The Cuban Missile Crisis

After the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, the Kennedy administration planned a covert campaign against Fidel Castro’s government, Operation Mongoose. In July 1962 Khrushchev reached a secret agreement with Castro to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, both to deter another invasion and, as historians at the Miller Center note, to offset the large American lead in nuclear weapons. Along with the missiles came some 42,000 Soviet troops. Construction began in late summer. When American surveillance flights detected a general Soviet arms buildup, Kennedy publicly warned on September 4 against bringing offensive weapons into Cuba.

The crisis grew out of the arms race and the Cold War rivalry over Cuba. The Soviets wanted to protect Castro’s government, to compete with China for the loyalty of revolutionaries worldwide, and to neutralize the large American advantage in nuclear weapons. The United States — which itself had nuclear missiles in Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union — declared that it would not permit offensive weapons in Cuba. Secrecy and mutual misunderstanding turned the deployment into a showdown.

On October 14 a U-2 took pictures clearly showing sites for medium- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles; the next day the photographs reached the White House. Kennedy gathered his closest advisers in secret meetings. All the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged an air strike followed by an invasion; others favored stern warnings. Kennedy chose a middle course. On October 22 he announced on national television a naval “quarantine” of Cuba — a word chosen because a “blockade” would legally mean a state of war — and warned that any missile launched from Cuba would be treated as a Soviet attack on the United States, “requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

Khrushchev called the quarantine an “act of aggression,” but on October 24 and 25 some Soviet ships turned back from the quarantine line. Meanwhile the missile sites neared readiness, and American forces went to DEFCON 2, meaning war involving the Strategic Air Command was imminent. On October 26 a Soviet agent approached ABC News reporter John Scali with an offer: the missiles would go if the United States promised not to invade. That night came a long, emotional letter from Khrushchev with a similar proposal, urging both sides to “untie that knot.” Hope faded the next day, October 27: a second Soviet message demanded the removal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey, and an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba. Kennedy chose to answer the first letter and ignore the second, while his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, told the Soviet ambassador privately that the Turkish missiles would be removed soon — but could not be part of any public deal. On October 28 Khrushchev announced that the missiles would be dismantled and taken home.

The naval quarantine stayed in place until the Soviets also agreed to remove their IL-28 bombers; the United States ended it on November 20, 1962. The Jupiter missiles left Turkey in April 1963. The outcome strengthened Kennedy’s standing at home and abroad and helped repair the damage done by the Bay of Pigs. Because the two leaders had struggled throughout the crisis to understand each other’s intentions, a direct telephone link between the White House and the Kremlin — the “Hotline” — was set up.

Having looked into the abyss, both superpowers began to reconsider the nuclear arms race. In 1963 the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union agreed to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater — an agreement Kennedy considered his greatest accomplishment. The State Department’s historians call the crisis a singular event of the Cold War, shaped as much by miscalculation and miscommunication as by calculation, and played out largely between the White House and the Kremlin themselves.