CAMBRIDGE – This
month marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis – those 13 days in
October 1962 that were probably the closest the world has come to a major
nuclear war. President John F. Kennedy had publicly warned the Soviet
Union not
to introduce offensive missiles into Cuba. But Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev decided to cross Kennedy’s red line surreptitiously and confront the
Americans with a fait accompli. When an American surveillance plane
discovered the missiles, the crisis erupted.
At first glance, this was a rational
and predictable outcome. The United States
had a 17-to-1 advantage in nuclear weaponry. The Soviets were simply outgunned.
And yet the US
did not preemptively attack Soviet missile sites, which were relatively
vulnerable, because the risk that even one or two of the Soviet missiles would
be fired at an American city was enough to deter a first strike. In addition,
both Kennedy and Khrushchev feared that rational strategies and careful
calculation might spin out of control. Khrushchev offered a vivid metaphor in
one of his letters to Kennedy: “We and you ought
not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of
war.”
In 1987, I was part of a group of
scholars that met at Harvard University
with Kennedy’s surviving advisers to study the crisis. Robert McNamara,
Kennedy’s secretary of defense, said he became more cautious as the crisis
unfolded. At the time, he thought that the probability of nuclear war resulting
from the crisis might have been one in 50 (though he rated the risk much higher
after he learned in the 1990’s that the Soviets had already delivered nuclear
weapons to Cuba).
Douglas Dillon, Kennedy’s treasury
secretary, said he thought that the risk of nuclear war had been about zero. He
did not see how the situation could possibly have escalated to nuclear war, and
thus had been willing to push the Soviets harder and to take more risks than
McNamara was. General Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, also believed that the risk of nuclear war was low, and he complained
that the US let
the Soviet Union off too easily. He felt that the
Americans should have removed the Castro regime.
But the risks of losing control of the
situation weighed heavily on Kennedy, too, which is why he took a more prudent
position than some of his advisers would have liked. The moral of the story is
that a little nuclear deterrence goes a long way.
Nonetheless, there are still
ambiguities about the missile crisis that make it difficult to attribute the
outcome entirely to the nuclear component. The public consensus was that the US
won. But how much the US
won, and why it won, is hard to determine.
There are at least two possible
explanations of the outcome, in addition to Soviet acquiescence to America’s
superior nuclear firepower. One focuses on the importance of the two
superpowers’ relative stakes in the crisis: the US
not only had a greater stake in neighboring Cuba
than the Soviets did, but could also bring conventional forces to bear. The
naval blockade and the possibility of a US
invasion strengthened the credibility of American deterrence, placing the
psychological burden on the Soviets.
The other explanation questions the
very premise that the Cuban missile crisis was an outright US
victory. The Americans had three options: a “shoot-out” (bomb the missile
sites); a “squeeze out” (blockade Cuba
to convince the Soviets to withdraw the missiles); and a “buyout” (give the
Soviets something they want).
For a long time, the participants said
little about the buyout aspects of the solution. But subsequent evidence
suggests that a quiet US promise to remove its obsolete missiles from Turkey
and Italy was
probably more important than was thought at the time (the US
also gave a public assurance that it would not invade Cuba).
We can conclude that nuclear
deterrence mattered in the crisis, and that the nuclear dimension certainly
figured in Kennedy’s thinking. But it was not the ratio of nuclear weapons that
mattered so much as the fear that even a few nuclear weapons would wreak
intolerable devastation.
How real were these risks? On October
27, 1962, just after Soviet forces in Cuba shot down a US surveillance plane
(killing the pilot), a similar plane taking routine air samples near Alaska
inadvertently violated Soviet air space in Siberia. Fortunately, it was not
shot down. But, even more serious, unbeknownst to the Americans, Soviet forces
in Cuba had
been instructed to repel a US
invasion, and had been authorized to use their tactical nuclear weapons to do
so.
It is hard to imagine that such a
nuclear attack would have remained merely tactical. Kenneth Waltz, an American
scholar, recently published an article entitled “Why
Iran Should Get the Bomb.” In a rational, predictable world, such an
outcome might produce stability. In the real world, the Cuban missile crisis
suggests that it might not. As McNamara put it, “We lucked out.”