Gwynne Dyer: The other Cuban Missile Crisis

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      This month is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16 to 28, 1962), so we’re going to hear a great deal about the weeks when the world almost died. But the past is a foreign country, a place where everything was black and white and men still wore hats, so it’s just scary stories about a long-gone time. Or so it seems.

      The outlines of the tale are well known. It was 17 years since the United States had used nuclear weapons on Japan, and the Soviet Union now had them too. Lots of them: the American and Soviet arsenals included some 30,000 nuclear weapons, and not all of them were carried by bombers anymore. Some were mounted on rockets that could reach their targets in the other country in half an hour.

      Both Washington and Moscow therefore had some version of a “launch on warning” policy: if you think the other side’s missiles are inbound, launch your own missiles before you lose them. There couldn’t be a more hair-trigger situation than that, you might think—but then things got a lot worse.

      At the start of the 1960s Moscow had gained a new Communist ally in Fidel Castro, but the United States kept talking about invading Cuba. So Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev moved some nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba to deter the United States from attacking the island. However, from Cuba the Soviet missiles would be only five minutes away from their American targets. That caused panic in Washington.

      Early in October 1962, the first Soviet SS-4 missiles arrived in Cuba, and American U-2 spy planes discovered them almost at once. President John F. Kennedy knew about them by October 16, but he did not go on television and warn the American public of the risk of nuclear war until the 22nd.

      He then declared a naval blockade of Cuba, saying that he would stop Soviet ships carrying further missiles from reaching Cuba by force if necessary. That would mean war, and probably nuclear war, but at least the blockade gave the Russians some time to think before the shooting started.

      The Soviet leaders were now desperately looking for a way out of the crisis they had created. After a few harrowing days, a deal was done: the Soviet SS-4 missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba in return for a public promise by the United States not to invade Cuba. The crisis was officially over by October 28, and everybody breathed a sigh of relief. It was closest the world ever came to an all-out nuclear war.

      Even so, they weren’t really scared enough. They thought that a couple of hundred million people would die in a “nuclear exchange”. At that time, nobody yet knew that detonating so many nuclear warheads would cause a “nuclear winter”: the dust and smoke put into the stratosphere by firestorms in a thousand stricken cities would have blocked out the sunlight for a year or more and resulted in a worldwide famine.

      What almost nobody knew until very recently is that the crisis did not really end on October 28. A new book by Sergo Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of November, reveals that it continued all the way through November.

      U.S. intelligence was unaware that along with the SS-4s, the Soviet Union had also sent more than a hundred shorter-range “tactical” nuclear missiles to Cuba. They weren’t mentioned in the Soviet–U.S. agreement on withdrawing the SS-4s from Cuba, so technically Khrushchev had not promised to remove them.

      Fidel Castro was in a rage about having been abandoned by his Soviet allies, so to mollify him, Khrushchev decided to let him keep the tactical missiles. It was crazy: giving Fidel Castro a hundred nuclear weapons was a recipe for a new and even bigger crisis in a year or two. Khrushchev’s deputy, Anastas Mikoyan, who was sent to Cuba to tell Castro the happy news, quickly realized that he must not have them.

      The second half of the crisis, invisible to Americans, was Mikoyan’s month-long struggle to pry Castro’s fingers off the hundred tactical nuclear missiles. In the end, he only succeeded by telling Castro that an unpublished (and in fact non-existent) law forbade the transfer of Soviet nuclear weapons to a foreign country. In December, they were finally crated up and sent home.

      So it all ended happily, in one sense—but the whole world could have ended instead. As Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defence secretary in 1962, said 40 years later, “we were just plain lucky in October 1962—and without that luck most of you would never have been born because the world would have been destroyed instantly or made unlivable in October 1962.”

      Then he said the bit that applies to us. “Something like that could happen today, tomorrow, next year. It will happen at some point. That is why we must abolish nuclear weapons as soon as possible.” They are still there, you know, and human beings still make mistakes.

