One Minute to Midnight

by Michael Dobbs

The president asked the obvious question: when would the missiles be ready to fire? The experts were unsure. That would depend on how soon the missiles could be mated with their nuclear warheads. Once mated, they could be fired in a couple of hours.

The question was how to respond. They would definitely step up U-2 reconnaissance of the island. Military options ranged from an air strike targeted on the missile sites alone to an all-out invasion. General Taylor warned that it would probably be impossible to destroy all the missiles in a single strike. “It’ll never be a hundred per cent, Mr. President.” Any military action was likely to escalate quickly to an invasion. The invasion plan called for as many as a hundred and fifty thousand men to land in Cuba a week after the initial air strikes. In the meantime, the Soviets might be able to launch one or two nuclear missiles against the United States.

Jack was forty-five when plunged into the gravest crisis of the Cold War, two years after becoming the youngest elected president in American history. Bobby was just thirty-six.

In addition to the original missile sites in Pinar del Río, U-2 spy planes had discovered a second cluster of sites in the center of the island. The new sites included facilities for so-called intermediate-range ballistic missiles, or IRBMs, which were capable of hitting targets nearly 2,800 miles away, more than double the distance of the medium-range rockets, or MRBMs, discovered on October 14.

At dawn on September 9, as the freighter passed by the Guantánamo Naval Base, patrol boats came out to inspect her. A pair of jet fighters screamed overhead. It would take Washington many weeks to figure out what the Omsk was carrying. Relying on intercepted Soviet messages, the National Security Agency had concluded on August 31 that the cargo consisted of “barreled gas oil.”

The scale of the Soviet deployment went far beyond the CIA’s worst fears. Briefing the president on the afternoon of Saturday, October 20, McNamara estimated Soviet troop strength on Cuba at “six thousand to eight thousand.” CIA analysts arrived at the figure by observing the number of Soviet ships crossing the Atlantic, and figuring out the available deck space. There was one missing element in these calculations: the ability of the Russian soldier to put up with conditions American soldiers would never tolerate. By October 20, more than forty thousand Soviet troops had arrived on Cuba.

By Monday afternoon, the secret was almost out. At noon, Marines began evacuating civilians from the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, escorting 2,810 women and children to waiting warships and planes. Urgent messages were dispatched to vacationing congressional leaders telling them to return to Washington immediately.

Most worrying of all to Khrushchev was the Aleksandrovsk, a 5,400-ton freighter crammed with nuclear warheads. Her cargo included twenty-four 1-megaton warheads for the R-14 missile, each one of which contained the destructive force of seventy Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. The explosive power concentrated on board the ship exceeded all the bombs dropped in the history of warfare by a factor of at least three.

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Soviet troops on Cuba had orders to resist an American invasion, but were not authorized to use nuclear weapons of any kind. Khrushchev was determined to maintain personal control over the warheads.

The Soviets had never been much interested in Latin America prior to Castro’s rise to power. Moscow did not even have an embassy in Havana between 1952 and 1960.

The Aleksandrovsk kept radio silence most of the way across the Atlantic, avoiding unwelcome attention. Communications with Moscow were handled by her escort ship, the Almetyevsk. The CIA located the Aleksandrovsk on October 19, four days out from Cuba, but listed her simply as a “dry cargo” ship of no particular significance.

After each mission, an enlisted man stenciled a drawing of a dead chicken onto the fuselage, a sarcastic reference to Castro’s September 1960 visit to the United Nations, when the Cuban delegation cooked chickens in their hotel rooms. “Chalk up another chicken” would soon become the ritual cry of pilots returning from low-level reconnaissance missions over Cuba.

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Enlisted men were using long handles to push markers around the map to reflect the latest intelligence. Flags representing American aircraft carriers and destroyers were forming up along an arc, five hundred nautical miles from the eastern tip of Cuba, stretching from Puerto Rico toward the coast of Florida. Nearly two dozen arrows denoting Soviet ships were pointed across the Atlantic toward Cuba.

McNamara was less concerned about the precise location of different ships than the question of how the naval “quarantine” should be enforced. The Navy interpreted the notion of a blockade literally: banned weapons would not be allowed through. McNamara and Kennedy viewed it more as a mechanism for sending political messages to the rival superpower. The objective was to get Khrushchev to back down, not to sink Soviet ships.

