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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Cuban Missile Crisis

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  • The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted exactly 13 days in October 1962, and during those 13 days, the world's two nuclear superpowers came closer to destroying each other than at any other point in the Cold War. On one side sat the United States, which already had nuclear missiles deployed in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Turkey. On the other sat the Soviet Union, which had secretly shipped nuclear missiles to Cuba, just 90 miles from American soil. The confrontation ran from the 16th to the 28th of October. Before it was over, American B-52 bombers would be circling the skies on continuous alert. A US spy plane pilot named Rudolf Anderson would be shot down and killed. And two leaders in the Kremlin, acting without authorization, would make a decision that nearly started a nuclear war. What drove the Soviets to place missiles in Cuba in the first place? Who knew what, and when? And how did two governments standing on the edge of catastrophe manage to step back?

  • Nikita Khrushchev made his decision to place missiles in Cuba in May 1962, and the strategic math behind it was grimly logical. The Soviets had only about 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States from Soviet territory, and those missiles were widely regarded as unreliable. A newer and more capable generation would not become operational until after 1965. The United States, by contrast, held approximately 5,000 strategic warheads to the Soviet Union's 300, along with a significant advantage in delivery technology, naval power, and air power. The Soviet ambassador in Havana, Alexandr Ivanovich Alexeyev, warned Khrushchev that Castro would not accept the missiles, but the Soviet leader pressed ahead. As Graham Allison, director of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, put it, moving existing nuclear weapons to locations from which they could reach American targets was one of the very few options the Soviet Union had. West Berlin was also on Khrushchev's mind. He believed that missiles in Cuba would give him leverage to force the Western powers out of a city they controlled inside Communist East Germany, a city he called the central battlefield of the Cold War. There was a third calculation too. Starting in late 1961, the US had run a campaign of terrorism and sabotage against civilian and military targets in Cuba, referred to as the Cuban Project. In January 1962, US Air Force General Edward Lansdale laid out a top-secret timetable for overthrowing the Cuban government, mandating guerrilla operations to begin in August and September, with the "open revolt" planned for the first two weeks of October. Both the Soviet Union and Cuba viewed an American invasion as a near certainty. A National Intelligence Estimate delivered to Kennedy at the time confirmed that the invasion threat was itself a key reason for the growing Soviet military presence. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a historian and adviser to Kennedy, later said that Castro did not want the missiles, but Khrushchev pressured him to accept them.

  • Operation Anadyr, the Soviet codename for the missile deployment, was built on deception. Plans were written in longhand. Marshal of the Soviet Union Rodion Malinovsky approved the operation on the 4th of July 1962 and Khrushchev signed off on the 7th of July. The Soviets told the troops headed for Cuba that they were going to a cold region. They were outfitted with ski boots and fleece-lined parkas. Specialists in missile construction traveled under the cover of machine operators and agricultural specialists. Chief Marshal of Artillery Sergey Biryuzov, head of the Soviet Rocket Forces, led a survey team and told Khrushchev the missiles would be hidden beneath Cuban palm trees. A total of 43,000 foreign troops would ultimately be brought in. The tropical climate proved a practical nightmare. Troops arriving to install the missiles complained almost immediately of fuse failures, excessive corrosion, overconsumption of oil, and generator blackouts. Their equipment had been designed for a very different environment. Even as the Soviets maintained the deception, American intelligence was gathering fragments. CIA director John A. McCone wrote a memo to Kennedy on the 10th of August 1962 guessing that the Soviets were preparing to introduce ballistic missiles into Cuba. On the 31st of August, Senator Kenneth Keating of New York warned on the Senate floor that the Soviet Union was "in all probability" building a missile base. A pause in U-2 reconnaissance flights over Cuba meant that five weeks passed without significant photographic coverage of the island's interior, a gap historians would later call the "Photo Gap". When coverage resumed, the first confirming images came on the 14th of October 1962, when a U-2 piloted by Major Richard Heyser took 928 photographs over the San Cristobal area in western Cuba, capturing images of an SS-4 construction site.

  • At 6:30 pm EDT on the 16th of October 1962, President Kennedy convened nine members of the National Security Council and five other key advisers, forming what he would formally name the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or EXCOMM. Kennedy secretly tape-recorded all of their proceedings. The options laid out before him ranged from doing nothing to a full invasion. The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended a full-scale attack and invasion. McNamara opposed them. The US already had approximately 5,000 strategic warheads, and he argued that an additional 40 Soviet missiles in Cuba would make little practical difference to the strategic balance. Kennedy was skeptical of the military's advice for different reasons. He believed that a US air strike on Cuba would prompt the Soviets to move on Berlin, and that American allies would see the US as reckless for triggering a nuclear confrontation over something that could be resolved diplomatically. On the 22nd of October, he chose a naval blockade, deliberately called a "quarantine" to avoid the legal implications of an act of war. That evening at 7:00 pm EDT, Kennedy addressed the nation on all major networks. He stated directly that any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be treated as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response. As the speech was delivered, a directive went out placing all US forces worldwide on DEFCON 3. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin had been telling American officials as recently as the 13th of October that the Soviets had no plans to put offensive weapons in Cuba.

