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The Cuban missile crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a six-day public confrontation in October 1962 between the United States and the Soviet Union over the presence of Soviet strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba. It ended when the Soviets agreed to remove the weapons in return for a US agreement not to invade Cuba and a secret assurance that American missiles in Turkey would be withdrawn. The confrontation stemmed from the ideological rivalries of the Cold War. It raised a real threat of nuclear war but was a turning point given that, in its wake, American and Soviet leaders adopted more sober attitudes to East-West relations. The crisis accelerated the development of a more complicated, polycentric world, with some of Washington and Moscow’s respective allies, charting a more independent path after 1962 – partly because of a lack of consultation during the missile confrontation.

Practically every minute of the missile crisis has been scrutinized intensely. Crisis participants and journalists dominated the literature in the first few years, tending to laud Kennedy’s response to the Soviet challenge. Presidential aide Arthur Schlesinger described his leadership as a “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world.” Thus, the cool, heroic Kennedy, exhibiting immaculate judgment, forced the impulsive and blustering Khrushchev to concede. Such accounts neglect to point out that Kennedy compromised by agreeing to remove US missiles from Turkey.

The 1970s and the 1980s saw a growing number of scholarly publications, including criticisms of the US administration, with questions being raised about how Kennedy appeared to obstruct quiet diplomacy in favour of public muscle-flexing. The greater openness that accompanied the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s led to growing acceptance that Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba in part to defend the island from American aggression, which had been demonstrated by the US-sponsored attack by Cuban émigrés at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Several conferences in the late 1980s and early 1990s involving missile crisis veterans brought the long-overlooked Cuban perspective more to the fore. This included accounting for why Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro, chose to accept Soviet missiles – he wanted to protect the island and to strengthen the international socialist camp. Furthermore, in the late 1980s, suspicions about the reason for the removal of the US Jupiter missiles in Turkey in 1963 were confirmed.

By CIA Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Cuban crisis map missile range by CIA. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The 1990s saw the accelerated declassification of material from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the US National Archives, and the Central Intelligence Agency. The Kennedy Library released 22 hours of secret recordings of missile crisis conversations between the President and his ‘ExComm’ colleagues. The recordings provide important insight into White House policy-making and into the views of individual advisers, revealing some to be less ‘dovish’ than was previously assumed. There are no signs of the literature of the missile crisis drying up, as shown by a fresh wave of publications on the 50th anniversary of the crisis. Why, then, decades on, does the missile crisis still merit interest?

There are at least three reasons. First, nuclear weapons were involved in both the origins and the resolution of the confrontation. Khrushchev stationed nuclear missiles on Cuba in part to boost the position of the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race as well as to protect his ally, but both him and Kennedy resolved the confrontation peacefully in large part due to fear of how matters might escalate. The literature has emphasized in recent years how easily the missile crisis could have escalated, not least because of Soviet nuclear-armed submarines in the Caribbean. Questions about the value of nuclear weapons are particularly germane today in Britain, where Parliament has agreed recently to renew the nuclear ‘deterrent.’ Critics argue that deploying nuclear weapons is against international law because it is disproportionately destructive. Certainly, Kennedy had been sobered by a briefing in 1961 that indicated that within the first few hours of a full-scale nuclear exchange hundreds of millions of people would be dead.

Second, there are significant gaps in knowledge about the missile crisis. While there is a great deal of US documentation available, the picture is far from complete. Many military records remain classified. The quantity of Soviet material available remains relatively modest. The Cuban government has released few documents, but the recent thaw in Cuban-American relations, with President Obama’s visit to Havana in 2016, may lead to improvements in this regard. There is still much to be learned about the contributions and perceptions of countries beyond the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba, not least from Latin American and former ‘Iron Curtain’ states. At the same time, the fact that certain areas of the missile crisis, such as the deliberations in the White House, are so well documented, provides continued opportunities to construct theoretical models to explain state behaviour and top-level decision-making.

Finally, there has long been a tendency among historians to play down the contributions of individuals, but the missile crisis suggests that this approach can be misplaced. Kennedy’s admirers were right to point out that he remained remarkably cool and composed throughout the confrontation, despite his appreciation of the danger of global nuclear war. He was willing to listen to a range of options from his ‘ExComm’ advisers, without surrendering his willingness to take decisions. Khrushchev showed more strain, but he too was gravely aware of the danger and kept open the channels of communication with his adversary. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev were willing to compromise, even at considerable political cost to themselves, and both demonstrated empathy. The question of personality and fitness for high office has been prominent recently in relation to the US presidential contest. It seems doubtful that there will be a crisis as grave as that of October 1962, but if one occurs, then one hopes that the next White House incumbent has the qualities required to navigate it safely.

Feature Image Credit: Nikita Khrushchev and Zoya Mironova at the United Nations, September 1960 by Warren K. Leffler. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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