One Minute to Midnight

by Michael Dobbs

“Their Spanish blood may be wearing thin but there is still of lot of Don Quixote” in Cubans, Marchant reported. “This starry eyed brand of national pride in the Cuban revolutionary is a characteristic no observer can afford to ignore in interpreting events.”

World peace was hanging by a thread, but it took nearly twelve hours to deliver a message from one superpower leader to another.

If the Soviet ambassador in Washington wanted to send a message to Moscow, it first had to be encrypted in groups of five letters. The embassy would then telephone the local office of Western Union, which would dispatch a courier on a bicycle to collect the cable.

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

Howze notified the Pentagon on Friday that he was “having a hard time keeping the lid on the pot” of the two airborne divisions. It was difficult to keep highly motivated troops in a prolonged state of alert without sending them into action.

At 12:38 a.m., T-branchers picked up the whoop of an air defense radar from a SAM site, just outside Mariel. They turned on their recorders and got out their stopwatches, measuring the interval between the buzzing sounds and consulting a bulky manual that contained the identifying characteristics of all known Soviet radar systems, including frequency, pulse width, and pulse repetition rate. The manual confirmed what they already suspected. It was a Spoon Rest radar.

The Soviets had so few intercontinental ballistic missiles in service that they had to make use of every single rocket in the inventory, outdated or not.

“We aren’t talking just about the death of a hundred thousand people from a specific nuclear warhead. This could be the beginning of the end for the entire human race. It’s not the same as in the war, when you were commanding a battery and someone shouted ‘Fire.’” Kirillov thought about this for a moment. “I am a soldier and I will fulfill my orders, just as I did at the front,” he replied eventually. “Somewhere or other, there is another missile officer, not called Kirillov, but something like Smith, who is waiting for an order to attack Moscow or this very cosmodrome. So there is no need to poison my soul.”

Accepting the unacceptable and thinking the unthinkable were key to his survival strategy. Nuclear war was the ultimate game of chicken. If Castro could convince Kennedy and Khrushchev that he was willing to die for his beliefs, that gave him a certain advantage. Since he was the weakest of the three leaders, stubbornness, defiance, and dignidad were his only real weapons.

It was impossible for them to land on an icecap. If he had to bail out near the North Pole, he would be alone with the polar bears. “I wouldn’t pull the ripcord,” was the best advice they could give him.

The preflight ritual was always the same. After waking up from his nap, he went to the officers’ mess for a high-protein, low-residue breakfast of steak and eggs. The idea was to eat something solid that would take a long time to digest, avoiding trips to a nonexistent bathroom. He changed into long underwear, put on a helmet, and started his “pre-breathing exercises,” inhaling pure oxygen for one and a half hours. It was important to expel as much nitrogen as possible from his system. Otherwise, if the cabin depressurized at seventy thousand feet, nitrogen bubbles would form in his blood, causing him to experience the bends, like a deep-sea diver who comes to the surface too quickly.

Neatly sewn into the seat cushion was a survival kit, which included flares, a machete, fishing gear, a camp stove, an inflatable life raft, mosquito repellant, and a silk banner proclaiming, in a dozen languages, I am an American. A pamphlet promised a reward to anyone who helped him.

After a lifetime of excitement, he was reminded of a line in a book by André Malraux, quoting a disillusioned revolutionary: “When you have only one life, you should not try too hard to change the world.”

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. He advised Kennedy to ignore the “caterwauling” and not pay too much attention to the qualms expressed by his British allies when America’s “most vital interests” were at stake. “Only stupid giants let themselves be tied down by Lilliputians,” he cabled.

“Berlin is the testicles of the West,” Nikita Khrushchev liked to say. “Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.”

West Berlin was a virtually defenseless capitalist bastion of 2 million people more than one hundred miles inside Communist East Germany. The city was connected to West Germany by thirteen negotiated access routes, any one of which could be severed in minutes by overwhelmingly superior Soviet forces. The access routes included four Autobahns, four railway lines, the Elbe River, a canal, and three air corridors, each of them twenty miles wide. The air corridors had been a lifeline in 1948 after Stalin cut the overland connections. The Western Allies ferried in supplies by air for 462 consecutive days. At the height of the blockade, one Allied transport plane landed in Berlin’s Tempelhof airport every minute.

On October 26, 1961, American and Soviet tanks had faced each other directly at Checkpoint Charlie in a two-day standoff. It was the first direct American-Soviet confrontation of the nuclear age, with “soldiers and weapons eyeball to eyeball.”

