[I went in and cleaned up this post for clarity--and to add Walter Sweeney's name--in September 2017. China Hand]
Fidel Castro's 90th birthday celebrations might have been a bit more extravagant if Cuba had emerged from the 1962 missile crisis as the world's fifth nuclear power.
Everybody loves to talk about the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when America’s
Best and Brightest under Jack Kennedy stared down Nikita Khrushchev and his
attempt to position strategic nuclear weapons in Cuba.
Revisionist history a.k.a. facts have as usual removed some
of the good v. evil gloss slathered on the US by Kennedy hagiographers
to reveal the political calculations underlying the confrontation.
It has emerged that Khrushchev was waaaaaaaay
on the wrong end of the notorious missile gap, contrary to Kennedy's
claims during the 1960 election, with major shortfalls in
operational ICBMs and no strategic submarine capabilities and, indeed,
with only 300 strategic nuclear devices overall compared to 1500 for the
US. Soviet strategists were appalled by the
introduction of US Jupiter nuclear-tipped missiles into Turkey and Italy and justifiably
anxious about the prospect of a pre-emptive US strike.
Kennedy understood
that standing up to the Soviets over Cuba was more a
matter of US (and
his) credibility and a reflection of US determination over Berlin than
an issue of US national security. From the beginning of the crisis, his
advisors are unambiguous in their analysis that the missiles in Cuba,
when
operational, would not effect the strategic balance.
Furthermore, the CIA informed Kennedy that the missiles apparently had not yet been armed with their nuclear warheads (correct) and the missile sites were not strongly defended and could be seized in a military operation with a minimum of fuss and muss (wrong wrong wrong).
In other words, the US saw Khrushchev as way out on a limb that was ripe for sawing off, thanks to the premature exposure of the Soviet missile gambit on Cuba thanks to US intelligence operations.
Missiles in Cuba were intended by Khrushchev as a) a
stabilizing strategic riposte to the US missiles in Italy and Turkey and b) a neat way to
succor Cuba and bind it into a Soviet alliance by deterring a widely expected
US “regime change” style invasion.
Recently, the tape recordings of the Oval Office discussions
during the crisis were declassified and, according to Benjamin Schwartz in
The Atlantic, yielded this
priceless
nugget:
On the first day of
the crisis, October 16, when pondering Khrushchev’s motives for sending
the missiles to Cuba, Kennedy made what must be one of the most staggeringly
absentminded (or sarcastic) observations in the annals of American national-security
policy: “Why does he put these in there, though? … It’s just as if we
suddenly began to put a major
number of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamned dangerous, I would think.”
McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, immediately pointed out: “Well
we did it, Mr. President.”
As for regime change, Soviet expectations were spot on;
after the Bay of Pigs debacle the Pentagon was busy with Operation Mongoose
planning for Castro’s overthrow.
Declassified documents reveal that the US would, as usual, take the high
ground by invading only in response to a Cuban outrage, albeit one manufactured
by the CIA.
One scenario, thanks
to an anonymous writer with a strong historical understanding of what had
worked in US-Cuban relations:
A “Remember the Maine” incident could
be arranged in several forms:
a. We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo
Bay and blame Cuba.
Etc.
The key assumption underlying the US strategy for facing down the Russians in Cuba was that the
United States didn’t think that the Soviet Union had any operational nuclear
weapons capability in Cuba when it decided to go public and issue the ultimatum
to Khrushchev.
In a piece I wrote about dead horses in Soviet Ukraine (one
of my favorite pieces about a pivotal event in Ukrainian history—
must
read!) I remarked in passing on the assertion by Victor Marchetti, a CIA
whistleblower perhaps little remembered today, but a big deal in the last
century:
Marchetti,
by the way, claims to have been intimately involved in the intelligence aspects
of the Cuban crisis. He alleges that
President Kennedy was well aware that the missiles in Cuba were still lacking
their warheads and therefore posed no threat to the United States. Nevertheless, Kennedy and his hagiographers,
perhaps in order to provide America’s youth with sufficient pretext for a
frantic pre-apocalypse f*ckfest, have skated over this aspect of the crisis.
