Cuban Missile Crisis Documentary

[Bridget Peral]

InOctober 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. President Kennedy did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles. He met in secret with his advisors for several days to discuss the problem.

After many long and difficult meetings, Kennedy decided to place a naval blockade, or a ring of ships, around Cuba. The aim of this "quarantine," as he called it, was to prevent the Soviets from bringing in more military supplies. He demanded the removal of the missiles already there and the destruction of the sites. On October 22, President Kennedy spoke to the nation about the crisis in a televised address.

No one was sure how Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would respond to the naval blockade and US demands. But the leaders of both superpowers recognized the devastating possibility of a nuclear war and publicly agreed to a deal in which the Soviets would dismantle the weapon sites in exchange for a pledge from the United States not to invade Cuba. In a separate deal, which remained secret for more than twenty-five years, the United States also agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey. Although the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba, they escalated the building of their military arsenal; the missile crisis was over, the arms race was not.

In 1963, there were signs of a lessening of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. In his commencement address at American University, President Kennedy urged Americans to reexamine Cold War stereotypes and myths and called for a strategy of peace that would make the world safe for diversity. Two actions also signaled a warming in relations between the superpowers: the establishment of a teletype "Hotline" between the Kremlin and the White House and the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on July 25, 1963.

In language very different from his inaugural address, President Kennedy told Americans in June 1963, "For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum is one of 15 presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. This website is hosted and maintained by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

The surviving notes of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting on that day, October 27, depict a six-and-a-half-hour cascade of crises where human error, miscalculation, reckless deployment of nuclear weapons, and testosterone ruled the day.

Notes Taken from Transcripts of Meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, October-November 1962, Dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis, SECRET. Released to the National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act.

Former SAC pilots and SAC headquarters staff told Dobbs that the U.S. was able to track both Maultsby and the Soviet MIGs attempting to shoot him down by intercepting Soviet air defense traffic. But they were unable to share this information with the pilot, as the U.S. eavesdropping capabilities were a closely guarded national secret. Navigators guided Maultsby out of Soviet air space by ordering him to turn left until he could see Orion's Belt off his right wingtip. With the constellation observable to his south, Maultsby would be flying westwards, back home toward Alaska.

Political scientist Scott Sagan was the first to report (in 1993) that the two Air Force fighters scrambled from Galena Air Base in Alaska to protect the Maultsby U-2 on October 27 each carried Falcon nuclear air-to-air missiles under their wings in lieu of their conventional arms. Alert levels had risen to DEFCON 2, and air-to-air nukes were meant for taking out incoming Soviet bombers. Thankfully, the F-102 Delta Daggers did not catch up to the MIGs before Maultsby glided his U-2, out of fuel, to a landing in Alaska.

Unknown to the Chiefs, from 1659 to 1733 hours the destroyer Beale and its anti-submarine cohort around the aircraft carrier Randolph were dropping hand grenades on a suspected Soviet submarine at the quarantine line. Unknown to the Beale or to the U.S. Navy, that submarine had a nuclear-tipped torpedo and the capacity to launch it when under attack.

Deck logs of the U.S. Navy destroyer Beale, signed by deck officer Lt. J.W. Peterson, listing the dropping of five hand grenades at 1659 hours, and the surfacing of the Soviet submarine at 2050 hours on October 27.

The U.S. Navy shadows the second Soviet F-class submarine to surface, after repeated rounds of signaling depth charges on 27 October (the sub features no conning tower number, but is Soviet fleet number B-59, commanded by Savitsky).

According to the authoritative account by Michael Dobbs in One Minute to Midnight, one of those nuclear warheads tipped an FKR cruise missile that deployed just 15 miles away from Guantanamo naval base, which would have become a smoking radiating ruin if U.S. invasion plans had proceeded. Dobbs tracked down the Soviet veterans of that FKR deployment, and even the graves in Cuba of two Soviet soldiers who died in a truck crash on the way to Guantanamo.

The historian Martin Sherwin has reported even more human error. The 873rd Tactical Missile Squadron on Okinawa apparently received mistaken launch orders at 3 p.m., Washington time, on October 27, for their cruise missiles, each with a 1.1 megaton nuclear warhead; but an Air Force captain named William Bassett questioned the command, since DEFCON 1 had not been reached yet. When he opened the Top Secret envelope, three of his four targets were in China, which had nothing to do with the missile crisis, as far as he knew, so he pressed higher-ups to stand down.

