Cuban Missile Crisis
“In reading the history of past wars and how they began, we cannot help but be impressed how frequently the failure of communication, misunderstanding and mutual irritation have played an important role in the events leading up to fateful decisions for war.” - John F. Kennedy, July 17, 1962
The opening quote originates from a correspondence of US President John F. Kennedy with the Soviet Union’s Premier Nikita Khrushchev on the conflict over the status of West Berlin. However, the quote should also prove relevant for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was already emerging. During this crisis, the correct interpretation of the opponents’ messages and signals played a decisive role, and it is now known that there were various misunderstandings on both sides, some of which brought the world dangerously close to nuclear war.
The Sham Discussion About West Berlin
In 1958 and the following years, the USA and the Soviet Union were in dispute over the status of West Berlin. Around this time, thousands of East German citizens were fleeing to West Germany every month via West Berlin due to political repression and economic shortages. To solve this problem, during his first meeting with Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961, Khrushchev repeated his demand that the allies conclude a comprehensive peace treaty with Germany and declare West Berlin a free city. When Kennedy rejected the proposal because of the USA’s commitments to its Western allies, Khrushchev threatened to conclude a separate peace treaty with East Germany which would have jeopardized the USA’s access to West Berlin. The two leaders left Vienna without having reached an agreement, and Kennedy was concerned that the dispute over Berlin could escalate to a military exchange of blows between the two nuclear powers.
In a letter arriving at the White House on July 5, 1962, Khrushchev once more repeated his demand that the allies should withdraw their troops from West Berlin. In retrospect, however, it seems likely that Khrushchev’s primary intention was to divert attention from another Soviet plan. In June 1962, the Presidium of the Central Committee had approved a secret operation, named after the Siberian river “Anadyr” to hide its destination: the deployment of missiles and nuclear warheads to Cuba capable to reach the territory of the USA. By that time the conflict about the status of West Berlin had largely lost its importance for Khrushchev since the emigration movement had been stopped by the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. From then on, for Khrushchev, the inflated dispute over the status of West Berlin mainly served as a bargaining chip and a diversion tactic.
The sham discussion over West Berlin allowed the Soviet Union to ship short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missiles, about 160 nuclear weapons of various kinds, and 43,000 servicemen to Cuba until October 1962. The equipment and troops, carefully covered by a layer of civilian equipment or hidden in the tween decks, remained concealed from US reconnaissance flights. Ignoring initial warnings from Cuban exiles, the presidential administration and most CIA officials assumed that the Soviet activities were of defensive nature, even when a surface-to-air missile was detected on the island by one of those flights in the end of August 1962. The White House confined itself to issuing a statement on September 4 that is widely understood as a red line to Moscow that the deployment of offensive missiles in Cuba would not be accepted. In his reply to the statement, Khrushchev followed the proven formula: “[The] Soviet Union has such powerful rockets to carry [its] nuclear warheads, that there is no need to search for sites […] beyond [its] boundaries”, he bluffed. “After the [US congressional] elections […] it would be necessary […] to continue the dialogue [on West Berlin]”, the letter concluded in a further attempt to draw away attention from Cuba. And the trick worked again: US reconnaissance flights over the territory of the Soviet Union had led to international tensions and it was decided to limit overflights of Cuba so as not to further complicate negotiations over West Berlin. In consequence of this decision, no such flights were conducted from September 6 to October 13.
The Misunderstood Motives of the Missile Deployment
With the missile deployment in Cuba, Khrushchev sought to solve two problems. First, he was concerned about US interference in Cuba. Khrushchev was impressed by the success of the Cuban revolution in 1959 and was hoping that it could serve as a blueprint for further Latin-American countries, helping to extend the Soviet’s Union influence in the region. He had been alarmed when in the CIA-organized Bay of Pigs invasion a group of Cuban exiles attempted to overthrow Castro in August 1961, a project Kennedy had inherited from his predecessor Eisenhower. The invasion had failed disastrously, brought the newly elected president a heavy defeat, and led to a rapprochement between the Cuban leadership and the Soviet Union – Castro now unequivocally declared the Cuban revolution to be socialist in nature. However, Khrushchev now feared that the USA was forging another invasion plan and would make a second, more successful attempt.
Second, around 1960, the US intelligence services had discovered that the Soviet Union’s alleged superiority in the construction of intercontinental missiles was a bluff. In October 1957, the launch of the Sputnik satellite had indicated to the world that the Soviet Union was leading the race for producing intercontinental missiles. During the following years, Khrushchev had boasted that his country produced “missiles like sausages” and was able to “hit a fly in the outer space”. The truth, however, was that the Soviet Union’s capability to reach US territory with its missiles was very limited due to difficulties in the production of intercontinental missiles. Khrushchev’s bluff initially worked and fueled US concerns about a “missile gap” in favor of the Soviet Union – Kennedy made the supposed gap a central topic of his election campaign in 1961. However, US reconnaissance flights brought down Khrushchev’s façade, and in October 1961 the Kennedy administration made public that the Soviet arsenal of intercontinental missiles had been overestimated.
The deployment of missiles in Cuba seemed to solve both problems at once. It would deter the USA from invading Cuba and compensate for the shortage of intercontinental missiles. From a missile base in Cuba, it was possible to reach almost the entire territory of the USA with medium- and intermediate-range missiles, which the Soviet Union had in abundance. Khrushchev expected the USA would sit still when they learned about the deployment. For him, the Bay of Pig fiasco and the lacking resistance towards the building of the Berlin Wall were indications that Kennedy was a weak opponent. Moreover, from Khrushchev’s point of view, the deployment of nuclear missiles would merely restore the nuclear balance. Under Eisenhower, medium and intermediate-range missiles had been stationed in Europe and Turkey, and from Khrushchev’s perspective, deploying missiles of the same type in Cuba would mean nothing other than to “pay [the USA] back in their own coin and give [it] a taste of [its] own medicine”.
