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The Cuban Missile CrisisRichard Ned Lebow *
Mershon Center, Ohio State UniversityThe Cuban Missile Crisis (Full Text, PDF, 31 pages, 49 KB)
Historical Controversies
The early Western literature on the crisis could only speculate about Khrushchev’s motives for deploying missiles in Cuba. Ex Comm officials and scholars proposed a series of motives (e.g., to force concessions in Berlin, spread revolution in Latin America, offset American strategic superiority, build support against China in the socialist camp), most of them offensive. 37 It now appears that Khrushchev was moved primarily by defensive concerns; he was intent on defending Cuba, offsetting American strategic superiority, and reducing, or at least equalizing, the vulnerability created by the deployment of American strategic weapons on the Soviet periphery. 38
In addition to these foreign policy motives, Khrushchev may also have been influenced by domestic considerations. He was extremely frustrated by the apparent failure of many of his key domestic programs. To sweep away the obstacles he believed stood in the way of their success, he took dramatic and risky actions. The missile deployment fits this pattern; its most important purpose may have been to compel the United States toward a political accommodation. This would strengthen Khrushchev’s hand at home and free scarce economic resources for agricultural and industrial development. 39 Determining Khrushchev’s motives and their priority is nevertheless difficult, because Khrushchev told the officials around him what he thought was mostly likely to win their support.
Kennedy and the Ex Comm, and many of the Cold War studies of the missile crisis, attributed the missile deployment to Khrushchev’s belief that Kennedy lacked the resolve to oppose it. 40 Proponents of this explanation maintained that Kennedy’s youth and personality conveyed the impression of inexperience and indecision, and that his refusal to commit American troops to the faltering Bay of Pigs invasion, his poor performance at the Vienna Summit, and his failure to prevent construction of the Berlin Wall all conveyed lack of resolve. 41 There is little evidence in support of this interpretation; all of Khrushchev’s comments, both at the time and later, indicate that he thought Kennedy tough and resolute. In this connection it is revealing that he categorically rejected Castro’s appeal for a publicly-announced missile deployment on the grounds that Kennedy would send out the American navy and stop or sink the ships en route to Cuba with the missiles. Khrushchev insisted on a secret deployment because he had no doubt about Kennedy’s resolve, but had considerable respect, after the Berlin crisis, for his good sense. He was convinced that, if the missiles were only discovered after they were operational, Kennedy would "think twice before trying to liquidate our installations by military means," because he knew that "there could be no winners in nuclear war." 42
Khrushchev’s behavior before the crisis was irrational. He regarded secrecy as essential, but never seriously investigated its feasibility and brushed aside the complaints of Mikoyan and others who said a large, elaborate operation could never be kept secret. He consulted few officials before committing himself to the deployment, and compelled a reluctant Presidium to sign off on the operation. It was also illusory to think that a missile deployment could serve as a catalyst for accommodation, and that Soviet-American relations would improve after Kennedy was informed of the missiles. This expectation entirely ignored the domestic and foreign policy costs to Kennedy of accepting the missiles after he had publicly committed himself to opposing the introduction of missiles into Cuba and had received private assurances from Khrushchev that there would be no such deployment. 43
For most Western scholars, the outcome of the crisis was unproblematic: American military superiority, nuclear and conventional, compelled Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles. Recent evidence indicates that the crisis was resolved because both leaders rejected any course of action they thought might lead to an unstoppable spiral of military escalation. Their mutual commitment to settle the crisis peacefully grew in intensity as the crisis deepened, and they devised a public-private deal to protect them both from reprisals from allies and domestic adversaries.
Diplomacy triumphed because of mutual learning. Three reinforcing factors were responsible. Leaders had time to learn, to overcome their anger, and formulate policy in terms of broader conceptions of their national interest. Learning was facilitated by information each leader received during the crisis. Kennedy’s correspondence with Khrushchev prompted him to revise his conception of the Soviet leader and his objectives. He came to believe that Khrushchev had most likely stumbled into the crisis, and was desperately searching for a face-saving way out. This realization made it easier for Kennedy to make the concessions necessary to end the crisis. He no longer thought that Khrushchev would interpret concessions as a sign of weakness and respond by becoming more aggressive toward Berlin. Instead, he expected Khrushchev to see his concessions as proof of his own commitment to avoid war, and to reciprocate with concessions of his own. Khrushchev also rethought his understanding of Kennedy. He was impressed by Kennedy’s caution and ability to restrain the American military. He later told his son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, that, "He had us by the balls and didn’t squeeze." 44 The final stimulus was fear of war, and here compellence played a role. By Saturday night and Sunday morning, both leaders and many of their advisors thought that war might be imminent. There is an old saying that nothing so concentrates the mind as the thought of one’s impending execution. In this instance, it inspired a creative search for accommodation, as the would-be victims sought desperately to cheat the hangman. 45
The threat of war remains a controversial issue. The Ex Comm hawks, then and now, insist that the risk of war was remote. 46 The "doves" felt the threat of war to be very real, although some of these former officials, and some scholars, now regard their fears as exaggerated. 47 Other doves –– Robert McNamara is the most prominent example –– and some scholars think the risk of war was greater than any officials supposed. In 1962, hawks and doves alike speculated that Khrushchev, or a successor, could be pressured into making a deliberate decision to go to war, while their Soviet counterparts had the same fear about Kennedy being pushed into war by right wing political forces and the military. McNamara and Kennedy also worried about runaway escalation once either side engaged in violence. The new evidence suggests that their concern was realistic, and that war could have been triggered by a cycle of tit-for-tat reprisals, some of them unauthorized. 48
The crisis was plagued by a series of incidents that indicated how difficult alerted military forces were to control. On the morning of Saturday, October 27, the Grozny, a Kazbeck-class oil tanker, attempted to challenge the blockade, and was successfully recalled by Moscow at the last minute. To this day, nobody in the West knows why the captain disobeyed his orders to hold his position. Later that morning, Soviet air defense forces shot down an American U-2 and killed its pilot. Soviet commanders in Cuba gave the order to fire in violation of a standing order from Moscow not to use any force unless fired on by the Americans. 49 Moscow in turn was troubled by the American broadcast of the DEFCON II alert en clair – a deliberate and unauthorized attempt at intimidation by the commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). 50 A more serious American mishap occurred on Sunday morning, when a U-2 operated by SAC strayed into Soviet air space over the Chukotski Peninsula in eastern Siberia. Khrushchev and his advisors worried that it was on a last-minute intelligence-gathering mission before a nuclear attack. 51
By far the most serious threat to the peace was the presence in Cuba of three tactical nuclear missile batteries with six launchers for Luna missiles with a 60-kilometer range. Soviet forces were prepared to use these missiles against an American invasion force when "the American ships were 10 to 12 miles from Cuban shores, that is, when their concentration was high." 52 These weapons were only to be used on receipt of explicit orders from Khrushchev, but former Soviet military officials speculate that these weapons might have been used without such authorization in the case of an American attack. 53 It is conceivable that American retaliation for the destruction of the U-2 would have led to the loss of further American aircraft and intensified pressure – as President Kennedy feared – for additional air attacks, followed by an invasion of Cuba. If a substantial portion of that invasion force had been destroyed by nuclear weapons, the next step is anybody’s guess.
