The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre), or the Caribbean Crisis (Russian: Карибский кризис, romanized: Karibskiy krizis), was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in the United Kingdom, Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis lasted from 16 to 28 October 1962. The confrontation is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war.
In 1959, the US government deployed Thor nuclear missiles in England, an initiative known as Project Emily. In 1961 the US put Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. All were within range of Moscow. The US had also trained a paramilitary force of Cuban expatriates, for a CIA-led attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow its government in April 1961. Starting in November of that year, the US government engaged in a violent campaign of terrorism and sabotage in Cuba, referred to as the Cuban Project, which continued throughout the first half of the 1960s. The Soviet administration was concerned about a Cuban drift towards China, with which the Soviets had an increasingly strained relationship. In response to these factors the Soviet and Cuban governments agreed, at a meeting between leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in July 1962, to place nuclear missiles on Cuba to deter a future US invasion. Construction of launch facilities started shortly thereafter.
A U-2 spy plane captured photographic evidence of medium- and long-range launch facilities in October. US president John F. Kennedy convened a meeting of the National Security Council and other key advisers, forming the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM). Kennedy was advised to carry out an air strike on Cuban soil in order to compromise Soviet missile supplies, followed by an invasion of the Cuban mainland. He chose a less aggressive course in order to avoid a declaration of war. On 22 October, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade to prevent further missiles from reaching Cuba. He referred to the blockade as a "quarantine", not as a blockade, so the US could avoid the formal implications of a state of war.
An agreement was eventually reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev. The Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement not to invade Cuba again. The United States secretly agreed to dismantle all of the offensive weapons it had deployed to Turkey. All Thors in the UK were disbanded by August 1963. While the Soviets dismantled their missiles, some Soviet bombers remained in Cuba, and the United States kept the naval quarantine in place until 20 November 1962. The blockade was formally ended on 20 November after all offensive missiles and bombers had been withdrawn from Cuba. The evident necessity of a quick and direct communication line between the two powers resulted in the Moscow–Washington hotline. A series of agreements later reduced US–Soviet tensions for several years.
The compromise embarrassed Khrushchev and the Soviet Union because the withdrawal of US missiles from Italy and Turkey was a secret deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and the Soviets were seen as retreating from a situation that they had started. Khrushchev's fall from power two years later was in part because of the Soviet Politburo's embarrassment at both Khrushchev's eventual concessions to the US and his ineptitude in precipitating the crisis. According to the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, the top Soviet leadership took the Cuban outcome as "a blow to its prestige bordering on humiliation".
Background
Cuba–Soviet relations
In late 1961, Fidel Castro asked for more SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles from the Soviet Union. The request was not acted upon by the Soviet leadership. In the interval, Castro began criticizing the Soviets for lack of "revolutionary boldness", and began talking to China about agreements for economic assistance. In March 1962, Castro ordered the ousting of Anibal Escalante and his pro-Moscow comrades from Cuba's Integrated Revolutionary Organizations. This affair alarmed the Soviet leadership and raised fears of a possible US invasion. As a result, the Soviet Union sent more SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles in April, as well as a regiment of regular Soviet troops.
Historian Timothy Naftali writes that Escalante's dismissal was a motivating factor behind the Soviet decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. According to Naftali, Soviet foreign policy planners were concerned that Castro's break with Escalante foreshadowed a Cuban drift toward China, and they sought to solidify the Soviet-Cuban relationship through the missile basing program.
Cuba–US relations
The Cuban government regarded US imperialism as the primary explanation for the island's structural weaknesses. The US government had provided weapons, money, and its authority to the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista that ruled Cuba until 1958. The majority of the Cuban population had tired of the severe socioeconomic problems associated with the US domination of the country. The Cuban government was thus aware of the necessity of ending the turmoil and incongruities of US-dominated prerevolution Cuban society. It determined that the US government's demands, part of their hostile reaction to Cuban government policy, were unacceptable.
With the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, the US government sought to promote private enterprise as an instrument for advancing US strategic interests in the developing world. It had grown concerned about the expansion of communism.
In December 1959, under the Eisenhower administration and less than twelve months after the Cuban Revolution, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) developed a plan for paramilitary action against Cuba. The CIA recruited operatives on the island to carry out terrorism and sabotage, kill civilians, and cause economic damage. At the initiative of the CIA Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Bissell, and approved by the new President John F. Kennedy, the US launched the attempted Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961 using CIA-trained forces of Cuban expatriates. The complete failure of the invasion, and the exposure of the US government's role before the operation began, was a source of diplomatic embarrassment for the Kennedy administration. Former President Eisenhower told Kennedy that "the failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something that they would otherwise not do."
