On the Edge of the Nuclear Abyss
The responsibility for breathing life and viability into the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency rested on the shoulders of its new director, William Chapman Foster. From the very outset of his tenure, Foster made it clear that neither he nor ACDA were expecting any sort of honeymoon period normally associated with new beginnings. Already familiar with the arms control and disarmament policy objectives of the Kennedy administration, Foster set about forming a policy study group, named the Foster Panel, to deal with the fundamental problem of heading off an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. One focus of the Foster Panel was to establish how many nuclear delivery vehicles represented enough—simply put, how much nuclear destruction was sufficient to enable effective deterrence to occur. Using a 50 percent level of guaranteed population annihilation as the benchmark at which nations would balk at going to war, the Foster Panel determined that a figure of 200 to 500 strategic nuclear delivery vehicles (missiles and bombers) was needed. To be on the safe side, the Foster Panel doubled the higher number and recommended to President Kennedy that he propose to the Soviets that a cap of 1,000 delivery vehicles be placed on the strategic nuclear arsenals of each nation.
Foster recognized that the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the edge of an arms race that would be economically prohibitive and, given the heightened levels of tensions between the two nations, potentially catastrophic. The Foster Panel recommendation had merit, and President Kennedy knew it. The problem was not so much getting the Soviets to agree—there was no doubt that Khrushchev would have accepted any solution that provided for parity between the two Cold War adversaries—but rather the domestic opposition such a cap would generate from a Congress and Defense establishment still highly distrustful of Soviet intentions.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had RAND calculate how many nuclear warheads were needed to destroy 50 percent of the Soviet population, and the number was no more than 400, roughly what the Foster Panel came up with. The day after the 1961 Thanksgiving, Kennedy assembled his advisers at the Kennedy family retreat in Hyannis Port, where the Foster Panel proposal was discussed. Although McNamara underscored the soundness of the proposal, he said that the Kennedy administration would be “politically murdered” by the Air Force and its supporters in Congress—the Air Force had submitted requests for some 2,400 ICBMs. McNamara, breaking with his military chiefs, believed he could get away with building around 1,000 (the number favored by the Foster Panel), but no less. Ted Sorenson, a close Kennedy advisor warned Kennedy that building that many missiles would lead to an arms race, but when McGeorge Bundy labeled the Foster Panel plan “too radical,” Kennedy concurred, and the last chance to contain the buildup of American and Soviet nuclear arsenals was missed.1
There was some fleeting progress in disarmament affairs on December 20, 1961, when the McCloy-Zorin Accord on General and Comprehensive Disarmament was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. Capitalizing on the momentum created by the McCloy-Zorin Accord, the United Nations established the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC), comprising five nations from NATO, five nations from the Warsaw Pact, and eight nonaligned nations, which began meeting in Geneva on March 14, 1962. One of the first acts of substantive business for the ENDC was to create a subcommittee to consider a treaty banning nuclear weapons tests.
But stopping nuclear war, not nuclear tests, dominated the agenda of President Kennedy as 1961 ended. The situation surrounding Berlin remained tense. By the end of October 1961, President Kennedy had signed off on National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 109, a military plan of action on how to respond to any Soviet ground or air blockade of Berlin. Divided into four phases, the plan called for a gradual escalation of conventional responses before implementation of phase four—general nuclear war as outlined in SIOP-62. NSAM 109 was hailed as the first genuine manifestation of a new flexible response strategy that had the United States relying on conventional forces initially before resorting to the use of nuclear weapons. But after all of the internal wrangling over creating a more flexible response capability, in the end the only nuclear fall-back Kennedy had was total nuclear war.2
For NSAM 109 to have any credibility, there would need to be a massive increase in the conventional war fighting capabilities of NATO. But the members of NATO were extremely hesitant to commit to the massive fiscal outlays that such a military buildup would require of them, preferring instead to fall back on the security blanket afforded by America’s nuclear umbrella. A critical factor in this thinking was that the United States would not divorce Europe from its overall approach to general, or nuclear, warfare, so the Soviets would know that any move on Europe would put the entire Soviet Union at risk. This, of course, was the exact opposite to the approach that was being pursued by the Kennedy administration under the precepts of flexible response. The United States was looking for the option to isolate and contain nuclear action without having to resort to general nuclear war. From Kennedy’s perspective, the only legitimate reason for a massive buildup of American conventional military power in Europe was to protect Berlin. If the Soviets were to launch a military assault on Western Europe proper, the United States, together with the other Western European nations, simply did not have the conventional capacity to resist. President Kennedy was unwilling to expend the resources necessary to change that basic equation. In short, if the Soviets attacked Western Europe, nuclear weapons would be employed almost immediately.
