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The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and Behavior*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Arnold L. Horelick
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Extract

In A television interview not long after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy observed that both the United States and the Soviet Union had made serious miscalculations in the Cuban affair. “I don't think we expected that he [Khrushchev] would put the missiles in Cuba,” he said, “because it would have seemed such an imprudent action for him to take He obviously thought he could do it in secret and that the United States would accept it.”

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , April 1964 , pp. 363 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1964

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References

1 Washington Post, December 18, 1962.

2 Pravda, December 13, 1962. The continuing drumfire of Albanian and Chinese criticism obliged Khrushchev to return to the subject repeatedly, particularly in his East German SED Congress speech (Pravda, January 17, 1963) and his Supreme Soviet election speech (Pravda, February 28, 1963).

3 Conversation with Julien, Claude, he Monde, March 22, 1963.Google Scholar

4 Professor Dewart, Leslie, who argued that the President played into Khrushchev's hands by oiw-reacting, wrote that “yielding was the essence of the [Soviet] scheme.” “The conclusion appears reasonable that Russia set up missile bases in Cuba in full knowledge or expectation of the consequences. It is those very consequences [to compel a shift from “rigidity to negotiableness” in U.S. foreign policy] which she can be presumed to have sought.” (“Russia's Cuban Policy and the Prospects of Peace,” Council for Correspondence Newsletter, No. 21 [October 1962], 17, 21.)Google Scholar

Chase, Stuart has similarly suggested that “it is not impossible” that the withdrawal of Soviet strategic weapons from Cuba “was part of a plan, more political than military, to secure a pledge against invasion.” (“Two Worlds,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, XIX [June 1963], 20.)Google Scholar

Those who criticized the Administration for reacting too cautiously tended to regard the outcome of the crisis as coinciding less with specific Soviet intentions than with general Soviet interests. For example, Lowenthal, David wrote: “It is what he [the President] could have done but did not do that will most strongly impress our Communist foes. He forced them to retract the move, and for a brief while aired their malice before the world. But he did nothing to penalize an action aimed at inflicting an almost mortal wound on us, and he even made a noninvasion pledge that had never been given before. … We did not even get the status quo ante.” (“U.S. Cuban Policy: Illusion and Reality,” National Review, January 29, 1963, 63.)Google Scholar

Along related lines, Crane, Robert D. wrote: “The USSR might conclude that the United States was content with a vague promise of the verified removal of an indefensible Communist military gain. The Soviets on the other hand, demanded — and apparently believed they had received — an assurance against an invasion of Cuba by any country in the Western Hemisphere, which under the circumstances could amount to the creation of a new doctrine strongly resembling a Monroe-Doctrine-in-reverse.” (‘The Cuban Crisis: A Strategic Analysis of American and Soviet Policy,” Orbis, VI [Winter 1963], 547–48.)Google Scholar

5 “In no circumstances,” the Peking People's Daily editorialized on October 31, 1962, can the people of the world trust “the empty promises of the U.S. aggressor.” Tirana Radio chimed in the following day: “The Cuban people know from their own experience — the experience of the Bay of Pigs and of all that is happening around them — that Kennedy and the imperialist monopolies represented by Kennedy cannot be trusted.” And Castro has said: “We do not believe in the words of Kennedy; but, moreover, Kennedy has not given any word. And if he gave it, he has already retracted it.” (Havana Radio, January 16, 1963.)

6 New York Times, November 17, 1962.

7 The Chinese Communists have accused him of being both.

8 Briefing by Hughes, John, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1964, Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 88th Congress, ist Session (Washington 1963)Google Scholar, Part 1, 7; hereinafter cited as Hearings.

9 Missiles and Rockets, January 7, 1963, 26.

10 Had the United States accepted the Soviet base-exchange proposal of October 27, Khrushchev would also have received such a U.S. pledge since a reciprocal exchange of no-invasion pledges was part of the proposed bargain.

11 Secretary McNamara has testified that the long-standing program to replace the obsolete Thor and Jupiter missiles dated from early 1961. (Hearings, 57.)

12 If the base-exchange proposal was a prepared fall-back position, the Soviet leaders failed to prepare their propagandists for it. On the same day (October 28, 1962) that it front-paged Khrushchev's base-exchange proposal letter to the President, the Soviet Government newspaper, Izvestiia, printed on an inside page a commentary which stated: ‘There are those in the U.S.A. who speculate that in exchange for denying Cuba the ability to repel American aggression, one might ‘give up’ some American base close to Soviet territory. … Such ‘proposals,’ if you can call them that, merely serve to betray the unclean conscience of the authors.” The editor of Izvestiia is Alexei Adzhubei, Khrushchev's son-in-law.

13 Pravda, December 13, 1962; emphasis supplied. The “other sources” may have included the U.S. Government.

14 Khrushchev referred obliquely to this miscalculation in his speech at the 6th Congress of the SED (East German Party) in Berlin on January 16, 1963, when he acknowledged that “this enforced measure [stationing Soviet missiles in Cuba] had the effect of a shock (shok) on the imperialists,” but argued that only such measures were capable of inducing U.S. statesmen “to make a more sober assessment of the objective reality.” (Pravda, January 17, 1963.)

