The Cuban Missile Crisis: What It Was, and How Close It Actually Came

On the morning of Sunday 14 October 1962, a U-2 flown by Major Richard Heyser crossed western Cuba and took 928 photographs. The previous week had been too cloudy to fly. This morning was clear. When analysts went through the film, they found, in a clearing near a town called San Cristobal, some tents, a fuel trailer, and a row of long canvas-covered shapes lying on the ground.

That is the picture above. It went onto a briefing board, and on the morning of 16 October the national security adviser McGeorge Bundy carried it in to President Kennedy. What the shapes were was a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile site under construction, about 90 miles from Florida.

The thirteen days that followed took the world closer to a full nuclear exchange than it has ever been, before or since. They also went rather differently from the way most people remember them.

Why the missiles were there in the first place

Start with the year before. In April 1961 the United States landed a force of CIA-trained Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, intending to overthrow Castro's government. It collapsed in three days and the American hand behind it was obvious to everyone. Eisenhower, out of office by then, told Kennedy the failure would embolden the Soviets to do something they otherwise would not.

Washington did not take the hint and stop. From late 1961 it ran Operation Mongoose, a sustained campaign of sabotage, subversion and attacks on economic targets inside Cuba, and in February 1962 it imposed the embargo that is still in place today. From Havana, and from Moscow, an American invasion did not look like paranoia. It looked like a scheduling question.

So in July 1962 Khrushchev and Castro secretly agreed to put Soviet nuclear missiles on the island. Nine sites were planned: six for R-12 medium-range missiles, which could reach about 2,000 kilometres, and three for R-14 intermediate-range missiles, which could reach 4,500. Around 43,000 Soviet troops went with them. The R-14s never arrived.

The other half of the explanation sat in Turkey. In March 1962 a squadron of fifteen American Jupiter missiles had gone operational at Cigli air base, well within range of Moscow, and there were more Jupiters in Italy and Thor missiles in England. Khrushchev's point, which he made repeatedly and which the American public mostly never heard, was that he was doing to the United States exactly what the United States had already done to him.

What the missiles did and did not change

Militarily, the missiles in Cuba barely mattered.

Robert McNamara, the defence secretary, said so at the time and never took it back. By his reckoning the United States had roughly 5,000 strategic nuclear warheads and the Soviet Union about 300. Adding forty more Soviet missiles made the arithmetic 340 against 5,000. "It made no difference," he said in 1990, nearly thirty years on. "The military balance wasn't changed. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now."

The Joint Chiefs of Staff disagreed and unanimously wanted an air strike followed by an invasion. But Kennedy's own reasoning, caught on the tapes he was secretly making in the Cabinet Room, was almost entirely political and almost entirely about somewhere else:

They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something. They can't, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and then do nothing. If they don't take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin.

That was the real fear. Not a missile landing on Miami, but West Berlin, a city sitting deep inside Soviet-controlled territory that the Americans could not have defended with conventional forces. Bomb Cuba and you hand Moscow the excuse to take Berlin, and then the question of nuclear war gets asked in Europe instead.

He picked a middle option. On 22 October he went on television, told the American public what was on the island, and announced a naval quarantine. The word was chosen with care. A blockade is legally an act of war. A quarantine is not, which also made it possible to get the Organization of American States behind it. American forces went to DEFCON 3 that evening, and shortly afterwards to DEFCON 2, one step from general war, the only time that has ever happened.

Thirteen days, most of them waiting

The days that follow are mostly the two governments trying to read each other through a very small hole. There was no direct line between the White House and the Kremlin. Messages went by cable and took hours, and both sides supplemented them with journalists, embassy contacts and guesswork.

Some Soviet ships turned back before reaching the quarantine line. Others were stopped, searched, found to be carrying nothing offensive, and let through. Meanwhile the reconnaissance flights kept showing the same thing: the sites on the island were getting closer to operational, quarantine or no quarantine.

On 26 October, Khrushchev sent a long, unusually personal letter. It had clearly been written in the middle of the night in Moscow, and it did not read like a state document.

If there is no intention to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.

The offer buried in it was straightforward: the missiles go, if the United States promises not to invade Cuba. Kennedy's people thought it was genuine. Then the next morning a second message arrived, colder and more formal, adding a new condition. The Jupiters in Turkey had to go too.

Black Saturday

27 October is the day the thing nearly got away from everyone.

That morning Major Rudolf Anderson took a U-2 over Cuba, his sixth flight of the crisis, unarmed at around 70,000 feet. A Soviet crew fired an SA-2 surface-to-air missile and shot him down. He was the only person killed by enemy fire in the whole crisis. The standing American plan said a downed reconnaissance plane meant the anti-aircraft sites got bombed in return. Kennedy held the order back.

At the same time, and entirely unknown to Washington, a Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine called B-59 was being hunted near the quarantine line by US destroyers dropping practice depth charges to force it to surface. The boat had been designed for Arctic water and was sitting in the Sargasso Sea. Its batteries were nearly flat, the air conditioning had failed, the internal temperature had climbed past 45 degrees and men were passing out at their stations. The crew had been out of radio contact with Moscow for days. As far as they knew, the war might already have started.

B-59 carried a nuclear torpedo. Its captain, Valentin Savitsky, ordered it readied. On that particular boat, three senior officers had to agree before it could be used, and the brigade chief of staff, Vasili Arkhipov, happened to be aboard. He argued against it and refused. Because he refused, nothing was fired.

None of this was known in the West until 2002, when the National Security Archive presented declassified Soviet naval records at a conference in Havana. Arkhipov had died four years earlier, of kidney cancer, and never heard anyone call him the man who saved the world.

