The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  The blockade had begun three days earlier with the utmost concern on President Kennedy’s part about just such an encounter. The ten A.M. ExComm meeting on Wednesday, October 24, produced what Robert Kennedy later described as the most intense moment of the crisis, precisely on the issue of signaling procedures with respect to Soviet submarines.

  At that same moment, as the quarantine became effective,120 the Strategic Air Command moved its alert level from Defense Condition (DEFCON) 3 to DEFCON 2—the level just below readiness for an imminent general nuclear war—for the first and only time in the Cold War. SAC Commander in Chief General Thomas Power had, on his own initiative, sent out the Execute orders for this change in the clear—uncoded—to intimidate the Soviets. Nearly 1,500 strategic bombers with nuclear weapons aboard were on alert around the world. And for the first time, one-eighth of SAC was on continuous rotating airborne alert, one nuclear-armed bomber taking off as another finished a tour and landed.

  McNamara told the meeting that two ships, both possibly carrying offensive weapons, were approaching the quarantine line and that there were submarines close to each of them. The plan was for a destroyer to intercept one of the subs. McNamara and General Taylor explained that a brand-new signaling arrangement had been sent to the Soviets the night before. By dropping “practice depth charges”—in effect, hand grenades—which could supposedly even hit the submarine without causing it damage, we would signal to the submarine that it should surface. They presumed, they said, that the Soviets had received the message and passed it on, but they couldn’t be sure. (In fact, the four submarines’ captains in the Caribbean all denied in later interviews that they had received any such message.)

  In his handwritten notes of that morning, Robert Kennedy said:

  These few minutes were the time121 of greatest worry by the President. His hand went up to his face & covered his mouth and he closed his fist. His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table.

  In later accounts, he quoted the president:

  “Isn’t there some way we can avoid122 having our first exchange with a Russian submarine—almost anything but that?”

  “No, there’s much too much danger to our ships. There is no alternative,” said McNamara.

  As Robert Kennedy observed:

  We had come to the time of final decision123 … I felt we were on the edge of a precipice with no way off.… One thousand miles away in the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, the final decisions were going to be made in the next few minutes. President Kennedy had initiated the course of events, but he no longer had control over them.

  Just then, John McCone, Director of Central Intelligence, broke in with confirmation that six Soviet ships approaching the quarantine line had stopped dead in the water or had reversed course. Robert Kennedy continues in his account: “The meeting droned on.124 But everyone looked like a different person. For a moment the world had stood still, and now it was going around again.”

  But unknown to Robert Kennedy in his lifetime or to any of the others on the ExComm for decades, the moment of truth had only been postponed.

  There had been no interceptions or even signaling to submarines on Wednesday, the 24th. The president gave orders to lay off that day, lest we attack a vessel that had actually been ordered to return by Khrushchev. But the Navy energetically continued to track Soviet submarines in the area in succeeding days, with the intention, as McNamara had explained to the president, of harassing them to the point of their leaving the vicinity.

  In the course of the next week, Navy destroyers, carriers, and helicopters had located precisely, at various times, three of the four Foxtrot submarines that had been dispatched to the Caribbean. None of them responded to the mock depth charge “signals” to surface and identify themselves. None of them, it turned out, interpreted the explosions as signals at all, not having received any information to this effect from Moscow, with which they were only intermittently in touch. Nor did they experience them as harmless.

  All three, in fact, believed themselves at certain points to be under attack. On two of these submarines, the commanding officer ordered the “special weapon,” the torpedo with a Hiroshima-size nuclear explosive power, to be readied for a retaliatory response. (Because the crew had not been told what they were carrying, it was referred to only as the “special weapon.”) The second of these incidents actually occurred on October 30—two days after the world had concluded that the crisis was over. American surveillance and efforts to force Soviet submarines to surface continued until the quarantine was ended on November 20, but the submarines, still trying to evade detection, had not received messages as to whether war had begun or not.

  Submarine B-130, under Captain Nicolai Shumkov—the same sub whose temporary detection six days earlier had brought President Kennedy’s hand to his mouth—submerged suddenly on October 30 on being spotted by a destroyer, but could do so only slowly because two of its diesel engines had failed. The destroyer passed overhead, the sonar dome on its prow missing the conning tower on the sub’s deck by only a few meters. Shumkov wondered whether the destroyer125 was trying to ram it, possibly to present it afterward as an accident. Unless, perhaps, they were already at war.

  According to Shumkov, one of the depth charges landed a direct hit on the hull, and its explosion damaged the depth steering wheel. At the same time, he received a report from a compartment of the submarine, reporting that they experienced a leak (which was later repaired). As Shumkov said in a later interview: “When they blew up those grenades,126 I thought they were bombing us.”

  In the account by Peter Huchthausen, Shumkov ordered the flooding of four torpedo tubes, preparatory to firing, including the tube for the special weapon. He quickly got a call from the special weapon security officer in the forward torpedo tube, who warned him, “Sir, we can’t arm that torpedo without specific instructions from the Special Weapons Directorate of the Main Navy Staff.”

