Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

The Mars probe was off, explained Anatoly Kirillov, commander of the Baikonur launch site, when Chertok finally caught up with him. Orders had arrived from Moscow to get a pair or reserve Semyorka s ready for launch. One missile had already been checked out, fueled, and mated with its warhead. It was standing on a launch pad at the other end of the cosmodrome. The second Semyorka would be ready to go as soon as the warhead was delivered from the special storage depot. When that happened, all civilian personnel would be “sent away,” in case the rocket exploded on takeoff, as had happened before.

Chertok did a quick mental calculation. A 2.8-megaton weapon would destroy everything within a seven-mile radius of the blast, and spew radiation over a much larger area. There was nowhere safe to go near Baikonur. He had known Kirillov for many years and got on well with him, but he was disturbed by what was happening. He wanted to call Moscow and speak to someone in the leadership, even Khrushchev personally. The launch site director brushed him aside. It was impossible to reach Moscow on a regular phone. All communication lines were reserved for the military, in case the order came to go to war.

The rocket designer found himself wondering if his friend was ready to push the button, if ordered by Moscow. A nuclear conflict was going to be very different from the last war in which they had both fought.

“We aren’t talking just about the death of a hundred thousand people from a specific nuclear warhead. This could be the beginning of the end for the entire human race. It’s not the same as in the war, when you were commanding a battery and someone shouted ‘Fire.’”

Kirillov thought about this for a moment.

“I am a soldier and I will fulfill my orders, just as I did at the front,” he replied eventually. “Somewhere or other, there is another missile officer, not called Kirillov, but something like Smith, who is waiting for an order to attack Moscow or this very cosmodrome. So there is no need to poison my soul.”

The Baikonur cosmodrome was just one island in a vast nuclear archipelago stretching across the Soviet Union. In the seventeen years since America exploded the world’s first atomic bomb, the Soviets had made a frantic effort to catch up. Matching the United States nuclear weapon for nuclear weapon and missile for missile was the supreme national priority. The nuclear bomb, plus the ability to deliver it, was both the symbol and guarantor of the Soviet Union’s superpower status. Everything else—the country’s economic well-being, political freedoms, even the promised Communist future—took second place to the nuclear competition with the rival superpower.

In their pursuit of nuclear equality, Stalin and his successors had transformed large parts of the country into a military-industrial wasteland. The Soviet Union was dotted with top secret nuclear installations, from the uranium mines of Siberia to the nuclear testing grounds of Russia and Kazakhstan to the rocket factories of Ukraine and the Urals. But despite some impressive achievements, the Communist superpower remained a long way behind the capitalist superpower in both the number and the quality of deliverable nuclear weapons.

By Pentagon calculations, the Soviet Union possessed between 86 and 110 long-range ballistic missiles in October 1962, compared to 240 on the American side; in fact, the real figure on the Soviet side was 42. Six of these missiles were antiquated Semyorka s, which were so large and unwieldy that they had little military utility. Soaring 110 feet into the air, the R-7 relied on unstable liquid propellants. It took twenty hours to prepare for launch and could not be kept on alert for more than a day. Too bulky to be stored in underground silos, the Semyorka s were an easy target for an American attack.

The most effective long-range Soviet missile was the R-16, which used storable propellants. The slim, two-stage missile was designed by Mikhail Yangel, the inventor of the medium-range R-12 missile that had made its appearance in Cuba. Never has a missile system had a less auspicious beginning. The first R-16 to be tested, in October 1960, blew up on the launch pad at Baikonur, killing 126 engineers, scientists, and military leaders who had come to witness Yangel’s moment of triumph over his rival, Sergei Korolev. The victims included the chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin. But the disaster was hushed up and the problems ironed out. The Soviet Union began to mass-produce the R-16 two years later. A total of thirty-six had been deployed by the time of the missile crisis and were on fifteen-minute alert. All but ten of these missiles were based in silos.

The “missile gap” against which Kennedy had campaigned during the 1960 presidential election did indeed exist. But it was in America’s favor, not Russia’s—and it was even wider than American experts believed.

In Havana, it was still the middle of the night. Soviet generals and Cuban comandantes were at their command posts waiting for news of a U.S. airborne landing, which was expected from hour to hour. At Soviet military headquarters in El Chico, officers sat around talking, smoking cigarettes, and exchanging the occasional mordant joke. A report arrived after midnight that U.S. naval ships had been sighted east of Havana. Machine guns were distributed, but it was a false alarm. In the heavy autumn mist, a lookout mistook some Cuban fishing boats for an American invading force.

Fidel Castro was also wide awake, as was usual for him at this hour in the morning. As the minutes ticked by, he became ever more pessimistic about the chances of avoiding an American invasion. The historical analogy that troubled him most was Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Stalin had received numerous intelligence reports about a Nazi invasion, but he ignored them all. Fearing a provocation to trap him into an unwanted war, he refused to mobilize the Soviet armed forces until it was too late. Such shortsightedness had “cost the Soviets millions of men, almost all their air force, their mechanized units, enormous retreats.” The Nazis reached the gates of Moscow and Leningrad. The homeland of world socialism was almost wiped out. Analyzing the state of the world that Saturday morning, Castro worried that “history would repeat itself.” He was determined to ensure that Khrushchev did not make the same mistake as Stalin. He would send a personal message to Khrushchev to alert him to the danger and encourage him to stand firm. At 2:00 a.m., he had President Dorticos telephone Ambassador Alekseev to tell him he was coming over for “an important meeting.”

The Soviet Embassy was located in the Vedado section of Havana, a leafy enclave of turn-of-the century mansions, Art Nouveau villas, and Art Deco apartment buildings expropriated from the Cuban elite. The neoclassical two-story mansion on the corner of B and 13th streets that now housed the embassy had previously belonged to a family of sugar barons who left Cuba shortly after the revolution. In addition to their offices, the ambassador and several of his top assistants also had apartments in the complex. Vedado was particularly magical at night when the dim streetlights cast long shadows through vine-covered porticoes and the scent of almond trees hung in the air.

The Cuban leader’s jeep pulled into the sweeping driveway of the embassy, behind wrought-iron gates covered in wisteria. Castro asked the ambassador to take him to the bomb shelter beneath the embassy, saying he feared an imminent American air strike, even an invasion. He paced up and down, waving his long, bony hands in the air. A yanqui attack was “inevitable,” he insisted. “The chances of it not happening are five in one hundred.” He was calculating the odds, just like JFK.