," Khrushchev had told Che Guevara when they first discussed the matter back in July. "And if there is a problem, we will send the Baltic fleet." When he heard this remark, Che raised his eyebrows in disbelief, but did not protest. He may have thought this was simply another of Comrade Khrushchev's little jokes. The Russian Baltic fleet was scarcely a match for the U.S. Navy: the last time it had been deployed into foreign waters was in 1904, when it was annihilated by the Japanese imperial navy, one of the greatest military defeats ever inflicted on Russia.

  Like his opposite num
ber in the White House, Khrushchev had ordered his armed forces to an advanced state of alert. All military leave had been canceled, and discharges from the army deferred indefinitely.

  As he looked down the Presidium table, Khrushchev understood he had to prepare his colleagues for a probable retreat. He had concluded that he had "to dismantle the missile sites." But he wanted to implement this decision in a way that would permit him to claim that he had achieved his primary objective, the defense of the Cuban revolution. As Khrushchev described the situation, it was Washington, not Moscow, that was backing down.

  "We have made Cuba a country at the center of international attention," he told the Presidium. "The two systems have come head-to-head. Kennedy is telling us to take our missiles out of Cuba. And we reply: 'Give us firm guarantees, a promise, that the Americans won't attack Cuba.' That's not bad."

  A deal was possible. In return for a noninvasion guarantee, "we could take out the R-12s, and leave the other missiles there." This was not "cowardice," merely common sense. "We will strengthen Cuba, and save it for two or three years. In a few years' time, it will be even harder [for the U.S.] to deal with it." The important thing now was to avoid bringing the crisis "to the boil."

  There were murmurs of "That's right" around the table. Nobody dared challenge the first secretary. Khrushchev insisted that the setback, if it was a setback at all, was only temporary.

  "Time will pass. If necessary, the missiles can appear there again."

  The tone of Soviet propaganda changed abruptly once Khrushchev decided, at least in principle, to withdraw the missiles. "Hands off Cuba," the Communist Party newspaper Pravda had fulminated earlier that morning. "The aggressive designs of United States imperialists must be foiled." The next day's headlines would read: "Everything to Prevent War. Reason Must Prevail."