  Shumkov cut him off127: “Why the hell don’t you dial the headquarters on your little telephone and ask them? Or doesn’t it work a hundred meters below the sea?” He ordered the young officer, “Look, just do as you’re told, and I’ll handle the permission.” As the conversation ended, Shumkov pulled his Exec Frolov by the arm out of earshot from the others and whispered, “I have no intention of arming or shooting that weapon. We’d go up with it if we did. That conversation was for his ears,” and he nodded over at the zampolit [the Communist Party political officer], who was looking at the depth gauge. “Regardless of what happens I know he’ll report what I was or wasn’t prepared to do.”

  Frolov stared at the captain for a moment, then slowly nodded in full understanding. The skipper was covering his ass by appearing ready to fire the special torpedo, but in fact he had no intention of firing anything. The zampolit would report it all, if they survived.

  What seems significant about this story is that it implies Shumkov believed it would look better for him—in the political officer’s report to his superiors—if he had appeared ready to use the special weapon against his pursuers, despite the absence of any authorization from Moscow.

  Such a judgment would have been sound, considering the reception the four captains got when they returned to port, which was even colder than they expected, three of them having been discovered by American antisubmarine forces and having chosen eventually to surface under the guns of those forces rather than to suffocate or go down (or to use their weapons, starting with the special one). The day after they returned to port, they were debriefed at a commission that was “aimed exclusively at uncovering violations128 of orders, documents, or instructions by the commander or by the personnel.” The commanders were especially criticized for “violating the conditions of secrecy by surfacing.” Or as some other superiors at the commission told them, rather than surface, they should have violated their written orders under the circumstances. Despite the lack of authorization from Moscow, they should have used their wea
pons, starting with the “special weapon.”

  It was not until forty years later that American scholars and former officials first heard of this latter choice as even a possibility. It was to them an unimagined response to the conditions that McNamara’s directive and the Navy’s practices had been imposing on Soviet submarines, which were, unknown to U.S. intelligence and decision makers, armed with nuclear warheads.

  Conditions on the submarines, meanwhile, were hardly conducive to sound judgment. These were Foxtrot-type subs, which were meant for the Northern Circle. They had never been in warm water before, and their ventilators had broken down. It was 140 degrees Fahrenheit in the main compartments. The coolest part of the sub was 113 degrees, next to the torpedoes, and the crew would take turns going there for a few minutes to recover. Carbon dioxide was building up, because they hadn’t been able to go up and snorkel and get more oxygen and some cool air. Crew members were dropping.

  At the Havana conference on the fortieth anniversary of the crisis in 2002—before an audience that included Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and naval officers from the Soviet Alfa group of hunter-killer submarines—Vadim Orlov, chief of the special signals intelligence detachment on the B-59, described conditions underwater that Saturday afternoon from the point of view of men in a barrel, or rabbits in a cage.

  For some time we were able to avoid them129 quite successfully. However, the Americans were not dilettantes either.… [Starting at 4:59 P.M. on Saturday, October 27] they surrounded us and started to tighten the circle, practicing attacks and dropping depth charges. They exploded right next to the hull. It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.…

  The temperature in the compartments was 45-50 C, up to 60C [113–122 degrees Fahrenheit, up to 140] in the engine compartment. The level of CO2 in the air reached a critical mark, practically deadly for people. One of the duty officers fainted and fell down. Then another one followed, then the third one.… They were falling like dominoes. But we were still holding on, trying to escape. We were suffering like this for about four hours. The Americans hit us with something stronger than the grenades [depth charges]—apparently with a practical depth bomb. We thought—that’s it—the end.

  After this attack, the totally exhausted Savitsky, who, in addition to everything, was not able to establish connection with the General Staff, became furious. He summoned the officer who was assigned to the nuclear torpedo and ordered him to assemble it to battle readiness. “Maybe the war has already started up there,130 while we are doing somersaults here”—screamed emotional Valentin Grigorievich, trying to justify his order. “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not disgrace our Navy!”

  Orlov’s account continues:

  But we did not fire the nuclear torpedo—Savitsky was able to rein in his wrath. After consulting with Second Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov and his deputy political officer Ivan Semenovich Maslennikov, he made the decision to come to the surface.

  But there was more to that story. At least two officers were required to agree on the firing of the special weapon: the captain and the political officer, in this case Maslennikov. According to Orlov, Maslennikov agreed with Savitsky’s order to fire. On another sub that would have been sufficient. These two each had half of a key that was required to fire the special weapon. (The special weapons officer next to the torpedo also had a key.)

