Cuban Missile Crisis

Cuban Missile Crisis (1962–63).On 15 October, 1962, U.S. intelligence discovered Soviet strategic nuclear missile bases under construction in Cuba, leading to the most dramatic and dangerous crisis of the nuclear age. After a week of secret deliberation with a group of advisers (the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExComm), President John F. Kennedy demanded that the missiles be withdrawn and imposed a naval “quarantine” on shipments of “offensive” weapons to Cuba. Kennedy ordered a massive redeployment of U.S. forces to the Caribbean and placed the Strategic Air Command (SAC) on heightened alert.

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was furious at what he considered Kennedy's flagrant interference in Soviet‐Cuban affairs and his violation of freedom of navigation. But by the time the quarantine took effect on the morning of 24 October—after a unanimous endorsement by the Organization of American States—Khrushchev ordered Soviet ships not to challenge the blockade. For several days a settlement proved elusive and pressure built for more decisive action.

Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev wanted to risk nuclear war over the issue, and both became increasingly concerned that an accident or inadvertent military action might trigger escalation. An apparent break in the tension came on 26 October, when, in a rambling, emotional letter, Khrushchev offered to withdraw the missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. But in a second, tougher letter received the following morning, Khrushchev demanded that Kennedy withdraw analogous Jupiter missiles from Turkey (deployed under the aegis of NATO). Most of Kennedy's advisers argued strongly against this, on the ground that it would be interpreted by the Soviets as evidence of American weakness, and by NATO as betrayal of an ally. Kennedy decided to ignore Khrushchev's latest demand and accept his earlier offer.

As the ExComm deliberated on 27 October, word reached the White House that an American U‐2 reconnaissance plane had been shot down over Cuba, and that another had inadvertently strayed over Siberian air space, narrowly avoiding a similar fate. Kennedy resolved to bring the crisis to an end. Ignoring the ExComm's advice, he secretly agreed that the United States would withdraw its missiles from Turkey “within a few months” as a private quid pro quo to a UN‐verified withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Kennedy would also pledge publicly not to invade Cuba. Khrushchev accepted, and on 28 October the acute phase of the crisis came to an end.

Castro, feeling betrayed by his Soviet patron, refused to allow United Nations inspectors on Cuban soil to verify the withdrawal. But satisfied by aerial photography that the Soviets had withdrawn the weapons the United States considered offensive, Kennedy issued a proclamation terminating the quarantine on 21 November.

The causes of the crisis have long been debated. Khrushchev conceived the deployment in the late spring of 1962, after a hasty and uncritical decision‐making process involving only a small group of advisers. His goals appear to have been to deter a feared American invasion of Cuba; to redress the United States's massive superiority in strategic nuclear weapons, publicly revealed by the United States in October 1961, exploding the myth of a “missile gap” favoring the Soviet Union; and less importantly, to reciprocate the Jupiter deployment in Turkey.

The crisis provides textbook illustrations of important misperceptions and miscalculations. The U.S. government had calculated that the Soviet Union would not deploy nuclear weapons to Cuba because such a move would be inconsistent with past Soviet behavior, and because it seemed obvious that it would trigger a major confrontation. The Kennedy administration also failed to appreciate the extent to which the public demolition of the missile gap myth heightened the Soviets' sense of vulnerability; the strength of Soviet and Cuban fears of a U.S. invasion of Cuba (heightened by the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of the previous year); and the strength and sincerity of the Soviet view that if the United States had the right to deploy missiles in Turkey, the Soviet Union had the right to deploy missiles in Cuba. Consequently, Kennedy failed to deter the move in a timely fashion, issuing stern warnings against it only in September 1962, when the secret deployment was well underway.

Similarly, Khrushchev grossly overestimated the willingness of Kennedy and the American people to tolerate a major disruption in the hemispheric status quo; under estimated the likelihood that American intelligence would discover the missiles prematurely; and failed to appreciate that the secrecy and deception surrounding the deployment would inflame American passions. Consequently, Khrushchev underestimated the risks of the deployment.

Although scholars differ in their assessment, some consider the Cuban Missile Crisis a classic case of prudent crisis management. Kennedy and Khrushchev prevented the conflict from escalating while they sought and found a mutually satisfactory solution. They did so by avoiding irreversible steps, curtailing unwarranted bluster, and avoiding backing each other into a corner. Other scholars have criticized the handling of the crisis as being too timid or too reckless. Kennedy's critics on the right lament his unwillingness to seize the opportunity to destroy Castro; his critics on the other side of the spectrum condemn his willingness to risk nuclear war merely to delay the inevitable—the vulnerability of the American homeland to Soviet nuclear weapons. Hard‐liners in the Soviet military severely criticized Khrushchev for yielding to U.S. pressure. New information on intelligence failures, command and control breakdowns, and near accidents suggest that both leaders' fears of uncertainty, misperception, misjudgment, accident, and unauthorized military action provided a critical degree of caution and circumspection that prevented the crisis from escalating even further.

Paradoxically, the Cuban Missile Crisis led to an immediate improvement in U.S.‐Soviet relations. A series of agreements intended to restrain the arms race and improve crisis stability followed, most notably the Hot‐Line Agreement and Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Over the following decades, the superpowers crafted a modus vivendi designed to prevent a similar occurrence whereby the Soviet Union refrained from deploying military equipment with offensive capabilities to Cuba, and the United States acquiesced in a Communist‐controlled Cuba with close ties to the USSR.
[See also Arms Control and Disarmament; Cold War: External Course; Cold War: Changing Interpretations; U‐2 Spy Planes.]

Bibliography

Raymond L. Garthoff , Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1987; rev. ed. 1989.
James G. Blight,, Bruce J. Allyn,, and and David A. Welch , Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse, 1993.
James G. Blight, and and David A. Welch , Risking ‘The Destruction of Nations': Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis for New and Aspiring Nuclear States, Security Studies, 4 (Summer 1994), pp. 811–50.
Anatoli I. Gribkov, and and William Y. Smith , Operation Anadyr: U.S. and Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1994.
Richard Ned Lebow and and Janice Gross Stein , We All Lost the Cold War, 1994.
Ernest R. May and and Philip D. Zelikow , Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1997.
James G. Blight and David A. Welch, eds., Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1998.

David A. Welch