The Book That Stopped an Outbreak of Nuclear War
It
is very likely that no work of popular history has ever informed an American
president’s actions in a crisis as much as The Guns of August did in the fall of 1962.
Published that spring, Barbara W. Tuchman’s account of the outbreak of World
War I made a lasting impression on John F. Kennedy. “In reading the history of
past wars and how they began,” he wrote to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in
July 1962, “we cannot help but be impressed how frequently the failure of
communication, misunderstanding and mutual irritation have played an important
role in the events leading up to fateful decisions for war.”Academic
historians may have sneered at the bestseller, which won the Pulitzer Prize the
following year, but they grudgingly lauded its vivid rendering of anxious
rivals, buffeted by misapprehension, as they plunged headlong into the pointless
hellfire of modern industrial warfare. The young commander in chief insisted
the book be read by his inner circle and had copies delivered to officers at
U.S. bases around the world. Robert Kennedy later recalled that during the
Cuban missile crisis the president committed himself to avoiding “a course
which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time [called] The Missiles of October.”The
story of those tense days in the fall of 1962 is well known. On October 14, an
American U-2 spy plane discovered medium-range Soviet missiles in Cuba, where three
years earlier a band of rebels toppled a U.S.-friendly despot. Fidel Castro,
the leader of the revolution, initially sought a rapprochement with Washington,
or at least a tacit commitment to noninterference. But after the bungled
U.S.-supported invasion of Cuba in 1961, Castro declared himself a
Marxist-Leninist and appealed to the Soviet Union for protection. Although Khrushchev
was initially cool on the Cuban revolutionaries—he was committed to reducing
the temperature of the Cold War and avoiding unnecessary confrontation with the
United States—he embraced Castro’s government in April 1962. Soon Soviet soldiers,
military equipment, and armaments were moved into position 90 miles off the
coast of Florida. The American reconnaissance pilot who first spotted the
missiles worried he might be responsible for starting World War III.As
recounted in works with titles like One Hell of a Gamble, One
Minute to Midnight,
and Gambling With Armageddon, the
two global superpowers at the center of the Cold War locked eyes and tensed up,
bringing the world to the brink of devastation. What followed, in one telling,
was the victory of American resolve. Kennedy made clear that he knew about the
missiles in Cuba and declared their presence unacceptable. After consulting
with advisers, he declared a quarantine of the island (Kennedy studiously
avoided calling the measure a blockade, which is an act of war). The missiles
were removed shortly thereafter. The real story was less sensational if no less
impressive, involving intensive back-channel communications and U.S. concessions.
Most importantly, Kennedy agreed to relocate U.S. missiles in Turkey in
exchange for Soviet missiles being removed from Cuba. However one shades the
episode’s conclusion, the competing hegemons prevented an outcome befitting a
Tuchman sequel.What
they did not do, of course, was banish nuclear war from the realm of
possibility. Indeed, the prospect of nuclear calamity looms in the background
of current geopolitics. The end of the Cold War scattered seeds of discord as
several nations raced to develop nukes of their own, Iran and North Korea being
only the most recent and worrisome examples. While the Obama administration successfully
negotiated with Iran to contain its nuclear ambitions—a feat Trump scuttled and
that Biden hopes to restore—any progress with North Korea has remained elusive.