[We
didn’t] come as close to war as many think, because Khruschev knew he was
caught. His missiles weren't armed, and he hadn't the troops to protect them.
Kennedy knew this, so he was able to say: "take them out." And
Khruschev had to say yes.
Ah,
history. Or, as we say, “Whaddya know?”
Well, at the time Marchetti wrote that in 2001, the USSR had
met its demise, rehashing the Cuban Missile Crisis had become a cottage
industry and occasion for mutual backpatting by Russian and US national
security types who had saved the world, at least certain paleskinned bits of
the Northern Hemisphere, from destruction…
…and it was pretty categorically stated that Cuba was loaded
to the gunwales with usable nuclear weapons in October 1962, when the crisis started...
...and Marchetti was defending his initial, less alarmist assessments
and dismissing the subsequent revelations as nefarious tag-team
U.S.-Russian Federation disinfo...
...so post-1989 revelations do have to be parsed carefully since the
Cuban missile crisis is apparently still a useful text for geopolitical
jockeying between Russia and the United States...
...but emerging documents and memoirs pretty convincingly support the latter assessments.
Anyway.
162 gadgets is the number bandied about, a mixture of
strategic warheads for the medium and intermediate range missiles
targeting the
US, and 92 tactical nuclear devices for defensive purposes, especially cruise and short range
missiles but also
including a pair of nuclear mines.
As we shall see, Marchetti was right
about the strategic warheads that could target the U.S. not being ready
for prime time, but the tactical nukes were apparently good to go...
And as for Khrushchev “not having the troops”, that was apparently a pretty major flub by the CIA. There were allegedly forty
thousand Soviet troops in Cuba, not the few thousand estimated by Marchetti and the CIA, infiltrated
together with shiploads of military equipment under the noses of the CIA and
including infantry, anti-aircraft, and other defensive units to protect the
core strategic nuclear force.
Soviet
forces were
commanded by
officers whose concept of operational routine was the Great Patriotic War
against Nazi Germany, had control over those tactical nuclear weapons, and had
authority to use them
if the U.S. invaded and communications with Moscow were severed.
Plenty of material, in other words, to turn
Cuba into a major battlefield, starting with the U.S. base at Guantanamo as a
focus of Soviet attentions.
Here’s a photo of the general in charge of Soviet forces in
Cuba, Issa Pliyev, wearing the “volunteer” civilian garb he
detested, standing with Castro, who is wearing the rarely-seen clunky glasses that, apparently, he detested)…
…and here's General Pliyev in his full military fig as veteran of Stalingrad, two
time Hero of the Soviet Union, seven time Order of Lenin, Hero of the Mongolian People’s Republic, Member,
French Legion of Honor, etc. etc.
However, Marchetti
is correct in terms of describing US perceptions at the time of the
crisis.
The part about the strategic missiles not being operational was something of a lucky guess.
According to the record, even after a U2 flight yielded
unambiguous photographic evidence that, indeed, the Soviets had established
intermediate and medium-range missile launch facilities in Cuba (built under a
crash program involving the labor of hundreds of thousands of Cubans), the CIA
didn’t know for sure that the warheads had arrived in Cuba.
Indeed, the photos reveal something that looks more like construction
sites than comfy bases of mass destruction (the Soviets apparently
cloned their homeland missile facilities in Cuba, making photo analysis
of the
nature and progress of the projects a bit easier), supporting the
inference
that the warheads were not yet on site and integrated with the missiles.
The CIA
conclusion appears to have been that the warheads weren’t in Cuba and if
they
were, they were off in some warehouse somewhere and the missiles were
unarmed.