15 According to Draper, Theodore, these remarks were reportedly made by Guevara in an interview with a London Daily Worker correspondent, but did not appear in the version published on December 4, 1962. (“Castro and Communism,” The Reporter, January 17, 1963, 44.)Google Scholar

16 New York Times, October 23, 1962. The phrase “full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union” may have implied to the Soviet leaders not only that the United States would not treat the Soviet Union as a sanctuary area if the Cuba-based missiles were fired, but that it did not intend to restrict itself to a limited strategic response (“tit for tat” retaliation).

17 Pravda, October 24, 1962.

18 Ibid.; emphasis supplied.

19 New York Times, November 18, 1962.

20 Pravda, October 28, 1962. The implication is that if the weapons had been under Cuban control, the possibility that they might be “accidentally used” could not be excluded.

21 This did not occur for all MRBM systems until October 28; the IRBM's never achieved operational status, nor, apparently, did the IL-28 bombers. (Hearings, 12, 16.)

22 For example, while the threat posed by MRBM's to cities, including Washington, D.C., in the southeastern part of the United States would, if credible, have been adequate to deter a U.S. attack on Cuba, most U.S. strategic bomber and missile bases would have been beyond the range of those weapons. These bases could have been covered by IRBM's.

23 Le Monde, March 22, 1963.

24 Havana, , Prensa Latina, March 22, 1963.Google Scholar Specifically, Castro denied only that “I expressed myself in an unfriendly way at any time about Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev.” Castro's general refutation pointedly referred only to the UPI version of Le Monde's article: “I do not believe that Julien, whom we consider a friend of Cuba, can be guilty of untruths like some of the statements the UPI attributes to him.” (Emphasis supplied.) The March 22 TASS version of Castro's denial omitted both of the statements quoted above.

After this article was written, Castro was questioned by two other journalists regarding the origination of the plan to deploy Soviet missiles in Cuba. According to Matthews, Herbert L. (Return to Cuba, Stanford University Hispanic American Report series [1964], 16)Google Scholar, Castro stated flatly on October 23, 1963, that “the idea of installing the nuclear weapons was his, not the Russians’.” However, three weeks later, according to Jean Daniel's account of his interview with the Cuban Premier, Castro appeared to confirm the account given earlier in the Julien interview: “We thought of a proclamation, an alliance, conventional military aid. … They [the Russians] reasoned that if conventional military assistance was the extent of their assistance, the United States might not hesitate to instigate an invasion, in which case Russia would retaliate and this would inevitably touch off a world war. … Under these circumstances, how could we Cubans refuse to share the risks taken to save us?” (Daniel, Jean, “Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report from Two Capitals,” New Republic, December 14, 1963, 18–19.Google Scholar) Matthews writes that he telephoned Castro after Daniel's account was published and was again told: “We were the ones who put forward the idea of the missiles” (Return to Cuba, 16).

25 Khrushchev handled this question gingerly in defending his Cuban policy against Chinese and Albanian criticism in his speech at the Congress of the SED in Berlin on January 16, 1963: “One may object that, under the influence of the most unrestrained incitement, the U.S. imperialists will not keep their promise and will again turn their arms against Cuba. But the forces which protected Cuba now exist and are growing in strength every day. It does not matter where the rockets are located, in Cuba, or elsewhere. They can be used with equal success against any particular aggression.” (Pravda, January 17, 1963; emphasis supplied.) The implicit question is: If so, why were Soviet missiles deployed in Cuba in the first place? The implicit answer is: Soviet-based strategic power was not then great enough to deter a U.S. attack, but it is “growing in strength every day” and soon will be (or will appear to be).

26 In July 1960, Khrushchev said that “figuratively speaking, in case of need, Soviet artillerymen can support the Cuban people with their rocket fire. …” (Pravda, July 9, 1960.) The conditional form of this threat (“can,” not “will,” support) was retained in the Soviet Government's statement on Cuba on September 11, 1962, which asserted that the USSR “has the capability from its own territory to render assistance to any peaceloving state.” (Pravda, September 11, 1962.)

27 Obra Revolucionaria, January 25, 1961, quoted by Draper, “Castro and Communism,” 39. (Emphasis supplied.)

28 In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the pre-crisis positions of the Soviet Union and Cuba on the firmness of Soviet pledges to defend Cuba were sharply reversed. Whereas the Soviet leaders, presumably to placate Castro, offered increasingly strong pledges to defend Cuba, Cuban leaders ignored them and vowed to resist any U.S. attack with their own resources. Later, however, as Soviet-Cuban relations recovered from the estrangement of the fall of 1962, Cuban leaders began to welcome Soviet pledges with great public enthusiasm.

29 Quoted in an interview by Alsop, Stewart, “Our New Strategy: The Alternatives to Total War,” Saturday Evening Post, December I, 1962, 18.Google Scholar

30 Soviet strategic pronouncements after the fall of 1961 shifted from claims of superiority to efforts to deprive American claims to superiority of political value by emphasizing the adequacy of Soviet retaliatory capability. Soviet leaders began explicitly to declare their readiness to accept strategic parity as the basic assumption from which political settlements should proceed (e.g., Malinovsky's, MarshalPravda interview, January 25, 1962Google Scholar). The emphasis in claims regarding the USSR's strike capability against the United States shifted from the high level of destruction that could be inflicted to the certaintythat some unspecified level of retaliation would occur.