A frustrated Obama warned his successor that Kim Jong Un’s regime would be his most
vexing foreign policy challenge. By 2017, amid loose talk of fire and fury, there were “multiple realistic pathways”
to the disaster of a nuclear war with North Korea, according to one expert. The Trump presidency is over, but the existential
danger of nuclear weapons persists.With
this simmering predicament in mind, Serhii Plokhy has written a new account of
the incident that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Plokhy, a
professor of history and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at
Harvard, has written prize-winning accounts of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and the implosion of the Soviet Union. In Nuclear Folly: A History of
the Cuban Missile Crisis,
he brings a deep understanding of Soviet political reality to the oft-told
story of those 13 dicey days in October 1962, a narrative still defined much
more by Camelot than the Kremlin in the popular imagination. The result is a
magisterial work based on a bevy of U.S. and Soviet archival sources, including
previously classified KGB documents. The perspective Plokhy provides exposes
the perverse incentives that fueled dangerous nuclear power plays during the
Cold War and, he suggests, beyond. Understanding how the most famous near miss
of the Cold War was peacefully resolved can, he believes, bring us some
reassurance—and perhaps offer crucial life-saving insights.In
early 1962, Khrushchev needed a win. During a trip to Bulgaria, he fretted
about the prospect of “losing” Cuba to a second, more organized U.S. invasion. On
top of that, in April, the U.S. had successfully tested a new kind of intercontinental
ballistic missile called the Minuteman. Unlike previous missiles, which took
hours to fill up with liquid propellants, during which time they were
vulnerable to enemy strikes, this one used solid fuel and could be launched at
a moment’s notice. The Soviets were caught sleeping as the arms race was upended.One
of Khrushchev’s first moves in response was to fire Marshal Kirill Moskalenko,
commander in chief of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces. This pained the
Soviet premier. Moskalenko had been a loyal officer, arresting Khrushchev’s main
rival during the succession crisis following Stalin’s death and mobilizing to
quash a coup against Khrushchev four years later. He had overseen triumphs like
Yuri Gagarin’s unprecedented space orbit and the detonation of the Tsar Bomba,
the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created. Now he was blamed for falling
behind the U.S. What good were nuclear weapons if they could not be
deployed in time? Plokhy notes that “very few of the missiles that Khrushchev
had at his disposal were intercontinental ones capable of reaching the United
States.… The Soviets thus had nothing to deter a possible attack.” Khrushchev
needed a quick fix. In Bulgaria, obsessing over the fate of Cuba, he had an
idea.On
the flight back to Moscow, Khrushchev told his foreign minister that they would
be sending missiles to Cuba. He reasoned that the Soviet Union wouldn’t need
rapidly deployable ICBMs if they could station their existing payload a stone’s
throw from the U.S. mainland. Kennedy wouldn’t dare take another crack
at Castro with Soviet weapons on the island. “I think that’s the only thing
that can save the country,” he said, presenting the move primarily as an act of
international solidarity with the besieged Cuban people. His interlocutor
expressed concern about how Washington would react to missiles at its doorstep.
Khrushchev reassured him: “We don’t need a nuclear war, and we are not about to
fight.” Despite his generally combative demeanor, Khrushchev was acting out of
insecurity. After all, Plokhy writes, he “had presented himself publicly as the
defender of world communism and leader of a country that was outdoing the
Americans in missile technology. Now he had to deliver.”What
follows is a cautionary tale of frictionless authority. Plokhy finds just one early
dissenter identified in the notes of a Defense Council secretary. Anastas Mikoyan
was Khrushchev’s first deputy in the Council of Ministers. Crucially, he had
been to Cuba and was convinced there was no way to keep the missiles a secret
for long. Kennedy would surely strike if weapons were found so close to U.S.
territory. “What are we supposed to do in such a case—respond with a strike on
U.S. soil?” he asked. Khrushchev recognized the risk but believed he could
avoid disaster. He would later assert his belief that “sensible politicians in
the USA” would not overreact once the missiles were discovered, considering that
the Soviets had taken the placement of U.S. missiles in Turkey a year earlier
in stride. On May 21, 1962, with no real checks on his power, the premier’s
plan went ahead. “One-man rule gave Khrushchev enormous latitude to be quick,
decisive, and flexible in crisis situations,” Plokhy observes, “but it also
gave him opportunities to create crises at will.” He assumed both that Castro
would welcome the help and that U.S. leaders would keep their cool. Hazardous
assumptions, to say the least.On
May 29, the Soviet delegation arrived on “the island of freedom” to confer with
Castro. Sensing that something unusual was afoot, the Cubans took notes as the
Soviets spoke, the first time the KGB’s top Cuba expert saw them do so in an
official meeting. What Castro wanted was something like Article 5 of the NATO
charter, a public statement that an attack on one was an attack on all. “Well,
if the United States were to understand that an invasion of Cuba would mean war
with the Soviet Union,” Castro later recalled saying, “that would be the best
way to keep it from invading Cuba.” He did not ask for armaments, let alone a
surge in Soviet troops on the island. The Soviets insisted that the missiles
were but an insurance policy for the revolution, not an attempt to dictate its
course. The USSR had no interest in replacing the U.S. as hemispheric hegemon.