The Kennedy administration had no desire to maintain a hands-off approach toward nuclear weapons and NATO. Given the consequences associated with any use of nuclear weapons by any NATO power, in particular the near certainty of a rapid escalation into a general strategic nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, independent nuclear deterrent capability such as that being sought by Great Britain and France (which tested a nuclear device in the Sahara Desert on February 13, 1960) was a policy direction not supported by the United States. To appease Western European desires for an independent European nuclear force, the United States had, since the time of the Eisenhower administration, proposed the creation of a so-called multilateral force (MLF). This force would consist of Polaris missiles carried onboard naval ships, which would be jointly manned by NATO personnel (including West Germans, a measure strongly opposed by the Soviets) and operate under the command of NATO itself. In December 1960, the Eisenhower administration went one step further, recommending that the United States commit five nuclear submarines, armed with eighty Polaris missiles, to a NATO MLF. The question of European joint command and control over nuclear weapons continuously haunted the MLF concept. Even more critical, from the U.S. perspective, was the question of how any MLF nuclear capability would be integrated into a larger U.S. plan for nuclear war.3
But the Western Europeans had concerns of their own. The United States maintained a stockpile of approximately 5,000 tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Even though there were a number of bilateral agreements between the United States and host nations ostensibly providing for a veto over the use of these weapons, in the end the United States, through its role as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), had the real ability to use these weapons when and how it best saw fit. The American-proposed MLF was designed to assuage European sensibilities, but as of early 1962, it remained largely theoretical, and largely ignored. In the spring of 1962, NATO secretary-general Dirk Stikker prepared a report that laid out a set of guidelines spelling out the assurances NATO wanted from the United States in terms of the availability of American nuclear weapons for NATO. It also proposed agreements NATO desired on the need for consultations between the United States and NATO prior to any decision being made about the use of nuclear weapons by NATO.4
But even though American nuclear strategy might have been influenced by Europe, ultimately it was driven by domestic American politics. By March 1962, it appeared that the driving force behind American defense posture was the struggling American economic situation. Both Kennedy and McNamara had ruled out a nuclear first strike option, and neither was satisfied with the Eisenhower strategy of Massive Retaliation. Flexible response was the ideal concept, but McNamara’s commitment toward producing a defense budget that met Kennedy’s needs for fiscal constraint meant that the boost in American conventional military power overseas was not going to materialize.
McNamara was able to assuage the Department of Defense by authorizing money in the fiscal year 1963 budget to build a force of 1,000 Minuteman and 656 Polaris missiles by 1967.5 These missiles were at the heart of what McNamara was beginning to refer to as a strategy of Counterforce, in which the first salvo of nuclear weapons launched by the United States in retaliation against a Soviet nuclear attack would be targeted against Soviet military forces (missile silos, bomber bases, and so forth) instead of Soviet cities. A certain portion of U.S. nuclear launch capability would be held back for potential use against Soviet military, industrial, and civilian targets, if needed. The key to such a new strategy rested with survivable missile systems, such as the silo-based Minuteman and the submarine-launched Polaris. Counterforce became the U.S. nuclear doctrine, and the planning guidance for SIOP-63—which went into effect in June 1962—reflected this thinking.6
Having sold Congress on the fiscal merits of Counterforce, and having shaped U.S. nuclear targeting plans accordingly, McNamara now needed to sell his new concept to an increasingly worried and skeptical NATO audience. His opportunity came on May 5, 1962, at a meeting of NATO ministers held in Athens, Greece, where McNamara detailed the new Counterforce strategy. McNamara not only stated that the United States would not be targeting Soviet or Warsaw Pact cities in the event of a nuclear war but also suggested that both the British and French nuclear capabilities, unless appropriately targeted (i.e., integrated into an overall U.S.-controlled nuclear command and control framework), were counterproductive in so far as neither the British nor the French nuclear forces possessed the accuracies necessary for effective employment in a Counterforce mode. America, McNamara stated, was against small, independently targeted nuclear forces because they were outdated and lacked credibility as a deterrent. By extension, therefore, the United States was against the MLF. The key to this all, McNamara noted, was that there was a much larger need for conventional forces, and Europe would have to do more in that regard.7
