Menu

01/03/13 - The Atlantic - The Real Cuban Missile Crisis

On october 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to
learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing
nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba.
With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential
threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear
rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and
the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the
president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that
his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an
ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine”
of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding
provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure,
Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite
Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite
predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of
international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets
went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid
resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special
assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s
“combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so
brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the
world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and
a cataclysm was averted.

* [1]The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory

By Sheldon M. Stern

Stanford

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis
is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the
Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that
the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is
the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the
pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of
the crisis attested.

Scholars, however, have long known a very different story: since 1997,
they have had access to recordings that Kennedy secretly made of meetings
with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security
Council (the “ExComm”). Sheldon M. Stern—who was the historian at the John
F. Kennedy Library for 23 years and the first scholar to evaluate the
ExComm tapes—is among the numerous historians who have tried to set the
record straight. His new book marshals irrefutable evidence to succinctly
demolish the mythic version of the crisis. Although there’s little reason
to believe his effort will be to any avail, it should nevertheless be
applauded.

Reached through sober analysis, Stern’s conclusion that “John F. Kennedy
and his administration, without question, bore a substantial share of the
responsibility for the onset of the Cuban missile crisis” would have
shocked the American people in 1962, for the simple reason that Kennedy’s
administration had misled them about the military imbalance between the
superpowers and had concealed its campaign of threats, assassination
plots, and sabotage designed to overthrow the government in Cuba—an effort
well known to Soviet and Cuban officials.

In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy had cynically attacked Richard
Nixon from the right, claiming that the Eisenhower-Nixon administration
had allowed a dangerous “missile gap” to grow in the U.S.S.R.’s favor. But
in fact, just as Eisenhower and Nixon had suggested—and just as the
classified briefings that Kennedy received as a presidential candidate
indicated—the missile gap, and the nuclear balance generally, was
overwhelmingly to America’s advantage. At the time of the missile crisis,
the Soviets had 36 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs),
138 long-range bombers with 392 nuclear warheads, and
72 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads (SLBMs). These forces
were arrayed against a vastly more powerful U.S. nuclear arsenal of
203 ICBMs, 1,306 long-range bombers with 3,104 nuclear warheads, and
144 SLBMs—all told, about nine times as many nuclear weapons as the
U.S.S.R. Nikita Khrushchev was acutely aware of America’s huge advantage
not just in the number of weapons but in their quality and deployment as
well.

Moreover, despite America’s overwhelming nuclear preponderance, JFK, in
keeping with his avowed aim to pursue a foreign policy characterized by
“vigor,” had ordered the largest peacetime expansion of America’s military
power, and specifically the colossal growth of its strategic nuclear
forces. This included deploying, beginning in 1961, intermediate-range
“Jupiter” nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey—adjacent to the Soviet
Union. From there, the missiles could reach all of the western U.S.S.R.,
including Moscow and Leningrad (and that doesn’t count the nuclear-armed
“Thor” missiles that the U.S. already had aimed at the Soviet Union from
bases in Britain).

The Jupiter missiles were an exceptionally vexing component of the U.S.
nuclear arsenal. Because they sat aboveground, were immobile, and required
a long time to prepare for launch, they were extremely vulnerable. Of no
value as a deterrent, they appeared to be weapons meant for a disarming
first strike—and thus greatly undermined deterrence, because they
encouraged a preemptive Soviet strike against them. The Jupiters’
destabilizing effect was widely recognized among defense experts within
and outside the U.S. government and even by congressional leaders. For
instance, Senator Albert Gore Sr., an ally of the administration, told
Secretary of State Dean Rusk that they were a “provocation” in a closed
session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1961 (more
than a year and a half before the missile crisis), adding, “I wonder what
our attitude would be” if the Soviets deployed nuclear-armed missiles to
Cuba. Senator Claiborne Pell raised an identical argument in a memo passed
on to Kennedy in May 1961.

Given America’s powerful nuclear superiority, as well as the deployment of
the Jupiter missiles, Moscow suspected that Washington viewed a nuclear
first strike as an attractive option. They were right to be suspicious.
The archives reveal that in fact the Kennedy administration had strongly
considered this option during the Berlin crisis in 1961.

It’s little wonder, then, that, as Stern asserts—drawing on a plethora of
scholarship including, most convincingly, the historian Philip Nash’s
elegant 1997 study, The Other Missiles of October—Kennedy’s deployment of
the Jupiter missiles “was a key reason for Khrushchev’s decision to send
nuclear missiles to Cuba.” Khrushchev reportedly made that decision in
May 1962, declaring to a confidant that the Americans “have surrounded us
with bases on all sides” and that missiles in Cuba would help to counter
an “intolerable provocation.” Keeping the deployment secret in order to
present the U.S. with a fait accompli, Khrushchev may very well have
assumed America’s response would be similar to his reaction to the Jupiter
missiles—rhetorical denouncement but no threat or action to thwart the
deployment with a military attack, nuclear or otherwise. (In retirement,
Khrushchev explained his reasoning to the American journalist Strobe
Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy
missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a
little of their own medicine.”)

Khrushchev was also motivated by his entirely justifiable belief that the
Kennedy administration wanted to destroy the Castro regime. After all, the
administration had launched an invasion of Cuba; had followed that with
sabotage, paramilitary assaults, and assassination attempts—the largest
clandestine operation in the history of the CIA—and had organized
large-scale military exercises in the Caribbean clearly meant to rattle
the Soviets and their Cuban client. Those actions, as Stern and other
scholars have demonstrated, helped compel the Soviets to install the
missiles so as to deter “covert or overt US attacks”—in much the same way
that the United States had shielded its allies under a nuclear umbrella to
deter Soviet subversion or aggression against them.

References

Visible links
1. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804783772


Original Source / Fuente Original:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban-missile-crisis/309190/