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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)
Theoretical Relevance
The Cuban missile crisis has been intensively mined as a case study of deterrence. For many years, the conventional wisdom was that it was a deterrence failure and a compellence success. 54 Deterrence failed because Kennedy was unable to prevent the Soviet Union from trying to deploy missiles in Cuba. General deterrence attempts to discourage a challenge through military buildups, force deployments, alliances, and threatening rhetoric. In Cuba, general deterrence was provocative rather than preventive. Soviet officials testified that the American strategic buildup, the missile deployment in Turkey, and assertions of U.S. strategic superiority exacerbated their insecurity. President Kennedy had considered all of these actions as prudent, defensive measures against Soviet threats, especially in Berlin. Instead of restraining Khrushchev, they convinced him to do more to protect the Soviet Union and Cuba. Through their avowedly defensive actions, the leaders of both superpowers made their fears of an acute confrontation self-fulfilling.
Immediate deterrence attempts to forestall a specific challenge, in this case the deployment of offensive weapons in Cuba by the Soviet Union. The failure of immediate deterrence to prevent a Soviet missile deployment illustrates another fundamental problem of deterrence: the inability or unwillingness of leaders facing serious domestic and foreign policy challenges to engage in a comprehensive and open-minded assessment of the expected costs and benefits of a challenge. Khrushchev made only the most cursory examination of the feasibility of secretly deploying missiles in Cuba, and committed himself to the operation before consulting with intelligence experts and foreign policy advisors who could have helped him make a more informed judgment. He then sought out confirming opinions and discounted information that indicated that the deployment would be discovered and would provoke a serious crisis. Khrushchev’s behavior bore little relationship to the expectation of rational behavior that lies at the core of deterrence theory and strategy.
Compellence, I have noted, was part of the reason why Khrushchev decided to withdraw the missiles. The single-minded focus in the American theoretical literature on deterrence and compellence – and lack of Soviet evidence –– tends to obscure the more complex, political reasons why Khrushchev decided to take out the missiles. Lack of evidence did not prevent historians and political scientists from interpreting the case in terms of their Cold War conceptions and using those interpretations to tautologically confirm their starting assumptions. The interpretations of the Cuban missile crisis offer a sobering lesson of how ideology can trump scholarship.
Bibliographical Essay
For much of the Cold War the Cuban missile crisis was a hot topic, and there is considerable literature on the crisis, almost all of it from the Western side. Most of these books and articles need to be read with great caution; they are infected by Cold War attributions, a bias facilitated by the absence of any good evidence on the Soviet side. The memoirs of American officials, and interviews with them, which are the primary sources of most empirical studies, share the same bias. Some of the most important memoir-cum-historical accounts – those of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, Theodore Sorenson and Robert F. Kennedy (as rewritten posthumously by Sorenson) – contained misinformation to preserve and enhance the President’s reputation and facilitate the American cover-up of the missile swap. 55 Khrushchev’s memoirs, published in two volumes, were also heavily edited. New evidence on the Soviet side emerged as a result of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. Former Soviet officials were permitted to participate in a series of conferences on the missile crisis organized by the John F. Kennedy Center. 56 Their oral recollections triggered matching revelations by American officials, and started a cascade of memoirs, documents from Soviet and American archives, and secondary works based on these sources. The most remarkable documents are the transcripts of the recordings that Kennedy had secretly made of the deliberations of the Ex Comm during the crisis. 57 The actual recordings are now available on line at http://www.hpol.org/jfk/cuban/. The U. S. Department of State has many documents one line at http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/frusX/index.html. The National Security Agency has also released many documents that can be found at http://www.nsa.gov/docs/cuba/. The National Security Archive, a private, non-profit organization, is the largest repository of public documents and photographs on the crisis, and many can be found at http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com. The website includes an extensive discussion of available documents and gaps in documentation. Other on-line sources include http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/cuba.html and http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/r/x/rxb297/CUBA/MAIN.HTML.
Soviet documents are not yet available on line, but many can be obtained through the National Security Archive, and many memoirs of participants have been published in English. Some of the most valuable ones have been cited in this essay. The Central Intelligence Agency has declassified documents, available in Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (New York: The New Press, 1992).
There are a number of good secondary sources on the crisis, the best of which base their interpretations on the new material. The most comprehensive and reliable overall accounts of the crisis are Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1990) and Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Mc George Bundy’s, Danger and Survival: Choice About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), which appeared before many of these documents were classified, is the best and most honest inside account of the crisis by an American official. James G. Blight and David A. Welch, eds., Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998), is the most authoritative study of intelligence and the missile crisis. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1997), makes use of many KGB, Committee for State Security, and Soviet foreign ministry documents, but must be read with great caution. The KGB provided a select set of documents for the authors to use, and their interpretative claims often go beyond any documentary base.
Endnotes
Note 54:. For example, Horelick, "The Cuban Missile Crisis"; Allison, Essence of Decision; George and Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy; Betts, Richard K., Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance, Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1987.Back.
Note 55:. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days; Sorenson, Kennedy. Back.
Note 56:. The transcripts of Cambridge, Hawk’s Cay, Moscow and Antigua conferences are available in mimeograph and in Allyn, Bruce J., Blight, James G. and Welch, David A., Back to the Brink: Proceedings of the Moscow Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 27-28 (Month?), 1989, Cambridge: Harvard University, Center for Science and International Affairs, 1992; Blight and Welch, Back to the Brink; Blight, James G., Allyn, Bruce J. and Welch, David A., Cuba on the Brink: Castro, The Missile Crisis and the Soviet Collapse, New York: Pantheon, 1993; Blight, Lewis and Welch, eds., Cuba Between the Superpowers: The Antigua Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis.Back.
Note 57:. May and Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes, is reported to contain serious errors of transcription.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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