Following the failed invasion, the US massively escalated its sponsorship of terrorism against Cuba. Starting in late 1961, using the military and the CIA, the US government engaged in an extensive campaign of terrorism against civilian and military targets on the island. The terrorist attacks killed significant numbers of civilians. The US armed, trained, funded and directed the terrorists, most of whom were Cuban expatriates. Terrorist attacks were planned at the direction, and with the participation, of US government employees and launched from US territory. The attacks would continue through 1965. In January 1962, US Air Force General Edward Lansdale described the plans to overthrow the Cuban government in a top-secret report, addressed to Kennedy and officials involved with Operation Mongoose. CIA agents or "pathfinders" from the Special Activities Division were to be infiltrated into Cuba to carry out sabotage and organization, including radio broadcasts. In February 1962, the US launched an embargo against Cuba, and Lansdale presented a 26-page, top-secret timetable for implementation of the overthrow of the Cuban government, mandating guerrilla operations to begin in August and September. "Open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime" was hoped by the planners to occur in the first two weeks of October.
The terrorism campaign and the threat of invasion were crucial factors in the Soviet decision to place nuclear missiles on Cuba, and in the Cuban government's decision to accept. The US government was aware at the time, as reported to the president in a National Intelligence Estimate, that the invasion threat was a key reason for the increased Soviet military presence.
US–Soviet relations
When Kennedy ran for president in 1960, one of his key election issues was an alleged "missile gap" with the Soviets. In fact the US at that time was ahead of the Soviets and by an increasingly wide margin. In 1961 the Soviets had four R-7 Semyorka intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); by October 1962, some intelligence estimates indicated a figure of 75.
The US had 170 ICBMs and was quickly building more. It also had eight George Washington- and Ethan Allen-class ballistic missile submarines, with the capability to launch 16 Polaris missiles, each with a range of 2,500 nautical miles (4,600 km). The Soviet First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, increased the perception of a 'missile gap' when he boasted to the world that the Soviets were building missiles "like sausages", but Soviet missile numbers and capabilities were nowhere close to his assertions. The Soviet Union had medium-range ballistic missiles in quantity, about 700, but they were unreliable and inaccurate. The US had a considerable advantage in total number of nuclear warheads (27,000 against 3,600) and in the technology required for accurate delivery. The US also led in missile defensive capabilities, naval and air power. The Soviets had a two-to-one advantage in conventional ground forces, particularly in field guns and tanks in the European theatre.
Khrushchev also thought Kennedy was weak. This impression was confirmed by the President's response during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, particularly to the building of the Berlin Wall by East Germany to prevent its citizens from emigrating to the West. The half-hearted nature of the Bay of Pigs invasion reinforced his impression that Kennedy was indecisive and, as one Soviet aide wrote, "too young, intellectual, not prepared well for decision making in crisis situations... too intelligent and too weak". Speaking to Soviet officials in the aftermath of the crisis, Khrushchev said, "I know for certain that Kennedy doesn't have a strong background, nor, generally speaking, does he have the courage to stand up to a serious challenge." He told his son Sergei that on Cuba, Kennedy "would make a fuss, make more of a fuss, and then agree".
Prelude
Conception
In May 1962, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev decided to counter the growing lead of the US in developing and deploying strategic missiles by placing Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, despite the misgivings of the Soviet Ambassador in Havana, Alexandr Ivanovich Alexeyev, who argued that Castro would not accept them. Khrushchev faced a strategic situation in which the US was perceived to have a "splendid first strike" capability that put the Soviet Union at a disadvantage. In 1962, the Soviets had only 20 ICBMs capable of delivering nuclear warheads to the US from inside the Soviet Union. Their poor accuracy and reliability raised serious doubts about their effectiveness. A newer, more reliable generation of Soviet ICBMs only became operational after 1965.
Soviet nuclear capability in 1962 placed less emphasis on ICBMs than on medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) which could strike American allies and most of Alaska from Soviet territory, but not the contiguous United States. As Graham Allison, the director of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, pointed out, "The Soviet Union could not right the nuclear imbalance by deploying new ICBMs on its own soil. In order to meet the threat it faced in 1962, 1963, and 1964, it had very few options. Moving existing nuclear weapons to locations from which they could reach American targets was one."