For the most part, it was boring work, punctuated by moments of intense activity. Many of the men on Willson’s plane had flown peripheral missions around the Soviet Union, probing for weaknesses in the air defense system in advance of a possible bomber attack. They would aim directly for the Soviet frontier, as if they were on a bombing raid, and then veer away at the last moment. The idea was to provoke the Russians to switch on their radars. The intercept data could be used later to map the Soviet air defense system. There was always a risk that they would stray over Soviet territory and be shot down. Several members of Willson’s outfit—the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing—had ended up in Soviet prisons, while others had been killed by the very weapons systems they had been sent to detect.

Where Kennedy differed from Castro, and also from Khrushchev, was in his sense of detached irony, which also had a lot to do with his long illness. He was forever questioning conventional wisdom. Castro was narcissistic and self-absorbed: all that mattered were his own actions and his own will. Khrushchev reduced world affairs to crude calculations of political power. Kennedy had a knack for looking at problems through the eyes of his adversaries. His “capacity for projecting himself into other people’s shoes” was at once his curse and his strength.

“This war here is a dirty business,” he wrote his Swedish girlfriend, Inga Arvad, in 1943. It was difficult to persuade his men that they were dying for a great cause when they were fighting on “some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap…. I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing better.” Unlike the Japanese, who were willing to sacrifice themselves for their emperor, the typical American soldier felt a divided loyalty—“He wants to kill but he is also trying to prevent himself from being killed.” The lesson that Jack drew was that politicians had better think very carefully before they sent their children off to war. He was scornful of abstract phrases like “global war” and “all-out effort.” It’s very easy to talk about the war and beating the Japs if it takes years and a million men, but anyone who talks like that should consider well his words. We get so used to talking about billions of dollars, and millions of soldiers, that thousands of casualties sound like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten that I saw [in his PT-boat, which was sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer], the people deciding the whys and wherefores had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal, and that when we reach that goal we may say it was worth it, for if it isn’t, the whole thing will turn to ashes, and we will face great trouble in the years to come after the war.

One of Kennedy’s favorite passages was a scene in which two German statesmen are analyzing the reasons for the most destructive military confrontation up until that time. “How did it all happen?” the younger man wanted to know. “Ah, if only one knew.” As Kennedy tried to imagine a war with the Soviet Union over the missiles in Cuba, one thought kept returning to trouble him. He imagined a planet ravaged by “fire, poison, chaos, and catastrophe.” Whatever else he did as president of the United States, he was determined to avoid an outcome in which one survivor of a nuclear war asked another, “How did it all happen?” and received the incredible reply, “Ah, if only one knew.”

The nuclear strike codes were kept inside a black vinyl briefcase known as “the Football.” The Football enabled the president to order the obliteration of thousands of targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Within seconds of the authentication of a presidential order, missiles would lift off from silos on the plains of Montana and North Dakota; B-52 bombers heading toward Russia would fly past their fail-safe points to their targets; Polaris submarines in the Arctic Ocean would unleash their nuclear warheads.

He had privately concluded that nuclear weapons were “only good for deterring.” He thought it “insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.”

“When you are in great danger and you feel righteous, it balances out somehow.

Whatever his human qualities, Che was also the most fanatical of Castro’s aides. How many people would die in the coming war with America was less important to him than the struggle between the opposing ideological systems. 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.”

“That’s when we hope that cooler heads will prevail, and they’ll stop and talk.”

Unwittingly, Acheson had laid bare a somber Cold War truth: it was impossible to know where a “limited” nuclear war would end.

“There’s always some sonofabitch who doesn’t get the word.”

The paradox of the nuclear age was that American power was greater than ever before—but it could all be jeopardized by a single, fatal miscalculation. Mistakes were an inevitable consequence of warfare, but in previous wars they had been easier to rectify. The stakes were much higher now, and the margin for error much narrower. “The possibility of the destruction of mankind” was constantly on Kennedy’s mind, according to Bobby. He knew that war is “rarely intentional.” What troubled him most was the thought that “if we erred, we erred not only for ourselves, our futures, our hopes, and our country,” but for young people all over the world “who had no role, who had no say, who knew nothing even of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else’s.”

The closest contact they had with the enemy was a playful sign that boasted: “Worldwide delivery in 30 minutes or less—or your next one is free.” Nuclear apocalypse was as mundane as delivering pizza.

