The Cold War between the US and USSR saw the world come close to complete annihilation on
more than one occasion, but no incident took us nearer to nuclear war than in October,
1962 when America discovered that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles 90 miles off of
the Florida coast in Cuba. That triggered 13 terrifying days of escalating tensions
between the two superpowers as both felt that their strategic interests were under threat,
and neither could afford to be seen backing down to the other. But in the leadership of both sides,
cooler-heads did eventually prevail and armageddon was avoided by a hair's
breadth. So then, in the end, just how bad was the Cuban Missile Crisis?
In April 1961, 1400 American-trained Cuban guerillas landed on the island
and attempted to overthrow the new leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro, who had led their socialist
revolution to victory in the late 1950’s. Within three days of landing at Bay of Pigs,
in the northwest of the island, the guerillas had been completely destroyed by Castro’s
revolutionary army, in no small part because of a lack of promised American air support.
The Bay of Pigs invasion was an international humiliation for the United States but more
importantly it also pushed Castro’s Cuba into the waiting arms of the US’s Cold War rival,
the Soviet Union, which sent surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles to Cuba to be used
to defend the island should the US get any more ideas about launching an invasion. The
American President, John F. Kennedy, knew about and tolerated the presence of Soviet anti-air
on the island though he warned them against them sending offensive weapons, nuclear-armed
ballistic missiles, to Cuba, but behind the scenes the Soviet Premier,
Nikita Khruschev, was doing just that.
On October 14th 1962 Major Richard Heyser, the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane
took hundreds of pictures of missile sites under construction in Cuba. The next day,
upon examining the images the CIA determined that the Soviets and Cubans were working together to
install weapons on the island that would have been capable of delivering a nuclear payload to almost
any city in the US. In response, JFK formed EXCOM, the Executive Committee of the National Security
council which gave him effectively three options: 1. They could enter into negotiations with Castro
and Khrushcev but not take any immediate action to prevent the installation of the missiles.
2. The US navy could blockade Cuba and prevent new Soviet ships from reaching the island. Or
3. The committee’s preferred choice, they could launch a
first-strike against missile sites across Cuba. JFK went against his advisors, fearing that an
attack on Cuba would provoke retaliation against NATO targets in Europe. Instead,
he chose to blockade the island, though he called it a “quarantine” as a blockade would
have been seen as an act of war. He also sent a letter to Khruschev, pointing out that no one
could win a nuclear exchange and demanding that the missiles be immediately removed from Cuba.
Khruschev protested and insisted that the missiles were intended
only for defensive purposes. It should be noted that the US kept nukes of its
own in Italy and on the borders of the Soviet Union itself, in Turkey.
By October 23rd the American quarantine was in place around Cuba and the Soviets,
for the most part, accepted it, on the surface anyway. Beneath the waves,
it was a different story. Soviet submarines, some of them armed with nuclear warheads,
were active across the Caribbean. One of them, the B-59, was unable to contact Moscow for several
days due to its depth and on the 27th of October an American vessel used practice depth-charges,
weapons with very little yield, to signal the B-59 to surface and identify itself. But the sub’s
Captain, who had no idea that the charges weren’t an attack, feared that war had already broken out
and he and the ship's political officer agreed to fire a nuclear torpedo at the Americans. And they
would have, if not for the presence on the B-59 of Vasily Arkhipov, the commander of all Soviet
submarines in the area, who refused to allow a launch and saved the world from thermonuclear war.
On the same day an American plane was shot down over Cuba and its pilot was
killed, but JFK correctly concluded that it was unlikely that Khruschev had ordered the
attack directly and like Arkhipov, he didn’t hit the nuclear button. That evening, JFK’s brother,
Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, met with the Soviet ambassador and informed him that the
Americans intended to secretly remove their missiles from Italy and Turkey. The next day,
Krushchev wrote to Kennedy and informed him that the Soviets would do the same in Cuba.
So then how bad was the Cuban Missile Crisis? Well over the course of less than two weeks the
world’s most powerful countries both came close to starting a nuclear war and ending life as we
know it, but in the aftermath of the crisis relations did cool. In 1963 a hotline was
setup between the White House and the Kremlin allowing for leaders on both sides of the
Cold War to communicate with each other nearly instantly and in 1968 the Americans and Soviets
signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, preventing them from supplying third-parties
with the ability to create nuclear weapons. So it was bad, but it could’ve been a whole lot worse.
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