Historiography of the Cuban Missiles Crisis, 1962

How close did the world come to nuclear annihilation?

Traditionalists, Revisionists,   Post-Revisionists,   How close did we come to Nuclear War?

The Traditionalists

For at least a quarter of a century after 1962, there was only one way the West looked at the Cuban Missiles Crisis – as the triumph of good over evil, with Kennedy and the Americans as good, and Khrushchev and the Soviets as the evil. 

By those accounts, John F Kennedy was the hero.  This was the time when the White House of the young US President and his wife was regarded as a modern Camelot, and Kennedy himself was the hope of the free world. 

The Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba, the story went, was a direct provocation and strategic threat to the USA, to which Kennedy responded wisely but forcefully, refusing to accept an offered trade-off for US weapons in Turkey, and forcing the Soviets to back down in a tense final stand-off at the border (of the US naval blockade of Cuba). 

To historians seeing the to-ing and fro-ing of telegrams, public speeches and decisions the crisis seemed indeed, as one historian in 1990 put it: “what appeared to be a poker game” … a view which could be confirmed by then US Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s triumphant comment when Khrushchev offered an accommodation: "We were eyeball-to-eyeball and the other fellow just blinked."  It was a poker game in which the stakes were nuclear annihilation. 

According to Arthur Schlesinger’s famous quote (1965), Kennedy’s unqualified triumph demonstrated:

“the ripening of American leadership unsurpassed in the responsible management of power...[a] combination of toughness...nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated that it dazzled the world.”

That was because all the accounts of the crisis were written by Americans involved in the crisis.  Arthur Schlesinger served as special assistant to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963.  Walt Rostow was a US National Security Advisor.  Ted Sorensen was a member of ExComm (the Executive Committee of the National Security Council) who drafted Kennedy’s letters to Khrushchev during the crisis. 

Robert Kennedy – who wrote the book Thirteen Days (published in 1969, the year after his assassination) – highlighted the role of Robert Kennedy in arguing down the ‘hawks’ who wanted war and ensuring that his brother opted for a naval blockade, and in suggesting that they reply to the October 26 telegram, and ignore the 27 October demand to withdraw missiles from Turkey. 

It was all a massively biased and distorted view of what happened but – as historian Laurence Chang (project director for the National Security Archive's 18000-page microfiche collection of declassified documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis) explained in 1992, they were writing at a time when a ‘view from nowhere’ was impossible ... not least because US sources were the only sources available to historians. 

They consequently produced not only a diplomatic history, and an account restricted to the US and the USSR, but a history which made little attempt to understand the Soviet position, and Khrushchev’s aims were variously represented as an attempt to test American’s determination; to extend Communist influence; to tilt the balance of power; to assert the USSR as the dominant world power; to turn attention away from the USSR’s internal problems; to re-open the Berlin question - e.g.:

“Khrushchev was looking for a quick success which would enhance his political prestige and power in Soviet politics; enhance his authority in the international communist movement...  redress the military balance cheaply in terms of resources...and provide leverage for the resolution of the Berlin problem he had sought without success since 1958” (Walt Rostow, The Diffusion of Power, 1972)

… but in reality these were little more than guesses, because all they had to go on were Khrushchev’s memoirs and articles in Soviet newspapers such as Pravda.

The Revisionists

As you know, because of the Vietnam war, many American historians challenged the traditional ‘heroic’ history of the Crisis. 

According to their analyses, placing missiles in Cuba would have made no difference to the balance of power or the safety of the United States.  So they asked why Kennedy had decided so quickly not to go through normal diplomatic channels, but to go straight onto TV with a threat of nuclear war … and they blamed him for the crisis.  For the revisionists, Kennedy risked nuclear war for no real reason. American historian James Paterson, A critical look at JFK's foreign policy (1974), concluded:

“The president's desire to score a victory, to recapture previous losses, to flex his muscle, accentuated the crisis and obstructed diplomacy...  Kennedy gave Khrushchev no chance to withdraw his mistake or to save face...  He left little room for bargaining but instead issued a public ultimatum and seem willing to destroy millions in the process.

“Russia was humiliated publicly.  Having its own pride, recognizing its nuclear inferiority, and being harangued by the Chinese as 'capitulationist', Moscow launched a massive arms build-up.  ‘Never will we caught like this again’, concluded the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister.”

