The Cuban Missile Crisis

The Threshold of Nuclear War

Alice George

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415899727
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136174032
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

For thirteen days in October of 1962, a truly perilous flirtation with nuclear war developed between the United States and USSR, as the superpowers argued over the installation of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba. Launched by rash judgment and concluded through circumspect leadership, the Cuban Missile Crisis acted as a catalyst for change during the Cold War. Resolved through back-channel negotiations, the moment is popularly remembered as the closest the world has ever come to full-scale nuclear war.

Using government memoranda, personal letters, and newspaper articles The Cuban Missile Crisis, details the actual events of the political history, while explaining widespread public response. In six concise chapters, Alice George introduces the history of Cold War America and contextualizes its political, social, and cultural legacy. This will be a must-read for anyone looking for an in-depth summary of these important events.

For additional resources please visit the companion website at http://www.routledge.com/cw/criticalmoments.

CHAPTER 1

The Chill of the Nuclear Age

INTRODUCTION: THE COLD WAR

The Cuban Missile Crisis marks the world’s closest brush with the Armageddon promised by the lethal combination of stark ideological differences and nuclear weapons. Its dangers were real, and the potential consequences were grave. After a week of stressful and sometimes-jumbled communications between the world’s two most powerful nations, the crisis ended in compromises, both public and secret. By frightening American and Soviet leaders as well as their constituents, the missile crisis laid the groundwork for a more cautious approach to Cold War relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. The world never again allowed a confrontation to rise to the same level of peril. A product of the times in which it occurred, the crisis demonstrated American and Soviet willingness to risk a nuclear conflict to achieve superiority in the competition between East and West—an attitude that seems foolhardy in retrospect.

The specter of the Cold War overshadowed almost half of the twentieth century. It was a time when the global showdown between Communism and capitalism seemed to offer clear choices in black and white, with little space allowed for the shades of gray that typically color the political arena. Powered by postwar memories, newfound ambitions, and simplistic stereotypes, the Cold War shaped economic and political life in both the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, commonly called the Soviet Union or USSR. And it drove Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy to a titanic near-disaster in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a faceoff in which the main combatants were not uniformed young men with guns slung over their shoulders: They were national leaders, middle-aged or older, sometimes working without a net. Fortunately for mankind, both Khrushchev and Kennedy found a solution that went beyond the common black-and-white Cold War rhetoric and moved a step closer to embracing the gray.

At the close of World War II, as the Russian army swept across eastern Europe, solidifying an Allied triumph over Nazi Germany, the war’s victors planted the roots of a Cold War that would divide them. Josef Stalin expanded his domain in the war’s closing months, creating a sphere of influence that he planned to rule with an iron fist. Soviet power over Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia led to the formation of Socialist governments throughout the region.¹ The Soviet Union itself was huge, and Stalin’s imposition of his will on these satellites intensified the fear of Communism among Western nations. The United States, which rose to world leadership as Europe struggled to recover from the ravages of war, became a counter-balance to Stalin’s dominion.

Anxiety about Communism had been a factor in American politics since the World War I era, when Marxists took control of the Soviet Union, setting off the first Red Scare in the United States. Stalin’s efforts to consolidate his power only deepened those feelings. Consequently, historians have speculated that the United States undertook atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as much to intimidate its Soviet allies as to stop its Japanese enemies. The Soviet Union invaded Manchuria just a few days before the bombing of Hiroshima; therefore, pushing the Japanese toward a quick surrender represented a solid step toward limiting Stalin’s ability to expand the area under Soviet control.

Fear of Communist expansion and world domination was an important element in what newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann dubbed “the Cold War” in 1946. In a confrontation powered by nuclear weapons, that trepidation sometimes escalated to outright terror. Consequently, one of the guiding principles of American and Western European foreign policy became “containment” of Communism.² The goal was to isolate Communist nations, accepting current holdings without allowing Stalin, his successor Khrushchev, or China’s Mao Zedong to extend Communism into other nations. Communist leaders added to containment concerns by promoting wars of national liberation in developing countries within Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where instability reigned as European colonial powers withdrew. Khrushchev bragged that these smaller wars would combine to spread Communism around the globe.

