Presidential Predicaments – VII. JFK: the closest we came?
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In October 1962, a little over two years after JFK’s election as President and one year after the Tsar Bomba was detonated at Novaya Zemlya, the Soviets’ test site in the Arctic Ocean, the Cuban Missile crisis arrived. This is the time when, it is widely thought now, we got the closest we would ever come during the Cold War to a full nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union (leaving out of consideration the false alarms that happened on both sides).
What happened here was that the Soviets’ leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was able to sneak into Cuba some Intermediate Range and Medium Range Ballistic Missiles. Both capable of carrying nuclear warheads. From Cuba, these missiles with their 1000 to 1500 mile range would certainly have been able to reach Washington D.C. and New York City, almost any city in the United States in fact. Maybe not Seattle.
The Soviets might not have had that many ICBMs yet but they had plenty of IRBMs and MRBMs.
This could have been seen as a case of turnabout is fair play. We had on alert by now around the Soviet Union some 90 IRBMs, the 60 Thors and the 30 Jupiters. Both were capable of reaching Moscow in under twenty minutes from the countries that had given us permission to put them in there—the UK for the Thors, and Italy and Turkey for the Jupiters. The warheads on these IRBMs were megaton range. We had deployed them openly, if that was important. It certainly made them targets for the Soviets.
I didn’t know anyone, though, who saw the missiles Khrushchev had gotten into Cuba as a case of turnabout is fair play.
The Soviets themselves said they had done this only for defensive reasons, to defend Cuba from an invasion by us. Like the one that our military leaders had recommended after the Bay of Pigs disaster in JFK’s first few months in office.
Since that time, in something called Operation Mongoose, our CIA had been conducting in Cuba covert actions of sabotage and making attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. We didn’t know anything about these. The Cubans and Soviets did.
By the time our CIA discovered that the Russians had gotten these missiles into Cuba, we thought they might have gotten maybe fifty missiles in. We didn’t know if they’d gotten in any thermonuclear warheads for the missiles, or how many, or if the warheads had been mated to the missiles. Our military leaders told President Kennedy they might not have gotten in any, or only a few. It turned out they’d gotten in 36 of them by the time the missiles were noticed. More were on the way in ships.
They’d also gotten in some short-range “tactical” missiles. The range of these missiles wouldn’t allow them to reach the United States. Tactical nuclear weapons are the ones you think you can use against invading forces. They don’t have established launch sites. Our photoreconnaissance couldn’t tell us about these missiles or their smaller warheads. Our CIA didn’t have any idea they’d gotten in the tactical weapons. The warheads on these missiles yielded only the equivalent of 6-12 thousand tons of TNT, 1.2 percent or less of a megaton, though ten times what our biggest conventional bombs yielded.
We had no idea they were there. We knew only about the Intermediate Range and Medium Range missiles. And weren’t sure we knew about all of those.
The IRBMs and MRBMs had been kept under the control of Nikita Khrushchev. The tactical weapons were placed in the control of the Russian commanders on the ground. They could use them without getting permission from Nikita Khrushchev.
When our CIA spotted the IRBMs and MRBMs in Cuba, some of our military leaders advised JFK to invade Cuba immediately. With our conventional forces. Some of them advised him to use nuclear weapons so we could be sure, or more sure, of taking out all the IRBMs and MRBMs. It wouldn’t be acceptable, would it, to have even one of their launchers survive to send a thermonuclear warhead back at us. Our military leaders couldn’t assure JFK they wouldn’t be able to do this.
Some of JFK’s civilian advisors didn’t think the Russians would ever use the missiles they’d brought into Cuba. The way the balance of forces stood between us now, using the missiles would likely result in the obliteration not just of Cuba but of the Soviet Union. The Soviets probably knew about this imbalance of power. They knew, even if we Americans didn’t, whom the “missile gap” favored. It wasn’t them.
Leaving aside what other countries in our hemisphere and elsewhere in the world would have thought about our obliterating Cuba with our nuclear weapons when they hadn’t attacked us, a problem we had here was the Soviet troops that had been brought into Cuba to handle the missiles. How many Soviet troops were in there now? Our CIA thought maybe 10,000. We learned later that the number was 43,000. What if we had also obliterated 43,000 Soviet soldiers who hadn’t attacked us?
Well, then, some of JFK’s military advisers said, we should just invade with our conventional forces. Except would that make the Soviets launch their missiles at the United States? Some of our military leaders thought the missiles weren’t ready to go yet. They thought we could take a chance on that. We’d just conquer the island quickly with our conventional forces, and eliminate all the missiles, and maybe not have to kill more than a few Soviet soldiers.