Anderson could barely contain his anger as he listened to McNamara’s detailed questions. “This is none of your goddamn business,” he finally exploded. “We know how to do this. We’ve been doing it ever since the days of John Paul Jones, and if you’ll just go back to your quarters, Mr. Secretary, we’ll take care of this.” Gilpatric could see the color rising in his boss’s countenance. For a moment, he feared a blazing row in front of the assembled Navy brass. But McNamara simply remarked, “You heard me, Admiral, there will be no shots fired without my permission,” and walked out of the room.

Castro would have preferred a public announcement about the missile deployment, but reluctantly went along with Khrushchev’s insistence on secrecy, until all the missiles were in place. At first, knowledge of the deployments was limited to Castro and four of his closest aides; but the circle of those in the know gradually widened. The garrulous Cubans, Castro included, were bursting to tell the rest of the world about the missiles.

Che was one of the very few people other than his brother Raúl whom Fidel trusted completely. He knew that an Argentinean could never aspire to replace him as leader of Cuba. Together, Fidel, Raúl, and Che formed Cuba’s ruling triumvirate.

In fact, it was impossible to do anything of the sort. The Kimovsk was nearly eight hundred miles away from the Essex at the time this order was issued. The Yuri Gagarin was more than five hundred miles away. The “high-interest ships” had both turned back the previous day, shortly after receiving an urgent message from Moscow. The mistaken notion that the Soviet ships turned around at the last moment in a tense battle of wills between Khrushchev and Kennedy has lingered for decades.

The Kimovsk had been located 300 miles east of the quarantine line at 3:00 a.m. Tuesday, eight hours after President Kennedy’s television broadcast announcing the blockade. By 10:00 a.m. Wednesday—just over thirty hours later—she was a further 450 miles to the east, clearly on her way home.

The truth is that Khrushchev had “blinked” on the first night of the crisis—but it took nearly thirty hours for the “blink” to become visible to decision makers in Washington. The real danger came not from the missile-carrying ships, which were all headed back to the Soviet Union by now, but from the four Foxtrot-class submarines still lurking in the western Atlantic.

There had been rumors that the Soviets were planning to construct a submarine base at the Cuban port of Mariel under the guise of a fishing port. But Khrushchev had personally denied the allegation in a conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Moscow. “I give you my word,” he had told Foy Kohler on October 16, as the four Foxtrots headed westward across the Atlantic on precisely this mission.

Shumkov comforted himself with the thought that the Americans had not discovered the most important secret of his submarine. Stacked in the bow of the B-130 was a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo.

Soon after the missile crisis, LeMay would became the inspiration for Buck Turgidson, the out-of-control Air Force general in Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove.

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one of JFK’s bottom-line questions: what difference would Soviet missiles on Cuba make to the balance of nuclear terror? The Joint Chiefs believed the impact was considerable; McNamara felt that the missiles did little to change the big picture.

In other words, both the Joint Chiefs and McNamara were right. Deploying missiles to Cuba strengthened Khrushchev’s hand, and compensated for his shortage of intercontinental missiles. On the other hand, Khrushchev could not deliver a knockout blow against the United States under any circumstances. The surviving U.S. nuclear strike force would still be able to wreak much greater damage on the Soviet Union than the Soviets had inflicted on America.

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The R-12 missile had a longer range than American intelligence analysts believed. In addition to reaching Washington, Soviet targeteers operated on the assumption that they could also hit New York. The CIA had informed Kennedy that New York was beyond the range of the R-12.

Once set in motion, the machinery of war quickly acquired its own logic and momentum. The unwritten rule of Cold War diplomacy—never concede anything—made it very difficult for either side to back down. The question was no longer whether the leaders of the two superpowers wanted war—but whether they had the power to prevent it. The most dangerous moments of the crisis still lay ahead.

Surrounded by protective mountains, GITMO offered the U.S. Navy one of the best natural harbors in the Caribbean. It was also a historical anomaly. The base agreement dated back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt, when Cuba was still under American protection. The fledgling Cuban government was compelled to lease the forty-five-square-mile enclave in perpetuity to the United States for an annual payment of $2,000 in gold coin, later converted to $3,386.25 in paper money.

