Since the bombing of Hiroshima, total nuclear war had been a distant threat—a nightmarish prospect with little more likelihood than H. G. Wells’s Martian invasion. While Americans had a mental picture of nuclear war, they had yet to recognize American vulnerability. As Eisenhower’s director of the Civil Defense Administration said in 1955, “The American people have simply not accepted yet the possibility of an enemy attack on the United States from the skies by intercontinental bombers carrying these tremendous nuclear weapons. It is something that still appears fantastic.”¹ Extremely rapid advances in science, such as the development of missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in the late 1950s and early 1960s, made it no easier for Americans to accept the truth or for scientists to conceive solutions. Nuclear war’s image, part fact and part science fiction, had become a part of the American psyche without being integrated into the real world through acceptance of its inevitably tragic outcome or through solid actions aimed at prevention or protection. In fact, American civil defense plans of this era could be compared to installation of a flimsy chain lock to protect the nation from a multimegaton monster named nuclear war. This chapter examines Americans’ expectations of nuclear war when they found themselves on the brink in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

By the time Kennedy became president, the Soviet Union’s technological advances had made the threat of nuclear war more real. Once confident, Americans now had “an image, born of Sputnik, of 10-foot-tall Russians who rarely do anything wrong,” reported a 1963 Rand Corporation report.² When the Soviet Union planted missiles in Cuba, Democratic senator Richard Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, warned that nuclear war could start within ten days,³ and privately, Kennedy set the odds “between one out of three and even.”⁴

On an often-unspoken level, nuclear war haunted Americans, and none more than the Ex Comm’s members. Like an army private who justifies his actions by claiming that he was just following orders, Secretary of State Rusk asserted, “We ourselves are not moved to general war, we’re simply doing what we said we would do if they took certain action.” In a macabre twist, he noted that America could “eliminate the Cuban problem by actually eliminating the island.”⁵ Cold War politics and anxiety about war drove the Ex Comm, but National Security adviser McGeorge Bundy said, “It wasn’t the fear of the foot soldier, afraid of being killed when his time comes to hit the beach or go over the top. It was rather the fear of the commanding officer who, having ordered his men to ‘charge,’ suddenly feels that he has given the wrong order.”⁶

Nuclear weaponry placed new burdens on world leaders. As Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later hypothesized, “If you go to nuclear war, and the other side retaliates, and only a few—maybe even only one—bomb gets through to an American city, you—the one who just initiated the nuclear war—will have had to shoulder the responsibility for the worst catastrophe in the history of this country.”⁷ Khrushchev and Kennedy were all too aware of the dangers inherent in their course. A month before the Hiroshima bombing, Kennedy wrote in his diary, “The clash [with the Soviet Union] may be finally and indefinitely postponed by the eventual discovery of a weapon so horrible that it will truthfully mean the abolishment of all nations employing it.”⁸ And in September 1959, Khrushchev declared in Moscow, “Those who say that they do not understand what peaceful coexistence is, and are afraid of it, are wittingly or unwittingly helping to further the Cold War which is bound to spread unless we intervene and stop it. It will reach a point of such intensity that a spark may at any moment set off a world conflagration.”⁹

For many Americans, nuclear warfare’s destructive capacity seemed unimaginable, but nuclear war’s potential was not wholly unknown. The U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 left behind ghostly images: “The streets were deserted except for the dead,” Dr. Michihiko Hachiya wrote in his diary after the Hiroshima bombing. “Some looked as if they had been frozen by death while in the full action of flight; others lay sprawled as though some giant flung them to their death from a great height. Hiroshima was no longer a city, but a burnt-over prairie.”¹⁰ The bomb destroyed industries, eliminated phone service, and disrupted other utilities. Debris and casualties cluttered the streets, making automobile travel impossible. Accompanying these dark scenes in many American minds was a stain of guilt: “A sense of impending doom and helplessness hangs over us. We fear that another nation might initiate an atomic attack on us, and we know, in our heart of hearts, that we would not be in a position to pass judgment on their deed,” a Presbyterian minister in Syracuse, New York, told his congregation in 1958.¹¹

