The Nature of the Danger We Face

For the first time in a long time, Americans are fearful of attacks on the U.S. itself, a fact dramatized by President Bush’s decision to establish a new Cabinet-level secretary for homeland defense. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the emerging threat of bioterrorism and the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, with its risk of provoking new terrorist strikes against America, have produced in a new generation of Americans an overwhelming feeling that the U.S. is vulnerable in much the same way that the rest of the world is.

The events of Sept. 11 have been likened to the British burning of Washington in 1814, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea in the Civil War and Pearl Harbor. But there is a more recent event during which Americans felt supremely vulnerable, completely surprised and shocked, and fearful about where the escalation would end: the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

Not only is there a psychological similarity between October 1962 and September 2001. There is also an unsettling likeness in the extremely dangerous situations posed by Fidel Castro and the Cuban people in 1962 and Osama bin Laden and the Taliban now. Grasping their correlation may enable us to better respond to the terrorist threat with less risk of catastrophic escalation.

Just how close we came to nuclear war on the climatic weekend of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Oct. 26-28, was not generally known until years later. A remarkable series of meetings, beginning in March 1987 and ending in January 1992, involving the former chief adversaries--Americans, Russians and Cubans--of the crisis produced these principal revelations:

First, any U.S. attack on Cuba would have also been an attack on more than 40,000 Soviet citizens--not the 10,000 the CIA had estimated--who were deployed chiefly around the missile sites, which would have been primary targets. A devastating Soviet response was thus likely, perhaps a nuclear one.

Second, by that weekend, Castro had concluded that an American air strike and invasion of his island was virtually inevitable. In a cable to Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Cuban leader urged the Soviet premier to launch an all-out nuclear strike against the U.S. if the invasion occurred. “That would be the moment,” Castro wrote, “to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear, legitimate self-defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there would be no other.” Or as the translator of the cable, Soviet Ambassador Aleksander Alekseev, put it in his own cable to Khrushchev, Castro said: “If they attack Cuba, we should wipe them off the face of the earth.” Separately, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Castro’s colleague, declared his willingness “to walk by the path of liberation even when it may cost millions of atomic victims.”

Third, by Oct. 27, when the majority of President John F. Kennedy’s military and civilian advisors favored an attack on Cuba, the Soviets had already delivered 162 nuclear warheads to the island and had stored them at a depot at Bejucal, southwest of Havana. The CIA had believed that there were zero warheads on Cuba. Since the U.S. invasion seemed imminent that weekend, the Soviet field commander in Cuba, Gen. Issa Pliyev, ordered the warheads for tactical weapons out of storage and moved closer to their launchers.

All the pieces were thus in place for Armageddon. A quarter of a million Cuban troops and more than 40,000 Soviet troops, armed with dozens of tactical nuclear weapons, would have met a U.S. invasion force, initiating nuclear war, in the (mistaken) assumption that the U.S. forces would have attacked with nuclear weapons. The Soviet troops, the Cuban leaders and the Cuban people would have paid the ultimate price for this misperception. Yet, so would the Soviet people, the American people--indeed, the entire world. For the initiation of nuclear war would certainly have provoked a U.S. nuclear response.

Fortunately, Khrushchev ordered the missile-carrying Soviet ships bound for Cuba to alter course, thus signaling the end of the crisis.

Are there insights to be applied to our current crisis?

Rather than being 13 days of gamesmanship followed by an American victory, as is popularly imagined, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the culmination of a long history of bitter enmity between the U.S. and Cuba. In Cuba, the crisis stirred notions of sacred mission, manhood, duty to a higher cause and other cultural characteristics poorly understood in North American (and Northern European) cultures. It aroused intense feelings of both desperation and resignation. When viewed in this light, the willingness of Cuban leaders to take measures that entailed huge risks appear quite predictable.

Are Cubans the only people of limited means who feel a need to confront the U.S. directly, “inviting” a U.S. attack? Is Castro’s communism the only belief system capable of driving people to contemplate suicide, even national suicide, in the service of their cause? Do we now understand non-Northern European systems of ideas any better than we understood the potent blend of nationalism and communism that moved Cubans to take on the most powerful and influential nation on Earth? Are there currently charismatic leaders like Castro capable of motivating their followers to carry out what may seem to Americans to be unbelievable acts of violence against the U.S.? If there are, can we depend on military means alone to change their fanaticism? At what point, and after how much escalation, will it all end?