McNamara’s Athens presentation was highly classified, presented behind closed doors to a limited audience. It wasn’t until June 1962 that the crux of his new Counterforce thinking was presented publicly, when McNamara gave a redacted version as his commencement address to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In this speech McNamara pointed out that the NATO alliance, inclusive of American power, had overall nuclear strength that was adequate to any challenge. Accordingly, McNamara told Ann Arbor, this nuclear strength not only reduced the likelihood of any major nuclear war but also provided for the development of a strategy that could limit the damage done to civil society in the case of a general nuclear war. In order to reduce the chances of nuclear war, and to deter any nonnuclear conflict, McNamara spoke in favor of improving the conventional military power of the NATO alliance. The American secretary of defense noted that American nuclear supremacy made a surprise nuclear attack by any enemy an act of insanity, given the assured consequences. Likewise, McNamara told the graduates, it was highly unlikely for an enemy to initiate limited nuclear warfare as an outgrowth of a limited conventional conflict, either in Europe or elsewhere. Counterforce, McNamara argued (without actually naming it), made it official U.S. policy that in the event of a nuclear war, the principal military objective would be “the destruction of the enemy’s forces, not of his civilian population.” The robust nature of the U.S. and NATO nuclear capability provided sufficient “reserve striking power to destroy an enemy society if driven to it. In other words, we are giving a possible opponent the strongest imaginable incentive to refrain from striking our own cities.”8
McNamara’s presentation in Ann Arbor did not go over well in Moscow, where the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, alerted to the speech by the KGB, was furious over what he viewed as an American effort to make nuclear war more acceptable. Contrary to the vision of McNamara’s No Cities strategy, Khrushchev angrily retorted that in any nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, cities would be the first targets to be destroyed, and he warned President Kennedy not to embark on a “sinister competition as to who will be the first to start a war.” Khrushchev’s angst was not, as many believe, derived from his tendency toward knee-jerk reactions but was rather a consequence of his growing frustration that the United States was seeking to leverage its nuclear supremacy in a manner that constrained Soviet interests and, more importantly, national security.9
A critical aspect to this problem of U.S.-Soviet tension was the strategic imbalance that existed between the two nations in the arena of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. While there never had been a Soviet missile gap, there was in fact an American missile gap, one which the Soviets were painfully aware of and were doing their best to close. While the Soviets struggled to field a viable ICBM, they were able to deploy two extremely capable intermediate-range missiles, the SS-4 and the SS-5. In early 1962, the first regiments of SS-5 missiles were deployed to deal with targets in Western Europe from sites in the western Soviet Union. Like the SS-4, the SS-5 was considered a strategic asset and was deployed as part of the Strategic Rocket Forces. And yet both missiles lacked the range to threaten anything other than regional targets. Other than American forces stationed in Europe and Asia, the national territory of the United States at that time remained out of reach of any Soviet ballistic missile.10
The Soviet Union’s only functional ICBM, the SS-6 missile, made use of unstable liquid fuel (see glossary), reducing its viability as a military weapon. The logical follow-up to the SS-6 would either be a missile with stored-fuel capability or with a vastly improved handling system for the liquid oxygen oxidizer. In typical fashion, the Soviets chose to pursue both options. They soon began work on the SS-8 missile, which used a fully automated launch system that allowed the missile to be ready for firing within twenty minutes, enough time to guarantee it could be launched if the Soviets received early warning of an American preemptive attack. The other missile design, the SS-7, featured a storable fuel capability and could be fueled at the onset of any crisis and thus be maintained in a “ready launch” mode (able to be fired within six minutes) for up to thirty days. The survivability afforded to the Soviet ICBM force through the deployment of these two missiles was tremendous.11
