How long cuban missile crisis

Identifier Accession. Rights Access Status. Relation Is Part Of Desc. Subject Geog. Type Category. Format Medium. Format Media Type. Creator Maker. Language ISO Type ARC. Title Folder. Rights Copyright Status. Relation Container Digid. Rights Access Restrictions. Rights Access Restriction Note. Subseries Name. This approach to foreign policy was guided—and remains guided—by an elaborate theorizing rooted in a school-playground view of world politics rather than the cool appraisal of strategic realities.

It put—and still puts—America in the curious position of having to go to war to uphold the very credibility that is supposed to obviate war in the first place. Recall that the Kennedy administration discovered the missiles on October 16, but only announced its discovery to the American public and the Soviets and issued its ultimatum on the 22nd. The administration, however, did not make such an overture to the Soviets. Instead, by publicly demanding a unilateral Soviet withdrawal and imposing a blockade on Cuba, it precipitated what remains to this day the most dangerous nuclear crisis in history.

In the midst of that crisis, the sanest and most sensible observers—among them diplomats at the United Nations and in Europe, the editorial writers for the Manchester Guardian , Walter Lippmann, and Adlai Stevenson—saw a missile trade as a fairly simple solution. In an effort to resolve the impasse, Khrushchev himself openly made this proposal on October Beginning in the late s, however, the opening of previously classified archives and the decision by a number of participants to finally tell the truth revealed that the crisis was indeed resolved by an explicit but concealed deal to remove both the Jupiter and the Cuban missiles.

Kennedy in fact threatened to abrogate if the Soviets disclosed it. A declassified Soviet cable reveals that Robert Kennedy—whom the president assigned to work out the secret swap with the U. Only a handful of administration officials knew about the trade; most members of the ExComm, including Vice President Lyndon Johnson, did not. And in their effort to maintain the cover-up, a number of those who did, including McNamara and Rusk, lied to Congress.

The patient spadework of Stern and other scholars has since led to further revelations. Stern demonstrates that Robert Kennedy hardly inhabited the conciliatory and statesmanlike role during the crisis that his allies described in their hagiographic chronicles and memoirs and that he himself advanced in his posthumously published book, Thirteen Days.

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.

Construction of several missile sites began in the late summer, but U. Despite the warning, on October 14 a U. These images were processed and presented to the White House the next day, thus precipitating the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kennedy summoned his closest advisers to consider options and direct a course of action for the United States that would resolve the 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.