      Comments

      16 Comments

      Telmea Story

      Oct 18, 2012 at 11:14am

      How come no one talks about the fact that the whole episode was a response to the US setting up missile bases in Turkey and Italy starting in the late 50's? This was the same country which had just nuked Japanese civilian population. No wonder the Soviets were freaked.

      petr aardvark

      Oct 18, 2012 at 3:58pm

      As part of the deal, the US did remove the missile bases in Turkey - not mentioned in the article. Another thing that McNamara stated was that decades later he asked Castro if he had them whether or not he would have used the missiles and Castro floored him by saying that they did have them and did want the Russians to use them.

      The sub incident as well is worth noting. The US navy spotted a Soviet sub and McNamara suggested they drop some depth charges as a warning - they didn't know however that the Naval commander had no radio contact with Moscow and since the sub was a boomer (nuclear armed) he had the authority to launch if threatened. In the end he did not. So in some sense that Russian Sub commander saved the world.

      shoegazer

      Oct 18, 2012 at 7:46pm

      Watch"The Fog of War"if you can find it on video.It's compelling to listen to McNamara talk of this time in our history.

      James T.

      Oct 19, 2012 at 8:56am

      What happened Mr. Dyer? You only write on safe topics nowadays. You used to write intelligent and great articles on current affairs . I used to look forward to them. Now you produce pretty bland stuff.

      nick9

      Oct 19, 2012 at 12:08pm

      Telmea - what you fail to mention or realize is that Japan was working on it's own nuclear weapons and that it would have used them. As much as it was unfortunate that the US had to use those weapons, if they hadn't the war would have dragged on indefinitely and caused even more casualties.

      Telmea Story

      Oct 19, 2012 at 1:25pm

      Yeah, yeah, right nick9. Keep pumping those talking points. The US has and continues to amply demonstrate its psychotic blood thirst mostly in the interest of corporate profiteering. It is incumbent on us all to be as critical as possible about any of the so called facts.

      PR_uno

      Oct 20, 2012 at 3:12am

      I don't know if Japan, if they had it would had use the bomb.
      But one thing we all agree is the Nazi Germany as did the US
      would not have hesitated to use it too.

      Anbake

      Oct 20, 2012 at 4:22am

      Now that America has done what Kennedy & Co could only have dreamed about, i.e fractured the Soviet Union and surrounded the rump of it with military bases, we'te all so much safer to-day?
      It doesn't work like that in America.
      New 'gunslingers' ride into town and we're never safe.
      Currently up to bat, the evils of Islamic Jihad, to be followed by the threat of the Yellow Peril.
      The current coterie of 'leaders' seem to be working up to a 'real' war, and their level of imagination is only matched by a dwindling ability to do diplomacy.

      Issac Chandler

      Oct 20, 2012 at 10:46am

      "Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev moved some nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba to deter the United States..."

      The missiles weren't armed, and the Russians hadn't the troops to protect them:

      Propaganda and Disinformation:
      How the CIA Manufactures History
      http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v09/v09p305_Marchetti.html

      'Secrecy is maintained not to keep the enemy from knowing what's going on, because the enemy usually does know. Secrecy exists to keep the American public, from knowing what is going on - the real enemy.'

      Trogdor

      Oct 20, 2012 at 12:07pm

      For the WWII side discussion:
      In the European war, there were a few accidental firestorms. British operations research noted that these raids were far more effective at damaging German production. They concluded that the British air raids would be more effective if they added incendiary bombs to the mix and created firestorms regularly. British command decided not to pursue this course because of the excessive damage to the civilian population. Presumably the German analysts made exactly the same observations.

      In the USA air raids on Japanese centers, they used incendiary bombs and create firestorms routinely, not by accident. When US command decided whether or not to use the new nuclear weapons, they were not discussing a new level of destruction. They knew these bombs would give them a regular air raid's damage, but with a single plane. It was perhaps not as difficult a decision as we would like to imagine.