What if cuban missile crisis

Some advisers—including all the Joint Chiefs of Staff—argued for an air strike to destroy the missiles, followed by a U.

The President decided upon a middle course. That same day, Kennedy sent a letter to Khrushchev declaring that the United States would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba, and demanded that the Soviets dismantle the missile bases already under construction or completed, and return all offensive weapons to the U. The letter was the first in a series of direct and indirect communications between the White House and the Kremlin throughout the remainder of the crisis.

Nevertheless, during October 24 and 25, some ships turned back from the quarantine line; others were stopped by U. Meanwhile, U. With no apparent end to the crisis in sight, U. On October 26, Kennedy told his advisors it appeared that only a U.

The crisis had reached a virtual stalemate. That afternoon, however, the crisis took a dramatic turn. ABC News correspondent John Scali reported to the White House that he had been approached by a Soviet agent suggesting that an agreement could be reached in which the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba if the United States promised not to invade the island.

It was a long, emotional message that raised the specter of nuclear holocaust, and presented a proposed resolution that remarkably resembled what Scali reported earlier that day. We are ready for this. Although U. The intelligence the CIA provided was flawed and inadequate. Not only had the agency missed the deployment of the medium- and intermediate-range missiles until it was almost too late to respond, but it was also unaware that the Soviets had on hand 35 LUNA battlefield nuclear weapons that would have devastated any American landing force.

The CIA's best estimate of the number of Soviet ground forces in Cuba was 10,—12,; in fact, more than 40, battle ready Soviet combat troops were prepared to confront a U. If the President had approved an attack on Cuba, Guantanamo Bay's reinforced garrison was primed to participate. But the Soviets had moved a battlefield nuclear weapon into range of the base with the intention of destroying it before a single marine could pass through the gate.

Other near disasters, oversights, and accidents added to the chaos within the crisis. Several anti-Castro groups, operating under a CIA program code-named Mongoose directed by Robert Kennedy, went about their sabotage activities because no one had thought to cancel their mission, which could have been mistaken for assault preparations.

They test-fired a missile without first contacting the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, no one dealing with the crisis appeared to be aware of the scheduled test to assess whether the Soviets might misinterpret the launch as a hostile action. And, most extraordinarily, the commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Thomas Powers, on his own authority, without informing the President or any national security staff member, raised the Defense Condition DefCon level to 2—one level short of war—and broadcast his order "in the clear" uncoded.

Obviously trying to intimidate the Soviets, his behavior was confirmation of Gen. Curtis LeMay's troubling assessment that Powers was mentally "not stable. Also on Saturday morning, October 27, the tensest day of the crisis, a U-2 pilot was killed when his plane was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet surface-to-air SAM missile. All of the ExComm's members assumed that the order to fire had been issued by Moscow; in fact, the decision was unauthorized and had been taken by the local commander.

The response of the Joint Chiefs was to pressure the President to bomb the offending SAM site, but he had the good sense and will to reject their insistent requests. And, as if following an improbable Hollywood script, that very afternoon, a U-2 flying on an air-sampling mission to the Arctic circle—which also should have been scrubbed—accidentally overflew Soviet territory when the pilot made a navigation error.

The Soviets could have interpreted that reconnaissance flight as anticipating an attack. But the most dangerous moment of the crisis occurred late on Saturday afternoon, and the United States did not learn about it until almost 40 years later. Four Soviet submarines were being tracked in the area of the blockade line, but no American knew that each had a kiloton nuclear torpedo aboard that their captains were authorized to use.

At about 5 o'clock, the commander of submarine B, Capt. Savitskii, convinced that he was being attacked by the practice depth charges and grenades that U. Navy anti-submarine warfare ASW forces were dropping to force him to surface, loaded his nuclear torpedo and came within seconds of launching it at his antagonists. Had he fired that weapon, there is no doubt about the devastating consequences that would have followed.

All of these incidents and mistakes, as well as the misunderstandings documented in the verbatim ExComm records, makes it clear that crisis management is a myth. The fundamental flaw in the concept is that accurate information, the most important element in coping with any serious crisis, is invariably unavailable.

In the Cuban Missile Crisis, good luck substituted for good information and good judgment, hardly a model of policymaking to celebrate or recommend. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the crisis, the ExComm's discussions became the central focus of historians' efforts to understand the process that led to its peaceful resolution.

The members of the committee, as well as the President, promoted that idea, touting its work as a classic example of the administration's ability to skillfully manage international challenges. A collection of early histories that relied on interviews with participants supported the view that the ExComm had been composed of "wise men" who had diligently worked through the most sensible policy options to reach the most appropriate decisions.

And in , Robert Kennedy published posthumously a memoir of the crisis, Thirteen Days, that continues to reinforce that view. This attention to the words of "the wise men" led to many misconceptions, but initially, and in particular, to two historical distortions. The first was the in correct impression that ExComm decisions had dictated the President's policies. The second was to isolate the crisis from its broader historical Cold War milieu.

Dangerously incorrect lessons are drawn when the ExComm is credited with successfully managing the Cuban Missile Crisis. War was prevented for two reasons, and the ExComm's members were responsible for neither. The first, and most important, is that Khrushchev did not want a war. His objective was to protect Castro's government by deterring, not fighting, the United States.