“Don’t worry,” Khrushchev told a skeptical Raúl Castro, “I’ll grab Kennedy by
the balls and make him negotiate.” Khrushchev was certain of his diplomatic
prowess and was offering to deploy it on Cuba’s behalf.Of
course, Khrushchev was not motivated merely by goodwill toward Castro’s upstart
regime. With short-, medium-, and long-range missiles in Cuba, the Soviets could
strike almost anywhere in the contiguous U.S. This was exactly the credible
threat Khrushchev believed he would need in any future dealings with
Washington. Backed into a corner, Castro stressed internationalist motives for
accepting Soviet military aid, arguing that doing so strengthened the cause of
socialism worldwide. Operation Anadyr, as the effort to surreptitiously place
Soviet missiles in Cuba was dubbed, could thus proceed. The
Kennedy administration did not foresee anything at all like Operation Anadyr
unfolding so close to the U.S. While Robert Kennedy oversaw ongoing
sabotage attempts against the Cuban government (Operation Mongoose), the
president fixated on the situation in Europe, especially escalating tensions in
Berlin. On August 1, 1962, a CIA report found that Soviet military aid to Cuba
was “essentially defensive.” Khrushchev was not likely to “provide Cuba with
capability to undertake major independent military operations overseas.” Six
days later, Cuban radio programs in Miami reported that 4,000 Soviet
soldiers had landed in Cuba the month before. Racing to verify the reporting, the
CIA found that 21 ships from the USSR had reached Cuba in July, with 17 more
either on their way or already docked. Almost overnight, surface-to-air
missiles in Cuba were a real possibility. Washington was now the one caught
flat-footed as the terrain of geopolitical conflict shifted. Heeding what he saw as the lesson of Tuchman, Kennedy
was thinking two or three moves ahead, worrying about the potential
ramifications of any action.On
August 21, Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of
State Dean Rusk, and Special Assistant to the President on Foreign Affairs
McGeorge Bundy were scheduled to discuss Operation Mongoose. In the wake of the
CIA’s alarming findings, however, the agenda changed. “They turned the
meeting,” Plokhy writes, “into a brainstorming session on what should be done
under the circumstances.” Bobby mused about staging a Cuban attack on the U.S.
base at Guantánamo Bay, a pretext for direct intervention. CIA chief John
McCone dismissed this idea immediately, citing the difficulty of carrying out
clandestine operations in a climate of increasing surveillance on the island. By
the end of the month, when CIA overflights obtained incontrovertible evidence
of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the president remained obsessed with the situation
in Berlin. Plokhy writes that “the worst thing that could happen, in Kennedy’s
view, was that his actions in Cuba might provoke a crisis in West Berlin,
leading to a Soviet blockade of the city, a U.S.-Soviet military confrontation,
and eventually a nuclear war.” Heeding what he saw as the lesson of Tuchman, Kennedy
was thinking two or three moves ahead, worrying about the potential
ramifications of any action.Most
accounts of the Cuban missile crisis revolve around the decisions that Kennedy
got right in response to Soviet provocations. The 2000 film Thirteen Days is a prominent example, depicting
an alarmed but steady commander in chief being pressured by his military brass
to use force. The film shows Kennedy, in close consultation with his brother, pushing
back against the hollow certainties of gung-ho military advisers—a lesson, it
is often said, he had drawn from The Guns
of August. But Plokhy is more interested in the “ideological hubris and
overriding political agendas” that the missile crisis laid bare, along with
demonstrations of “poor judgment often due to the lack of good intelligence, and
cultural misunderstandings.”The
successful resolution to the crisis meant that Kennedy and Khrushchev alike
could claim to have prevailed. Kennedy, of course, had forced the USSR to stand
down. The president’s ecstatic advisers pushed him to use his renewed standing
on the world stage to press for foreign policy breakthroughs in other areas.