A second reason that Soviet missiles were deployed to Cuba was that Khrushchev wanted to bring West Berlin, which was controlled by the American, British and French within Communist East Germany, into the Soviet orbit. The East Germans and Soviets considered western control over a portion of Berlin to be a threat to East Germany. Khrushchev made West Berlin the central battlefield of the Cold War. He believed that if the US did nothing over the deployments of missiles in Cuba, he could force the West out of Berlin by using the missiles as a deterrent to western countermeasures in Berlin. If the US tried to bargain with the Soviets after it became aware of them, Khrushchev could demand a trade of the missiles for West Berlin. Since Berlin was strategically more important than Cuba, the trade would be a win for Khrushchev, as Kennedy recognized: "The advantage is, from Khrushchev's point of view, he takes a great chance but there are quite some rewards to it."
Thirdly, it seemed from the perspective both of the Soviet Union and of Cuba that the United States wanted to invade Cuba or increase its presence there. In view of actions which included an attempt to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States, a campaign of violent terrorist attacks on civilians which the US was carrying out on Cuba, economic sanctions against the country and an earlier attempt to invade the island, Cuban officials understood that America was trying to overrun their country. The USSR would respond by placing missiles on Cuba, which would secure the country against attack and keep it in the Socialist Bloc.
American missiles could have been launched from Turkey to attack the USSR before the Soviets had a chance to react. Placing nuclear missiles on Cuba would have created a balance of mutual assured destruction. If the United States launched a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, the Soviets would have been able to react by launching a retaliatory nuclear strike against the US.
Placing nuclear missiles on Cuba was also a way for the USSR to show support for Cuba and the Cuban people who viewed the United States as a threat. The USSR had become Cuba's ally after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. According to Khrushchev, the Soviet Union's motives were "aimed at allowing Cuba to live peacefully and develop as its people desire".
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a historian and adviser to Kennedy, told National Public Radio in an interview on 16 October 2002 that Castro did not want the missiles, but Khrushchev pressured him to accept them. Castro was not completely happy with the idea, but the Cuban National Directorate of the Revolution accepted them, both to protect Cuba against US attack and to aid the Soviet Union.
Soviet military deployments
In early 1962, a group of Soviet military and missile construction specialists accompanied an agricultural delegation to Havana and met Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro. According to one report, the Cuban leadership expected that the US would invade Cuba again and enthusiastically approved the idea of installing nuclear missiles on Cuba. According to another source, Castro objected to being made to look like a Soviet puppet, but was persuaded that missiles in Cuba would be an irritant to the US and would help the interests of the entire socialist camp. The deployment would include short-range tactical weapons with a range of 40 km, usable only against naval vessels, that would provide a "nuclear umbrella" for attacks upon the island.
By May, Khrushchev and Castro agreed to place strategic nuclear missiles secretly in Cuba. Like Castro, Khrushchev felt that a US invasion of Cuba was imminent and that to lose Cuba would do great harm to the communists, especially in Latin America. He said he wanted to confront the Americans "with more than words.... the logical answer was missiles". The Soviets maintained their tight secrecy, writing their plans in longhand, which were approved by Marshal of the Soviet Union Rodion Malinovsky on 4 July and Khrushchev on 7 July as Operation Anadyr.
Operation Anadyr entailed elaborate denial and deception, known as "maskirovka". All the planning and preparation for transporting and deploying the missiles was carried out in the utmost secrecy, with only a very few knowing the exact nature of the mission. Even the troops detailed for the mission were given misdirection by being told that they were headed for a cold region and were outfitted with ski boots, fleece-lined parkas, and other winter equipment.
Specialists in missile construction, under the guise of machine operators and agricultural specialists, arrived in July. A total of 43,000 foreign troops would ultimately be brought in. Chief Marshal of Artillery Sergey Biryuzov, Head of the Soviet Rocket Forces, led a survey team that visited Cuba. He told Khrushchev that the missiles would be concealed and camouflaged by palm trees. The Soviet troops would arrive in Cuba heavily underprepared. They did not know that the tropical climate would render ineffective many of their weapons and much of their equipment. In the first few days of setting up the missiles, troops complained of fuse failures, excessive corrosion, overconsumption of oil, and generator blackouts.
As early as August 1962, the US suspected that the Soviets were building missile facilities in Cuba. During that month, its intelligence services gathered information of sightings by ground observers of Soviet-built MiG-21 fighters and Il-28 light bombers. U-2 spy planes found S-75 Dvina (NATO designation SA-2) surface-to-air missile sites at eight different locations. CIA director John A. McCone was suspicious. Sending antiaircraft missiles into Cuba, he reasoned, "made sense only if Moscow intended to use them to shield a base for ballistic missiles aimed at the United States". On 10 August, he wrote a memo to Kennedy in which he guessed that the Soviets were preparing to introduce ballistic missiles into Cuba. Che Guevara himself traveled to the Soviet Union on 30 August 1962, to sign the final agreement regarding the deployment of missiles in Cuba. The visit was heavily monitored by the CIA as Guevara was being watched closely by American intelligence. While in the Soviet Union, Guevara argued with Khrushchev that the missile deal should be made public but Khrushchev insisted on total secrecy, and promised the Soviet Union's support if the Americans discovered the missiles. By the time Guevara arrived in Cuba, U-2 spy planes had already discovered the Soviet troops in Cuba.
