Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

One quarter of a million American troops prepared for an invasion of Cuba. Secretary of Defense McNamara worried that, with thousands of nuclear weapons on high alert, something could go wrong. President Kennedy had recently approved the installation of permissive action links. But his executive order applied only to weapons in the NATO atomic stockpile — and none of the locks had been installed yet. U.S. Air Force units in Europe were kept at DEFCON 5, and the readiness of NATO forces wasn’t increased. Any sign of a mobilization in Europe might alarm the Soviets, creating another potential trigger for nuclear war. McNamara also worried that if the United States attacked the Soviet missiles in Cuba, the Soviet Union might retaliate by attacking the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. The American custodians of the Jupiters were ordered to render the missiles inoperable, somehow, if Turkish officers tried to launch them without Kennedy’s approval.

The lack of direct, secure communications between the White House and the Kremlin, the distrust that Kennedy felt toward the Soviet leader, and Khrushchev’s impulsive, unpredictable behavior complicated efforts to end the crisis peacefully. Khrushchev felt relieved, after hearing Kennedy’s speech, that the president hadn’t announced an invasion of Cuba. Well aware that the Soviet Union’s strategic forces were vastly inferior to those of the United States, Khrushchev had no desire to start a nuclear war. He did, however, want to test Kennedy’s mettle and see how much the Soviets could gain from the crisis. Khrushchev secretly ordered his ships loaded with missiles not to violate the quarantine. But in private letters to Kennedy, he vowed that the ships would never turn around, denied that offensive weapons had been placed in Cuba, and denounced the quarantine as “an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward… a world nuclear-missile war.”

Bertrand Russell agreed with the Soviet leader and sent President Kennedy a well-publicized telegram. “Your action desperate,” it said. “Threat to human survival. No conceivable justification. Civilized man condemns it…. End this madness.” Khrushchev’s first public statement on the missile crisis was a cordial reply to the British philosopher, proposing a summit meeting. While the Kennedy administration anxiously wondered if the Soviets would back down, Khrushchev maintained a defiant facade. And then on October 26, persuaded by faulty intelligence that an American attack on Cuba was about to begin, he wrote another letter to Kennedy, offering a deal: the Soviet Union would remove the missiles from Cuba, if the United States promised never to invade Cuba.

Khrushchev’s letter arrived at the American embassy in Moscow around five o’clock in the evening, which was ten in the morning, Eastern Standard Time. It took almost eleven hours for the letter to be fully transmitted by cable to the State Department in Washington, D.C. Kennedy and his advisers were encouraged by its conciliatory tone and decided to accept the deal — but went to bed without replying. Seven more hours passed, and Khrushchev started to feel confident that the United States wasn’t about to attack Cuba, after all. He wrote another letter to Kennedy, adding a new demand: the missiles in Cuba would be removed, if the United States removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Instead of being delivered to the American embassy, this letter was broadcast, for the world to hear, on Radio Moscow.

On the morning of October 27, as President Kennedy was drafting a reply to Khrushchev’s first proposal, the White House learned about his second one. Kennedy and his advisers struggled to understand what was happening in the Kremlin. Conflicting messages were now coming not only from Khrushchev, but from various diplomats, journalists, and Soviet intelligence agents who were secretly meeting with members of the administration. Convinced that Khrushchev was being duplicitous, McNamara now pushed for a limited air strike to destroy the missiles. General Maxwell Taylor, now head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended a large-scale attack. When an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba, killing the pilot, the pressure on Kennedy to launch an air strike increased enormously. A nuclear war with the Soviet Union seemed possible. “As I left the White House… on that beautiful fall evening,” McNamara later recalled, “I feared I might never live to see another Saturday night.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis ended amid the same sort of confusion and miscommunication that had plagued much of its thirteen days. President Kennedy sent the Kremlin a cable accepting the terms of Khrushchev’s first offer, never acknowledging that a second demand had been made. But Kennedy also instructed his brother to meet privately with Ambassador Dobrynin and agree to the demands made in Khrushchev’s second letter — so long as the promise to remove the Jupiters from Turkey was never made public. Giving up dangerous and obsolete American missiles to avert a nuclear holocaust seemed like a good idea. Only a handful of Kennedy’s close advisers were told about this secret agreement.

Meanwhile, at the Kremlin, Khrushchev suddenly became afraid once again that the United States was about to attack Cuba. He decided to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba — without insisting upon the removal of the Jupiters from Turkey. Before he had a chance to transmit his decision to the Soviet embassy in Washington, word arrived from Dobrynin about Kennedy’s secret promise. Khrushchev was delighted by the president’s unexpected — and unnecessary — concession. But time seemed to be running out, and an American attack might still be pending. Instead of accepting the deal through a diplomatic cable, Khrushchev’s decision to remove the missiles from Cuba was immediately broadcast on Radio Moscow. No mention was made of the American vow to remove its missiles from Turkey.

Both leaders had feared that any military action would quickly escalate to a nuclear exchange. They had good reason to think so. Although Khrushchev never planned to move against Berlin during the crisis, the Joint Chiefs had greatly underestimated the strength of the Soviet military force based in Cuba. In addition to strategic weapons, the Soviet Union had almost one hundred tactical nuclear weapons on the island that would have been used by local commanders to repel an American attack. Some were as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Had the likely targets of those weapons — the American fleet offshore and the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo — been destroyed, an all-out nuclear war would have been hard to avoid.

Pushed to the brink, Kennedy and Khrushchev chose to back down. But Kennedy emerged from the crisis looking much tougher — his concession to the Soviets not only remained secret but was vehemently denied. LeMay, among others, suspected that some sort of deal had been struck. Asked at a Senate hearing whether the Jupiters in Turkey had been traded for the missiles in Cuba, McNamara replied, “Absolutely not… the Soviet Government did raise the issue… [but the] President absolutely refused even to discuss it.” Secretary of State Rusk repeated the lie. In order to deflect attention from the charge, members of the administration told friendly journalists, off the record, that Adlai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the United Nations, had urged Kennedy to trade NATO missiles in Turkey, Italy, and Great Britain for the missiles in Cuba, but the president had refused — another lie. A reference to the secret deal was later excised from Robert Kennedy’s diary after his death. And a virile myth was promoted by the administration: when the leaders of the two superpowers stood eye to eye, threatening to fight over Cuba, Khrushchev was the one who blinked.

Within the following year, President Kennedy gave a speech at American University that called for a relaxation of the Cold War and “genuine peace” with the Soviets. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting nuclear detonations in the atmosphere, the ocean, and outer space. And a hot line was finally created to link the Kremlin and the Pentagon, with additional terminals at the White House and the headquarters of the Communist Party in Moscow. The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle. “We at the embassy could only pray,” Ambassador Dobrynin recalled, “that he would take it to the Western Union office without delay and not stop to chat on the way with some girl!”