The deal, and the part nobody was told

On the evening of 27 October, Kennedy did something counter-intuitive. He ignored Khrushchev's second letter, the one demanding Turkey, and replied to the first one as if the second had never arrived: the missiles go, under UN supervision, and the United States pledges not to invade Cuba.

Then Robert Kennedy went to see the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, privately, and delivered the rest of it out loud. The Jupiters in Turkey would come out within four or five months. It could not be written down, it could not be acknowledged, and if the Soviets ever made it public the deal was void. Nine American officials knew. The Jupiters were duly gone by the end of April 1963, and the Italian ones went too, so that the Turkish withdrawal would look less pointed.

On 28 October, Moscow announced the missiles were coming out. The quarantine stayed until 20 November, when the Soviet bombers left as well.

Publicly, this looked like a Soviet climbdown and nothing else. Khrushchev had put missiles somewhere provocative and taken them away again with nothing visible in return. The trade that would have made the retreat look like a negotiation stayed secret for more than twenty-five years, so the Soviet leadership took the outcome, in Dobrynin's words, as a blow to its prestige bordering on humiliation. It counted against Khrushchev when he was removed from power two years later.

The hundred warheads nobody saw

There is one more thing the men in the Cabinet Room did not know. Along with the big missiles, the Soviet Union had shipped nearly a hundred short-range tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba, and Washington had no idea they were there. The deal on 28 October covered offensive weapons, meaning weapons that could reach the United States, so the tactical warheads were not part of it and stayed behind. They only left on 1 December, and then largely because Anastas Mikoyan, sent from Moscow to calm Castro down, decided on his own initiative that handing them over to the Cubans was too dangerous and invented a Soviet law forbidding it.

Soviet commanders on the island did not need permission from Moscow to use them. Had Kennedy taken the advice of his Joint Chiefs and invaded, American troops coming ashore would have walked into tactical nuclear weapons controlled by local officers who believed they were fighting for their lives. Anderson may have been shot down precisely because Soviet officers thought his cameras were about to find them.

The Americans learned this in January 1992, at a conference in Havana, when a Soviet general mentioned it in passing. McNamara was in the room. He had to hold on to a table to steady himself.

What came out of it

Two things changed quickly. A direct communications link between Washington and Moscow was set up, the hotline, so that the next crisis would not be run through cables and journalists. And both governments, having looked at what they had nearly done, agreed the Limited Test Ban Treaty in Moscow in 1963, ending atmospheric nuclear testing between them.

The longer lesson is more uncomfortable. Nobody in October 1962 wanted a nuclear war. Kennedy did not, Khrushchev did not, and by the end both were working quite hard to give the other a way out. It still nearly happened, because a pilot flew a routine mission over an island where a local commander was jumpy, and because a submarine crew ran out of air and information at the same time. The decisions that mattered most were not taken in the Cabinet Room at all. They were taken by tired men who could not phone anyone.

Rudolf Anderson was 35. He was hit at 10:19 that morning, over Banes, on the eastern end of the island, and Robert Kennedy went to see Dobrynin later that night. He is buried in Greenville, South Carolina, where he went to school. Pieces of his aircraft are still on display in three museums in Cuba.

Sources

• US Department of State, Office of the Historian, "The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962" (the July 1962 Khrushchev-Castro agreement, Kennedy's September warning, the quarantine and the choice of the word, DEFCON levels, the two Khrushchev letters and the text quoted from the 26 October letter, the Robert Kennedy meeting with Dobrynin, the lifting of the quarantine on 20 November, the hotline and the test ban treaty).
• John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, "Cuban Missile Crisis" (Bundy alerting Kennedy on 16 October, the San Cristobal site 90 miles from Florida, the 22 October address, the 28 October announcement, the hotline and the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and the Turkish deal staying secret for more than twenty-five years).
• National Archives, "Aerial Photograph of Missiles in Cuba (1962)" (the 14 October flight after a week of cloud, the briefing board, and the provenance of the photograph used above).
• National Security Archive, "The Jupiter Missiles and the Endgame of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 60 Years Ago" (fifteen Jupiters operational at Cigli from March 1962, the four to five month timetable given to Dobrynin, the nine officials who knew, and the removal of the Italian Jupiters to disguise the Turkish withdrawal).
• National Security Archive, "The Underwater Cuban Missile Crisis at 60" (B-59's conditions in the Sargasso Sea, Captain Savitsky readying the nuclear torpedo, the three-officer rule, Arkhipov's refusal, and the 2002 Havana disclosure).
• Council on Foreign Relations, "TWE Remembers: Secret Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Cuba" (the roughly one hundred tactical warheads, why they fell outside the 28 October deal, Mikoyan's invented law, the 1 December departure, the 1992 Havana revelation and McNamara steadying himself, and the Jupiters gone by the end of April 1963).
• John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, "October 27, 1962" (Black Saturday, the second Khrushchev letter demanding the Turkish missiles, and the shooting down of Major Anderson).
• Wikipedia, "Cuban Missile Crisis" (Heyser's 928 photographs, the nine planned sites and the ranges of the R-12 and R-14, the figure of 43,000 Soviet troops, McNamara's 5,000 against 300 strategic warhead comparison and his 1990 remark, Kennedy's Berlin reasoning as quoted, the Joint Chiefs' unanimous position, and Dobrynin on Soviet humiliation).
• Wikipedia, "Rudolf Anderson" (his age, the sixth flight of the crisis, the SA-2 fired on the orders of two Soviet generals in Havana, the time and place of the shootdown at 10:19 over Banes, his schooling and burial in Greenville, and the wreckage displayed in three Cuban museums).