Of course, the United States was hardly an innocent party. The previous week, the president had personally signed off on a series of acts of terrorism on Cuban soil, including a grenade attack on the Chinese Embassy in Havana, the demolition of a railroad in Pinar del Río, and attacks on oil refineries and a nickel plant.

The idea that the Soviet Union would be the first to use nuclear weapons was completely unacceptable to Khrushchev, however much he threatened and blustered. Unlike Castro, he had no illusions about the USSR’s ability to win a nuclear war. The United States had more than enough nuclear weapons both to sustain a first strike and to wipe out the Soviet Union. The Cuban obsession with death and self-sacrifice startled Khrushchev, who had seen more than his share of destruction and suffering. He understood, perhaps for the first time, just how differently he and Castro “viewed the world” and valued human life. As Khrushchev saw it, “We are not struggling against imperialism in order to die” but to achieve the long-term “victory of communism.” To be Red and dead was to miss the point.

Top aides like Powers, Sorensen, and Kenny O’Donnell received pink identification cards, which meant they would accompany the president to an underground bunker in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia.

The evacuation instructions were part of a secret doomsday plan to ensure the survival of the U.S. government in the event of nuclear war. The president would be evacuated to Mount Weather, fifty miles from Washington, along with cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, and several thousand senior federal officials.

Contingency plans called for the rescue of Federal Reserve assets and cultural treasures such as the Declaration of Independence and masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art.

By the time the coded cable reached Havana, the whole world would already know about the “crate and return” order from Radio Moscow.

There had been many times over the last twenty-four hours when Kennedy, like Abraham Lincoln before him, had reason to ask himself whether he controlled events or events controlled him.

Unsure whether to be amused or protective, Bobby played along with his brother’s macabre joke. “If you go, I want to go with you.”

John F. Kennedy was murdered in November 1963. His assassin had been active in a left-wing protest group that called itself “Fair Play for Cuba.”

Nor was the day-to-day diplomacy as “brilliantly controlled” as the Kennedy camp would have us believe. In their desire to claim credit for Khrushchev’s sudden about-face on the morning of Sunday, October 28, Kennedy aides came up with the notion of the “Trollope ploy” to describe the American diplomatic strategy on Black Saturday. The gambit was named after a recurring scene in novels by Anthony Trollope, in which a lovesick Victorian maiden chooses to interpret an innocent squeeze on the hand as an offer of marriage. By this account, accepted for many years by missile crisis scholars, it was Bobby who came up with the idea of the ploy. He suggested that his brother simply ignore Khrushchev’s call on Saturday morning for a Turkey-Cuba missile swap and instead accept his ambiguously worded offer of Friday night to dismantle the missile sites in return for a U.S. guarantee not to invade Cuba. It was, wrote Schlesinger, “a thought of breathtaking ingenuity and simplicity.”

Convinced of America’s unchallengeable military superiority, Rumsfeld had little patience with the notion that everything can be screwed up by “some sonofabitch.” Like his Vietnam-era predecessor, he was a “gung-ho fellow” with a “can-do” mentality.

The most enduring lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is that, in a world with nuclear weapons, a classic military victory is an illusion. Communism was not defeated militarily; it was defeated economically, culturally, and ideologically. Khrushchev’s successors were unable to provide their own people with a basic level of material prosperity and spiritual fulfillment. They lost the war of ideas. In the end, as I have argued in Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, communism defeated itself.

They were rational, intelligent, decent men separated by an ocean of misunderstanding, fear, and ideological suspicion. Despite everything that divided them, they had a sneaking sympathy for each other, an idea expressed most poignantly by Jackie Kennedy in a private, handwritten letter she sent to Khrushchev following her husband’s assassination: You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up. The danger which troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones. While big men know the need for self-control and restraint, little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride.

Bismarck defined political intuition as the ability to hear, before anybody else, “the distant hoofbeats of history.”

The story of the missile crisis is replete with misunderstandings and miscalculations. But something more than “dumb luck” was involved in sidestepping a nuclear apocalypse. The real good fortune is that men as sane and level-headed as John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev occupied the White House and the Kremlin in October 1962.

I came across the key document, a map showing Maultsby’s precise flight route, along with tracking data on Soviet MiGs that were sent up to shoot him down, in the files of the State Department Executive Secretariat, which were declassified by the National Archives at my request. I suspect that the map may have been released inadvertently by State Department declassifiers unaware of its significance.