The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  It was read happily by the Kennedys and much of the ExComm, who went to bed that night with relief. (Less so by the Joint Chiefs, who were eager to invade; a non-invasion pledge was anathema to them in any case, worst of all as a resolution of this crisis, which I suspect they regarded as the best justification for an invasion that would ever come along.) But by Saturday morning in Moscow, Khrushchev had come to doubt the immediate imminence of the invasion and decided to try for a better deal. Thus, with the agreement of the Presidium, he updated the earlier-composed message proposing a trade with the Turkish missiles and sent that.

  The arrival of this second message caused confusion and consternation among the ExComm Saturday morning. Had Khrushchev possibly been sidelined by a more hard-line faction? After much debate, it was decided that Kennedy should ignore this second letter and simply respond to the earlier message, agreeing to settle the crisis on the basis of a pledge not to invade Cuba. No one now had much hope that this would be sufficient to get the missiles out—not the Joint Chiefs, not McNamara, and not Kennedy. He now thought it unlikely that they would accept his latest offer, even though it purported to accept one that Khrushchev appeared to have proposed the night before.

  When confirmation arrived on Saturday afternoon that an American U-2 had been shot down over Cuba that morning by a Soviet surface-to-air missile (SAM), the ExComm assumed this was a deliberate escalation by Khrushchev, a further signal that the Soviet position was hardening and that they were more willing to take risks and less prone to accept terms that had seemed possible even the night before.

  And yet early Sunday morning, October 28, 1962, Moscow radio began broadcasting Khrushchev’s full acceptance of Kennedy’s proposal—withdrawal of the missiles in exchange for a non-invasion pledge. This unexpectedly rapid resolution, on these terms, came as an intoxicating surprise. The initial inferences drawn were that111 Khrushchev had simply given up on achieving his more favorable terms; Khrushchev’s “loss of nerve,” as Dean Acheson put it later. It appeared a victory for Kennedy’s firmness throughout that week, evidenced not only in his public and private statements but also in the blockade and the urgent preparations for invasion. The lesson drawn was “Take a firm stand, prepare to back it up, and the Soviets will back down.”

  A different light was shed on this seven years later112 when Robert Kennedy’s posthumous memoir of the crisis, Thirteen Days, revealed that on Saturday night he had met with Ambassador Dobrynin and conveyed what amounted to an ultimatum: the missiles must begin to be removed within forty-eight hours or the United States would remove them by force. This was accompanied by what amounted to a private deal: if the missiles were removed from Cuba, the missiles in Turkey would also be withdrawn in four or five months, though only if the Soviets did not reveal this explicit but secret understanding.

  For military commanders who had regarded the failure of the crisis to lead to invasion as an intense disappointment, this last revelation was one more proof of Kennedy’s weakness and “appeasement.” Others found that the real lesson, after all, was the effectiveness of negotiation and compromise. A number of former members of the ExComm, in a joint column published in Time in 1982,113 maintained that it was the secret concession to Khrushchev that had led to a swift resolution of the crisis. Since then, it has been widely assumed that this secret offer was critical to ending the confrontation.

  But that is almost surely untrue. The secrecy of the deal—RFK even rejected a proposal by Dobrynin the next day that the oral understanding be confirmed in writing—meant that it offered Khrushchev virtually nothing to soften the humiliation of his retreat. He couldn’t even take credit for this deal to his own Presidium, let alone, say, to the Chinese—who mocked him for his craven surrender. It has since turned out that Khrushchev had announced his decision to concede to the Presidium before he received by phone, later in the same meeting, a report of RFK’s threats and offer. In any case, I believe that this promise—even though it was meticulously carried out by the Americans—would have had no effect at all on Khrushchev’s decision.

  And yet the ultimatum by RFK wouldn’t entirely explain Khrushchev’s abrupt concession any more than the hollow offer of a secret deal. That ultimatum had allowed at least another day, perhaps two, for more bargaining. Even twenty-four hours—the time “requested” by RFK for a decision, though the hard deadline was forty-eight—allowed time for Khrushchev to stand on or reiterate his own latest demand for a public trade. Why hadn’t he taken that time to renew his proposal, or at least ask for direct response to it?

