Cuban Missile Crisis – First of four parts

How the U.S. played Russian roulette with nuclear war 

(Editor’s Note: Due to the importance of the analysis by the author, Progreso Weekly has decided to publish the entire article by Noam Chomsky in four consecutive days.)

President Kennedy is often lauded for managing the crisis. The reality is he took stunning risks to impose American hegemony

By Noam Chomsky

From guardian.co.uk

The world stood still 50 years ago during the last week of October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended – though, unknown to the public, only officially.

The image of the world standing still is due to Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings where Kennedy, and a close circle of advisers, debated how to respond to the crisis. The meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate, as compared to other participants who were unaware that they were speaking to history. Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important documentary record, finally declassified in the 1990s. I will keep to that here. “Never before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,” culminating in the Week the World Stood Still.

There was good reason for the global concern. A nuclear war was all too imminent – a war that might “destroy the Northern Hemisphere”, President Eisenhower had warned. Kennedy’s own judgment was that the probability of war might have been as high as 50%. Estimates became higher as the confrontation reached its peak and the “secret doomsday plan to ensure the survival of the government was put into effect” in Washington, described by journalist Michael Dobbs in his recent, well-researched bestseller on the crisis – though he doesn’t explain why there would be much point in doing so, given the likely nature of nuclear war. Dobbs quotes Dino Brugioni, “a key member of the CIA team monitoring the Soviet missile build-up”, who saw no way out except “war and complete destruction” as the clock moved to One Minute to Midnight – Dobbs’ title. Kennedy’s close associate, historian Arthur Schlesinger, described the events as “the most dangerous moment in human history”. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wondered aloud whether he “would live to see another Saturday night”, and later recognized that “we lucked out” – barely.

A closer look at what took place adds grim overtones to these judgments, with reverberations to the present moment.

‘The most dangerous moment’

There are several candidates for “the most dangerous moment”. One is 27 October, when US destroyers enforcing the quarantine around Cuba were dropping depth-charges on Soviet submarines. According to Soviet accounts, reported by the National Security Archive, submarine commanders were “rattled enough to talk about firing nuclear torpedoes, whose 15 kiloton explosive yields approximated the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in August 1945”.

In one case, a reported decision to assemble a nuclear torpedo for battle readiness was aborted at the last minute by Second Captain Vasili Archipov, who may have saved the world from nuclear disaster. There is little doubt what the US reaction would have been had the torpedo been fired, or how the Russians would have responded as their country was going up in smoke. Kennedy had already declared the highest nuclear alert short of launch (Defcon 2), which authorized “Nato aircraft with Turkish pilots … [or others] … to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb”, according to Harvard University strategic analyst Graham Allison, in Foreign Affairs.

Another candidate is the previous day, 26 October. That day is selected as “the most dangerous moment” by a B-52 pilot, Major Don Clawson, who piloted one of those Nato aircrafts and provides a hair-raising description of details of the Chrome Dome (CD) missions during the crisis, “B-52s on airborne alert” with nuclear weapons “on board and ready to use”. 26 October was the day when “the nation was closest to nuclear war,” Clawson writes in his “irreverent anecdotes of an Air Force pilot”, Is That Something the Crew Should Know? On that day, Clawson himself was in a good position to set off a likely terminal cataclysm. He concludes that:

“We were damned lucky we didn’t blow up the world – and no thanks to the political or military leadership of this country.”

The errors, confusions, near-accidents and miscomprehension of the leadership that Clawson reports are startling enough, but not as much as the operative command-and-control rules – or lack of them. As Clawson recounts his experiences during the 15, 24-hour CD missions he flew – the maximum possible – the official commanders “did not possess the capability to prevent a rogue crew or crew-member from arming and releasing their thermonuclear weapons”, or even from broadcasting a mission that would have sent off “the entire airborne alert force without possibility of recall”. Once the crew was airborne, carrying thermonuclear weapons, he writes:

“It would have been possible to arm and drop them all with no further input from the ground. There was no inhibitor on any of the systems.”

About one-third of the total force was in the air, according to General David Burchinal, director of plans on the air staff at Air Force headquarters. The Strategic Air Command, technically in charge, appears to have had little control. And according to Clawson’s account, the civilian National Command Authority was kept in the dark by SAC, which means that the ExComm “deciders” pondering the fate of the world knew even less. General Burchinal’s oral history is no less hair-raising, and reveals even greater contempt for the civilian command. According to him, Russian capitulation was never in doubt. The CD operations were designed to make it crystal clear to the Russians that they were hardly even competing in the military confrontation, and could quickly have been destroyed.

From the ExComm records, Stern concludes that on 26 October President Kennedy was “leaning towards military action to eliminate the missiles” in Cuba, to be followed by invasion, according to Pentagon plans. It was evident then that the act might have led to terminal war, a conclusion fortified much later by revelations that tactical nuclear weapons had been deployed, and that Russian forces were far greater than US intelligence had reported.

As the ExComm meetings were drawing to a close at 6pm on the 26 October, a letter arrived from Prime Minister Khrushchev, directly to President Kennedy. Khrushchev’s “message seemed clear,” Stern writes:

“The missiles would be removed if the US promised not to invade Cuba.”

The next day, at 10am, the president again turned on the secret tape. He read aloud a wire service report that had just been handed to him:

“Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy in a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey.”

These were Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads. The report was soon authenticated. Though received by the committee as an unexpected bolt from the blue, it had actually been anticipated: “We’ve known this might be coming for a week,” Kennedy informed them. To refuse public acquiescence would be difficult, he realized. These were obsolete missiles, already slated for withdrawal, to be replaced by far more lethal and effectively invulnerable Polaris submarines. Kennedy recognized that he would be in an “insupportable position if this becomes [Khrushchev’s] proposal”, both because the Turkish missiles were useless and were being withdrawn anyway, and because “it’s gonna – to any man at the United Nations or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair trade.”