Endnotes
Note 37:. Ulam, Adam, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet foreign Policy, 1917-67, New York: Praeger, 1968, pp. 661-71; Horelick, Arnold L. and Rush, Myron, Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, pp. 125-38; Wohlstetter, Albert and Wohlstetter, Roberta "Controlling the Risks in Cuba," Adelphi Paper no. 17, London: International Institute of Strategic Studies, 1965; Allison, Graham T., Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Boston: Little, Brown, 1971, pp. 43-45.Back.
Note 38:. See Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, Ch.2 for a discussion of these motives.Back.
Note 39:. Ibid., Ch. 3 develops this argument in detail.Back.
Note 40:. Abel, Elie, The Missile Crisis, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966; Horelick, Arnold L. "The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and Behavior," World Politics 16 (April 1964): 363-89; Allison , Essence of Decision; George, Alexander L. and Smoke, Richard, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice, New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.Back.
Note 41:. Abel, The Missile Crisis, pp. 35-36; Reston, James, "What Was Killed was Not Only the President but Promise," New York Times Magazine, 15 November 1964, p. 126; Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1965, p. 820; Allison, Essence of Decision, pp. 231-35; George and Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy, p. 465.Back.
Note 42:. Alexei Adzhubei, interview by the author, Moscow, 15 May 1989; Sergei Khrushchev, interview by the author, Moscow, 17 May 1989; Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 459-60; Khrushchev, Nikita S., Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. Strobe Talbott. New York: Bantam, 1975, pp. 561, 568, 570, 578-79; see Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, Ch. 4 for a full treatment of this issue.Back.
Note 43:. See Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, Ch. 4 for an analysis of Khrushchev’s decision and the role that wishful thinking and defensive avoidance may have played in it.Back.
Note 44:. Alexei Adzhubei, interview by the author, Moscow, 16 May 1989.Back.
Note 45:. Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, Ch. 12, addresses the controversy surrounding the resolution of the crisis.Back.
Note 46:. The chief "hawks" on the Ex Comm were Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, John McCone, Douglas Dillon and Maxwell Taylor. See Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, Ch 12, for a discussion of risk assessment.Back.
Note 47:. See the comments of various Kennedy administration officials and Thomas Schelling at the "Hawk’s Cay Conference," in Welch, ed., Proceedings of the Hawk’s Cay Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, passim. Back.
Note 48:. See Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, Chs. 6 and 12 for a review of these expectations and an assessment.Back.
Note 49:. Leonid Zamyatin, Anatoliy Dobrynin, Georgiy Kornienko and Admiral Nikolai Amelko, interviews by the author, Moscow, 16-18 December 1991; Alekseev, "The Caribbean Crisis As It Really Was"; Gribkov, Anatoli I. and Smith, William Y.. Operation Anadyr: U.S. and Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis, Chicago: edition q, 1994, pp. 66-67, 71, 127; Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, pp. 303-05.Back.
Note 50:. Sagan, Scott, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," International Security 9 (Spring 1985) 99-139; Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 62, n. 101.Back.
Note 51:. U.S. Alaskan Air Defense Command, "Air Defense Operations," December 1962; Col. John A. Des Portes, Maj. C. B. Stratton, Gen. David Power, et al., interviews by Ron Caywood, Headquarters, Strategic Air Command, 23 May 1965, p. 56; Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 89.Back.
Note 52:. Mikoyan, Sergo. "The Crisis of Misperceptions: One More Retrospective Appraisal of the Missile Crisis," in Nathan, James A., ed., The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992, p. 67.Back.
Note 53:. See Gribkov and Smith, Operation Anadyr, pp. 5, 7-8, 63-68.Back.
Note *: Richard Ned Lebow is director of the Mershon Center and professor of political science, history and psychology at The Ohio State University. His most recent books are We All Lost the Cold War (1994), co-authored with Janice Gross Stein, and The Art of Bargaining (1996). He has a novel (Play It Again Ilse) and two co-edited books forthcoming : Unmaking the West: Counterfactual and Contingency, and Learning from the Cold War. Back.
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