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

by Fred Kaplan

After October 1961, Khrushchev saw that he needed real military leverage if he was to make another play for Berlin. American military forces surrounded the Soviet Union, and now he knew that Kennedy knew that the Kremlin had very few—really, next to no—weapons with the range to hit U.S. territory in response to an American first strike. Despite the rhetoric about sausages, the Soviet ICBM program was in doldrums. But Khrushchev did have a fair number of medium-range missiles, and the idea struck him that placing some of those missiles in Cuba—the revolutionary island nation that had recently declared itself a Soviet ally and that sat just ninety miles off American shores—would have the same effect as a crash buildup of ICBMs.