50 years on from Cuban crisis, threat remains

50 years on from Cuban crisis, threat remains
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By Gwynne Dyer on Mon, 22 Oct 2012

This month is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis (October
16-28, 1962), so we are hearing a great deal about the weeks when the
world almost died. But the past is a foreign country, a place where
everything was in black and white and men still wore hats, so it's just
scary stories about a long-gone time.

Or so it seems.

The outlines of the tale are well known. It was 17 years since the
United States had used nuclear weapons on Japan, and the Soviet Union
now had them, too. Lots of them: the American and Soviet arsenals
included some 30,000 nuclear weapons, and not all of them were carried
by bombers any more. Some were mounted on rockets that could reach their
targets in the other country in half an hour.

Both Washington and Moscow therefore had some version of a "launch on
warning" policy: if you think the other side's missiles are inbound,
launch your own missiles before you lose them. There couldn't be a more
hair-trigger situation than that, you might think - but then things got
a lot worse.

At the start of the 1960s, the Soviet Union had gained a new Communist
ally in Fidel Castro, but the United States kept talking about invading
Cuba. So Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev moved some nuclear-tipped
missiles to Cuba to deter the United States from attacking the island.
However, from Cuba the Soviet missiles would be only five minutes away
from their American targets.

That caused panic in Washington.

Early in October 1962, the first Soviet SS-4 missiles arrived in Cuba,
and American U-2 spy planes discovered them almost at once. President
John F. Kennedy knew about them by October 16, but he did not go on
television and warn the American public of the risk of nuclear war until
the 22nd.

He then declared a naval blockade of Cuba, saying he would stop Soviet
ships carrying further missiles from reaching Cuba by force if
necessary. That would mean war, and probably nuclear war, but at least
the blockade gave the Russians some time to think before the shooting
started.

The Soviet leaders were now desperately looking for a way out of the
crisis they had created. After a few harrowing days a deal was done: the
Soviet SS-4 missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba in return for a public
promise by the United States not to invade Cuba.

The crisis was officially over by October 28, and everybody breathed a
sigh of relief. It was the closest the world ever came to an all-out
nuclear war.

Even so, they weren't really scared enough. They thought a couple of
hundred million people would die in a "nuclear exchange". At that time,
nobody yet knew that detonating so many nuclear warheads would cause a
"nuclear winter": the dust and smoke put into the stratosphere by
firestorms in a thousand stricken cities would have blocked out the
sunlight for a year or more and resulted in a worldwide famine.

What almost nobody knew until very recently is the crisis did not really
end on October 28. A new book by Sergo Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile
Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of
November, reveals it continued all the way through November.

US intelligence was unaware that, along with the SS-4s, the Soviet Union
had also sent more than a hundred shorter-range "tactical" nuclear
missiles to Cuba. They weren't mentioned in the Soviet-US agreement on
withdrawing the SS-4s from Cuba, so technically Mr Khrushchev had not
promised to remove them.

Fidel Castro was in a rage about having been abandoned by his Soviet
allies, so to mollify him, Mr Khrushchev decided to let him keep the
tactical missiles. It was crazy: giving Fidel Castro a hundred nuclear
weapons was a recipe for a new and even bigger crisis in a year or two.

Mr Khrushchev's deputy, Anastas Mikoyan, who was sent to Cuba to tell Dr
Castro the happy news, quickly realised he must not have them.

The second half of the crisis, invisible to Americans, was Mr Mikoyan's
month-long struggle to pry Dr Castro's fingers off the hundred tactical
nuclear missiles. In the end, he only succeeded by telling Dr Castro an
unpublished (and in fact nonexistent) law forbade the transfer of Soviet
nuclear weapons to a foreign country.

In December, they were finally crated up and sent home.

So it all ended happily, in one sense, but the whole world could have
ended instead. As Robert McNamara, Mr Kennedy's defence secretary in
1962, said 40 years later, "we were just plain lucky in October 1962 -
and without that luck most of you would never have been born because the
world would have been destroyed instantly or made unlivable in October
1962".

Then he said the bit that applies to us. "Something like that could
happen today, tomorrow, next year. It WILL happen at some point. That is
why we must abolish nuclear weapons as soon as possible." They are still
there, you know, and human beings still make mistakes.

• Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.

http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/231358/50-years-cuban-crisis-threat-remains