But the deployment of the SS-7 and SS-8 missiles would take time. On March 9, and again on March 11, 1962, Khrushchev received sensitive reports from Soviet military intelligence (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, or GRU) that reported on deliberations within the Pentagon and White House (purportedly happening in the summer and fall of 1961) about a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Khrushchev was troubled by these reports, especially when considering the overall strategic balance that existed in early 1962. Even though the Soviet Union had sufficient nuclear strike capability to hit all of Western Europe, the United States was relatively secure from a Soviet nuclear threat. The Soviet Union had no long-range bomber capable of penetrating the air defenses of North America, and the SS-8 and SS-7 ICBM capability was small in numbers, slow to make operational, and thus vulnerable to preemption. The Golf-class submarine, although theoretically capable of intercontinental deployments, was not viewed as a survivable system because it would need to maneuver close to American shores, surface, raise its missiles, and then launch. The Soviet Union was able to flex its nuclear muscle against Western Europe but not against the United States.12
The United States was not in the same position. American strategic bombers were not only capable of penetrating Soviet air defenses at will but also were on active patrols over the Arctic, the Pacific, and Europe, ringing the Soviet homeland with the ever-present danger of a no-notice nuclear attack. The United States had eighteen new Titan missiles deployed by May 1962, all of them in hardened underground silos. The Titan deployments were in addition to 129 Atlas missiles either already deployed or in the process of being deployed.13 George Washington– and Ethan Allen–class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, each armed with sixteen Polaris missiles, were actively engaged in nuclear deterrence patrols based out of Holy Loch, Scotland, and were operating in arctic waters, placing Leningrad, Moscow, and much of the Soviet Union’s European industrial and military infrastructure under imminent risk of military attack.14
The United States had deployed sixty Thor IRBMs to Great Britain between 1958 and 1959, where they could deliver a 1.4-megaton nuclear warhead to a target 1,500 miles away, with a total flight time of less than eighteen minutes. All of the Warsaw Pact nations west of the Ural Mountains as well as the Soviet Union were in range. The Thor missile took fifteen minutes to erect, fuel, and launch, making it a very difficult missile to neutralize with anything other than a surprise attack. The United States had also deployed Jupiter IRBMs to both Italy (thirty missiles) and, as of April 1962, Turkey (fifteen missiles). Like the Thor, the Jupiter missile had a range of 1,500 miles and carried a 1.4-megaton warhead. From its Turkish bases outside the city of Izmir, the Jupiter was capable of delivering a nuclear strike against Khrushchev’s Pitsunda dacha in less than twenty minutes, something the Soviet premier was well aware of, and a fact that, after the receipt of the GRU intelligence on planning for an American preemptive nuclear attack, took on added significance.15
From Khrushchev’s perspective, the Soviet Union faced an unacceptable national security situation. Europe, Khrushchev believed, could be stabilized if a German peace treaty could be obtained and the question of Berlin resolved. Soviet conventional military strength, backed up by theater-level (i.e., able to operate throughout Europe) nuclear weapons, would maintain a balance of power acceptable to Soviet interests. However, given the fact that Western Europe and the United States were integrated from a defense standpoint, the balance of power equation visà-vis the Soviet-bloc and NATO was skewed unacceptably against the Soviet Union, especially when one factored in the imbalance between Soviet and American strategic nuclear capabilities. Matching the United States missile for missile was not an attractive option. Khrushchev faced severe economic problems at home. His agricultural reforms were failing, and overall the Soviet economy was growing at an unacceptably slow rate. In addition to the SS-7 and SS-8 missile development and deployment currently underway, the Soviet military was planning a new generation of missiles designed to match both the quick launch capabilities of the Minuteman ICBM and the hard-target kill capability of the Titan ICBM. To counter the American ICBM threat, the Soviet Union was designing advanced antiballistic missile (ABM) defenses, as well as new generations of ballistic missile submarines. Khrushchev was on the edge of embarking on an arms race that he knew would hold a distinct disadvantage for the Soviet Union because of the precariousness of its economic health.
Disarmament was the way out, Khrushchev believed, but the Soviet military and political bureaucracies would never concede the large number of on-site inspections that a genuine verification system would require, especially given the weak state of the Soviet strategic nuclear capability. Once disarmament was accomplished, and rough parity established, some form of limited inspection regime could be considered. A major problem, from the Soviet standpoint, was that America did not seem inclined toward genuine disarmament, which negated its strategic advantages. Khrushchev was left with two options: engage in a costly arms race until parity was achieved, or rearrange the strategic situation as it now stood to maximize available Soviet capabilities.