Understanding the American conception of the Cold War requires consideration of Americans’ view of their nation as it emerged from the “heroic” saga of World War II. Faced with the threat of an aggressive enemy, Americans sought to make their new adversary fit an established pattern. Although Communism and Nazism are located at opposite ends of the political spectrum, many Westerners sought to draw lessons from World War II and came to see Soviet totalitarianism as a reincarnation of Nazism. Thus, any Soviet leader became a stand-in for Hitler—and this was not an entirely fatuous notion. Stalin, like Hitler, ran death camps to eliminate his enemies and counted Jews among his chief targets.

In contrast, most Americans believed that the brave young men who stormed the beaches at Normandy—what would later be called “the greatest generation”—represented soldiers of freedom who stepped into the world arena to correct wrongs and to protect human rights. After the war, many Americans thought the United States’ Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe demonstrated the nation’s pious generosity by helping to rebuild Western Europe. The idealized United States worked to bring new life to areas destroyed by others. The destruction that atomic bombs had brought to Japan became an unfortunate side effect of the drive to topple tyranny. Once a frontier to be conquered, the United States now stood tall. Both righteous and ambitious, this was a nation ready to claim a century.

Writing during World War II in And Keep Your Powder Dry, anthropologist Margaret Mead challenged U.S. citizens to follow in their ancestors’ footsteps and tap into American character:

If we are to give our utmost effort and skill and enthusiasm, we must believe in ourselves, which means believing in our past and in our future, in our parents and in our children, in that peculiar blend of moral purpose and practical inventiveness which is the American character.³

In July 1962 when President Kennedy wrote an article for Sports Illustrated, he reflected Americans’ view of their nation and its history. Promoting his national program for physical fitness among the nation’s youngsters, Kennedy wrote, “It was men who possessed vigor and strength as well as courage and vision who first settled these shores and over more than three centuries, subdued a continent and wrested a civilization from the wilderness.”⁴

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted in 1959 that Americans “are still inclined to pretend that our power is exercised by a peculiarly virtuous nation. The uniqueness of our virtue is questioned both by our friends and our enemies.”⁵ In another analysis, foreign affairs specialist Alton Frye wrote, “It is a familiar critique of nationalism in general, and Americanism in particular, that it tends to veer toward a secular religiosity that is incapable of compromise with others.”⁶ Several scholars have noted that American nationalism and anti-Communism seemed to be grounded in a sense of destiny and “chosen-ness.” Many Americans believed their nation had been selected by God to provide a model for the rest of the world. As Niebuhr argued, the view from the outside differed. The Soviet Union, its allies, and many other nations saw the United States as an imperialistic and expansionistic nation trying to spread its own political and economic systems around the world.

Late in the Cold War, historian John L. Gaddis concluded that selfdoubt affected America’s acceptance of its position as a world leader. He contended that the United States sometimes failed to use its power because

we are not wholly comfortable in the role of a great power, that we tend to worry more about it than other great powers have in the past and that we tend to look, more actively than most other great powers do or have done, for ways to justify the power we have not in terms of power itself, but of some very different end.⁷

Moral superiority, not military might, explained the United States’ position of dominance in the minds of many.

During the 1950s a new force began coloring American attitudes. At odds with citizens’ belief in the nation’s special nature, this new feeling created a stifling sense of foreboding without totally extinguishing American exceptionalism. Creeping into the American psyche was apprehension about the possibility that Communism’s restrictions on freedom might yield a regimented society that could tackle twentieth century technological advancement more efficiently than a capitalist democracy. This idea gained momentum after the Soviet Union’s launch of the first artificial satellite Sputnik in 1957 and was reinforced four years later when Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth. These achievements in rocket technology received added psychological heft from Soviet claims of massive increases in industrial production. Another blow to the American feeling of technological and moral ascendancy occurred in 1960 when a sophisticated and secret American spy plane known as a U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union. This incident suggested that the Soviet Union could defend itself well against a bomber attack, and at the same time, the plane’s downing became a source of embarrassment because America’s World War II hero, President and retired General Dwight D. Eisenhower, lied about the existence of the spy plane until the Soviet Union presented evidence that both the plane and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had been recovered.