  Even in Moscow, some were struck by the special haste that Sunday. Fyodor Burlatsky, Khrushchev’s speechwriter, later recalled for me some details of that day. “They were very, very nervous at this time,” Burlatsky told me, speaking of the drafters of the October 28 message, with whom he had been in close touch. “This letter was not drafted in the Kremlin, nor in the Politburo. It was drafted at Khrushchev’s dacha, by a very small group. As soon as it was done, they ran it to the radio station. That is to say, they sent it by car, very fast; as a matter of fact, the car ran into some trouble on the way, an obstruction, which delayed it. When it arrived, the manager of the station himself ran down the steps, snatched the message from the hands of the man in the car, and ran up the steps to broadcast it immediately.” Burlatsky didn’t know, he said, why they seemed in such a hurry.

  In fact, there were good reasons for a sense of urgency in Moscow. One of these I learned from Robert F. Kennedy in 1964, in the course of a highly classified interagency study I was conducting of communication between governments in nuclear crises. He told me, in more detail than was made public in his memoir, that at the direction of his brother, on the evening of Saturday, October 27, 1962, he began a secret discussion at the Justice Department with Dobrynin by impressing on him the serious implications of the attacks that day on American reconnaissance aircraft.

  “I said, ‘You have drawn first blood, and that’s a very serious matter,’ ” he told me he had said to Dobrynin. “I said the president had decided against advice—strongly from the military, but not only the military—not to respond militarily to that attack, but he [Dobrynin] should know that if another plane was shot at, we would shoot back.… I said we would be continuing to fly reconnaissance missions over Cuba—we had to. The shooting had to stop. If one more plane was shot at, we wouldn’t just attack the site that had fired at it; we would take out all the SAMs and antiaircraft and probably all the missiles. And that would almost surely be followed by an invasion.”

  I asked Kennedy, “Did you name a deadline?”

  He said, “Yes. Forty-eight hours.”

  I wanted to be sure I understood. “So he was giving them forty-eight hours—”

  He cut in right away, correcting me. He said, “Unless they shot a plane sooner, in which case we would go right away.”

  “So there were two separate threats, or warnings,” I said. “They had just two days to start removing the missiles or we would remove them. That’s if no more planes were shot at, or shot down. But if we lost another plane, the attack would start immediately, right after that.”

  He said, “That’s right.”

  The shooting down of the U-2 plane over Cuba on Saturday morning had certainly represented an ominous escalation of the crisis. (As it turned out, it was the first and only deliberate, acknowledged killing of an American soldier by Soviet troops in the entire Cold War.) But aside from the U-2, we were also flying low-level reconnaissance planes, crisscrossing the island every two hours, producing sonic booms and causing general panic. Cuban antiaircraft guns couldn’t reach a U-2 at seventy thousand feet, but they could hit these low-level reconnaissance planes. Nevertheless, on Khrushchev’s urging, the Cubans had refrained from firing before Saturday morning.

  On Saturday this changed for Castro. Convinced that the recon flights were preparing for an imminent invasion, Castro rejected Khrushchev’s cautions and ordered his antiaircraft to fire, damaging one low-
flying plane. Given the assumption among the ExComm that Castro was a puppet under the iron control of Khrushchev, it didn’t occur to anyone that the Cubans could take such action without Soviet authorization. Yet they had. At the same time, a Soviet-manned SAM had fired on the U-2, shooting it down. As transcripts of the White House meeting on October 27 make clear, no participant questioned that both firings represented a deliberate escalation, a change of orders by Khrushchev himself.

  In reality, according to Burlatsky, “Khrushchev had given very strong, very precise orders that Soviet officers should make no provocation, initiate no attack in Cuba.” In particular, the firing of the SAM that destroyed Major Anderson’s U-2, he said emphatically, “was done absolutely without the direction of Khrushchev and the Soviet high command. In fact, it was against their orders, and Khrushchev was very apprehensive about the American reaction.” All this has been confirmed by revelations, decades after the crisis, by other participants and Soviet files.

