Cuban Missile Crisis Questions And Answers Pdf

[Rocki Eibl]

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This afternoon, we will look at something that took place 40 years ago and something that historians have all agreed were 13 of the most perilous days in world history. The Cuban Missile Crisis was in many ways the event more than any other that shaped the course of the Kennedy presidency and the way it would be remembered for generations to come. It was also the event above all that defined the nature of the Cold War and demonstrated how to survive it.

And it was one of the events in a stream of events that took place over those thousand days in the Kennedy administration that perhaps best defined the character and the qualities of leadership of President Kennedy.

As we know, President Kennedy did not let that happen. But the means he used to achieve that end were extremely complex and subtle. And his leadership in that regard especially speaks across the decades as Americans today confront another crisis under a different President with the world again on the brink of war, apparently.

Svetlana Savranskaya is Director of Russia Programs at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. She has a distinguished academic background, having received her diploma with highest academic honors from Moscow State University in 1988 and the best dissertation in the year in international relations in 1998 from Emory University. She is a specialist on Russian Affairs. Two years ago, she was appointed adjunct professor in international relations at American University in Washington, D.C.

PHILIP BRENNER: Thanks very much, Graham. Thanks to the Kennedy Library. Thank you all for coming out on such wonderful day. At the Library here, I particularly want to thank Kiki Helffenstein and Tom Putnam who've made coming here just a pleasure, and very easy. Two of the nicest people I've ever worked with.

John Shattuck may be too modest. Other people may not tell you this, but the whole process of getting information about the Missile Crisis very much owes a debt to him. He was very much involved in helping to create the National Security Archive, which has been very important in declassifying or getting declassified government documents. And John was the Chairman of the Board for a number of years. So it was really a pleasure to see him again here.

We know from reading Essence of Decision how important the Munich analogy was to President Kennedy. The notion that if you give anything essential to a rapacious dictator, it won't satisfy their appetite. It will only make them more hungry, and they won't be appeased. It will only bring on more war. And that lesson hung over much of the decision-making in the Missile Crisis.

From a Cuban perspective, what was luminous was that they were arm in arm. They were ready to do battle with the United States. They were ready to defend themselves. Castro says to U Thant, "We won't be like Austria and Czechoslovakia. We will defend ourselves to the very last person."

To get inside the view of the Cubans is not so easy. And one of the things that one has to do, I think, in regard to the Missile Crisis is kind of set aside most of what we -- if you're at least my age -- remember about the crisis or think we know about the crisis. That it was two superpowers banging heads. And either we won or they lost, or a more charitable and more accurate description from their point of view is that, instead of one side backing down, both sides backed off. But just barely in time. This has absolutely no relationship to the ways the Cubans see the crisis.

I remember watching Walter Cronkite and a very young-looking Dan Rather, who was moving around little pieces of paper on a map with a semicircle roughly 500 miles North-Northeast of Cuba. And when those ships stopped, they seemed almost to be touching the U.S. ships, the pink pieces of paper representing it, that is. And many of us breathed deeply for the first time in quite a while.

Six, the Soviets refused to consult with or even properly to inform the Cubans of the Soviet decision to terminate the crisis and the deployment. Fidel Castro heard about it on the radio. He is reported to have -- depending on the orientation of who was reporting -- to have gone berserk, to have thrown things. But what it said to him was two things.

And secondly, because our interests were never involved in this, what is going to happen is that the Soviets will withdraw all those missiles which the Americans say are offensive, namely everything, including the Soviet troops in Cuba. And Khrushchev won't make it a condition that the Americans stand down their forces -- their nuclear forces and their conventional forces.

Finally, seven, the Soviets refused to leave all but a faint residue of a tripwire to deter a U.S. invasion. There were 43,000 Soviet fighting men on that island by late October 1962. Three, four, five times what the CIA was recommending. And the only troops that were left, once the deployment was undone, was a couple of thousand Soviet soldiers that actually wound up in a rather humiliating fashion, calling themselves "a training brigade," not much of a tripwire at all.