Khrushchev chose the former. In May 1962, he approached Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky with an audacious plan of action: deploy Soviet medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles to bases in Cuba. There they would be able to target U.S. cities and military-industrial facilities as far north as Atlanta, Georgia (for the medium-range missiles) and all of the U.S. bomber and missiles bases in the Midwestern part of America (for the intermediate-range missiles).16
On June 10, 1962, Khrushchev and Malinovsky briefed the Soviet presidium on the plan to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, codenamed Operation Anadyr. In a follow-up meeting of the presidium held on July 1, 1962, Khrushchev linked Operation Anadyr with a new decision to resolve the ongoing Berlin crisis in the Soviet Union’s favor. Khrushchev proposed a phasing out of the Allied occupation forces in Berlin over a two-year period, to be replaced by international troops under UN command. This proposal was to be the bottom line position of the Soviets, which would be backed up by the new strategic nuclear reality of the Soviet missile force in Cuba. McNamara’s Ann Arbor speech played a central role in pushing Khrushchev toward this decisive confrontation. Khrushchev knew that without the Cuban missile bases, the Soviet nuclear force was inferior to that of the United States. This massive American nuclear supremacy prevented any aggressive Soviet moves regarding Berlin. Operation Anadyr would, in Khrushchev’s opinion, dramatically alter this equation.17
While Khrushchev put in place the pieces of his nuclear gambit in Cuba, U.S.-Soviet disarmament talks continued, albeit with almost zero progress. As of July 1962, talks in Geneva over the issue of a nuclear test ban remained stalled, primarily over the continued Soviet refusal to consider on-site inspections as a means of verification for any test ban agreement. The Soviets continued to be angry with what they viewed as American trickery concerning the technical issues surrounding seismic detection of any potential tests.
The Soviet point was reinforced, without their knowledge, in early July 1962, when the U.S. Air Force came in with some startling findings produced by Project Vela, which the Department of Defense had initiated in 1959. The project was set up to study seismic phenomena needed for nuclear test detection and treaty verification, spending some $30 million by 1961 in deploying a detection system known as the “World Wide Standardized Seismographic Network.” In reviewing Project Vela data relating to two underground nuclear tests (a Soviet test in Semipalatinsk conducted in February 1962 and a French test conducted in the Sahara Desert in May 1962), the Air Force determined that the Vela system was, in fact, capable of detecting seismic events 20 percent smaller than the current Geneva threshold of 4.75 kilotons. This meant that there would be a need for fewer on-site inspections because the seismic sensors would be able to detect the difference between a nuclear and nonnuclear seismic event.18
The Project Vela data set off a storm of debate inside Washington as to how best to proceed on the matter of a nuclear test ban treaty. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson made it clear that he regarded the new Vela data with great skepticism, informing the White House that in his view “there could be nothing more dangerous than to make a hasty change in the fundamental principle of arms control because of a preliminary scientific finding.”19 But there was a recognition that the Soviet insistence on zero inspections was the fundamental blockage in a comprehensive test ban treaty being negotiated, and the new Vela data threw open the question of whether or not inspections were even needed. In October 1961, the Indian government, in an effort to get ENDC talks back on track had submitted a proposal for a test ban that excluded on-site inspections, and there was growing pressure on the part of the United Nations, both in terms of the General Assembly and the ENDC, for movement to be made. More and more, the United States, and not the Soviet Union, was being viewed as the impediment to progress in the field of disarmament.20
America’s hands were no longer clean when it came to nuclear testing. When the Soviets resumed testing on September 1, 1961, Kennedy had responded with a series of underground tests. The weapons design laboratories had a number of atmospheric tests planned, however, many of which were high yield in nature and intended as weapons development tests. Under pressure from the military and nuclear laboratories, Kennedy had authorized U.S. atmospheric nuclear testing to resume on April 25, 1962.
Meanwhile, the situation in Cuba was growing more critical. By July 1962, the CIA was detecting evidence of a massive increase in the delivery of Soviet weapons to Cuba, including surface-to-air missiles. A month later, the evidence continued to grow, prompting an intervention on the part of U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoliy Dobrynin on September 4, 1962. Robert Kennedy expressed alarm over the scope and nature of the Soviet weapons’ presence in Cuba, stating that although the current weapons appeared to be defensive in nature, if such shipments continued, what would prevent the Soviets from dispatching to Cuba offensive missiles armed with nuclear warheads? Dobrynin assured Robert Kennedy that the Soviet actions were defensive in nature and that the Soviet Union supported the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.21
In Washington, President Kennedy was under increasing pressure from his Republican counterparts in the U.S. Senate, especially Senator Ken Keating of New York, who was expressing concern over the Soviet buildup in Cuba. The feeling was that the United States had to do something about Cuba. In discussions with his national security team and members of Congress, the idea of a naval blockade of Cuba was broached by the attendees. “Well, a blockade is a major military operation, too,” the president responded. “It’s an act of war.” Kennedy meanwhile had his attention focused elsewhere—on Berlin. In his opinion, if the United States initiated a blockade against Cuba, “Berlin obviously would be blockaded also.” Kennedy was searching for a sense of perspective. “I think Berlin is coming to some sort of climax this fall,” he said. Cuba was, in his opinion, a distraction, a weapons buildup that, in Kennedy’s opinion, “did not threaten America.” For the moment, it seemed, the best option was to wait and observe. Under pressure from his national security team to ask Congress for an extension to the one-year call-up of reserves he had requested in July 1961, the president opted to ask for only 150,000 troops in an effort to downplay any suggestion of a crisis.22
On September 8, 1962, the Soviet freighter Omsk arrived in Cuba with the first shipment of SS-4 missiles, followed on September 15 by the freighter Poltava with the remaining ones. In response to Kennedy’s decision to mobilize 150,000 reservists, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, in a speech before the United Nations, warned that any American attack on Cuba could result in a war with the Soviet Union. On that same day, the Soviet news agency TASS issued a statement in which the Soviets declared all weapons sent to Cuba to be strictly defensive in nature. On September 13, 1962, President Kennedy, under increasing pressure from Republicans in Congress, again addressed the Cuba issue, stating that any talk of military action by the United States against Cuba was unjustified and not required. The main problem, so it seemed to the president, continued to be Berlin. The decision by Khrushchev to push Kennedy simultaneously on Berlin and Cuba left the president searching for a logical link between the two actions. Whereas the president was inclined toward striking a deal on Berlin, the domestic ramifications of the Soviet buildup in Cuba, exploited deftly by his Republican opponents, precluded any such action.