The second reason that war was avoided is that the President, not the members of the ExComm and certainly not the Joint Chiefs, who unanimously and persistently recommended attacking Cuba , insisted on providing Khrushchev with a politically acceptable exit from his failed gamble. The challenge was to find a resolution that gave the Soviet leader options other than capitulate or fight. To do so, it was necessary for the President to empathize with his adversary, to see the crisis from Khrushchev's perspective.

He was encouraged in this by two unsung, consistently level-headed advisers. The ExComm recordings, for all the detailed, fascinating information they reveal, do not tell us nearly enough about the views of the most important member of the administration, John Kennedy. Inclined toward military action early in the crisis, the President quickly grew increasingly wary of its unpredictable consequences.

Forced to maintain his schedule, so as not to raise suspicions that something untoward was occurring, he missed many of the meetings during the week preceding his speech. But within 48 hours of being briefed by Bundy, he privately told his brother to back away from the military option and bring the committee members around to support a blockade. It is clear that Khrushchev's crude deception had, at least initially, trumped any inclination the President had to seek a diplomatic exit from the crisis.

But what restored his commitment to diplomacy is less clear, although circumstantial evidence suggests that the cogent arguments presented to him by Under Secretary of State George Ball and Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson contributed to turning him against a military assault. A surprise attack [on Cuba], "far from establishing our moral strength.

Expanding on McNamara's view that the missiles were not strategically significant, Ball condemned the idea of igniting a war on their behalf. His alternative was to begin the process of eliminating the missiles with a blockade. Stevenson's contribution to reason was more detailed and direct.

Having fortuitously arrived in Washington on October 16 to attend a White House luncheon, the President briefed him after lunch about the missiles and the conclusions of that morning's ExComm meeting.

Stevenson strongly demurred. Stevenson pointed out that while the United States had superior force in the Caribbean, any military action against Cuba could be countered by the Soviets in Berlin or Turkey, and that process would most likely escalate rapidly out of control. The problem with this interpretation is that Kennedy intensely disliked Stevenson, for both political and personal reasons.

His enmity went so deep as to lead him to plant false stories after the crisis portraying his ambassador as having advocated "another Munich. But, in fact, Stevenson had been heroic in his dissent and, during those first confused days, had provided the clearest analysis of the dangers the crisis raised and the range of possible peaceful solutions.

That thought nettled the President. Like it or not, however—and Kennedy hated it—the Stevenson and Ball view made a lot more sense to him than the war whoops of the Joint Chiefs and the ExComm's majority. The psychology is complicated, but despite the President's personal dislike of Stevenson-the-man, Stevenson's intellect had spoken clearly, directly, and persuasively to Kennedy's intellect. That "conversation" planted the seed for a diplomatic solution that Kennedy would cultivate and harvest as his own over the next 12 days.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was Khrushchev's colossal, irresponsible gamble, which in retrospect appears almost incomprehensibly stupid. But it was a gamble based on 17 years of nuclear experiences going back to Hiroshima. A review of his reasoning reveals the historical roots of his thinking and its crude mimicking of United States nuclear policies.

By , nuclear weapons played a major role in U. This included how each nation tested and deployed them, how they figured into diplomatic exchanges, and how strategists and generals promoted their use in war. This state of affairs tempted Khrushchev to bet that their secret deployment to Cuba would solve many of his problems. But the attempted deployment also motivated Kennedy to demand their removal lest their existence, even if unused, destroy his presidency.

Soviet Premier Khrushchev responded to President Kennedy on October 24, stating that You are no longer appealing to reason, but wish to intimidate us. The plan was bizarre, vintage Khrushchev, a wild gamble that promised a huge payoff for both his domestic and foreign policies.

He had thought of it himself, and so he pushed it through the presidium, manipulating the doubters with alternating displays of reasonableness and combative confidence.

He began by enlisting the support of the equally facile enthusiast, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, his minister of defense. A military mind with no political sense, Malinovsky told a visiting Cuban delegation: "There will be no big reaction from the U.

And if there is a problem, we will send the Baltic Fleet. Khrushchev had become consumed after the April Bay of Pigs invasion with the need to protect Castro's communist government.

Moreover, there was the reputation of the Soviet Union to consider. The force consisted of 1, bombers with 2, nuclear bombs. Brand new Minuteman-I missiles as well as older Atlas missiles would fly from U. These ballistic missiles were capable of delivering megatons of devastation to targets across the Soviet Union. Seven American nuclear missile submarines, dispatched to staging points in the oceans since Oct.

Each missile carried a 1-megaton nuclear warhead. Facing off against this force was the relatively modest Soviet arsenal : 36 intercontinental ballistic missiles carried a combined yield of megatons. Only bombers were available. A mere 30 submarines carried about 84 missiles with a combined yield of less than megatons. The American military would count losses in the hundreds of thousands in a single day of fighting. Fortunately, none of this ended up happening. Through secret back-channel negotiations, U.

Today, anything the first children do is under public scrutiny. So imagine the scandals underway when Alice Roosevelt, daughter of The Office of Strategic Services and the Supreme A CIA map showing the range of the medium range ballistic missiles successfully deployed to Cuba in Oct. The intermediate range ballistic missiles with their range shown by the larger arrow never arrived in Cuba. Hansen On Oct.