Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The Soviet foreign minister met with the American ambassador in Moscow to discuss the situation. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s younger brother, had a secret, late-night meeting with Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet intelligence officer, in Washington, D.C. The negotiations were successful. Sixteen hours after arriving at the border, the Soviet tanks turned around and left. The American tanks departed half an hour later.

Khrushchev had already backed away from his ultimatum that NATO troops must leave West Berlin by the end of the year — and withdrawing the tanks first seemed like another sign of weakness. Two days later, Khrushchev made a blunt, defiant statement. Above an island in the Arctic Sea, the Soviet Union detonated Tsar Bomba, “the King of Bombs” — the most powerful nuclear weapon ever built. It had a yield of 50 megatons. The mushroom cloud rose about forty miles into the sky, and the fireball could be seen more than six hundred miles from ground zero. The shock waves circled the earth three times with enough force to be detected in New Zealand.

The Berlin crisis eased somewhat. But Khrushchev did not let go of his central demands, Kennedy distrusted the Soviets, and the city still threatened to become a flash point where a third world war would begin. McGeorge Bundy later recalled, “There was hardly a week in which there were not nagging questions about what would happen if….” On November 6, a tear-gas battle erupted between East German and West German police officers. On November 20, a crowd of fifty thousand gathered to protest the wall, and the demonstration ended in chaos, with about a thousand people battling police. And on November 24, just before dawn, SAC headquarters in Omaha lost contact with the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar in Thule, Greenland. A SAC controller picked up the phone and called NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs to find out what was wrong. The line was dead.

The odds of a communications breakdown simultaneously extending east and west from Omaha seemed low. SAC’s entire alert force was ordered to prepare for takeoff. At air bases worldwide, Klaxons sounded and pilots climbed into hundreds of planes. A few minutes later the order was rescinded. The B-52 circling Thule had made contact with the base. It had not been destroyed by the Soviets. An investigation subsequently found that the failure of a single AT&T switch in Black Forest, Colorado, had shut down all the ballistic missile early warning circuits, voice communications between the SAC and NORAD command posts, and the “hot line” linking SAC’s commander to NORAD headquarters. AT&T had neglected to provide redundant circuits for some of the nation’s most important communications links, despite assurances that it had done so. When news of the “Black Forest incident” leaked, Radio Moscow claimed the false alarm was proof that “any maniac at a US military base can, in a panic, easily throw mankind into the abyss of a nuclear war.”

THE BERLIN CRISIS LED Secretary of Defense McNamara to believe, even more strongly, that NATO’s reliance on tactical nuclear weapons increased the threat of a nuclear holocaust. During the first week of May 1962, at a meeting of NATO ministers in Athens, Greece, McNamara urged America’s European allies to spend more money on their own defense. Despite having a larger population than the Soviet Union and much larger economies, the European members of NATO refused to pay for conventional forces that could stop the Red Army. In his top secret speech, McNamara warned that NATO should never be forced to choose between suffering a military defeat or starting a nuclear war. “Highly dispersed nuclear weapons in the hands of troops would be difficult to control centrally,” he said. “Accidents and unauthorized acts could well occur on both sides.”

In addition to greater spending on conventional weapons, McNamara proposed a new nuclear strategy. Later known as “no cities,” it was similar to Kaysen’s plan, influenced by RAND — and like Henry Kissinger’s early work, hopeful that a nuclear war could be fought humanely. Its goal was to save the lives of civilians. “Our best hope lies in conducting a centrally controlled campaign against all of the enemy’s vital nuclear capabilities,” McNamara said. Attacking only military targets would give the Soviets a strong incentive to do the same. The centralized control of nuclear weapons was essential for this strategy — and the control would ultimately lie with the president of the United States. McNamara’s remarks were partly aimed at the French, who planned to keep their nuclear weapons outside of NATO’s command structure. By acting alone during a conflict with the Soviet Union, France could threaten the survival of everyone else. The independent actions of one country, McNamara explained, could “lead to the destruction of our hostages — the Soviet cities — just at a time at which our strategy of coercing the Soviets into stopping their aggression was on the verge of success.” Without the centralized command and control of nuclear weapons, NATO might suffer “the catastrophe which we most urgently wish to avoid.”

The following month, McNamara repeated many of these themes during a commencement speech at the University of Michigan, in his hometown of Ann Arbor. The speech was poorly received. McNamara’s plan to save civilian lives — without the classified information that supported its central argument — sounded like a boast that the United States could fight and win a nuclear war. Great Britain and France publicly repudiated the strategy. In their view the threat of total annihilation was a better deterrent than a more limited and more expensive form of warfare, fought with conventional weapons. And America’s NATO allies suspected that a “no cities” approach would primarily spare the cities of the United States. Nikita Khrushchev didn’t like the speech, either. “Not targeting cities — how aggressive!” Khrushchev told the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He suggested that McNamara’s remarks had a sinister aim: “To get the population used to the idea that nuclear war will take place.”

Although the United States and the Soviet Union publicly supported peace, diplomacy, and a settlement of their differences through negotiation, both countries behaved less nobly in secret. During the summer of 1962, the Kennedy administration was trying to overthrow the government of Cuba and assassinate its leader, Fidel Castro. Robert Kennedy guided the CIA’s covert program Operation Mongoose enlisting help from Cuban exiles and the Cosa Nostra. Robert McNamara supervised the planning for a full-scale invasion of the island, should Operation Mongoose succeed. Meanwhile, Khrushchev approved a KGB plan to destabilize and overthrow the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. More important, he decided to turn Cuba into a military outpost of the Soviet Union, armed with nuclear weapons.

If Khrushchev’s scheme worked, by the end of 1962, the Soviets would have twenty-four medium-range ballistic missiles, sixteen intermediate-range ballistic missiles, forty-two bombers, a fighter wing, a couple of tank battalions, antiaircraft missiles, and about 50,000 personnel in Cuba. The medium-range missiles would be able to strike targets as far north as Washington, D.C.; the intermediate-range, to destroy SAC bases in the West and the Midwest. The Cuban deployment would triple the number of Soviet land-based missiles that could hit the United States. Throughout the summer, Soviet merchant ships secretly transported the weapons to Cuba, hidden belowdecks, along with troops dressed in civilian clothes. Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them — if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or he would keep them in Cuba, just a hundred miles from Florida, and build a naval base on the island for ballistic-missile submarines.