The Cubans had 270,000 well-trained soldiers. Did we know that?
But what if the Soviets had brought in with them tactical nuclear weapons just in case we did invade? Our military leaders didn’t know they had done that. But if they had gotten tactical weapons in, that’s just what tactical weapons are supposedly for, fighting off invading forces. Operation Mongoose had convinced the Soviets and Fidel Castro that we were getting ready to invade.
If the Cubans had tactical nuclear weapons and used them to defend themselves, would we then just go ahead and obliterate Cuba with our nuclear weapons? We could certainly do it. Then what? Occupy it?
Would you sign up for that?
JFK decided not to drop a nuclear weapon on Cuba and not to invade Cuba with conventional forces as advised. Instead he decided to impose what he called a “quarantine”--it was really a “blockade”--to keep any ships from getting into or leaving Cuba. He didn’t want to call it a “blockade” because under international law a “blockade” is an act of war.
We knew the Soviets had more ships now sailing toward Cuba, probably carrying more missiles and warheads and soldiers. The question now was what would happen when those ships reached our warships at the quarantine line.
I won’t leave you in suspense. JFK and Nikita Khrushchev did some intense negotiating, the President’s brother Bobby Kennedy was deeply involved, and eleven days after we’d discovered the missiles in Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove them if we would agree not to invade Cuba. JFK agreed not to invade Cuba, which shouldn’t have been that hard, to agree not to invade another country. In the end he also told Khrushchev, in secret, that we would take the Jupiter IRBMs out of Turkey. This was cagey of JFK. We’d already decided to bring the vulnerable IRBMs home since we now had ICBMs on alert right here at home.
JFK asked Khrushchev to keep this second part of the agreement a secret and Khrushchev did. JFK seems to have thought that he needed to make us in the public and Congress think he had resolved this crisis, not by being careful and smart, but by being “tough.”
Khrushchev also did something cagey. He left in Cuba the tactical nuclear weapons we didn’t know he’d gotten in there. They could still be used if we broke our word and invaded.
This account of how the Cuban Missile Crisis ended makes it sound simpler and more straightforward than it was. While the negotiations were going on, dangerous incidents had occurred, all because of misunderstandings and faulty communication. One was when one of our destroyers dropped fake depth charges on a Soviet submarine to signal it to surface. The Soviets thought they were under attack. Unbeknownst to us the submarine was carrying a nuclear torpedo that had a ten kiloton warhead on it that they very nearly fired off in desperation.
Another incident was when a U-2 doing photoreconnaissance over Cuba was shot down by one of the Soviet anti-aircraft missiles they’d also brought into Cuba. The U-2 had been doing this surveillance contrary to JFK’s orders and the shoot-down had happened contrary to Khrushchev’s orders. Both incidents obviously could have led to a nuclear exchange between our two countries, but didn’t.
In one case, it was the restraint of the Russian submarine’s commander, in the other the decision by Kennedy not to retaliate for the killing of our U-2 pilot, that had headed things off.
It was clear that what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis had scared both JFK and NK. They’d had to imagine some awful outcomes and had seen how easily things could get out of control in such a situation and produce a result nobody had intended.
JFK and Khrushchev weren’t the only ones scared, of course. I was a senior at Amherst College in Massachusetts at the time. As the Soviet ships approached the quarantine line, I had asked myself which direction I should start walking in if I survived the nuclear exchange. North into Canada didn’t seem like a good idea in November. Nor did south into New York City or what there would be left of it. My home in Tucson, Arizona was a long way from Massachusetts.
After this crisis, our two countries installed a direct communication “hotline” between us and the Soviets. Before the crisis and during it, we hadn’t had one. Amazing we hadn’t set up something like this before, but we hadn’t. The new line was just a teletype machine but still. Before this, we’d had nothing.
Do you remember the treaty negotiations that were mentioned in JFK’s news release after Tsar Bomba? Those were the negotiations for a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty that had begun under President Eisenhower but had been dead since our U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union and the pilot captured and Eisenhower had lied about what it was doing over Russia. When the Soviets had produced the U-2’s pilot, Eisenhower had refused to apologize to Nikita Khrushchev for this covert action and Khrushchev had called off a summit they had planned that had looked very promising.
It looked like we might be able to start working on this treaty again. The Cuban Missile Crisis might have scared our leaders into it.