Cratology scored its greatest triumph in late September when analysts correctly deduced that a Soviet ship bound for Cuba was carrying Il-28 bombers. Since the Il-28 was known to be nuclear-capable, this discovery prompted Kennedy to agree to the crucial October 14 U-2 overflight of Cuba to investigate the Soviet arms buildup.

The world was in the throes of a half-finished information revolution. Artificial satellites could beam Kennedy’s speeches around the world almost instantaneously, but he could not talk to Khrushchev in real time. He could pick up the phone and call the British prime minister whenever he wished, but it could take hours to reach the leader of Brazil. Navy communications vessels were bouncing messages off the moon, but high-priority traffic between the Pentagon and the warships enforcing the blockade was routinely delayed by six to eight hours.

Many of the technicians and engineers who worked with the “gadgets”—as they called the warheads—would later develop cancer.

The CIA’s dismissal of Bejucal as a nuclear storage bunker—after it had been earmarked as the “best candidate” for such a site—can best be explained by the tyranny of conventional wisdom. “The experts kept saying that nuclear warheads would be under the tight control of the KGB,” recalled Brugioni. “We were told to look out for multiple security fences, roadblocks, extra levels of protection. We did not observe any of that.” The analysts noted the rickety fence around the Bejucal site, which was not even protected by a closed gate, and decided that there were no nuclear warheads inside. The photo interpretation reports referred merely to an unidentified “munitions storage site.”

There was a shortage of military police because some units had been dispatched to the Deep South to enforce federal court orders on desegregation.

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As word spread within the upper reaches of the U.S. bureaucracy about the sighting of nuclear-capable battlefield weapons in Cuba, in the hands of Soviet defenders, American commanders began clamoring for tactical nuclear weapons of their own.

The Cold War was an intelligence war. There were times and places when it was waged in the open, as in Korea and later in Vietnam, but for the most part, it was fought in the shadows. Since it was impossible to destroy the enemy without risking a nuclear exchange, Cold War strategists attempted instead to discover his capabilities, to probe for weakness. Military superiority could be transformed into political and diplomatic advantage. Information was power.

The activation of the radar systems coincided with the discovery of a major change in the organization of Cuban air defenses. NSA analysts noticed that Cuban call signs, codes, and procedures were replaced by Soviet ones in the early hours of Saturday morning. Commands were issued in Russian rather than Spanish. It looked as if the Soviets had taken over and activated the entire air defense network. Only the low-level antiaircraft guns remained under Cuban control. There was only one possible conclusion: the rules of engagement had suddenly changed. From now on, American planes flying over Cuba would be tracked and targeted.

A 2.8-megaton weapon would destroy everything within a seven-mile radius of the blast, and spew radiation over a much larger area.

R-7

Fidel Castro was also wide awake, as was usual for him at this hour in the morning. As the minutes ticked by, he became ever more pessimistic about the chances of avoiding an American invasion. The historical analogy that troubled him most was Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Stalin had received numerous intelligence reports about a Nazi invasion, but he ignored them all. Fearing a provocation to trap him into an unwanted war, he refused to mobilize the Soviet armed forces until it was too late.

Rather than submit to an American occupation, he and his comrades “were ready to die in the defense of our country.” He had no problem authorizing the use of tactical nuclear weapons against American invaders, even if it meant poisoning Cuba for generations to come.

“Fucked again,” exploded Kennedy, when he heard the news. He responded by ordering a resumption of American tests in April 1962. By October, the two superpowers were engaged in a frenetic round of tit-for-tat nuclear testing, detonating live bombs two or even three times a week while preparing to fight a nuclear war over Cuba.

The U-2 had many other unique design features, in addition to its flimsy construction. To gain lift at high altitude, the plane needed long, narrow wings. Maultsby’s plane was eighty feet wide wingtip to wingtip, nearly twice the distance from nose to tail. The willowy wings and light airframe allowed the plane to glide for up to 250 miles if it ever lost power from its single engine. Flying this extraordinary airplane required an elite corps of pilots, men who were physically and mentally equipped to roam the upper reaches of earth’s atmosphere at a time when manned space flight was still in its infancy. A U-2 pilot was a cross between an aeronaut and an astronaut. To be selected for the program, he needed to demonstrate a combination of athleticism, intellect, and utter confidence in his own abilities. Training was carried out at “the ranch,” a remote airstrip in the Nevada Desert. Also known as “Area 51,” the ranch was already becoming notorious as the site of numerous alleged UFO sightings, most of which were likely sightings of the U-2. Seen from below, with the sun glinting off its wings, the high-flying spy plane could be mistaken for a Martian spacecraft.

