Start of the Nuclear Era
The detonation of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 brought Japan’s swift and unconditional surrender. Horror at the destruction they caused tempered the world’s relief at the war’s end and acted as a deterrent against their future use. In the following years, the expansion of nuclear arsenals, the development of the hydrogen bomb, and the creation of modern delivery devices, especially the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), reinforced this deterrence.
Following World War II, several major attempts were made to curtail the use and stockpiling of atomic weapons. Named for financier and public servant Bernard Baruch, the United States presented the Baruch Plan to the United Nations in June 1946. Based on The Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy, the plan proposed an internationally supervised phased reduction of the US stockpile of atomic weapons. The Soviet Union vetoed this initiative. Other arms control efforts included the 1959 demilitarization of Antarctica, achieved by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty reached by. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1963.3 For most of the early nuclear era, the atomic arms race and threat of mutual destruction seemed reliable deterrents. Then Cuba became a central nation in the race to expand one superpower’s sphere of influence.
Concern about Cuba as a security threat to the United States began early in 1959—shortly after the victory of revolutionary forces led by Fidel Castro. Support for Castro as a successor to corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista ended with mass executions and a new dictatorship. Castro’s steady drift into the Soviet orbit raised alarm in the United States and elsewhere, and Cuba became a central
2. Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022); and Edward C. Rosenthal, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Game Theory (New York: Alpha-Penguin Group, 2011), a serious, clear, and practical guide to this complex subject.
3. Bundy, Danger and Survival.
topic during the 1960 presidential campaign between Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy.4
Senior Soviet representatives consistently denied any intent of placing long-range nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. These statements were revealed as lies early in the crisis, providing the Kennedy administration with a significant advantage in world, public, and diplomatic opinion.5
Conferences among surviving participants of the Cuban Missile Crisis, beginning with the initial meeting at Hawk’s Cay, Florida, in March 1987, provided valuable information on what was happening in the command centers of the two superpowers, plus Cuba, and within their militaries.6 Particularly important, but not evident during the crisis, is that the Soviet Union already had shorter-range tactical nuclear-capable missiles and warheads in Cuba.
On the Soviet side, General Anatoli I. Gribkov was responsible for the planning and execution of Operation Anadyr, the top-secret shipment of missile forces to Cuba. Gribkov testified premier and chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikita Khrushchev gave General Issa Pliyev, commander of Soviet forces on Cuba, “authority to use his battlefield weapons and atomic charges if, in the heat of combat, he could not contact Moscow.”7 Gribkov was present for Khrushchev’s conversation with Pliyev. Marshal Marvei Zakharov, chief of the general staff of the Soviet Armed Forces, signed an order to Pliyev to that effect but Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, minister of defense, chose not to sign the document approving this order, telling Gribkov, “We don’t need any extra pieces of paper.”8
As the crisis approached, an increasingly anxious Khrushchev contacted the Soviet military in Cuba, emphasizing restraint. One particularly forceful message occurred on October 22, about 30 minutes before Kennedy announced to the American people and the world the discovery of Soviet long-range missiles in Cuba and initial US responses.9 For Soviet personnel in Cuba, Khrushchev’s message
4. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1961); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Real Making of the President: Kennedy, Nixon, and the 1960 Election (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009).
5. Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), 64.
6. James G. Blight and David A. Welch, On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).
7. Anatoli I. Gribkov and William Y. Smith, Operation Anadyr: U.S. and Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Alfred Friendly Jr. (Chicago: Edition q, Verlags GMBH, 1994), 4.
8. Gribkov and Smith, Operation Anadyr, 6.
9. Gribkov and Smith, Operation Anadry, 62.
reiterated the status quo. Pliyev did not share the private verbal authorization he had received.10
A related important interpersonal revelation concerns the exceptional heroism of Vasili Arkhipov, a Soviet staff officer of a submarine flotilla off Cuba. During the height of the crisis, he proved instrumental in preventing a Soviet submarine commander from launching a nuclear torpedo.11