With important Congressional elections scheduled for November, the crisis became enmeshed in American politics. On 31 August, Senator Kenneth Keating (R-New York) warned on the Senate floor that the Soviet Union was "in all probability" constructing a missile base in Cuba. He charged the Kennedy administration with covering up a major threat to the US, thereby starting the crisis. He may have received this initial "remarkably accurate" information from his friend, former congresswoman and ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, who in turn received it from Cuban exiles. A later confirming source for Keating's information may have been the West German ambassador to Cuba, who had received information from dissidents inside Cuba that Soviet troops had arrived in Cuba in early August and were seen working "in all probability on or near a missile base". The ambassador passed this information to Keating on a trip to Washington in early October. Air Force General Curtis LeMay presented a pre-invasion bombing plan to Kennedy in September, and spy flights and minor military harassment from US forces at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base were the subject of continual Cuban diplomatic complaints to the US government.
The first consignment of Soviet R-12 missiles arrived on the night of 8 September, followed by a second on 16 September. The R-12 was a medium-range ballistic missile capable of carrying a thermonuclear warhead. It was a single-stage, road-transportable, surface-launched, storable liquid propellant-fuelled missile that could deliver a megaton-class nuclear weapon. The Soviets were building nine sites, six for R-12 medium-range missiles (NATO designation SS-4 Sandal) with an effective range of 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) and three for R-14 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (NATO designation SS-5 Skean) with a maximum range of 4,500 kilometres (2,800 mi).
On 7 October, Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado spoke at the UN General Assembly: "If... we are attacked, we will defend ourselves. I repeat, we have sufficient means with which to defend ourselves; we have indeed our inevitable weapons, the weapons, which we would have preferred not to acquire, and which we do not wish to employ." On 11 October in another Senate speech, Sen Keating reaffirmed his earlier warning of 31 August and stated that, "Construction has begun on at least a half dozen launching sites for intermediate range tactical missiles."
The Cuban leadership was further upset when on 20 September, the US Senate approved Joint Resolution 230, which stated that the US was determined "to prevent in Cuba the creation or use of an externally-supported military capability endangering the security of the United States". On the same day, the US announced a major military exercise in the Caribbean, PHIBRIGLEX-62, which Cuba denounced as a deliberate provocation and proof that the US planned to invade Cuba.
The Soviet leadership believed, based on its perception of Kennedy's lack of confidence during the Bay of Pigs Invasion, that he would avoid confrontation and would accept the missiles as a fait accompli. On 11 September, the Soviet Union publicly warned that a US attack on Cuba or on Soviet ships that were carrying supplies to the island would mean war. The Soviets continued the Maskirovka program to conceal their actions in Cuba. They repeatedly denied that the weapons being brought into Cuba were offensive in nature. On 7 September, Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin assured United States Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson that the Soviet Union was supplying only defensive weapons to Cuba. On 11 September, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS: Telegrafnoe Agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza) announced that the Soviet Union had no need or intention to introduce offensive nuclear missiles into Cuba. On 13 October, Dobrynin was questioned by former Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles about whether the Soviets planned to put offensive weapons in Cuba. He denied any such plans. On 17 October, Soviet embassy official Georgi Bolshakov brought President Kennedy a personal message from Khrushchev reassuring him that "under no circumstances would surface-to-surface missiles be sent to Cuba."
Missiles reported
Missiles placed in Cuba would enable the Soviets to target most of the continental US. The planned arsenal consisted of forty launchers. The Cuban populace observed the arrival and deployment of the missiles and hundreds of reports reached Miami. US intelligence received countless reports, many of dubious quality or even laughable, most of which could be dismissed as describing defensive missiles.
Only five reports bothered the analysts. They described large trucks passing through towns at night that were carrying very long canvas-covered cylindrical objects and could not make turns through towns without backing up and maneuvering. Defensive missile transporters, it was believed, could make such turns without undue difficulty. The reports could not be satisfactorily dismissed.