It turns out the the warheads for the strategic missiles were in Cuba but had not been deployed to the launch sites yet.
Another indication that the strategic missiles were not
operational in October 1962 is that Khrushchev was not yet prepared to formally
announce their existence.
Apparently, Khrushchev planned to announce the existence of
the missiles during a visit to the United States in November 1962, bringing to
mind this exchange from Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove:
Dr.
Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if
you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
---Ambassador
de Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As
you know, the Premier loves surprises.
As for the tactical nuclear weapons, McNamara states that his
knees wobbled when he was told about them at a thirtieth anniversary
get-together in 1992 between the US, Russia, and Cuba. However, it's
more accurate to state that he had been informed of the possible
presence of tactical nukes on Cuba at the time of the crisis, but had
simply refused to believe it.
According to the Kennedy tapes,
by October 29, 1962 it was known thanks to low altitude surveillance
that there were nuclear capable Soviet tactical missiles on Cuba, and US
military commanders were asking for permission to use tactical nuclear
weapons in the planned invasion: McNamara himself refused. I'm guessing
McNamara chose to assume (erroneously) the missiles were not nuclear
tipped and this was the version presented to Kennedy.
Therefore, President Kennedy had the certain luxury of
gaming his Cuba scenarios on the assumption that Cuba didn't have any usable nukes yet (which was true of the strategic missiles the US knew about, but absolutely wrong concerning the tactical nukes the CIA had missed).
US planners therefore set aside the worry that a nuke would get lit off in Cuba, and gamed the nuclear element as if it would play
out only within the parameters of a potential direct nuclear exchange between the US
and Russian homelands.
The assumption was, in other words, that any nukes would have to come out of Russia, and Khrushchev probably wouldn't escalate to global nuclear war if the U.S. dropped the hammer on Cuba.
The
consensus opinion
in Washington in October 1962—buttressed by the reports cited by
Marchetti that the warheads had probably not arrived and there weren’t a lot of Soviet
troops on the island--was to launch massive airstrikes followed by invasion to
take out the missiles (and also, though it’s not much discussed in the official
hagiography, provide a useful pretext for going into Cuba big and dealing with that pesky Castro problem once and for all).
However,
according
to McNamara, Kennedy was swayed to go for the quarantine* -->
ultimatum --> airstrikes + invasion to follow option instead by the
general in charge of U.S.
Tactical Air Command, Walter Sweeney, who cautioned that maybe a nuclear-armed missile
might
survive the massive U.S. strike to hit the United States.
In other words, the group opinion was 99% sure everything
would go great, but Kennedy wanted 100%.
If the group opinion had prevailed and the US had invaded
Cuba and been surprised by 40,000 nuclear-armed Soviet troops, things would
have gone south in a hurry (together with McNamara's knees and career). Which is why
expert opinion has started to tilt away from “masterful statesmanship” toward
the “lucky accident” interpretation of the crisis.
As it transpired, the
most immediate nuclear risk during the crisis didn’t even involve the weapons
on Cuba.
It was created by the US Navy
enthusiastically
depth charging a Soviet sub nearing Cuba that was armed with a nuclear
torpedo.
Unaware that the USN was
dropping undercharged “we want you to surface and identify yourself” ashcans
and not “we want to sink you” depth bombs and worried that his vessel was about
to be destroyed, the Soviet captain decided to dish out his 10-kiloton nuclear
torpedo and go down in a blaze of glory.
Fortunately, the launch was vetoed by his flotilla commander, who
happened to be on the boat.
The sub,
happily, survived, as did significant swaths of the Soviet Union and US.
Khrushchev eventually obliged Kennedy, climbing down in a
nice superpower-to-superpower way, receiving in return a pledge that the United
States would not invade Cuba (a pledge honored somewhat in the breach) and a sub
voce US undertaking to remove soon-to-be-obsolete Jupiter missiles from Turkey
and maybe Italy (which were subsequently replaced by invulnerable sub-based Polaris missiles).