When the president demurred, Ted Sorensen complained: “But Mr. President, today
you’re more than ten feet tall.” Kennedy chuckled and replied, “That will last
about a couple of weeks.” For his part, Khrushchev insisted he had come out on
top, securing a commitment that the U.S. would not invade Cuba and
demonstrating to the world how to avoid nuclear war (never mind his role in
almost bringing it about).The
Cuban missile crisis illustrated the very real danger of nuclear war,
instilling a sobriety in policymakers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It
marked a shift in attitudes that would mostly endure for the rest of the Cold
War. Just two years earlier, in 1960, RAND Corporation futurist Herman Kahn had
been shockingly cavalier in his technical treatise On Thermonuclear War, arguing that nuclear war was, for the U.S., perfectly winnable. “Will the survivors envy the dead?” Not necessarily,
he argued. He did not believe that such a conflict would inevitably end human
civilization. As for the health effects of nuclear fallout, he coldly posited
that “the high risk of an additional one percent of our children being born
deformed” might be acceptable “if that meant not giving up Europe to Soviet
Russia.” For Kahn, deterrence would only work if the U.S. communicated
a genuine willingness to engage in nuclear war; that, he argued, was the only
way to ensure the Soviets never called Washington’s bluff. Fortunately,
it was Tuchman’s arguments, not Kahn’s, that prevailed. As Plokhy puts it, “What
saved the world during the Cuban crisis was that both leaders considered a
nuclear war unwinnable.” After the world had come so close to an unthinkable conflict,
ideas like Kahn’s were never again taken seriously. In the years that followed, they would find a hearing only in Hollywood movies. Stanley Kubrick met with
Kahn several times as he developed Dr.
Strangelove. That the film’s absurdist spectacle never played out in real
life suggests that presidential reading lists matter.Plokhy
fears that the circumspection Kennedy and Khrushchev showed is in short supply today.
Although the two leaders sidestepped disaster in Cuba, they didn’t clear the
proverbial minefield. The world’s nuclear arsenal has only grown since then. As
Plokhy notes with both resignation and alarm, “There is little doubt that today
there are world leaders prepared to take a more cavalier attitude toward
nuclear weapons and nuclear war than Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1962.” While the
nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran dominate headlines, experts worry about tensions between India, which tested its first
nuclear weapon in 1974, and Pakistan, which declared itself a nuclear weapon
state in 1998. The neighboring nations went to war four times in the twentieth
century. Israel, for its part, is widely believed to possess an ample nuclear stockpile of
its own. In The Sum of All Fears,
Tom Clancy imagined what would happen if one of those Israeli weapons
ended up on the black market and was used to provoke a nuclear war between
Russia and the U.S. (spoiler alert: Goodbye Baltimore).The
dispersal of nuclear know-how in recent decades has led many observers to pine
for the relative stability of the Cold War.The
dispersal of nuclear know-how in recent decades has led many observers to pine
for the relative stability of the Cold War, which was ultimately defined by the
power plays of two competing superpowers who could communicate quite
efficiently with one another through back channels in a pinch. The way Kennedy
and Khrushchev resolved the 1962 crisis—by placing decisive negotiating power in
the hands of trusted intermediaries—has been rendered obsolete. Current
U.S. policy holds that the president will never use or threaten to use nuclear
weapons against states that are party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,
which took force in 1970. China, Russia, and North Korea never signed that
treaty. With that in mind, the U.S. should, at a minimum, adopt a no-first-use policy, making clear to the world that it would never initiate a
nuclear war. When Elizabeth Warren embraced this position in last year’s
Democratic primary, she was needled by Montana Governor Steve Bullock, who
proclaimed, “I don’t want to turn around and say, ‘Well, Detroit has to be
gone before we would ever use [nuclear weapons].’” Such reluctance to take
nuclear weapons off the table mistakes an obdurate lack of imagination for
principle. “As long as they continue to maintain nuclear arsenals, the security
‘policy’ of the nuclear-armed states is essentially a hope for continued good
luck,” according to Ira Helfand, a leader of the
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2017. That year, 122 nations voted to abolish nuclear weapons
outright. Washington ignored the negotiations. The
terrible bind that the belligerent and paranoid leaders of the past have placed
us in is striking. Yet the creeping advance of nuclear arms around the world is
remarkably overlooked today. While there are measures the Biden administration could take to
mitigate the chances of disaster, the issue of nuclear disarmament does not currently
register as a priority. In his first major address on March 3, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken mentioned
nuclear weapons once and only as part of the broader challenge of U.S.-Iranian
relations. On February 4, discussing the U.S. role in global affairs, Biden
touched on the issue of nuclear proliferation just twice. To borrow Tuchman’s
description of the early days of World War I, the nuclear age remains “a trap
from which there was, and has been, no exit.”
Read More