All of these factors combined to create a barely submerged and growing inferiority complex jockeying for a position within the American consciousness. While American exceptionalism suggested that the United States was unique and excelled over any other nation, Americans quietly began to question this conclusion. Khrushchev perpetuated U.S. insecurity in the 1950s when he said, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side.” Shortly after the Soviet Union pulverized rebellion in Hungary in November 1956, he told a group of Western ambassadors: “We will bury you.”⁸ When Kennedy ran for president in 1960, one of his campaign themes—the missile gap—assumed Soviet dominance in the arms race. After he became president, he learned that the Soviet Union was far behind the United States in production of missiles and warheads. However, in 1960, he and many other Americans had accepted Khrushchev’s claims of Soviet supremacy.

Eighty-four percent of Americans believed that the United States was losing ground in the worldwide struggle against Communism, according to a 1962 Harris Poll, and among the hands that rocked the cradle, pessimism was greatest: Ninety-two percent of mothers of children 10 or younger believed that Communism was gaining the upper hand in its competition with the United States.⁹ At the same time, 40 percent of Americans taking part in a Gallup Poll believed that the Soviet Union was winning the propaganda war; only 33 percent saw the U.S. government as the victor on that battlefront.¹⁰

Despite his claims, Khrushchev knew that his nation was outgunned, and he was alarmed to realize that American U-2s would enable the United States to pre-empt his bragging rights by photographically capturing images of his small Soviet strategic missile force. Furthermore, Khrushchev realized that the United States gave its citizens a quality of life unavailable to Soviet citizens. To minimize evidence of that problem, he needed to maintain belief in his nation’s military and technological dominance.

Because of the Cold War, Eisenhower felt that the military had too much influence on American policymaking. He attempted to reduce the military’s ability to affect decisions, and in a 1960 farewell address he warned Americans about the rising power of the “military-industrial complex” that profited from Cold War fears. He urged voters not to give the military or armament manufacturers the ability to guide the United States away from peace and toward war because it was, in essence, good for business. Eisenhower emphasized that both the existence of a large military force in peacetime and the ongoing drive to produce new weapons systems could create an imbalance in the nation’s policies. When Kennedy became president and learned that the United States dominated the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race, he asked Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric to reveal the truth: Taking a page from Eisenhower’s book, JFK wanted to counter military scare tactics intended to generate greater expenditures on bigger and better weapons. However, as crises occurred around the globe, Kennedy expanded military spending.

On American soil, the arms race was propelled by a tendency to see Communism as a monolithic force despite evidence to the contrary. A great split developed between China and the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev era. China felt that the Soviet Union should encourage violence to establish Communist regimes in newly emerging Third World nations.¹¹ In 1959, the Soviet Union reneged on a pledge to help China develop nuclear weapons, and Khrushchev issued an announcement in July 1960 that his nation was recalling all advisers from China.¹²

Cold War espionage yielded many secrets during these years; however, sophisticated spying did not correct the fact that the United States and the USSR failed to understand one another. Each viewed the other through a fixed set of stereotypes that predicted behavior falling within narrow and well-precedented boundaries. Actions that fell outside those cozy cubbyholes were shocking and mysterious—and that made them dangerous. Moreover, each side doubted that it would be feasible to establish a rational dialogue with the other. A January 1962 Gallup Poll in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain showed that more than a third of respondents were convinced that it would be impossible to live peacefully with the Soviet Union.¹³

VISIONS OF NUCLEAR WAR

Beginning with the Soviet Union’s first tests of atomic weapons at the close of the 1940s, the Cold War and the Nuclear Age became intertwined entities. While the United States produced the first working atomic bombs in 1945 and the first hydrogen bomb in 1952, the Soviet Union was never far behind, detonating an atomic bomb in 1949 and a hydrogen bomb in 1953. Much of this era’s terror reflected the new human ability to cause massive devastation with nuclear weapons. The same power that heightened tensions seemed to lower the odds of direct conflict, discouraging the two leading combatants from engaging in battle beyond skirmishes over contested ground in the human mind. The Cold War opened up the possibility of a conflagration propelled by fear of “the othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgment
• Timeline
• 1 The Chill of the Nuclear Age
• 2 Kennedy and Khrushchev
• 3 The Ticking Clock
• 4 A World on Edge
• 5 Into the Dark
• 6 Moving Ahead, Looking Back
• Documents
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index