And that, of course, did not oblige Fidel Castro, who
regards Khrushchev as an ass and a wimp.
An ass, because instead of declaring to Kennedy that the
missiles were a deterrent and an sovereign Soviet security interest covered by
the USSR’s nuclear force when a U2 flight detected initial signs of missile
facility construction in August 1962, Khrushchev fudged and called them
defensive (with the apparent mental reservation that “defensive” meant “offensive
weapons that defend Cuba by virtue of their deterrent function”). This put the Soviet foreign policy
establishment on the wrong foot in vigorously and credibly defending the
initiative when it turned out in October that there were four dozen
strategic missiles in the package capable of reaching most of the continental United States.
And wimp, because Khrushchev backed down in October 1962 and
threw Cuba under the bus.
Cuba under
Castro had irrevocably burned its bridges to the United States by hosting the
missiles, and was ready to do that socialist shoulder-to-shoulder thing and
risk US annihilation in an attack if the USSR was ready to take out the United
States in retaliation.
But not to
be.
Khrushchev caved to the US and
removed
all the nukes, not just the strategic weapons he had promised Kennedy to
remove, but also the tactical nuclear weapons he had promised Castro in the
initial agreement would eventually be delivered to Cuban control—and Washington
didn’t even know about.**
So instead of getting a powerful, nuke-based alliance with
the USSR that would give Castro bargaining leverage against US security and
economic coercion—and maybe diplomatic recognition, who knows? The US
had extended the courtesy to a number of Soviet proxies with considerably less
national legitimacy than Cuba-- Cuba was
left as a lonely piñata twisting in the wind while the US took whacks at it for
over 50 years. President Obama marked
the continuation, rather than conclusion, of the effort by going to Cuba for a
triumphal visit that was interpreted, especially in the United States, as
receiving the Castros’ surrender to the forces of US democracy and capitalism,
notwithstanding Raul Castro’s effort to literally spin Obama’s flaccid wrist
into a display of equality and popular solidarity.
Here's how those socialist photops are supposed to look, by the way.
For the Soviet Union, a dismal botch that helped cost Khrushchev his job
and, coming on the heels of the China debacle, pretty much put paid to
Soviet overseas nuclear junketeering.
What about Cuba? What would have happened if the USSR, instead of putting
its own nukes on Cuba, had just given Cuba some nukes?
Or,
in a strikingly plausible scenario, let
Castro keep the tactical nukes after the Soviets withdrew? How would US
relations with Cuba and the rest of Latin America evolved?
Looking at the cavalcade of instability in places like Chile,
Argentina, Colombia, Honduras, and Guatemala engendered by the successful US
rollback of socialism after Khrushchev bugged out, Latin America would certainly
have been different if Cuba had nukes…and maybe not worse off.
But that’s a possibility the US, for obvious
reasons, has no interest in exploring.
*There was no basis under international law for the unilateral US
blockade of Cuba in 1962. The legal recourse for the US would have been
to obtain a 2/3 vote from the Organization of American States
authorizing a blockade against a member state, something that the US
wasn't willing to wait for. The legal end-around was to call it a
"quarantine".
**The
report that
Khrushchev had decided to let Castro keep the nukes post-crisis, but
his envoy, Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan, evaluated that Castro
(admittedly at that time 32 years old, emotionally vigorous, and under
tremendous stress) was too headstrong & irrational, &
decided on his own initiative to negotiate their withdrawal is, by the
way, false. Mikoyan determined that Khrushchev's serial mismanagement
of the crisis had alienated Castro to the degree that effective
co-management of the weapons was impossible. Castro, in desperation,
was prepared to inform the world through the UN that, despite the Soviet
withdrawal, Cuba still had the nukes and an effective deterrent against
US invasion. The decision to notify Castro the tactical weapons were
being pulled
from Cuba was
made in consultation with the Soviet Party Presidium.
