The Other Terrifying Lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis. By GEORGE PERKOVICH
The clock of the Cuban
crisis began ticking on October 16, 1962, when President Kennedy was notified
that U.S. spy planes had detected medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba which
could target much of the United States. On October 22, Kennedy announced this
discovery on television and said that he would impose a naval “quarantine” of
Cuba in two days. He warned that the launch of a single missile from the island
would cause “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” This meant a
massive United States nuclear attack on the USSR and its Eastern European
satellite countries.
Top military, intelligence, diplomatic and White House officials were now working around the clock to prepare options for the president. Kennedy secretly taperecorded the meetings in the Cabinet Room and the Oval Office. The tapes reveal military leaders pressing Kennedy to authorize an invasion, and Kennedy calmly asking questions and reminding everyone of the consequences of nuclear war.
U.S. Air Force and CIA
planes, meanwhile, were flying high and low over Cuba to glean intelligence on
the Soviet missile buildup and to prepare plans for attacking key installations
and invading the island. On Saturday, October 27, an American U-2 spy plane was
shot down over Cuba by a Soviet surface-to-air missile (SAM). “Well now, this
is much of an escalation by them, isn’t it?” Kennedy mused, wondering how to
explain why Krushchev would do this. “I don’t know how to interpret it,” Defense
Secretary McNamara answered.
That evening, the
president dispatched his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to meet
secretly with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the Justice Department.
Robert Kennedy issued a two-pronged ultimatum. The details would not be
publicly known for years.
The first demand was that the Soviets begin removing the missiles within 48 hours, or the United States would attack them. This part was soon publicly known. The second demand, which long remained secret, was that firing on American reconnaissance planes must end immediately. According to Daniel Ellsberg’s notes from the higher-than-top-secret 1964 study he conducted of the crisis for the Department of Defense, the attorney general declared, “If one more plane was shot at, we wouldn’t just attack the site that had fired at it; we would take out all the SAMs and antiaircraft and probably all the missiles. And that would almost surely be followed by an invasion.”
The first demand was that the Soviets begin removing the missiles within 48 hours, or the United States would attack them. This part was soon publicly known. The second demand, which long remained secret, was that firing on American reconnaissance planes must end immediately. According to Daniel Ellsberg’s notes from the higher-than-top-secret 1964 study he conducted of the crisis for the Department of Defense, the attorney general declared, “If one more plane was shot at, we wouldn’t just attack the site that had fired at it; we would take out all the SAMs and antiaircraft and probably all the missiles. And that would almost surely be followed by an invasion.”
As Ellsberg recounts
in his penetrating new memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a
Nuclear War Planner, American officials assumed that Khrushchev had
authorized the anti-air firing on U.S. planes. In fact, however, Cuban
personnel were conducting operations under the direction of Fidel Castro. On
Saturday morning, the 27th, Castro, feared an imminent invasion and
ordered his antiaircraft personnel to fire on American planes. Some Soviet
operators were carried away by the example of their Cuban comrades and ignored
orders not to fire without the expess authorization of the Soviet general in
charge in Cuba. This turned out to be the case with the local SAM commander,
who ordered the firing that downed the U-2 plane on Saturday, as Ellsberg
recounts, drawing on much later scholarly research.
In other words, the
Kennedy brothers had issued an ultimatum that other American officials (and the
public) did not know about, and which they could not confirm Khrushchev
received. The Kennedys did not consider that Castro and his forces were acting
independently, and therefore that their immediate ultimatum would not reach
this key actor, whether or not he would heed it. Signals were being sent
assuming they would be received and acted upon by the right actors, but
American leaders did not know that they did not know who the right actors were,
or that the messages were being received as intended.
These were not the
most dangerous unknown unknowns. For, until 1992, at a conference in Cuba of
American, Soviet and Cuban veterans of the crisis, no Americans knew that the
Soviets had deployed more than 100 “tactical” nuclear weapons in Cuba. These
smaller, battlefield-oriented nuclear weapons were to defend against an
expected marine invasion by the United States. Prior to October 22, local
Soviet officers were pre-authorized to use them against an American invasion
force. The Kennedy brothers and all their advisers had mistakenly thought that
the only nuclear-related forces on Cuba were medium and intermediate-range
missiles; intelligence assets were searching for those missiles’ corresponding
nuclear warheads, but had not been able to locate them. The deployment of
tactical nuclear weapons was unknown, and the delegation to use them utterly
unimaginable to American intelligence analysts and leaders.
Had another American
plane been hit, the United States probably would have responded first by
bombing missile installations. Depending on how Castro and his forces reacted
to that, and whether the Soviets would have begun removing the detected
missiles, Kennedy and the military planned that the United States would begin
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