31 Washington Post, December 18, 1962.

32 A link between the Cuban missile deployment and Khrushchev's Berlin strategy was suggested by the Soviet Government's statement of September 11, 1962, in which the USSR acknowledged that it was providing military assistance — though of a strictly defensive type — to Cuba, and warned that a U.S. attack on Cuba might unleash the beginning of a thermonuclear war, but at the same time declared a moratorium on new moves in Berlin until after the U.S. Congressional elections. (Pravda, September 11, 1962.) Khrushchev may have hoped to discourage any new U.S. action in regard to Cuba until after the elections (i.e., until after the MRBM's, at least, became operational), by offering, in return, to desist from fomenting a new crisis in Berlin, and then, after establishing a strategic base in Cuba, to use this new leverage to press for a favorable settlement in Berlin.

33 New York Times, September 5 and 14, 1962.

34 Hearings, 25.

35 Ibid.

36 Testimony of John Hughes, Defense Intelligence Agency, ibid., 6.

37 Actually, if the same U.S. policy had been adopted for dealing with the situation, the outcome need not have been different even if the Soviet missiles had been operational at the time of their detection. The missile sites would still have been highly vulnerable to attack and Soviet reluctance to initiate a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange would presumably still have been sufficiently great to make the threat of a U.S. attack on Cuban bases highly credible. However, sufficient doubt might have arisen on the U.S. side so as to cause a different U.S. policy to be adopted for dealing with the crisis.

88 Sorensen, Theodore C., Decision-Making in the White House: The Olive Branch or the Arrows (New York 1963), 31.Google Scholar

39 Apparent inconsistencies and contradictions in communications received in Washington from Moscow and in Soviet press treatment of the crisis suggest that Soviet decision-making was being conducted in an environment of considerable uncertainty and perhaps even sharp controversy among political and military elite groups. (See Kolkowicz, Roman, Conflicts in Soviet Party-Military Relations: 1962–1963, The RAND Corporation, RM-3760-PR, August 1963.Google Scholar)

40 Pravda, April 19, 1961. The reference at that time was presumably to Laos.

41 New York Times, August 30, 1962.

42 See, for example, the chronological account of the Cuban crisis published in ibid., November 3, 1962.

43 Ibid., October 23, 1962.

44 Speaking of the deliberations which led up to the President's October 22 speech, Theodore Sorensen said that “all of us knew that, once the Soviets learned of our information and planning, our prospects for surprise and initiative would be greatly lessened.” (Decision-Making in the White House, 31.)

45 Sixteen out of 18 Soviet dry-cargo ships en route to Cuba, presumably those containing quarantined items, reversed course and returned to the Soviet Union. (Hearings, 13.)

46 Theodore Sorensen has suggested that if the OAS had failed to provide the necessary vote authorizing a Cuban quarantine, “the Soviets and possibly others might have been emboldened to challenge the legality of our action, creating confusion and irresolution in the Western camp and giving rise to all kinds of cargo insurance and admiralty questions that this nation would not enjoy untangling.” (Decision-Making in the White House, 24–25.)

47 In regard to the role played by the danger of general war in Khrushchev's decision to withdraw Soviet strategic weapons from Cuba, Secretary McNamara testified before a Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations in February 1963: “… we had a force of several hundred thousand men ready to invade Cuba … had we invaded Cuba, we would have been confronted with the Soviets… had we been confronted with the Soviets we would have killed thousands of them… had we killed thousands of them the Soviets would probably have had to respond… they might have had nuclear delivery weapons there [that] might have been operational and they might have been launched … in any event, Khrushchev knew without any question whatever that he faced the full military power of the United States, including its nuclear weapons… we faced that night the possibility of launching nuclear weapons and Khrushchev knew it, and that is the reason, and the only reason, why he withdrew those weapons.” (Hearings, 31.)

48 Pravda, December 14, 1962.

49 For an illuminating discussion of this point and its relevance for decisions regarding the extent to which NATO should rely on conventional weapons for the tactical defense of Europe, see Brodie, Bernard, “What Price Conventional Capabilities in Europe?” The Reporter, May 23, 1963, 25–33.Google Scholar

50 Lippmann, Walter continued to argue after the crisis that “it would have been an incalculable risk to invade and occupy Cuba at the risk of retaliatory military action against Berlin, action which could have escalated into nuclear war.” Yet the Soviet Union evidently yielded because its leaders found it highly credible that the United States would assume this “incalculable risk.” According to Lippmann, “the United States prevailed in Cuba because, after nuclear power had been neutralized, it had powerful conventional weapons.” (“Cuba and the Nuclear Risk,” The Atlantic, February 1963, 56, 58.)Google Scholar But if U.S. nuclear power served no function other than to neutralize that of the Soviet Union, it is difficult to understand why preponderant Soviet conventional military power has not enabled the USSR to prevail in Berlin.