John has already rightly said that the events of October 1962, whose 40th anniversary we're just now on the edge of. Next week will be the 40th anniversary of these famous 13 days with the most dangerous moments in recorded history.

President Kennedy said at the time, and afterwards reflecting on the crisis, that he thought the odds of war were somewhere between 1-3 and even in this confrontation. That was dismissed by some people immediately afterwards as an exaggeration.

Had such an event in the worst of wars, within a day, 100 million could have died. Mostly not Americans. But 5-10 million Americans could have been among them. Mostly Soviets and Europeans. But this could have been the worst event in recorded history.

And as a consequence, this crisis, I think, has continued to have a hold on the imagination of commentators, and historians, and analysts, and even policy-makers. Any of you that have been reading the newspapers lately will notice that the Bush administration talks almost every week, indeed sometimes almost every day, about the Missile Crisis.

And Assistant for National Security Affairs, Dr. Rice, has said that the President, President Bush seems to keep going back to the Missile Crisis to try to locate himself, or to have some point of reference for what he sees as going on in the current Iraqi situation.

The next wave of risk activity, Jim Blight and his colleague, Bruce Allyn, instigated as we had postmortems in which participants from the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and then ultimately participants from the U.S. and Cuba, plus documents, cross-examined each other about what people were saying and thinking in order to dig up layers and layers of additional ...(inaudible). The standard histories of the Cold War in which the Missile Crisis is characterized as the defining event of the cold, the defining crisis of the Cold War.

And here to talk to you about making decisions that they think could lead to a nuclear war. So this is actually a wonderful microcosm for both trying to understand a very dangerous moment of history, but also to ask what the lessons of these events are, or events and issues like the confrontation over Iraq.

The Soviet Union, by deploying missiles in Cuba, thought it was performing quite a legal act of assistance to Cuba, which was threatened by the United States. And for the Soviet Union and for Cuba, of course, the seriousness of that threat was shown in the Bay of Pigs invasion. So the cause was the U.S. threat to Cuba.

Of course, another cause was the strategic imbalance which was felt very acutely by Khrushchev and, of course, his desire to adjust the military balance. Both sides, the United States and the Soviet Union were forced through the intelligence data to realize that there was a military build-up going on in the summer of 1962 around Cuba.

Therefore, the act of putting the missiles in Cuba was seen as an act of legitimate assistance to an ally. Of course, projecting the influence in Latin America is nice, too. So this is the first point I wanted to make. Review of the causes is very different. The immediate crisis for the United States starts on October 14, when the missiles are discovered. But the Soviet Union -- the Soviet Union asked the question, "Why Kennedy reacted in the way he reacted? Why missiles in Cuba were unacceptable? Why missiles in Turkey, then, were acceptable to the Soviet Union?"

Because for the Soviet Union, the missiles in Cuba were the direct equivalent to the U.S. missiles in Turkey and Italy. The Soviet Union sort of felt surrounded by U.S. bases at the time. My second point, how dangerous was the crisis? I think we will return to this question again and again and again. And more and more documents are being declassified and coming out now. The public has access to these in the Soviet Union, in Cuba. And based on the reading of the newer declassified documents, I can say that it was even more dangerous than we thought. Even more dangerous than we thought a couple of years ago.

What about the tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba? The United States, at the time, did not realize that the Soviet Union actually deployed nuclear-capable bombers, cruise missiles, and short- range launchers that could carry nuclear warheads and nuclear warheads in Cuba.

The standard procedure was that the commanders on the island could use both the strategic and the tactical nuclear weapons, only with authorization from the Soviet Premier. However, it was not exactly like that on the ground. We know that the Defense Ministry in the Soviet Union prepared draft orders to the Commander of the Soviet forces in Cuba, pre-delegating authority to use tactical nuclear weapons in two cases: U.S. air strikes or U.S. invasion landing on Cuba. The order was never signed by Khrushchev himself or by Defense Minister Myunorvsky (?). But...(inaudible) was informed of that order, was ...(inaudible) so what? He did not get the final authorization.

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