  With no American advisor having guessed this possibility, RFK’s mission Saturday evening was in part to induce Khrushchev to recognize the dangers of his supposed decision to escalate and to refrain from further attacks on reconnaissance planes, starting with the low-level flights scheduled for the next day.

  This warning was no bluff. The October 27 transcript reveals that it conveyed accurately to the Soviets the consensus of the White House discussions that afternoon. (The Joint Chiefs were already furious that Kennedy had decided not to retaliate immediately for the attacks on our aircraft.) When he returned to the White House that night, RFK wrote: “The President was not optimistic, nor was I.114 He ordered twenty-four troop-carrier squadrons of the Air Force Reserve to active duty. They would be necessary for an invasion. He had not abandoned hope, but what hope there was now rested with Khrushchev’s revising his course within the next few hours. It was hope, not an expectation. The expectation was a military confrontation by Tuesday and possibly [Sunday] …”

  But the warning almost surely had more impact than intended, for a reason the president and his advisors did not know and could not even imagine. Very simply, the deterrent warning was directed to the wrong party. Even if he could expect to control future SAM firings (which was in question at this point), Khrushchev knew he had no influence at all over the Cuban antiaircraft artillerymen who threatened low-flying flights. They had begun firing on Saturday morning on the direct orders of Fidel Castro, who was determined to defend the sovereignty of Cuban airspace, regardless of Soviet desires to avoid provoking American retaliation.

  As Castro put it to Tad Szulc in 1984: “It was we who gave the order to fire115 against the low-level flights.… We had simply presented our viewpoint to [the Soviets], our opposition to low-level flights, and we ordered our batteries to fire on them.” The Cuban gunners had never fired at live targets before; they were getting closer during the day on Saturday. Castro later said he was sure they would have destroyed at least one plane by Sunday.

  As for the downing of the U-2, it wasn’t immediately clear to Khrushchev how this had happened. All he knew was that it had not been done by his authority and was against his desire; he thought mistakenly it had come about under the influence of Castro, whom he berated the next day. In fact, the order came from the local SAM commander, a general. Though he was under orders not to fire without authorization from General Isa Pliyev, the commander in chief of Soviet forces in Cuba, he had been carried away by the action of the Cuban antiaircraft batteries wildly firing, for the first time, at low-level reconnaissance planes. Suspecting that an invasion was under way and unable to reach Pliyev, he had acted on his own authority and gave the order to fire.

  As Khrushchev’s son Sergei later told me, this was a turning point for his father. He knew things were getting out of his control; he could not control Castro, and now he had to wonder whether Soviet-manned SAMs were under his control. Even before he heard Dobrynin’s account of his meeting with Robert Kennedy—which could only confirm his fears, and the urgency of acting on them—Khrushchev could only conclude that he might well lose both his missiles and SAMs, with heavy Soviet casualties and the likelihood of further escalation, soon after low-flying U.S. reconnaissance planes entered Cuban airspace on Sunday, perhaps at first light, less than twelve hours away in the Caribbean. If there was any way to avert this, it could only be to announce his acceptance of Kennedy’s Saturday-night proposal and to start dismantling missiles before another shoot-down and the subsequent reprisal occurred.

  That much I had come to know in my classified study in 1964. It seemed enough to explain why Khrushchev had folded his hand before the twenty-four or forty-eight-hour deadline Kennedy had sent his brother to deliver. But there was even more that Khrushchev knew and Kennedy didn’t—secrets that Khrushchev had chosen not to reveal at the time and that remained unknown to any Americans (including me) for twenty-five years or more. First, that the number of Soviet troops116 in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included.

  So far as we knew, Khrushchev had never sent117 tactical (or until now, strategic) weapons with nuclear warheads outside the Soviet Union.† Yet not only had he done this, but also the Presidium had agreed to delegate authority to local commanders to use them against an invasion fleet, without direct orders from Moscow.