  But on this submarine, a third concurrence was required, because the chief of staff of the brigade, Vasili Arkhipov, was traveling with them. In terms of command on the vessel, Arkhipov—who was of the same rank as Savitsky—was second to the commander, Savitsky. Nevertheless, for this decision, because of his role in the brigade, Arkhipov’s agreement was also required. And he withheld it. He did so on the grounds—which Savitsky and Maslennikov understood as well as he, but which they chose to ignore under the circumstances—that Moscow had not authorized it.

  Had Arkhipov been stationed on one of the other submarines (for example, B-4, which was never located by the Americans), there is every reason to believe that the carrier USS Randolph and several, perhaps all, of its accompanying destroyers would, within minutes of the agreement by Savitsky and Maslennikov, have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion. Or if not destroyed, then drenched in a lethal bath of radioactive water that would incapacitate crew members almost immediately and kill them soon after.

  The source of this explosion would have been mysterious to other commanders in the Navy and officials on the ExComm, since no submarines known to be in the region were believed to carry nuclear warheads. The clear implication on the cause of the nuclear destruction of this antisubmarine hunter-killer group would have been a medium-range missile from Cuba whose launch had not been detected. That is the event that President Kennedy had announced on October 22 would lead to a full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

  Savitsky and Arkhipov are now both dead and cannot testify further; but Arkhipov’s widow, Olga Arkhipova, says he told her they came close to firing the nuclear torpedo. Had that happened, we would probably not be reading this. The fear of Robert McNamara on October 27, 1962, that he might not see another sunset would have been realized. Olga Arkhipova in 2012 was justly proud that her husband, Vasili Alexandrovich, had, since the Havana conference ten years earlier, become known as “The Man Who Saved the World.”131

  But there was even more going on that Saturday.

  During the morning, while McNamara was in the tank with the Joint Chiefs, word came through that an American SAC U-2 under General Power had wandered into Soviet airspace. The story was that it was a weather plane that went off course. Most of us—and I suspect the president—assumed that Power was playing a game, and that he, like his boss LeMay, wanted to go to war.

  When he received this news (according to a 1975 oral history interview with Air Force General David Burchinal), McNamara rushed out of the Pentagon meeting “yelling hysterically ‘this means war with the Soviet Union.’ ” In the height of the crisis, the Russians might have assumed this was a reconnaissance plane preparing for an all-out attack. In a message to Kennedy on October 28 agreeing to dismantle his missile sites on Cuba, Khrushchev expressed concern that the American intruder could have “easily” been mistaken “for a nuclear bomber,132 which might push us to a fateful step.”

  The U-2’s pilot had been confused by the northern lights over the pole and gone in the wrong direction. By the time he realized his mistake, he was over the Chukot Peninsula in the Soviet Union. Running out of fuel, the pilot turned around and proceeded to glide for miles, unaware that MiGs were coming after him, attempting to intercept him and shoot him down. Meanwhile, Alaskan Air Command scrambled F-102A fighters to protect the U-2. These fighters, designed to confront not MiGs but Russian bombers coming over the pole, were armed only with nuclear air-to-air missiles. Fortunately they did not encounter the MiGs, and the U-2 coasted safely home.

  Roger Hilsman, chief of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, happened to be in the White House when word of this incident arrived. In a panic, he rushed in to tell the president there was a U-2 over Russia being pursued by MiGs. Kennedy, very cool, responded from his rocking chair (as Hilsman reported) with an old Navy joke: “There’s always some son-of-a-bitch133 who didn’t get the word.”

  If, on Saturday, Khrushchev had reason to believe he was losing control over his own forces in Cuba, he had similar grounds to doubt his counterpart’s control over events. In their meeting that night, Robert Kennedy told Dobrynin, among other things, “[Those favoring diplomacy are] losing momentum.… It’s going to be hard to stop this process. The generals are itching for a fight.134 They want to go.” The message that Khrushchev took from Dobrynin’s account was that if this crisis continued to escalate, Kennedy might well face a coup.

  * * *

  Yes, the world of humans came very close to ending in October 1962. Closer t
han anyone in high office in the United States imagined at the time, or for some forty years afterward. Certainly far closer than I could have conceived. This was not because the two opposing leaders were rash or reckless or insensitive to the potential dangers. Both, in fact, were cautious to a degree that neither could know, more cautious than the world or most of their associates could realize. Furthermore, they both shared an extreme abhorrence for the idea of nuclear war, which they recognized as potentially the end of civilization and even of humanity.

  On that terrible Saturday night, October 27, when the fate of the world hung in the balance, Robert Kennedy described his brother’s thoughts that evening in the Oval Office:

  The thought that disturbed him most,135 and that made the prospect of war much more fearful than it would otherwise have been, was the specter of the death of the children of this country and all the world—the young people who had no role, who had no say, who knew nothing even of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else’s. They would never have a chance to make a decision, to vote in an election, to run for office, to lead a revolution, to determine their own destinies.

  Khrushchev saw the stakes in identical terms. In his personal letter to the president on October 26, he wrote:

  Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull136 on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.