  • On the 24th of October 1962, at 10:00 pm EDT, the US raised the readiness level of Strategic Air Command forces to DEFCON 2. For the only confirmed time in US history, B-52 bombers were put on continuous airborne alert. One-eighth of SAC's 1,436 bombers were in the air at any given moment. Some 145 intercontinental ballistic missiles were placed on alert, and 23 nuclear-armed B-52s were sent to orbit points within striking distance of the Soviet Union. Air Defense Command repositioned 161 nuclear-armed interceptors to 16 dispersal fields within nine hours. Meanwhile, a CIA report on the 25th of October confirmed that construction on the missiles in Cuba had not slowed. Soviet ships initially bound for Cuba began turning back after the quarantine was established, with the first indication coming from British GCHQ intercepts of Soviet ship communications. At the United Nations, US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson confronted Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin on the 25th of October and demanded he admit the missiles existed. Zorin refused to answer. Through this period, Soviet communications with Washington were visibly deteriorating under pressure. Khrushchev's messages became poorly phrased and repetitive. According to Dean Rusk, Khrushchev had begun to "blink": signs of panic were appearing in the tone of Soviet dispatches. On the 26th of October, KGB station chief Alexander Feklisov, operating under the cover name Aleksandr Fomin, met ABC News journalist John A. Scali at Fomin's request and asked whether the US would consider a diplomatic solution involving a Soviet pledge to remove the weapons under UN supervision in exchange for a US guarantee not to invade Cuba. That same evening, a long, personal letter from Khrushchev arrived at the State Department, proposing essentially the same framework.

  • On Saturday the 27th of October 1962, USAF Major Rudolf Anderson took off from McCoy Air Force Base in Orlando, Florida, on his sixth U-2 mission over Cuba. At approximately 12:00 pm EDT, his aircraft was shot down over Banes, Cuba, by Soviet-supplied S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missiles. The order was given by Soviet Forces Deputy Commander Major General Leonid Garbuz and Deputy Commander of Air Defenses Lieutenant General Stepan Grechko. They had attempted to reach their superior, Army General Issa Pliyev, who was unreachable, possibly due to illness. Acting without authorization from Moscow, they gave the order themselves. Anderson was killed. Earlier that same morning, Radio Moscow broadcast a new message from Khrushchev that contradicted the letter of the night before. Where the private letter had proposed only a non-invasion pledge, the public message demanded that the US remove its Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey in exchange for Soviet withdrawal from Cuba. The Jupiter missiles in Turkey were already being phased out and Kennedy acknowledged privately that the trade would look reasonable to any outside observer. Kennedy told his brother Robert that the situation was becoming "insupportable" if Khrushchev's public offer became the only proposal on the table. Robert Kennedy was secretly meeting Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin throughout this period. On the 27th, Robert Kennedy relayed a message to Dobrynin that the president was under pressure from the military and that "an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will". The resolution that emerged that night involved ignoring Khrushchev's public offer entirely and responding to the private letter of the night before. The US would publicly pledge not to invade Cuba. Secretly, Kennedy agreed to remove the missiles from Turkey, but no part of that language would appear in any written agreement.

  • On the 28th of October 1962, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would dismantle and remove its offensive weapons from Cuba, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a public US pledge not to invade. The Soviet bombers that remained in Cuba after the missile withdrawal prompted the US to keep the naval quarantine in place until the 20th of November 1962, when the blockade was formally lifted after all offensive missiles and bombers had been withdrawn. All Thor missiles in the United Kingdom were disbanded by August 1963. The Moscow-Washington hotline, a direct communication line between the two governments, was established as a direct result of the crisis. According to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet leadership regarded the Cuban outcome as "a blow to its prestige bordering on humiliation". Khrushchev fell from power two years later, partly because the Soviet Politburo was embarrassed both by his concessions and by his role in triggering the crisis. The secret withdrawal of the Turkey missiles meant the Soviets appeared to the outside world to have simply backed down. The US had matched Soviet deployments in Britain, Italy, and Turkey with its own missiles years before the crisis began, and quietly removed them in the aftermath without public acknowledgment. Fidel Castro, who in October 1962 had sent Khrushchev a telegram that appeared to call for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the US in the event of an American attack, reflected on that stance in a 2010 interview: "After I've seen what I've seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn't worth it at all."

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Common questions

How long did the Cuban Missile Crisis last?

The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted 13 days, from the 16th to the 28th of October 1962. It began when U-2 spy plane photographs confirmed Soviet missile installations in Cuba and ended when Khrushchev announced the removal of Soviet offensive weapons.

Why did the Soviet Union place nuclear missiles in Cuba?

The Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba for three main reasons: to offset a large US advantage in nuclear warheads and delivery systems, to use Cuba as leverage in negotiations over West Berlin, and to protect Cuba from what both Soviet and Cuban leaders believed was an imminent US invasion. The US had been running a covert campaign of sabotage and terrorism inside Cuba, referred to as the Cuban Project, since late 1961.

What was EXCOMM during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

EXCOMM, formally known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, was a group of nine NSC members and five other key advisers convened by President Kennedy on the 16th of October 1962 to manage the crisis. Kennedy secretly tape-recorded all of their proceedings.

Why did Kennedy call the blockade a quarantine during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Kennedy used the word "quarantine" instead of "blockade" because, under international law, a blockade is an act of war. Calling it a quarantine allowed the US to avoid the formal legal implications of a state of war while still preventing Soviet ships from delivering offensive weapons to Cuba.

Who was shot down during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

USAF Major Rudolf Anderson was shot down and killed on the 27th of October 1962, while flying his sixth U-2 reconnaissance mission over Cuba. His aircraft was struck by Soviet-supplied S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missiles, on the order of two Soviet generals who acted without authorization after failing to reach their superior officer.

What was the secret part of the Cuban Missile Crisis agreement?

The United States secretly agreed to remove all of its offensive Jupiter missiles from Turkey as part of the resolution. This was not disclosed publicly; the Soviets therefore appeared to the outside world to have simply retreated, which Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin described as "a blow to its prestige bordering on humiliation".

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195 references cited across the entry

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