Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

After initially taking the Tatyanas to one of Batista’s seaside estates, Anastasiev had eventually persuaded his superiors to move them to a more secure location. The new storage place consisted of a tunnel in the nearby mountains protected by some barbed wire and a fence. The security arrangements were rudimentary, but they were an improvement on the padlocked shed by the sea. Equally important, it was easier to control temperature and humidity levels inside the mountain caves. Anastasiev and his men used rounded metal bars to roll the crates containing the 12-kiloton bombs into the tunnel.

Having found a place to store his bombs, Anastasiev went looking for an airfield for the IL-28s. According to the original Defense Ministry plan, they were meant to be based at Santa Clara, in the center of the island. But the Santa Clara field turned out to be totally unsuited to the storage of nuclear weapons. After flying around Cuba for a couple of days, Anastasiev finally settled on the airfield at Holguin. There were earthen bunkers next to the field that could be camouflaged and hermetically sealed. When the IL-28s were assembled, they could be wheeled into the bunkers, along with the Tatyanas.

The next challenge was to transport the Tatyanas from their storage point in western Cuba to Holguin, a journey of five hundred miles. This was the problem that Anastasiev was grappling with on Black Saturday.

If Russian generals had tactical nuclear weapons, American generals wanted them too. The discovery of the Ilyushin light bombers and the nuclear-capable FROG missiles had touched off a new arms race. Even though they had no firm evidence that nuclear warheads had arrived in Cuba, U.S. commanders felt they had to plan for all eventualities. While the rest of the country was focused on the medium-range R-12 missiles, the generals were preparing for a tactical nuclear war, to be fought in and around Cuba.

On Saturday morning, the Joint Chiefs of Staff received a top secret message from the commander in chief of the North American Defense Command describing the threat from the Ilyushins. General John Gerhart was responsible for preventing Soviet bombers from attacking Florida from Cuba. He had deployed HAWK missile batteries along the Florida Keys, but had been forbidden to load the missiles with nuclear warheads. He wanted the policy reversed.

“In the event of an IL-28 raid from Cuba which penetrates U.S. air space, I consider it imperative to use weapons with a maximum kill capability,” Gerhart cabled the Pentagon. He asked for clarification of his authority to “declare Cuban/Sino-Soviet tactical aircraft hostile” and advance permission “to use nuclear weapons” against incoming Soviet bombers. The Joint Chiefs assured him that nuclear weapons could be used to destroy hostile aircraft if a “pattern of actions” elsewhere in the air defense system indicated a general “Cuban and Sino-Soviet attack.” If the Cubans attacked by themselves, nonnuclear weapons should be used.

The commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Robert Dennison, was worried about the short-range FROG missiles first discovered on October 25 during a low-level reconnaissance flight. If equipped with nuclear warheads, the FROGs could decimate the invading force now heading for Cuba aboard his warships. The admiral proposed equipping “U.S. air and ground forces earmarked for Cuban operations” with “an atomic delivery capability.”

The appearance of the FROGs had also alarmed Rear Admiral Edward J. O’Donnell, commander of the Guantanamo Naval Base. He wanted authority to declare “any movement of FROG missiles” into positions threatening the base an “offensive act unacceptable to the United States.” The admiral was blissfully unaware of the much more immediate threat from nuclear-armed FKR cruise missiles deployed within a fifteen-mile radius of GITMO.

After earlier discounting the threat from Soviet battlefield nukes, the Joint Chiefs had to rewrite the war plan. They asked for casualty estimates that took into consideration “possibility of enemy use of tactical nuclear weapons.” The Cuba invasion force would be supplied with nuclear-capable Honest John rockets, the American equivalent of the Soviet FROG, or Luna. Even though McNamara refused to authorize the deployment of tactical nuclear warheads with the Honest Johns, they could have been delivered very quickly from depots in Florida.

Dozens of Navy and Air Force strike aircraft were already “on call” to attack targets in Cuba with tactical nuclear weapons if hostilities escalated to that level. Two aircraft carriers, the Independence and the Enterprise, were stationed off Jamaica, within 150 miles of Guantanamo Bay. Some forty tactical nuclear bombs were aboard each carrier, ready to load onto A4D Skyhawks. The nuclear cores for the bombs were stored separately on nearby cruisers, a short helicopter ride away. Other nuclear-armed jets belonging to the Tactical Air Command were on fifteen-minute alert at airfields in southern Florida. If all else failed, the Strategic Air Command was ready to obliterate Cuba with 20-megaton weapons dropped from B-47 Stratojets.

The way the Pentagon saw it, these plans were necessary to counter the Soviet reliance on battlefield nuclear weapons. Before becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Maxwell Taylor had made a detailed study of Soviet military doctrine. He was alarmed to discover that the standard Soviet plan of attack called for an army group to be equipped with “250 to 300 nuclear weapons.” The general had also received reports of a military exercise in the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe in July 1961 during which Soviet troops planned to use as many as seventy-five tactical nuclear weapons in a “surprise first strike” against NATO. Taylor warned of the “emotional resistance in some quarters” against tactical nuclear weapons. In his view, the real issue was not whether to develop such weapons, but how to make them sufficiently small and flexible to permit “a separate stage in escalation short of the use of weapons of mass destruction.”

Other Kennedy advisers believed that a limited nuclear war was a contradiction in terms. They recalled an exchange with Dean Acheson soon after the discovery of Soviet missiles on Cuba. Living up to his hard-line reputation, Acheson advocated an immediate air strike against the missile sites. Someone asked how the Soviets would react to such a strike.

“I know the Soviet Union very well,” the former secretary of state replied with his trademark confidence. “They will knock out our missiles in Turkey.”

“Well, then what do we do?” someone else asked.

“I believe under our NATO treaty, with which I was associated, we would be required to respond by knocking out a missile base inside the Soviet Union.”

“Then what would they do?”

By now, Acheson was becoming a little less sure of himself.

“Well,” he said with some irritation. “That’s when we hope that cooler heads will prevail, and they’ll stop and talk.”

Other ExComm members felt a “real chill” descend on the room as they listened to the legendary “wise man” of the Truman era. Unwittingly, Acheson had laid bare a somber Cold War truth: it was impossible to know where a “limited” nuclear war would end.

At the same time that U.S. generals were fretting over the threat posed by the IL-28s in Cuba, they were lobbying the White House for an end to restrictions on loading high-yield thermonuclear bombs onto Quick Reaction Alert aircraft in Europe. On Saturday morning, they finally achieved their goal.

In some ways, the F-100 Super Sabre fighter-bombers were analogous to the Ilyushins. They were deployed in front-line NATO countries like Turkey, and could bomb targets inside the Soviet Union with little warning. On the other hand, they were designed to carry much more powerful bombs than the IL-28s and were much faster. A two-stage thermonuclear bomb loaded onto a Super Sabre had several hundred times the destructive power of the relatively crude atomic bombs carried by the Ilyushins. Unlike the three-seater Ilyushins, the F-100s were single-seater aircraft. The bombs were under the physical control of a lone pilot, a violation of the traditional “buddy system.”