Serhii Plokhy - Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis

NUCLEAR

FOLLY

A HISTORY OF
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

Serhii Plokhy

To those who had the courage to step back

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.

JOHN F. KENNEDY, SEPTEMBER 1961

Of course, I was scared. It would have been insane not to be scared, I was frightened about what could happen to my country and all the countries that would be devastated by a nuclear war. If being frightened meant that I helped avert such insanity, then Im glad I was frightened. One of the problems in the world today is that not enough people are sufficiently frightened by danger of nuclear war.

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, DECEMBER 1962

B allistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill, said a text message received by tens of thousands of Hawaii residents on the morning of January 13, 2018. First instinct was to jump out of bed and figure out what was going on, recalled Luke Clements, a twenty-one-year-old college sophomore and football player at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The basement classroom where Clements found temporary refuge was soon full of people. Some were screaming, demanding that the door be closed. For a good 10 minutes, there were no rules. Everyone was trying to survive together, recalled Clements. It was a calm chaos.

The message turned out to be a false alarm. As the authorities would later say, someone had pushed the wrong button. In fact, the story was more complicated. The official who made the mistake was a ten-year veteran of the emergency agency and had to push not one but two buttons to activate the alert that caused panic all over the state. The missile alert that sent Clements, his classmates, and a good part of the population of Hawaii in search of nonexistent shelters and eventually into the basements of buildings did not come completely out of the blue. The Hawaii authorities began to test their sirens in December 2017 for the first time in thirty years; the previous test had been back in 1987.

In 2017 Kim Jong-un, the secretive thirty-four-year-old leader of North Korea, defied the United States and the international community by choosing July 4, Americas Independence Day, to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching Alaska. Later that year he declared his country a full-fledged nuclear power whose missiles could hit targets around the globe. In October 2017, when the North Korean media announced the test of a hydrogen bomb, President Donald Trump threatened to totally destroy North Korea. He declared that Rocket Man [Kim Jong-un] is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime. Kim shot back, calling Trump a mentally deranged old lunatic. In May 2018, President Trump withdrew from the multilateral agreement with Iran that precluded that country from developing nuclear weapons. In January 2020, Iran declared its own withdrawal from the agreement, raising fears of the rapid development of its nuclear capabilities.

As the United States was experiencing the worst nuclear crises since the end of the Cold War, history suddenly became the present. In August 2017, two influential commentators, one a Republican, the future national security adviser to President Trump, John Bolton, the other a Democrat, the former White House chief of staff under President Clinton and CIA director and secretary of defense under President Obama, Leon Panetta, suggested in unison that the USNorth Korean standoff over the development of Kim Jong-uns nuclear and missile program was the worst nuclear crisis to hit the world since the standoff over Cuba. In February 2019, Vladimir Putin joined the fray, declaring that he was prepared for a new Cuban-type missile crisis and threatened the United States with supersonic rockets to be installed on ships and submarines off the American coast. He repeated the same statement in February 2020. One month earlier, in January 2020, after the US assassination of Irans architect of clandestine warfare Qasem Suleimani and Tehrans announcement of Irans complete withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the US media compared President Trumps nuclear gamble with President Kennedys actions in the Cuban missile crisis.

The references to the Cuban missile crisis have shown no tendency of disappearing from the world political scene and media any time soon. The return of nuclear weapons to the center stage of international politics inevitably brought back memories of the nuclear stand over Cuba. Can we prevent the emergence of a new nuclear showdown, or at least resolve it without a nuclear war, by reexamining the history of the crisis? In this book I argue that there is indeed much to be learned from the experience of those who created and then resolved the crisis. There is an additional reason to revisit that history. With the world sliding back into the nuclear brinkmanship that characterized the 1950s and early 1960s, it is essential to educate new generations about the dramatic events of that era in a way that addresses the uncertainties of todays world.

THE BODY OF LITERATURE ON THE HISTORY OF THE CUBAN MISSILE crisis is truly enormous, but as I show below there are major gaps both in the coverage of the crisis and in understanding it as an international rather than a solely American affair. The deep dive into the history of the crisis began in the 1960s with Robert Kennedys Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It remains very popular with readers. But the appearance in the public domain of tapes of the ExCom

Major progress has been made by historians, political scientists, and journalists since the publication of Robert Kennedys book in 1971. The classic work of the Harvard historian Graham Allison (later joined by Philip Zelikow) on decision-making during the crisis became a must-read for generations of international relations students throughout the world. The work done in the 1990s by the American historian Timothy Naftali and his Russian colleague Aleksandr Fursenko contributed enormously to our understanding of the decision-making process in Moscow, while an excellent journalistic investigation by Michael Dobbs presented the bottom-up story of the crisis, which involved dozens if not hundreds of thousands of people in the three belligerent countries. The Cuban side of the story, long unavailable, has become known in recent decades with the publication and eventual translation into English of works by Cuban historians.