As reviewer Réachbha FitzGerald has pointed out (2007), however, the revisionists had basically the same sources as the traditionalist historians, were still writing from an American perspective, and from within the Cold War itself … they were just interpreting the same sources differently. 

Gradual Revisionism

After 1990, however, a vast amount of new sources became available, particularly about the Soviet side of the story – declassified documents, personal memoirs and a series of conferences held between 1987 and 1992, where participants in the crisis were convened to produce an oral history – but also the ‘Kennedy Tapes’ of the word-by-word discussions of the National Security Council.  This has allowed a much fuller and more insightful interpretation of what was going on. 

One thing that came to light was that the deal on the Jupiter Missiles was not rejected, nor was even a vague intimation, but a solid deal, which the USSR agreed to keep secret for a couple of month to allow Kennedy to save face at the UN – not only was this the clear memory of Soviet Ambassador to the US Anatoli Dobrynin, it had been included in the first draft of Robert Kennedy’s book … but falsified by his editor (Ted Sorensen, John Kennedy’s letter-writer). 

The ’Kennedy Tapes’ show that the US response was not just a ‘John F Kennedy Show’, nor even a ‘Kennedy Brothers Show’, but a joint-decision in which many other advisers opposed the idea of war. 

Particularly important has been the growing awareness of Cuba’s role in the crisis.  Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, in Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis (2008) have decried “Cuba’s marginalization in the heroic missile crisis myth”, which only started to be changed after Cubans were invited to the third oral history conference in 1989 – they see the exclusion as a sign of the “patterns of racism, paternalism and imperial desire that shaped U.S.  policy towards Cuba”. 

The American historian Philip Brenner (2002) has pointed out that, whereas for the Americans the crisis of 1962 was the ‘Cuban Missiles Crisis’ (NOTE: ‘Missiles’ crisis – not even the ‘Cuban Crisis’ – i.e.  all about the nuclear threat to America):

- for the Soviets it was ‘the Caribbean Crisis’ (i.e all about them and the Americans)

- but for the Cubans it was ‘the October Crisis’ – i.e. one more event in an ongoing attempt by the USA to overthrow the Cuban government, which included the Bay of Pigs invasion, funding of sabotage attacks and assassination attempts by exiles, the Northwoods Conspiracy, and a full-blown plan to overthrow Castro, code-named Operation Mongoose … with a further ‘November Crisis’ the next month when (to the fury of Castro) Khrushchev withdrew the weapons and soldiers he had already stationed in Cuba. 

For the Cubans, therefore, the cause of the October Crisis was simple to find – as Castro said:

““If the United States had not been bent on liquidating the Cuban revolution there would not have been an October crisis..  .How could we be sure that we would not be invaded?  And this thought determined the setting up of strategic missiles in Cuba.”

And it also clarifies the reasons why Khrushchev sought to place nuclear weapons in Cuba (along with the L-28 nuclear-capable bombers, the cruise missiles, the surface-to-air missiles and the 43,000 military personnel he had stationed in Cuba – unknown to the Americans – in case of an American invasion):

“[It was] our duty, a duty of communists, to do everything necessary to defend the Cuban revolution, to frustrate imperialist plans."
(Anastas Mikoyan, First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union)

One thing that the Cuban perspective does not debunk, however, is the interpretation of the Crisis as a high-level, top-down clash between the US and the Soviets.  One of Cuba’s outspoken criticisms of the USSR in the 1960s – made clear in a 1968 secret speech by Castro which has only recently come to light – is the extent to which Khrushchev –  perhaps determined not to be manipulated by Castro as he had been by Ulbricht over Berlin – simply ignored the Cubans throughout the crisis: refusing Cuban advice to deploy the missiles publicly, to camouflage the site, to demand the return of Guantanamo Bay, or to put the resolution agreement into a Treaty ... even to consult with the Cubans on that final agreement.

How close did we come to nuclear war in 1962?

One issue on which perspectives have changed over the years is how close the world came to nuclear annihilation in 1962. 

