Cuban Missile Crisis

From Freepedia

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a tense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis began on October 14, 1962 and lasted for 38 days until November 20, 1962. It is regarded as the moment when the Cold War was closest to becoming nuclear war, and which could have turned into World War III. Russians refer to the Cuban Missile Crisis as the "Caribbean Crisis" and Cubans refer to it as the "October Crisis".

Contents

Soviet strategy

The Soviet government determined in 1959 that any future war would be largely nuclear and would likely be a world-wide war. In that same year the Strategic Rocket Forces were founded. Under Khrushchev, the Soviet government focused increasingly on rockets and missiles instead of conventional military forces, in response to the new administration of Kennedy and his accompanying rearmament program. The Soviets decided to install nuclear weapons, in the form of medium and short range ballistic missiles, in Cuba, a Caribbean nation off the coast of Florida with a socialist government under Fidel Castro. Castro had sought Soviet support after the collapse of its relations with the U.S. due to the Cuban Revolution and the subsequent failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Soviet reasoning was two-fold — first, to defend this new socialist state from a U.S. or U.S.-sponsored invasion, and second, to restore the nuclear balance of power putting US cities directly within the range of Soviet missiles.

U.S. response

With the news of the confirmed photographic evidence of Soviet missile bases in Cuba, President Kennedy convened a special group of senior advisers to meet secretly at the White House. This group later became known as the ExComm, or Executive Committee of the National Security Council. From the morning of October 16 this group met frequently to devise a response to the threat. The officials had discussed the various options - an immediate bombing strike was dismissed early on, as was a potentially time-consuming appeal to the United Nations. The choice was reduced to either a naval blockade and an ultimatum, or full-scale invasion. A blockade was finally chosen, although there were a number of hawks (notably Paul Nitze, and Generals Curtis LeMay and Maxwell Taylor) who kept pushing for tougher action. An invasion was planned, and troops were assembled in Florida (although with over 40,000 Soviet soldiers in Cuba, complete with tactical nuclear weapons, the proposed invading force would have faced considerable difficulties).

There were a number of issues with the naval blockade. There was legality - as Fidel Castro noted, there was nothing illegal about the missile installations; they were certainly a threat to the U.S., but similar missiles aimed at the U.S.S.R. were in place in Europe (sixty Thor IRBMs in four squadrons near Nottingham, in the United Kingdom; thirty Jupiter IRBMs in two squadrons near Gioia del Colle, Italy; and fifteen Jupiter IRBMs in one squadron near Izmir, Turkey.) Then there was the Soviet reaction to the blockade - would a conflict start out of escalating retaliation?

Kennedy spoke to the American public (and the Soviet government) in a televised address on October 22. He confirmed the presence of the missiles in Cuba and announced the naval blockade as a quarantine zone of 500 nautical miles (926 km) around the Cuban coast, warned that the military was "prepare[d] for any eventualities," and condemned the Soviet Union for "secrecy and deception". The U.S. was surprised at the solid support from its European allies and also from much of the remaining international community.

When Kennedy openly publicized the crisis, the entire world was put in a state of terror. People began talking and worrying openly about nuclear Armageddon, and drills for such an emergency happened almost daily in many cities.

The case was conclusively proved on October 25 at an emergency session of the UN Security Council. U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson attempted to force an answer from Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin as to the existence of the weapons, famously demanding, "Don't wait for the translation!" Upon Zorin's refusal, Stevenson produced photographs taken by U.S. surveillance of aircraft showing the missile installations in Cuba.

Khrushchev sent letters to Kennedy on October 23 and 24 claiming the deterrent nature of the missiles in Cuba and the peaceful intentions of the Soviet Union; however, the Soviets had delivered two different deals to the US government. On October 26, they offered to withdraw the missiles in return for a U.S. guarantee not to invade Cuba or support any invasion. The second deal was broadcast on public radio on October 27, calling for the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey in addition to the demands of the 26th. The crisis peaked on October 27, when a U-2 (piloted by Rudolph Anderson) was shot down over Cuba and another U-2 flight over Russia was almost intercepted. At the same time, Soviet merchant ships were nearing the quarantine zone. Kennedy responded by publicly accepting the first deal and sending Robert Kennedy to the Soviet embassy to accept the second in private - the small number (fifteen) of Jupiter missiles near Izmir, Turkey would be removed. The Soviet ships turned back and on October 28 Khrushchev announced that he had ordered the removal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. The decision prompted Dean Rusk to comment, "We went eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked."