And the threat of destruction radiated almost from the moment of the Hiroshima blast. “In that terrible flash 10,000 miles away, men have seen not only the fate of Japan, but have glimpsed the future of America,” the New York Times’s James Reston wrote in August 1945.¹² One day after the Hiroshima attack, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch warned that scientists may have “signed the mammalian world’s death warrant.”¹³ When the Soviet Union set off an atomic bomb in 1949, the United States began a blueprint of life after nuclear war. Civil defense officials even scripted what a president might tell his battle-scarred nation: “Within the hour the aggressor has launched a brutal unprovoked nuclear attack on our country and the homelands of our allies. Some of our cities have been hit and heavy casualties have been suffered by the civilian population.”¹⁴

Why would Americans accept the prospect of such a fate? For many, it was a potentially tragic end to a noble cause. Others felt like helpless victims in a world apparently barreling toward self-destruction. Nuclear war was a part of daily life, and a nightmare waiting to happen.

Many Americans believed nuclear war was an acceptable risk in the Cold War battle against Communism. Following World War II, fear of Communism often seemed to outweigh fear of nuclear war. Historian Marc Trachtenberg has labeled this phenomenon “the ‘heroic’ phase in American attitudes about nuclear war” because nuclear war’s potential for destruction was not considered adequate to rule out its use.¹⁵ As Spencer R. Weart has noted, it is almost as if the United States and the Soviet Union had joined in an “apocalyptic suicide pact,”¹⁶ and as he also stated, suicide was not foreign to Americans who, statistics show, are far more likely to kill themselves than to be murdered.¹⁷

In World War II, “civilized” nations accepted the idea of exterminating enemy civilians through massive bombing—whether nuclear or conventional. Blanket bombing of Dresden and Tokyo followed the same logic that justified the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And at times after the war, zealous anti-Communism became intertwined with this willingness to exterminate the enemy or even risk one’s own civilization. By 1962, although both sides talked about restricting nuclear attacks to military targets, that was no longer an advantageous strategy because many missile sites had been hardened, or shielded by steel and concrete. Ten to thirty missile hits would have been required to destroy one hardened installation, according to Secretary of the Air Force Curtis LeMay.¹⁸ Also, the United States’ Polaris missiles on submarines were too weak to destroy hardened sites and, therefore, were clearly intended to target Soviet cities.¹⁹ LeMay’s definition of war represented some Americans’ willingness to accept extermination: “I’ll tell you what war is all about—you’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.”²⁰ However, there were opponents of this point of view. Social philosopher Lewis Mumford condemned anti-Communism’s infatuation with extermination in 1959, writing, “Those who believe that any country has the right to make such a decision share the madness of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. For them Russia is the White Whale that must be hunted down and grappled with.”²¹

As Mumford suggested, anti-Communism was often obsessive, and it had contradictory effects on the United States. As a force that led neighbor to suspect neighbor, it was divisive. During the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s ugly witch-hunt for Communists reflected paranoia about Communist infiltration, which was embraced by many Americans. And yet, anti-Communism also fortified solidarity at a time when civil rights issues opened huge rifts.

As the U.S. government’s efforts to protect African Americans’ rights conflicted with states’ rights, fissures between black and white and North and South widened. Just over a month before the Cuban crisis, America’s attention was riveted on Oxford, Mississippi, where federal troops interceded to enroll James Meredith as the University of Mississippi’s first African American student. Cries of “states’ rights” mingled with outrage over Mississippi’s refusal to obey a federal injunction to integrate. On such issues, southern Democrats responded to federal intervention by creating legislative obstacles for Kennedy’s administration, often joining Republicans to block social legislation. On foreign policy, however, anti-Communism reigned as the almost unquestioned voice, and most liberals joined conservatives of both parties in backing strong action whenever faced with Soviet aggression. Therefore, a president unable to find consensus on domestic issues could expect solid support for tough action against Communism.

After Sputnik, appealing to people’s fears of Soviet superiority became a strong political strategy: Kennedy himself capitalized on a nonexistent Soviet advantage in nuclear missiles as a theme in his 1960 presidential campaign. As Philip Nash has concluded, “He chose to believe the most dire assessments of the strategic balance and disregard the rest”²²—a common phenomenon in the Cold War. Thus, public fear of Communism nourished a willingness to support large defense budgets and to accept l...