On October 14, 1962, a U.S. Air Force U-2 plane flew over Cuba and, taking advantage of a break in the clouds, imaged a portion of western Cuba where the SS-4 missiles were being deployed. By October 15, CIA photo analysts had assessed the images and confirmed the presence of the Soviet surface-to-surface missiles in Cuba. Operation Anadyr had been uncovered by U.S. intelligence. The president was informed of the Soviet action on October 16, 1962, and immediately convened an executive committee of his closest advisors to discuss the issue. Early on in this meeting, President Kennedy had a telling exchange with his national security team. Speaking about a Soviet move to place missiles in Cuba, Kennedy noted that “It’s as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBM’s in Turkey. Now that’d be Goddam dangerous, I would think.” McGeorge Bundy responded, “Well, we did, Mr. President.” Alexis Johnson, a senior State Department official, added, “We did it. We did it in England.” In a related conversation, General Maxwell Taylor speculated that the Soviet move might be designed to supplement their defective ICBM systems. Dean Rusk commented that the United States had fifteen Jupiter missiles installed in Turkey, noting that maybe Khrushchev “wants us to feel what it is like to live under medium-range missiles.”23
Over the span of October 18 and 19, Kennedy and his advisers went back and forth about the consequences of any U.S. move against Cuba. Kennedy was concerned that if the United States attacked Cuba, then the Soviets would be compelled to take steps to end the Allied occupation of Berlin. Kennedy was adamant that the United States had no intention of invading Cuba but noted that the Soviet missiles stationed there had created “the most dangerous situation since the end of World War II.” Bundy urged the president to avoid any notion of trading Cuba for Berlin and suggested rather that the president stay focused on Berlin and maintain the U.S.-Western European alliance.24
On October 19, 1962, U.S. intelligence revealed that eight SS-4 missile sites in Cuba were operational, and eight more were approaching operational status. Sensitive intelligence from Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet working for the CIA and British Intelligence, confirmed that the other system deployed to Cuba, and detected by U.S. intelligence on October 17, was the SS-5 intermediate-range missile. An associated nuclear warhead storage site was assessed to be six to eight weeks away from completion. Kennedy continued to hesitate on taking military action, again feeling that to do so would clear the way for the Soviets to move on Berlin. General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, believed that there really was no other choice but military action because if the United States waited three months and did nothing, the Soviets were, in his opinion, going to “squeeze us on Berlin.” In LeMay’s opinion, the Soviet missiles in Cuba increased the overall Soviet accuracy against the fifty critical targets inside the United States that had been assessed as capable of being struck by Soviet nuclear delivery systems (LeMay’s assessment deviated considerably from the reality of Soviet nuclear capability at that time).
