The date, and why it matters
The Cuban Missile Crisis happened in October 1962, not in 1963. It lasted from 16 October, when President John F. Kennedy was first shown evidence of Soviet missile sites in Cuba, to 28 October, when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced that the missiles would be removed. It is sometimes described as the moment when the world came closest to nuclear war, a judgement that historians generally accept while noting how hard it is to measure.
By 1967 the crisis was five years in the past, and the world had changed around it. Kennedy had been assassinated in November 1963, and Khrushchev had been removed from power in October 1964. Both the Soviet Union and the United States were now preoccupied elsewhere, the Americans in Vietnam and the Soviets with relations with China and the Middle East. Yet the crisis continued to shape how leaders on both sides thought about risk, and this article looks at what happened and how it was remembered by 1967.
Discovery
In the summer of 1962 American intelligence noticed an increase in Soviet shipping to Cuba. On 14 October a U-2 reconnaissance flight photographed sites in western Cuba, and analysts identified them as medium-range ballistic missile installations. Kennedy was told on 16 October and formed a group of senior advisers, later known as ExComm, to consider the response.
The Soviet Union had its own reasons for the deployment. Khrushchev wanted to protect Cuba, which had been invaded by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 with American backing, and to improve the Soviet position in the nuclear balance, since the United States then had a considerable advantage in long-range weapons. He also wished to answer American missiles based in Turkey and Italy. The Soviet missiles in Cuba could have reached much of the eastern United States.
The blockade
The advisers debated options that included air strikes, an invasion and diplomacy. Kennedy chose a middle course: a naval “quarantine” of Cuba, announced in a television address on 22 October. The word was chosen partly because a blockade is an act of war under international law. American ships were to stop vessels carrying offensive weapons to the island, and Kennedy demanded that the missiles be withdrawn.
The days that followed were tense. Soviet ships approaching the line stopped or turned away on 24 October, and the two sides exchanged messages. On 27 October an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba and its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, was killed. Another U-2 strayed into Soviet airspace the same day. Military advisers on the American side urged action, but Kennedy held back. Several of the officials involved later said they believed the situation could have escalated by accident or miscalculation.
The bargain
The crisis ended through a mixture of public and private exchanges. On 26 October Khrushchev sent a long private letter offering to remove the missiles in exchange for an American promise not to invade Cuba. The next day a second, more formal message added a demand that American missiles in Turkey be removed. Kennedy’s response accepted the first proposal and ignored the second in public.
In private, his brother Robert Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador in Washington that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey would be taken out within a short time, so long as the arrangement was not made public. The missiles were indeed withdrawn in the spring of 1963. The secret part of the bargain remained unknown to the public for years, and it explains why the settlement looked more one-sided at the time than it was. On 28 October Khrushchev announced the withdrawal.
Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro, was not consulted on the final settlement, and he was angry about it. The episode left lasting tension between Havana and Moscow, and some historians link it to the more independent and sometimes critical line taken by Cuban revolutionaries in the following years, including that of Che Guevara.
Consequences
The immediate results included practical steps to reduce the risk of misunderstanding. In 1963 the two countries agreed to establish a direct communications link, the “hotline”, and they signed a treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and under water. The crisis also encouraged efforts to limit nuclear weapons that continued through the decade, including the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
Soviet leaders drew a different lesson, according to many accounts: that they should not again be so exposed to American nuclear superiority. The Soviet Union put considerable effort into expanding its strategic forces in the following years. The crisis is also widely thought to have contributed to Khrushchev’s fall, though domestic problems and other policies counted for more.
Remembered in 1967
By 1967 the missile crisis had become a reference point. For American officials it was often seen as a success of calm and controlled pressure, which affected how they thought about later confrontations. Robert McNamara, who had been Defense Secretary during the crisis, was still at the Pentagon in 1967, and he and other veterans of the decision-making brought its lessons to the Vietnam War escalation, although they did not all draw the same lessons. In the Middle East, when the Six-Day War brought the superpowers into rival positions in June 1967, the hotline created after Cuba was used, as the Soviet Middle East policy of the time shows. Memories of 1962 helped both sides see the importance of keeping a crisis from spreading.
For many ordinary people, the October days of 1962 were remembered as a week of dread, with schools and families preparing for the worst. The later release of documents and the recollections of participants have added detail, and some of it, such as the secret Turkey arrangement, changed the standard account. Historians continue to revise the picture, but the basic facts of the dates, the quarantine and the bargain are well established.