Khrushchev’s expectations regarding the consequences of his maneuver soon proved wrong. When Kennedy learned on October 16, 1962, that surface-to-surface missiles had been discovered on Cuba by a reconnaissance flight, he felt betrayed. The Executive Committee of the National Security Council (“ExCom”) which was convened to advise the President on the handling of the crisis, considered three possible responses: air strikes on the missile sites/military infrastructure, an invasion of the island, and a naval blockade with the purpose to stimulate a negotiated settlement. The scenario Khrushchev had envisioned, the toleration of the missile deployment, was at no time up for debate. After the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the building of the Berlin Wall, accepting the missile deployment would have meant a political defeat for the President and would have severely damaged his reputation. This was all the more true given that Kennedy had defined a red line as late as in September 1962, which the missile deployment clearly crossed. Arguably, Khrushchev had underestimated that the deployment was not only observed by the Kennedy administration but also by the US electorate.
In the series of ExCom meetings in which the three options were discussed, Kennedy and his advisors had a hard time to interpret Khrushchev’s message behind the missile deployment. It is speculated that they did not recognize that the prevention of an invasion of Cuba was a central motive of Khrushchev, or at least underestimated the importance of this motive. It occurred in one of the first meetings that Khrushchev’s move was compared with the deployment of US missiles in Europe and Turkey under the Eisenhower administration. However, in this initial state of the crisis Kennedy rejected the interpretation of the Cuban missiles as a mere quid pro quo, and arguably perceived Khrushchev’s move more hostile than intended.
In the first ExCom meetings, Kennedy and his advisors tended towards the option of an air attack or an invasion. Many years later it turned out that this would probably have led to a nuclear exchange. Unbeknownst to the President and his advisors, some missiles had been already operational, the first nuclear warheads had been delivered, and tactical nuclear weapons that had been deployed on the island were suited to defend the island against invaders. One can speculate that a proper understanding of Khrushchev’s motive to prevent an invasion may have raised concerns about the presence of such tactical weapons. In later meetings, awareness of the risks associated with a purely military response increased, and Kennedy ultimately decided in favor of the naval blockade which, however, was disguised as “quarantine”, since a blockade constitutes an act of war under international law.
The “quarantine” was announced on October 22, 1962, and led to the desired negotiations when both leaders realized that they increasingly lost control of the crisis (on the 24th, the defense readiness condition for the US Strategic Air Command had been raised to “DEFCON 2” without informing the President of this important step beforehand; on the 27th, a US reconnaissance flight over Cuba had been shot down with a Soviet surface-to-air missile without prior authorization from Moscow). Via various channels – written letters, diplomatic exchanges, and public radio broadcasts – Kennedy and Khrushchev bargained about the dismantling of the missiles in Cuba.
On October 28, they finally agreed publicly that the Soviet Union would dismantle the missiles in Cuba and that the USA would refrain from further invasion attempts in return. In a secret side agreement only known to the two leaders and their closest advisors, Kennedy in addition committed himself to timely withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey. By keeping the second part of the agreement secret, tensions with the USA’s NATO partners could be avoided, and Kennedy was able to present himself to the US public as a tough negotiating partner. Through mutual concessions both leaders could reach a deal that addresses both of Khrushchev’s concerns – prevention of an invasion and restoration of the nuclear balance. Both motives arguably had been underestimated by the US side in the first days of the crisis.
The Misunderstood Lesson of the Crisis
As a result of the secrecy surrounding the agreement on the dismantling of the US missiles, the Cuban Missile Crisis was long misunderstood as evidence that a tough negotiating line could prevail, and it is speculated that this supposed lesson from the crisis in some instances misled Kennedy’s successors in the handling of foreign policy crises. After the secret side agreement was leaked to the public and secret tape recordings of the ExCom meetings (made on behalf of the President) were released in the decades after the crisis, it seems that Kennedy contributed to the peaceful settlement of the crisis not through intransigent negotiation but through a very different leadership quality: his awareness of possible misunderstandings, mirrored in the opening quote, and his efforts to understand the motives of the other side, reflected in the tape recordings.
Misunderstanding on Board of the Soviet Submarine B-59
Many years after the crisis, when the military officers were allowed to speak about the events publicly, it emerged that another misunderstanding had occurred on board of the Soviet submarine B-59 on October 27, 1962, the clarification of which was of crucial importance for a peaceful outcome of the conflict. The US Navy had tracked down the submarine and – without knowing that the boat was armed with a nuclear torpedo – dropped harmless depth charges and grenades on the boat to signal that it should surface. Valentin G. Savitsky, the captain of the submarine, mistook the measure for an attack and was close to initiating the launch of the torpedo, which was prevented by commander Vasily A. Arkhipov who clarified the misunderstanding at the last moment. If the torpedo had been launched, the crisis would probably have turned into a serious nuclear exchange before Kennedy and Khrushchev could have reached an agreement.
Author: Timm Dusemund
Sources:
Fisher, Max, The Cuban Missile Misunderstanding: How cultural misreadings almost led to global annihilation, October 10, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/10/16/the-cuban-missile-misunderstanding-how-cultural-misreadings-almost-led-to-global-annihilation/
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Kennedy, John F., Letter from President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev, July 17, 1962, in: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, No. 51, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v06/d51
Khrushchev, Nikita, Message from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy (undated), in: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, No. 49, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v06/d49
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