On October 20, 1962, Kennedy decided to impose a naval blockade on Cuba. The military kept pressing Kennedy for a preemptive military attack, but he hesitated. President Kennedy was growing increasingly concerned about any Soviet preemption of the Jupiter missile bases in Turkey and Italy. The NATO European Defense Plan (EDP) called for the launching of the Jupiter missiles in the case of any Soviet nuclear attack against NATO. But the president felt that if the United States were to attack Soviet missiles in Cuba, then the Soviets would most logically launch “spot reprisals” against the Jupiter sites in Turkey and Italy. On October 22, 1962, Kennedy ordered General Taylor to make sure that no Jupiter missiles were to be fired without specific presidential authority. Taylor added that if any Soviet attack did occur, whether nuclear or nonnuclear, the U.S. custodians must destroy or make inoperable the nuclear warheads of the Jupiter missiles if any effort was made to fire them void of a directive from the U.S. President in order to help prevent any escalation of nuclear conflict by ending the cycle of retaliation before it could spin out of control.25
That same morning, Kennedy briefed members of Congress on the Soviet missile deployments. That night at 7:00 pm, President Kennedy broadcast a live message to the nation, and to the world: “This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” Kennedy announced his intention to impose a naval quarantine around Cuba and demanded the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from that island.26
In an opinion column published in the New York Times on October 23, 1962, the noted journalist Walter Lippmann, a friend and confidant of John Kennedy, wrote that the presence of U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey complicated President Kennedy’s options when it came to Cuba.27 This was indeed the case. But Kennedy did not have the flexibility of absolute authority when it came to the Jupiter missiles, which were ostensibly NATO assets and had been deployed under its auspices. Unilateral U.S. action to remove the Jupiter missiles from either Turkey or Italy, without coordinating this action through NATO and getting concurrence from the respective host nation, would greatly undermine the NATO alliance at a time when the crisis in Berlin mandated NATO unity and coherence.28
However, Kennedy no longer operated with the luxury of time, which was what diplomacy usually required. While the State Department floated the question of the utility of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey (the United States was prepared to offer Turkey Polaris nuclear submarines in their stead),29 Robert Kennedy made use of asecret back channel he had established with a Soviet intelligence officer, Georgi Bolshakov. Bypassing normal bureaucratic channels, Robert Kennedy turned to a reporter for the Daily News, Frank Holeman, to float the idea of a Turkey-Italy-Cuba missile swap. Holeman was careful to pass on Robert Kennedy’s caveat to the proposal: such a deal could only be made once tensions had subsided.30
But tensions did not subside. In the frantic days that followed, both the United States and the Soviet Union increased their respective defense postures. Whereas the public rhetoric between the United States and the Soviet Union remained harsh, behind the scenes both sides were scrambling for a peaceful solution. Khrushchev ordered all Soviet ships involved in Operation Anadyr, with the exception of those carrying the remaining SS-5 missiles, to turn around and return to the Soviet Union. President Kennedy continued to fend off the pressure from the hawks at the Pentagon and within the Joint Chiefs of Staff to attack Cuba, all the while looking for the means to bring the crisis to a peaceful end. Kennedy was aware that the only way to give Khrushchev a face-saving way out of Cuba was to offer up the Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
Matters concerning Cuba were quickly coming to a head. On the evening of October 23, 1962, President Kennedy signed into effect a naval blockade of Cuba. By 10:00 am on October 24, 1962, the U.S. Navy had sufficient ships in place to begin enforcing the blockade. The delay in ordering the blockade proved fortunate because in the meantime the Soviet ship Aleksandrovsk, carrying the nuclear warheads for the SS-5 missiles, had slipped into Cuban coastal waters and had anchored off the Cuban port city La Isabela. By avoiding contact with the U.S. Navy vessels blockading Cuba, they had skirted the prospect of a conflict arising over any attempt on the part of the U.S. Navy to seize Soviet nuclear warheads. But the Soviets still had nineteen other ships sailing toward Cuba, two of these carrying the SS-5 IRBMs. Under orders from Khrushchev, sixteen of these ships turned around and returned to the Soviet Union. The two freighters carrying the SS-5 rockets, escorted by a single Soviet submarine, stopped short of the quarantine line. The Soviets sent an oil tanker forward, which was intercepted, boarded, and inspected by the U.S. Navy. Clearly, the United States was intending to enforce the blockade. Khrushchev condemned the U.S. Navy’s boarding of a Soviet vessel as a “pirate action.”31
The next morning, U.S. intelligence detected continuing activity at the Soviet missile bases in Cuba, prompting Strategic Air Command’s General Thomas Powers, acting without the authority of the president, to order his forces to Defense Condition (DEFCON) 2, one level below general war. His orders were deliberately broadcast unencrypted, to ensure that Soviet and Cuban signal intercept operators knew exactly what was happening.32 The U.S. Army deployed three experimental radars along the southern border of the United States to detect any missile launch activity from Cuba. Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum 199, authorizing nuclear weapons to be loaded onto aircraft operating in Europe, because those would be the first to launch against the Soviet Union in case of any nuclear war. America was on a hair-trigger alert.