Aerial confirmation
The United States had been sending U-2 surveillance flights over Cuba since the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. A pause in reconnaissance flights occurred on 30 August 1962 when a U-2 operated by the US Air Force's Strategic Air Command flew over Sakhalin Island in the Soviet Far East by mistake. The Soviets lodged a protest and the US apologized. Nine days later, a Taiwanese-operated U-2 was lost over western China to an SA-2 surface-to-air missile (SAM). US officials were worried that one of the Cuban or Soviet SAMs in Cuba might shoot down a CIA U-2, causing another international incident. In a meeting with members of the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance (COMOR) on 10 September 1962, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy restricted further U-2 flights over Cuban airspace. The resulting lack of coverage over the island for the next five weeks became known to historians as the "Photo Gap". No significant U-2 coverage was achieved over the interior of the island during this time. US officials attempted to use a Corona photo-reconnaissance satellite to photograph reported Soviet military deployments, but the imagery acquired over western Cuba by a Corona KH-4 mission on 1 October 1962 was obscured by clouds and haze and did not provide usable intelligence. At the end of September, Navy reconnaissance aircraft photographed the Soviet ship Kasimov with large crates on its deck the size and shape of Il-28 jet bomber fuselages.
In September 1962, analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) noticed that Cuban surface-to-air missile sites were arranged in a pattern similar to those used by the Soviet Union to protect ICBM bases, and the DIA lobbied for resumption of U-2 flights over the island. In the past the flights had been conducted by the CIA, but pressure from the Defense Department led to that authority being transferred to the Air Force. After the loss of a CIA U-2 over the Soviet Union in May 1960, it was thought that if another U-2 were shot down, an Air Force aircraft apparently being used for a legitimate military purpose would be easier to explain than a CIA flight.
When reconnaissance missions were permitted again, on 9 October 1962, poor weather kept the planes from flying. The US first obtained U-2 photographic evidence of the Soviet missiles on 14 October 1962, when a U-2 flight piloted by Major Richard Heyser took 928 pictures on a path selected by DIA analysts, capturing images of what turned out to be an SS-4 construction site at San Cristóbal, Pinar del Río Province (now in Artemisa Province), in western Cuba.
President notified
On 15 October 1962, the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) reviewed the U-2 photographs and identified objects that appeared to be medium range ballistic missiles. This identification was made partly on the strength of reporting provided by Oleg Penkovsky, a double agent in the GRU working for the CIA and MI6. Although he provided no direct reports of Soviet missile deployments to Cuba, technical and doctrinal details of Soviet missile regiments that had been provided by Penkovsky in the months and years prior to the crisis helped NPIC analysts to identify the missiles in U-2 imagery.
That evening, the CIA notified the Department of State and at 8:30 pm EDT, Bundy chose to wait until the next morning to tell the President. McNamara was briefed at midnight. The next morning, Bundy showed Kennedy the U-2 photographs and briefed him on the CIA's analysis of the images. At 6:30 pm EDT, Kennedy convened a meeting of the nine members of the National Security Council and five other key advisers, in a group he named the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) after the fact on 22 October by National Security Action Memorandum 196. Without informing the members of EXCOMM, President Kennedy tape-recorded all of their proceedings, and Sheldon M. Stern, head of the Kennedy library transcribed some of them.
On 16 October, President Kennedy notified Attorney General Robert Kennedy that he was convinced the Soviets were placing missiles on Cuba, that it was a legitimate threat and that the possibility of nuclear destruction by two world superpowers had become a reality. Robert Kennedy responded by contacting the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Robert Kennedy expressed his "concern about what was happening" and Dobrynin "was instructed by Soviet Chairman Nikita S. Khrushchev to assure President Kennedy that there would be no ground-to-ground missiles or offensive weapons placed in Cuba". Khrushchev further assured Kennedy that the Soviet Union had no intention of "disrupting the relationship of our two countries" despite the photo evidence presented before President Kennedy.
Responses considered
The US had no plan for a response in place because it had never expected that the Soviets would install nuclear missiles on Cuba. EXCOMM discussed several possible courses of action:
Do nothing: American vulnerability to Soviet missiles was not new.
Diplomacy: Use diplomatic pressure to induce the Soviet Union to remove the missiles.
Secret approach: Offer Castro the choice of parting from the Soviets or being invaded.
Invasion: Full-force invasion of Cuba and overthrow of Castro.
Air strike: Use the US Air Force to attack all known missile sites.
Blockade: Use the US Navy to block any missiles from arriving in Cuba.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that a full-scale attack and invasion was the only solution. They believed that the Soviets would not attempt to stop the US from conquering Cuba. Kennedy was skeptical:
They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something. They can't, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and then do nothing. If they don't take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin.