On the Brink

In January 1986, Harvard political scientist Eliot Cohen published an essay in the National Interest called “Why We Should Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis.” According to Cohen, ever since the crisis of October 1962, scholars, journalists and policymakers in the United States had mistakenly looked to the missile crisis to help them understand how to conduct foreign policy. What, asked Cohen, could that long-ago allegedly nuclear confrontation have to do with the day-to-day conduct of foreign policy? His answer: nothing at all. In fact, he said, our obsession with that crisis, and the (probably inflated) fear of nuclear war, had paralyzed policymakers and prevented the forceful pursuit of American objectives around the world.

At almost the same time as the publication of Cohen’s essay, a small group of scholars at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government set out to study the missile crisis more intensively than it had ever been studied before. Why? Because they believed that while Cohen’s argument was cogent and compelling, it also was irrelevant to the fundamental character of the crisis: it was a nuclear crisis, and it was, most likely, the only time the world came close to being blown to bits by an American-Soviet war. The crisis provided the only piece of relevant data scholars have when they approach questions of preventing nuclear crises and nuclear war.

In the past 10 years, scholars from various countries have been fruitfully violating Eliot Cohen’s instructions. A series of international conferences held between 1987 and 1992 in the United States, Russia and Cuba brought to light new information on the crisis, much of it suggesting that it was more dangerous than anyone thought. With the publication of “One Hell of a Gamble,” we learn, in mortifying detail, chiefly from Russian archives, how close we came to nuclear disaster in October 1962. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, the first to gain access to a treasure-trove of Soviet-era Russian documents on the crisis, have written the book that all students of the Cuban missile crisis will wish they had written: It is learned, exciting and exquisitely well-documented.

Fursenko and Naftali provide an intricately interwoven tale of three countries, the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba, and their leaders, John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro. Each acted from defensive motives that were perceived by the others as an attempt to gain unilateral advantage, resulting in further actions, which were interpreted as escalations that eventually led to the moment of nuclear truth in late October 1962.

The authors are especially smart when they write about Khrushchev’s twin fears of losing his new Cuban ally due to an American invasion and of falling behind the United States in the nuclear arms race. The latter fear was particularly compelling for Khrushchev, who was concerned about nuclear blackmail and the status of Berlin. Confronted in West Berlin by a vast array of allied warheads, Khrushchev feared that inferior Soviet weaponry would never be able to force the allies out of the city. Could Soviet missiles on Cuban soil, then, add the right countermeasure? For the first time, we are able to read what Khrushchev actually read as he was moving toward his fateful decision. For example, he received the following report of a conversation between his son-in-law (and Izvestia editor) Alexei Adzhubei and President Kennedy in February 1962:

Kennedy: “We have no intention of intervening in Cuba.”

Adzhubei: “But what about the attacks from Guatemala and some other countries? Have you changed your opinion that the April 1961 [Bay of Pigs] invasion was an American mistake?”

Kennedy: “At the time I called [CIA director] Allen Dulles into my office and dressed him down. I told him: You should learn from the Russians. When they had difficulties in Hungary, they liquidated the conflict in three days. When they did not like things in Finland, the president of that country goes to visit the Soviet premier in Siberia and all is worked out. But you, Dulles, have never been capable of doing that.”

While the authors question the accuracy of the report, they conclude that its veracity really doesn’t matter since Khrushchev evidently believed that Kennedy was “seriously considering a second, even bigger invasion of Cuba, this time involving U.S. troops.” (In the notes to Chapter 8, we learn that the source for this reported conversation is Adzhubei’s report to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.) Before the opening of the Russian archives, scholars could only dream of this kind of documentation.

We learn much more than this about Khrushchev’s decision in April 1962, to deploy missiles. Just after receiving Adzhubei’s report of Kennedy’s intention to invade Cuba, the Soviet leader received two other reports containing the following astounding claims: First, the United States had planned to launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union in September 1961, and second, that the United States was deterred because of an announcement from Soviet officials of a new series of nuclear tests. This led American officials to believe that the Soviet arsenal was larger than they had supposed. Both claims are patently false, but there is good reason to suspect that Khrushchev believed they might be true. How else does one explain Khrushchev’s decision to order a shipment of missiles to Cuba? Clearly, it was out of fear--fear of losing Cuba and fear of losing the arms race.

In addition to elaborating on answers to old questions, Fursenko and Naftali also ask questions so novel that they have been virtually unasked by Western scholars. Why did Khrushchev deploy and authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba in addition to strategic missiles? (The existence of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba was unknown and undreamed of in the West until January 1992, when their presence was revealed by Gen. Anatoly Gribkov at a conference in Havana. Gribkov said there was a small number--nine, to be exact--of tactical nuclear warheads in Cuba that could be used for an offensive strike on the United States.) While the easy answer may have been to prevent an attack on Cuba, this didn’t make sense to many American participants, including former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The missiles could not deter an invasion since the Americans did not know of their existence, and just a few nuclear weapons would, if used, only raise the ante and probably lead the United States to use its much larger nuclear force against Cuba.

In one of the most fascinating sections of their book, Fursenko and Naftali describe what they call “the Pitsunda decision,” made by Khrushchev at his Black Sea dacha in early September 1962. Kennedy had just issued a statement indicating that if “offensive” nuclear missiles were to be discovered in Cuba, “the gravest issues would arise,” which Khrushchev interpreted to mean an attack on Cuba. Panicked by this announcement because the Cuban missile sites were unfinished and could not respond to an attack, Khrushchev deployed tactical, short-range nuclear weapons that could stop a U.S. amphibious landing on Cuba. In one of the book’s most chilling passages, the authors conclude:

“Unfortunately there is no way of knowing whether the Soviet premier experienced any angst as he considered the possible consequences of what he was doing. No state had ever used nuclear weapons in battle before. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were part of a strategic bombing campaign at the end of a war. If Kennedy decided to attack Cuba, and Khrushchev gave the green light to his commanders, the Soviet Union would be using nuclear weapons at the start of a war.”

“One Hell of a Gamble” is not quite the authoritative history of the Cuban missile crisis that the authors hoped to have written. They have mastered the voluminous U.S. sources (though more references to this literature would have been helpful to scholars seeking to link any work-in-progress with this new synthesis). And their use of Russian sources has no precedent in the study of the crisis. But there are many indications, minor and significant, that the authors are not familiar with Cuba. There is a hotel in Havana called the “Comodoro,” which they refer to as the “Camadora.” It will surprise readers that Cuba is “an eight-minute flight” from Miami, instead of a 45-minutes flight estimated by most airlines. And students of revolutionary Cuba may not recognize the person referred to by Fursenko and Naftali as Carlos Rodriguez until they discover later on that this is Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, who in most other histories is referred to as Carlos Rafael. These insignificant errors only point to something deeper: Modern histories of Cuba come almost exclusively from Soviet archives or from secondary sources in the United States.

Does this matter? It does. It shows insufficient appreciation of a well-known Cuban aphorism: History has yet to record whether Cuba suffered more from American hostility or Soviet friendship. Cubans and Soviets mixed like oil and water. Fursenko and Naftali say, for example, that there were four “war scares” in Cuba in 1961 and 1962 after the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Soviets may have believed this, but it is doubtful that Castro believed it. The authors cite Castro’s February 1962 speech as evidence that he feared an American invasion. But this speech, which they do not identify by name, is the “Second Declaration of Havana,” the moment when Castro declared war on U.S. interests in Latin America--perhaps the high-water mark of Castro’s romanticism about becoming the modern Bolivar of the Americas, using the armed Cuban insurrection as the model.

In short, the Cubans, who quickly developed mistrust of, and distaste for, the Russians, discovered how to yank the chain of the Russian bear just as effectively as they knew how to pull the beard of Uncle Sam. The authors are also too quick to credit, or at least not to question, Soviet reports regarding how “emotional” the young Cuban leadership was. It was young, but to dispense with Castro’s behavior as simply “emotional” is not to comprehend one of the century’s cleverest politicians. The Cubans, especially Castro, are primarily to blame for this state of affairs. Until they open their archives, a truly “international history” of the kind Fursenko and Naftali had hoped to write remains impossible.

Until such a history is possible, however, “One Hell of a Gamble” will remain a magnificent achievement. It is scholarly without being pedantic, full of revelations and frightening, but in a way that leads to reflective thought rather than panic.