President Kennedy was becoming convinced that the only option available to rid Cuba of the Soviet missiles was an invasion. There was a growing recognition within the White House that any U.S. military action against Cuba would trigger a Soviet move on Berlin. The thinking was simple: bomb Cuba, kill Russians. Russians take Berlin, overrun American troops. “Then what do we do?” Robert Kennedy asked. Maxwell Taylor gave the answer no one wanted to hear: “We go to general war, if it is in the interest of ours.”
“You mean nuclear exchange?” Robert Kennedy said. “I guess you have to,” Taylor affirmed. This reality persuaded the president to give diplomacy a final chance. But time was running out. If there was no change in the Soviet position by Sunday, October 28, then the president would order the U.S. military to move in the following day.33
A breakthrough in the Cuban crisis came from a totally unexpected source. On October 25, Alexandr Feklisov, the KGB resident agent at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, invited the ABC News reporter John Scali, best known for hosting the program Questions and Answers, to lunch. During this lunch, Scali was asked by Feliksov if the United States might be interested in a deal where the Soviets would dismantle their missile bases in Cuba under UN supervision if the United States would undertake not to invade Cuba. Scali passed this proposal to a skeptical State Department.34
But the skeptics were proven wrong when, the very next day, Nikita Khrushchev wrote a letter to President Kennedy in which he agreed to the basic formula of a U.S.-Soviet deal over Cuba that had been floated during the meeting between Scali and Feklisov. In exchange for the Soviet agreement to withdraw their missiles from Cuba, the United States would agree not to invade Cuba. But then, on October 27, a second letter was received, this one linking the Soviet withdrawal from Cuba with an American withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The Kennedy administration chose to ignore the second Soviet communication and based its response upon the initial letter of October 26. This would represent the public face of diplomacy.35
Behind the scenes, President Kennedy provided assurances that U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey would be withdrawn soon, within four to five months. Robert Kennedy conveyed this to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin during a meeting on Saturday, October 27, 1962. Robert Kennedy emphasized the need to keep the details of the missile trade confidential. Dobrynin passed Kennedy’s message on the Khrushchev.36 The next day, Khrushchev made a public announcement in which he explained the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba to a Soviet public previously unaware of the bold, dangerous gambit. Khrushchev announced that these missiles would now be withdrawn, linked to an American agreement not to attack Cuba. No mention was made of the secret pact on the American pledge to close its Jupiter missile bases in Turkey. Both America and the Soviet Union had come right to the edge of the nuclear abyss and, having peered over, collectively decided to step back.
ENDNOTES
1 Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms—A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 216.
2 Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 106–107.
3 Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), 851.
4 Derek Srikker, “Final Communiqué on the Athens’s Guidelines” (NATO Conference, Berlin, May 4, 1962).
5 Peter Beckman, The Nuclear Predicament: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), 90.
6 Joseph Lepgold, The Declining Hegemon: The United States and European Defense, 1960–1990 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1990), 122.
7 Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 283–285.
8 William Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 114.
9 Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 225.
10 Cristoph Bluth, Soviet Strategic Arms Policy Before SALT (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9–10.
11 Michael MccGwire, Perestroika and Soviet National Security (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), 49–50.
12 A. A. Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 155.
13 Stephan Schwartz, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1998), 123.
14 Graham Spinardi, From Polaris to Trident: The Development of U.S. Fleet Ballistic Missile Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 76.
15 Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957–1963 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 108–110.
16 Raymond Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1989), 12.
17 Fursenko and Naftali, 213.
18 Glenn Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 20–21.
19 Timothy Naftali, Philip Zelikow, and Ernest May, John F. Kennedy: The Great Crises (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 82.
20 Richard Burns, Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), 232.
21 Anatoliy Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War President’s (1962–1986) (New York: Random House, 1995), 68.
22 Naftali, Zekilow, and May, 62–64.
23 Richard Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987), 113.
24 Naftali, Zekilow, and May, 573.
25 Sheldon Stern, Averting the “Final Failure”: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 144–146.
26 Naftali, Zekilow, and May, 91.
27 Garthoff, 42.
28 Nasuh Uslu, The Turkish-American Relationship Between 1947 and 2003: The History of a Distinctive Alliance (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2003), 141–144.
29 Ibid., 150.
30 Fursenko and Naftali, 112.
31 Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1964 (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), 501.
32 Betts, 118.
33 Stern, 85.
34 Naftali, Zelikow, and May, 335.
35 Freedman, 209–210.
36 Dobrynin, 87–88.