The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

Kennedy cut them off. The real question, he said, is what the Soviets would do if we gave them a chance to withdraw the missiles from Cuba. For instance, he proposed, we could tell Khrushchev, “If you begin to pull them out, we’ll take ours out of Turkey.” This was the first time anyone around the table had mentioned the medium-range nuclear missiles—known as Jupiters—that the United States had recently installed in Turkey, poised on the southern border of the Soviet Union. Kennedy fixed on the idea. Wondering aloud why Khrushchev had taken this wild gamble of putting missiles in Cuba, he figured that they must be part of some diplomatic bargaining scheme and that, to get rid of them, he might have to let Khrushchev save face. “The only offer we would make, it seems to me, that would have any sense of giving him some out,” he told the group, “would be our Turkey missiles.”