Early on in the crisis, Soviet military intelligence had reported that “Robert Kennedy and his circle” were willing to trade U.S. bases in Turkey and Italy for Soviet bases in Cuba. The information was considered authentic because it came from an agent named Georgi Bolshakov, who had served as a Kremlin backchannel to Bobby Kennedy. More recently, Khrushchev’s interest had been piqued by a syndicated column by Walter Lippmann calling for a Cuba-Turkey missile swap. The Soviets knew the columnist had excellent sources in the Kennedy administration. It seemed unlikely that he was speaking only for himself. Khrushchev understood the Lippmann column as an unattributable feeler from Washington.

Contrary to later myth, Kennedy refrained from issuing orders directly to the ships enforcing the blockade. Instead, he used the traditional chain of command, through the secretary of defense and chief of naval operations. Nevertheless, the fact that the White House could monitor military communications on a minute-by-minute basis had major implications for the Pentagon. The military chiefs feared that the very existence of the Situation Room would reduce their freedom of action—and they were correct. The relationship between the civilians and the military had undergone a profound change during the two decades since World War II. In the nuclear age, a political leader could no longer afford to trust his generals to make the right decision on their own, without close supervision.

Half a dozen Soviet cargo ships were still heading for the island—despite an assurance by Khrushchev to the United Nations that they would avoid the quarantine zone for the time being. The Soviet ship closest to the barrier was called the Grozny.

The U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, David Bruce, reported dryly to Washington that he thought he detected “a slight oscillation in one wing” of the famously unflappable prime minister.

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Both Kennedy and Khrushchev considered Berlin “the most dangerous spot in the world.” They had been sparring over the city ever since Kennedy’s election as president. The status quo was unacceptable to the Soviets: hundreds of East German refugees were crossing the border every day. At the Vienna summit in June 1961, the Soviet leader threatened to sign a peace treaty with East Germany and eliminate Allied rights to West Berlin. Two months later, he chose a different option, erecting a 104-mile-long “anti-Fascist defense barrier,” more commonly known in the West as the Berlin Wall.

Appalled by the all-or-nothing choices in SIOP-62, the Kennedy administration drew up a new plan, known as SIOP-63. Despite its title, this one came into effect in the summer of 1962. It allowed the president several “withhold” options, including China and Eastern Europe, and made some attempt to distinguish between cities and military targets. Nevertheless, the plan was still built around the notion of a single devastating strike that would totally destroy the Soviet Union’s ability to make war. None of these options appealed to Kennedy at the moment of actual decision. He had asked the Pentagon how many people would die if a single Soviet missile got through and landed somewhere near an American city. The answer was six hundred thousand.

In Moscow, the official government newspaper Izvestia was rolling off the presses. The editors had remade the front page at the last moment to include Khrushchev’s latest message to Kennedy acknowledging the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and offering to withdraw them, if the United States withdrew its missiles from Turkey. “Keeping the peace is the main goal of the government of the USSR,” the newspaper declared. Unfortunately for Izvestia’s credibility, there was nothing to be done about the commentary on page two, which had gone to press many hours in advance. The writer accused the United States of concocting stories about Soviet missile bases in Cuba. He poured scorn on the notion of a Turkey-Cuba missile swap as a cynical public relations initiative by the “Pentagon propaganda machine.”

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In a newspaper editorial written during the missile crisis but published posthumously, he made clear he saw only two possible futures for mankind: “the definitive victory of socialism or its retrogression under the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression.” Che had already made his choice: “the path of liberation even when it may cost millions of atomic victims.”

The Soviets had even dropped a live Tatyana on their own troops during a military exercise in Siberia that was meant to simulate a nuclear war with the United States. Some forty-five thousand officers and soldiers were exposed to fallout from the blast, and many subsequently died of radiation-related illnesses.