For people – such as myself, btw – who were alive at the time of the events, there was no question: we expected the ICBMs to be dropping at any moment!  A canadian called Joan Vredik Broadley on Quora (2024) sums it up:

“How well I remember watching The Jack Parr show in October 1962.  He said that he wasn’t sure we would all be around for him to present his show the next week, or for us to watch it.  That was very scary for my 13-year-old self.  Added to that the nuclear bomb drills we had at our Canadian school and the talk in everyone’s house about how fast the family could drive away from the city and where we would go, caused many sleepless nights.  We all knew that the Russian leader Khrushchev was a bit of a looney … and he could well order a nuclear strike at any time.  We also knew that President John F Kennedy was not a guy to back down.  The two men were playing ‘chicken’ with the world.”

and this of course is exactly what the traditionalist historians represented in their accounts:

“For thirteen days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union stood ‘eyeball to eyeball’, each with the power of mutual annihilation in hand.” (Graham Allison, Essence of Decision, 1971)

The post-revisionists significantly re-wrote this narrative.  Both Khrushchev and Kennedy clearly had no intention of going to nuclear war over Cuba … it has recently come to light that Kennedy had already agreed with UN General Secretary U Thant that, if the US deal with Russia fell through, the UN would propose a missiles trade.  And, of course, he decided to ignore the shooting-down of a U2 plane over Cuba. 

Similarly, however, after a U2 plane piloted by Charles Maultsby had flown into Soviet airspace over Siberia, Khrushchev chose to ignore that incident, commenting only in a letter the next day about the dangers of so tense a situation: “Is it not a fact that an intruding American plane could be easily taken for a nuclear bomber, which might push us to a fateful step?”

As Khrushchev’s son said in an interview in 1999:

“Q:  Everyone my age remembers the Cuban Missile Crisis as a very scary time.  How close did the U.S.  and the Soviet Union come to war? 

“A:  They were not so close as Americans thought at that time and even now, because the situation was under full control from both sides.  And Kennedy and my father never wanted to begin the war.  If American public opinion and the military had pressed the president to begin the invasion, nothing would have happened.  ... 
“Why the crisis was so dangerous was because it was one of my father's biggest mistakes.  When he decided to send missiles to Cuba, he understood it would be a crisis, but he did not understand the level of the crisis.  He thought the American reaction would be the same as the Soviet reaction for the American missiles in Europe.  It's unpleasant.  It's bad.  But you understand as a politician that it is not a war. 

“Q:  So, as you lived through the Cold War, did you ever think the world was going to blow up? 

“A:  In reality, it was not so big a fear.  During these crises, I was close to my father and when I asked him this question he told me, I hope that never war will begin until we control the situation.”

Recently, however, historians have realised that, whilst Khrushchev and Kennedy might have been determined to avoid a nuclear war, there were others involved in the crisis who might have intentionally or unintentionally provoked a war:

On 27 October (‘Black Saturday’):

1. With 100,000 US troops on stand-by to invade Cuba, Castro and the Soviet Ambassador in Cuba, Aleksandr Alekseyev, had messaged Khrushchev telling him that an American invasion was imminent and that they advised a pre-emptive strike before the Americans (who were 5 hours behind) woke up. 

2. Soviet Generals Gorbuz and Grechko stationed in Cuba gave the order for the SAM installation at Banes, Cuba, to shoot down a low-flying U-2 after it overflew the latest Soviet deployments in eastern Cuba.  Soviet forces in Cuba were pre-authorised to use tactical nuclear weapons if the Americans invaded;

3. Soviet Mig fighters were chasing Maultby’s off-course U2 plane, which was being escorted by US F-102 Delta Daggers armed with nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles, and the only reason there wasn’t an incident was because they couldn’t catch it up;

4. US naval forces spotted a Soviet B-59 submarine which had come to the surface to recharge its batteries.  They subjected the submarine to:

“Overflights by planes just 20-30 metres above the submarine’s conning tower, use of powerful searchlights, fire from automatic cannons (over 300 shells), dropping depth charges, cutting in front of the submarine by destroyers at a dangerously [small] distance, targeting guns at the submarine,”

Miffed at being told they could only use practice depth-charges, US officers had strapped hand-grenades into the cannisters, which exploded right beside the submarine. 

When one plane shone a powerful light on the submarine’s bridge, its already-bewildered commander Valentin Savitsky panicked, calling for an 'urgent dive' and for the number one torpedo with the nuclear warhead to be prepared.  However, because the signalling officer was in the way, Savitsky could not immediately get down the narrow stairway through the conning tower, and during those few moments of hesitation, it was realised that the US forces were signalling rather than attacking, and deliberately firing off to the side of the submarine, and the order was never conveyed. 

How close did the world come to global nuclear war?  Disarmament campaigner Tom Collina concludes: “We got lucky”.