On October 28, after Khrushchev and Kennedy had just resolved the most acute and public part of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet leaders decided to send Anastas Mikoyan to Cuba to settle the crisis between the Soviet Union and their ally, Cuba. Fidel Castro, who was not consulted or even informed about the negotiations between the Soviets and the Americans, sent Khrushchev an angry letter "disagreeing" with the policies of the Soviet government. Khrushchev knew he had a real problem in Cuba-with 42,000 Soviet military personnel armed with tactical nuclear weapons-and an emotional revolutionary leader, who felt betrayed and abandoned by the Kremlin.

Khrushchev's three priorities in regard to Cuba at the moment were: to negotiate a smooth withdrawal of the missiles without provoking the Americans; to get Castro to accept inspections because those were the condition for the American non-invasion pledge; and to keep Cuba as a close ally and thus preserve the Soviet Union's legitimacy in the global communist movement.

There was only one person he could turn to with this tall order-his reliable trouble shooter, Anastas Mikoyan. As Fidel Castro put it at a state dinner on November 17, addressing Mikoyan, "Who if not you, and only you, can carry out this mission! If you cannot do this, then it proves that in general this is impossible."

Second, it was necessary to explain the Kremlin's decisions, which were already announced, and come to an agreement regarding which additional Soviet weapons and military forces could be withdrawn from Cuba with the Cuban leadership's consent, and which should stay on the island.

Fourth, it was important to convince the Cuban leaders that this time, in this situation, after such a crisis and such a dangerous moment in international relations, the U.S. President's pledge of non-aggression toward Cuba and his commitment not to allow others to attack Cuba should not be received as yet another empty promise that could be revoked at any moment and under any pretense.

One may add that the seventh major task was to explain the decisions taken by the Kremlin to their own officers and soldiers, who had not been informed by their own government about the negotiations. Those people, who had worked day and night to assemble the missiles and were preparing to fight and die to defend the Cuban revolution against an imperialist aggression, were certainly surprised by the total turnaround by their government, which seemed to be making one concession after another under U.S. pressure.

The documents, published today for the first time, allow us to be a fly on the wall as Mikoyan goes about trying to fulfill his mission-first in New York and then in Havana. We see him as a tough negotiator with John McCloy and Adlai Stevenson, defending the Cuban position, knowing at the same time that Soviet concessions had already been made and that his bargaining position was extremely weak. In Cuba, Mikoyan, faced with Castro's flat rejection of ground inspections, is trying to find a compromise position with inspections by ambassadors from Latin American countries who are already in Cuba. We see how crucial he was in the dynamics of negotiating the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis-at the very nexus of a three-party negotiation, negotiating with the Cubans, privy to all communications between Moscow and its representatives at the U.N., and in daily contact with the Presidium and Nikita Khrushchev himself.

Mikoyan is also very sensitive to the issue of revolutionary legacy and concerned about the effect of the Soviet withdrawal on Chinese influence in Cuba. He is using every "opportune moment" to criticize the Chinese position and draw comparisons between the Soviet willingness to defend Cuba with the real blood and life of its own soldiers and the Chinese efforts to donate blood by their embassy people in Havana. He suggests that if China was serious about helping Cuba, it could have created a distraction-create a crisis around Taiwan, or take over some Portuguese or British bases, like Hong Kong.

In one of Mikoyan's most eloquent moments during the Cuban trip, he addresses the officers of the Pliev group of forces to explain the decisions of the Soviet government. This is one of the first Soviet efforts to spin the results of the Cuban Missile Crisis to make it look as if Khrushchev has envisioned it to turn out just exactly as it did, that the main goal-the defense of the Cuban revolution-has been achieved. Mikoyan assures them that their task has been carried out brilliantly and that the correlation of forces in the world is changing in the Soviets' favor. In this speech, however, there is some real criticism of the way the Soviet military carried out Operation Anadyr. Mikoyan takes a stab at the rocket forces decision makers (Marshall Biryuzov), describing how the Americans discovered the missiles: "they flew the U-2 and discovered that our missiles were sticking up just like they were at a military parade in Red Square. Only in Red Square they would be placed horizontally, and here they were deployed vertically. Apparently, our rocket forces decided to make an offensive gesture to the Americans."

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