Satisfied that the Soviets had removed the missiles, President Kennedy ordered an end to the quarantine of Cuba on November 20.

Aftermath

The compromise satisfied no one, though it was a particularly sharp diplomatic embarrassment for Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, who were seen as backing down from a situation that they had created, whilst, if played well, it could have looked like just the opposite; the USSR gallantly saving the world from nuclear holocaust by not insisting on restoring the nuclear equilibrium. Khrushchev's fall from power a few years later can be partially linked to Politburo embarrassment at both Khrushchev's eventual concessions to the US and his ineptitude in precipitating the crisis in the first place.

U.S. military commanders were not happy with the result either. General LeMay told the President that it was "the greatest defeat in our history" and that the US should invade immediately.

For Cuba, it was a betrayal by the Soviets whom they had trusted, given that the decisions on putting an end to the crisis had been made exclusively by Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Author and former Cuban military intelligence officer Servando Gonzalez has advanced a controversial but well-supported hypothesis that there were never any nuclear warheads in Cuba at all--that the crisis had been an unintended consequence of a May 1962 plan hatched by Khrushchev as a means of getting the United States to invade Cuba in order to depose Castro, whom the Soviets were beginning to see as an unstable and troublesome ally, one who was fast becoming a major political and financial liability to the Kremlin.

In early 1992 it was confirmed that Soviet forces in Cuba had, by the time the crisis broke, received tactical nuclear warheads for their cruise missiles, artillery rockets, and IL-28 bombers [1], though General Anatoly Gribkov, part of the Soviet staff responsible for the operation, stated that the local Soviet commander, General Issa Pliyev, had predelegated authority to use them if the U.S. had mounted a full-scale invasion of Cuba. Gribkov misspoke: the Kremlin's authorization remained unsigned and undelivered.

The short time span of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the extensive documentation of the decision-making processes on both sides makes it an excellent case study for analysis of state decision-making. In the Essence of Decision, Graham T. Allison and Philip D. Zelikow use the crisis to illustrate multiple approaches to analyzing the actions of the state. The intensity and magnitude of the crisis also provides excellent material for drama, as illustrated by the movie Thirteen Days (2000), directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp.

In October 2002, McNamara and Schlesinger joined a group of other dignitaries in a "reunion" with Castro in Cuba to continue to release classified documents and further study the crisis. It was during the first meeting that Secretary McNamara first discovered that Cuba had many more missiles than initially expected, and what McNamara refered to as 'rational men' (Castro and Khruschev) were perfectly willing to start a nuclear war over the crisis.

See also

Further reading

  • Allison, Graham and Zelikow, P. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Longman, 1999.
  • Blight, James G., and David A. Welch. On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.
  • Brugioni, Dino A. Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Random House, 1991.
  • Divine, Robert A. The Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: M. Wiener Pub.,1988.
  • Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Naftali, Timothy; One Hell of a Gamble - Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy 1958-1964; W.W. Norton (New York 1998)
  • Giglio, James N. The Presidency of John F. Kennedy. Lawrence, Kansas, 1991.
  • Gonzalez, Servando The Nuclear Deception: Nikita Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis; IntelliBooks, 2002 ISBN: 0-9711391-5-6
  • Kennedy, Robert F. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis; ISBN 0-3933183-4-6
  • May, Ernest R., and Philip D. Zelikow., eds. The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis. Concise Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.
  • Nuti, Leopoldo (ed.) I «Missili di Ottobre»: La Storiografia Americana e la Crisi Cubana dell’Ottobre 1962 Milano: LED, 1994.
  • Thompson, Robert S., The Missile of October: The Declassified Story of John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
  • Diez Acosta, Tomás, October 1962: The 'Missile' Crisis As Seen From Cuba. Pathfinder Press, New York, 2002.

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.freepedia.org/Cuban_Missile_Crisis.html"


Views
Personal tools
In other languages
Similar Links