  That delegation—by Soviets supposedly obsessed with centralized political control of the military—was virtually unimaginable to American intelligence analysts and officials. Yet it had been agreed to, throughout the period of deployment prior to Kennedy’s speech on October 22, by the entire Presidium. This was reportedly on the theory that since these limited-range tactical weapons could not reach Florida or threaten other parts of the United States, their use by local Soviet commanders against an invasion force could be trusted not to escalate to all-out war—as fat-headed a belief by the Presidium as the earlier assurance by General Sergey Biryuzov to Khrushchev that IRBMs would look to overhead reconnaissance like palm trees. Although this prior authorization had been withdrawn following Kennedy’s speech on October 22, it was understood by Soviet commanders that in the heat of combat and with communications from Moscow interrupted, the new orders not to fire without explicit direction from Moscow were uncertain to be obeyed. (That would correspond to what actually happened with the SAM Saturday morning.)

  When Robert McNamara learned about this in 1992, thirty years later, he noted: “We don’t need to speculate what would have happened. It would have been an absolute disaster for the world118 … No one should believe that a U.S. force could have been attacked by tactical nuclear warheads without responding with nuclear warheads. And where would it have ended? In utter disaster.”

  Khrushchev knew the weapons were there, and he had no reason to believe that JFK knew that. Those weapons had not been intended as a deterrent but rather to defend against an invading fleet. (In fact, our reconnaissance had spotted only one weapon—during or after the crisis—which it regarded as “dual-capable,” probably without a nuclear warhead.) Nevertheless, Khrushchev knew that by dawn’s light on Sunday, low-flying reconnaissance planes would resume their flights over Cuba; that Castro could not be restrained from taking what he regarded as defensive measures; and that when one of those planes was shot down, it would trigger a U.S. attack on the SAMs, the missiles, and more than likely an invasion force that would have no idea what was in store for it. The invasion would almost surely trigger a two-sided nuclear exchange that would with near certainty expand to massive U.S. nuclear attacks on the Soviet Union.

  Khrushchev’s order to dismantle the missiles arrived in Cuba thirty-six hours ahead of RFK’s ultimatum deadline. The dismantling began at five A.M. The race to the radio station for the public broadcast announcement, bypassing slower diplomatic cha
nnels, came a few hours later.

  Khrushchev, as he expected, paid a heavy political price for withdrawing abruptly from what he had discovered to be Cuban roulette; yet surely he was wise to do so, without awaiting one more day’s spin of the chamber. Explaining his decision suddenly to remove his forces from dangers to which he should never have exposed them, Khrushchev said later about that Saturday night, “A smell of scorching hung in the air.”119

  The fact is, JFK and his brother never lived to know what Khrushchev had done about the Cuban defiance, or the insubordination of a SAM commander, or the tactical nuclear weapons on the island. But more was happening that neither leader knew that Saturday afternoon, while they were both still postponing agreement, haggling for better terms.

  The same day that a Soviet SAM downed an American U-2, a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean, armed with a nuclear torpedo, believed it was being attacked by American destroyers.

  It was 4:59 in the afternoon of October 27 that sonar operators on the American destroyer USS Beale detected the submerged Soviet submarine B-59 and began to bombard it with “practice” depth charges. A carrier, five destroyers, and several antisubmarine helicopters had their quarry cornered in a narrow sector of the Caribbean and were signaling, as they supposed, for it to come up and identify itself, a token of vulnerability and surrender. Otherwise they could wait it out until it had to come up amid them, running low on oxygen and electricity, to recharge its batteries.

  The crews in the ships on the surface were exulting in their first live antisubmarine practice against a Soviet target. No one among the ships on the surface, nor any member of the ExComm that had directed this harassment, was aware or even suspected that the Foxtrot-class diesel submarine they were baiting was armed—for the first time in the operation of such vessels—with a nuclear-tipped torpedo, whose ten-to-fifteen-kiloton (Hiroshima yield) warhead was capable of destroying several or all of those ships in one blast. And the commander and crew in that submarine were coming to believe they were under attack.