Cuban Missle Crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a tense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis began on October 14, 1962 and lasted for 38 days until November 20, 1962. It is regarded as the moment when the Cold War was closest to becoming nuclear war, and which could have turned to world war three.

The Soviet government determined in 1959 that any future war would be largely nuclear and would likely be a world-wide war. In that same year the Strategic Rocket Forces were founded. Under Khrushchev, the Soviet government focused increasingly on rockets and missiles instead of conventional military forces, in response to the new administration of Kennedy and his accompanying rearmament program. The Soviets decided to install nuclear weapons, in the form of medium and short range ballistic missiles, in Cuba, a Caribbean nation off the coast of Florida with a Communist government under Fidel Castro. Castro had sought Soviet support after the collapse of its relations with the U.S. due to the Cuban Revolution. Soviet reasoning was two-fold — first, to defend this new Communist state from an American or American-sponsored invasion, and second, to shift the nuclear balance of power away from the U.S. by putting American cities directly within the range of Soviet missiles.

A U-2 flight in late August photographed a new series of SAM sites being constructed, but on September 4 Kennedy told Congress that there were no offensive missiles in Cuba. On the night of September 8, the first consignment of SS-4 MRBMs was unloaded in Havana, and a second shipload arrived on September 16. The Soviets were building nine sites — six for SS-4s and three for SS-5s with a range of 4,000 km (2,400 statute miles). The planned arsenal was forty launchers, an increase in Soviet first strike capacity of 70%.

A number of unconnected problems meant that the missiles were not discovered by the Americans until a U-2 flight of October 14 clearly showed the construction of an SS-4 site near San Cristobal. The photographs were shown to Kennedy on October 16 . By October 19 the U-2 flights (then almost continuous) showed four sites were operational. Initially, the U.S. government kept the information secret, telling only the fourteen key officials of the executive committee. The United Kingdom was not informed until the evening of October 21. President Kennedy, in a televised address on October 22, announced the discovery of the installations and proclaimed that any nuclear missile attack from Cuba would be regarded as an attack by the Soviet Union and would be responded to accordingly. He also placed a naval "quarantine" (blockade) on Cuba to prevent further Soviet shipments of military weapons from arriving there. The word quarantine was used rather than blockade for reasons of international law and in keeping with the Quarantine Speech of 1937 by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The officials had discussed the various options - an immediate bombing strike was dismissed early on, as was a potentially time-consuming appeal to the UN. The choice was reduced to either a naval blockade and an ultimatum, or full-scale invasion. A blockade was finally chosen, although there were a number of hawks (notably Paul Nitze, and Generals Curtis LeMay and Maxwell Taylor) who kept pushing for tougher action. An invasion was planned, and troops were assembled in Florida (although with over 40,000 Russian soldiers in Cuba, complete with tactical nuclear weapons, the proposed invading force would have faced considerable difficulties).

There were a number of issues with the naval blockade. There was legality - as Fidel Castro noted, there was nothing illegal about the missile installations; they were certainly a threat to the U.S., but similar missiles aimed at the USSR were in place in Europe (sixty Thor IRBMs in four squadrons near Nottingham, in the United Kingdom; thirty Jupiter IRBMs in two squadrons near Gioia del Colle, Italy; and fifteen Jupiter IRBMs in one squadron near Izmir, Turkey.) Then there was the Soviet reaction to the blockade - would a conflict start out of escalating retaliation?

Kennedy spoke to the U.S. people (and the Soviet government) in a televised address on October 22. He confirmed the presence of the missiles in Cuba and announced the naval blockade as a quarantine zone of 500 nautical miles (926 km) around the Cuban coast, warned that the military was "prepare[d] for any eventualities," and condemned the Soviet Union for "secrecy and deception". The U.S. was surprised at the solid support from its European allies and also from much of the remaining international community.

When Kennedy openly publicized the crisis, the entire world was put in a state of terror. People began talking and worrying openly about nuclear Armageddon, and drills for such an emergency happened almost daily in many cities.

The case was conclusively proved on October 25 at an emergency session of the UN, during which U.S. ambassador Adlai Stevenson showed photographs of Russian missile installations in Cuba, just after Soviet ambassador Valerian Zorin had denied their existence.

Khrushchev sent letters to Kennedy on October 23 and 24 claiming the deterrent nature of the missiles in Cuba and the peaceful intentions of the Soviet Union; however, the Soviets had delivered two different deals to the American government. On October 26, they offered to withdraw the missiles in return for a U.S. guarantee not to invade Cuba or support any invasion. The second deal was broadcast on public radio on October 27, calling for the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey in addition to the demands of the 26th. The crisis peaked on October 27, when a U-2 (piloted by Rudolph Anderson) was shot down over Cuba and another U-2 flight over Russia was almost intercepted. At the same time, Soviet merchant ships were nearing the quarantine zone. Kennedy responded by publicly accepting the first deal and sending Robert Kennedy to the Soviet embassy to accept the second in private - the small number (fifteen) of Jupiter missiles near Izmir, Turkey would be removed. The Soviet ships turned back and on October 28 Khrushchev announced that he had ordered the removal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. The decision prompted Dean Rusk to comment, "We went eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked."

Satisfied that the Soviets had removed the missiles, President Kennedy ordered an end to the quarantine of Cuba on November 20.

The compromise satisfied no one, though it was a particularly sharp diplomatic embarassment for Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, who were seen as backing down from a situation that they had created. Khrushchev's fall from power a few years later can be partially linked to Politburo embarrassment at both Khrushchev's eventual concessions to the Americans and his ineptness in sparking the crisis in the first place.

American military commanders were not happy with the result either. Curtis LeMay told the President that it was "the greatest defeat in our history" and that the US should invade immediately.

For Cuba, it was a betrayal by the Soviets whom they had trusted, given that the decisions on putting an end to the crisis had been made exclusively by Kennedy and Khrushchev.

In early 1992 it was confirmed that Cuba had tactical nuclear missiles available , though General Anatoly Gribkov, part of the Soviet staff responsible for the operation, stated that the local Soviet commander, General Issa Pliyev, was prohibited from using them even if the U.S. had mounted a full-scale invasion of Cuba. Gribkov misspoke: the Kremlin's authorization remained unsigned and undelivered.

The short time span of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the extensive documentation of the decision-making processes on both sides makes it an excellent case study for analysis of state decision-making. In the Essence of Decision, Graham T. Allison and Philip Zelikow use the crisis to illustrate multiple approaches to analyzing the actions of the state. The intensity and magnitude of the crisis also provides excellent material for drama, as illustrated by the movie Thirteen Days (2000), directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp.

 

 

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