Fifty years ago, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and the Soviet Union within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war. By the Pentagon’s estimates, had the crisis not been averted, more than 150 million people would have been killed and the strikes would have ushered in a “nuclear winter” in the Northern Hemisphere.
Here are three things that many Americans don’t know about what historians routinely call “the most dangerous moment in human history.”
1. The Cuban Missile Crisis almost caused a US military coup
The Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted to President Kennedy that a preemptive surgical strike of Cuba was the only way to respond to the Soviet Union’s placement of missiles in Cuba.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara instead proposed the idea of a US Navy “quarantine” of the island. (US officials avoided using the word “blockade” because it’s an overt act of war.)
The Joint Chiefs “were not at all happy with this,” says Robert Pastor, director of the Center for North American Studies at American University in Washington. These Pentagon officials “were prepared to go to war if the Soviets had not accepted the withdrawal of the missiles.”
US officials later learned that had the US military invaded Cuba, the Soviets were prepared to launch tactical nuclear weapons at the US, adds Dr. Pastor, who was national security adviser onLatin America in the late ’70s and McNamara’s son-in-law.
Robert Kennedy recalled in his memoirs that “the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were unanimous in railing for immediate military action” and “forcefully presented their view that the blockade would not be effective.”
Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay in particular “strongly argued with the president that a military attack was essential,” according to the Robert Kennedy memoirs.
The memoirs also say that the State Department proceeded with preparations “for a crash program on civil government in Cuba to be established after the invasion and occupation of the country” and that McNamara reported the military’s conclusion that “we should expect very heavy casualties in the invasion.”
President Kennedy ultimately decided on a blockade.
During negotiations with the Soviets, however, Robert Kennedy warned them that “there were indeed people in the Pentagon that would take action if Kennedy did not – that there could be a military coup,” Pastor says, adding that Robert Kennedy “wasn’t bluffing.”
After the crisis, McNamara went to the president and said, “We need to replace LeMay and [Chief of Naval Operations Adm. George Whelan] Anderson. They were both insubordinate, and we need to send a clear message on that,” Pastor says. “Bob McNamara told me this personally.”
The president told McNamara that for political reasons, he could only publicly discipline one person and told McNamara to choose. McNamara picked Anderson, whom Kennedy then nominated to be ambassador to Portugal.
Robert Kennedy for his part reflected on the president’s discussion with the US military leaders in his memoirs. “Like all meetings of this kind, certain statements were made as accepted truisms which I, at least, thought were of questionable validity. One member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, argued that we could use nuclear weapons, on the basis that our adversaries would use theirs against us in an attack,” he recalled.
“I thought, as I listened, of the many times that I had heard the military take positions which, if wrong, had the advantage that no one would be around at the end to know.”
2. Fidel Castro was pushing for nuclear annihilation of the US
This revelation came during a conference convened in 1989 with Soviets and Americans to learn the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was then that Sovietologist Bruce Allyn, former director of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School-Soviet Joint Study on Crisis Prevention, was confronted with a bombshell during a lunch break of Pepsi and Russian beet salad.
He was sitting with McNamara and Sergei Khrushchev, son of the Soviet leader, who had transcribed his father Nikita’s uncensored memoirs. Dr. Allyn, author of the new book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, “The Edge of Armageddon,” recalls that “Sergei leaned forward and quietly said, ‘I just wanted you to know that Castro wanted to launch a preemptive strike against the US.’ ”
The younger Khrushchev provided proof in his father’s uncensored memoirs. The plea for a nuclear strike came in a cable from Castro to Khrushchev, which warned that a US invasion ofCuba was imminent and urged Soviets to fire their nuclear missiles preemptively at the US.
Castro wrote: “If [the imperialists] actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba in violation of international law and morality, that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear and legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other.”
The cable left the elder Khrushchev in “utter shock,” Allyn recounts. In his uncensored memoirs,Nikita Khrushchev reported his own reaction: “Is he proposing that we start a nuclear war? This is insane.”
3. Nikita Khrushchev wasn’t an irrational warmonger
In the wake of the cable he received from Castro, Khrushchev was both alarmed and chastened, says Allyn. “Khrushchev was no more anxious to stumble into war than Kennedy,” he says.
Soon after receiving it, he “raced to broadcast over open radio the removal of the missiles fromCuba.”
In his cabled response to Castro, Khrushchev made clear his refusal to launch a preemptive strike on the US.
“You, of course, realize where that would have led,” Khrushchev wrote to Castro, according to Khrushchev’s memoirs. “Rather than a simple strike, it would have been the start of a thermonuclear war. Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I consider this proposal of yours incorrect, although I understand your motivation.”
Castro never forgave the Soviets for publicly announcing the withdrawal of their missiles before even discussing it with him, and years later he denied Khrushchev’s son Sergei a visa to attend a Cuban Missile conference in Havana.
Allyn further argues in his book that the iconic moment in which Khrushchev banged his shoe on the desk during a United Nations meeting – cementing his reputation as a hothead – was an overblown misunderstanding. A journalist had stepped on his shoe in the hallway, but Khrushchev was self-conscious about his weight and “didn’t want to bend over to pick it up.”
A UN staffer delivered it to his desk. Then, during the General Assembly debate, there was a point where “one country insulted a Soviet satellite country and there was a huge ruckus,” Allyn says. “Khrushchev stood up to get the floor, because he had to respond to the insult.”
He waved first one hand, then the other. “The [UN] chairman didn’t see him, and the shoe was sitting conveniently on his desk,” Allyn says. “He actually tapped it; he didn’t bang it.”
Khrushchev was “an emotional, strong-minded individual who used graphic metaphors, but the stereotype of him as a hothead” was the product of the “propaganda war” that both countries waged during the cold war, Allyn says.
To this day, however, the most commonly asked question on the UN tour in New York, Allyn notes, is, “Where was Khrushchev sitting when he banged his shoe?”
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