A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  These were the officers and men of a proud army, the Red Army that had destroyed the mightiest host the vaunted German nation had ever fielded. However hopeless their position, it is unlikely they would have laid down their weapons meekly and trudged off to prison camps. With 42,000 of them on the island, they would have put up a fight. Regardless of what Khrushchev might ordain from the safety of Moscow, there is an old adage about soldiers resorting to any weapon they can get their hands on in the hair-trigger emotions of battle: “Use ’em or lose ’em,” the saying goes. Years later, General Anatoly Gribkov, a senior General Staff officer detailed at the time to draw up the plans for the expedition, described the trepidation with which he had done so: “Would a desperate group of Soviet defenders, with or without an order from above, have been able to arm and fire even one Luna warhead … or one of the more powerful [cruise missile] charges? If such a rocket had hit U.S. troops or ships, if thousands of Americans had died in the atomic blast, would that have been the last shot of the Cuban crisis or the first of global nuclear war?”

  76.

  LEMAY AND TOMMY POWER AS THE WILD CARDS

  Had Soviet action been limited to firing its tactical nuclear weapons to destroy an invasion fleet, it is probable that the American side, in shock and fury, would have reacted by escalating to its own tactical nuclear weapons and incinerating much of Cuba and its inhabitants and would-be Russian defenders. But far worse might have ensued because LeMay and Power would have become wild cards in the crisis. To exert maximum psychological pressure on Khrushchev, right after Kennedy’s blockade speech on Monday, the 22nd, Army and Marine divisions were started on the move to assembly points in the Southern United States; a fleet, including eight aircraft carriers, began gathering in the Caribbean; and the president ordered SAC into Defense Condition 3 (DEFCON 3), two steps short of war. To ratchet up the pressure, he raised the alert to DEFCON 2, a single step short of all-out nuclear conflict, on Wednesday, October 24. Tommy Power announced the escalation himself in the clear over the radio circuits to be certain that the Russians monitoring them would hear it. All of SAC went to the highest possible state of readiness. Sixty-six of its B-52s, fully loaded with hydrogen bombs, took off in an airborne alert of unprecedented scale. They flew north to circle over Canada and the Arctic and east across the Mediterranean on the southern attack route to the Adriatic coast of Greece and Yugoslavia, holding just short of their points of no return, awaiting the go code to roar for their targets. When a B-52 had been on station for twenty-four hours and the crew was deemed exhausted, it returned to base to be replaced by a fresh bomber. The rest of SAC’s 639 B-52s were put on strip alert, bombs aboard, planes cocked for takeoff. The 1,102 B-47 and B-58 medium bombers, also with bombs loaded, were dispersed to forty airfields, a lot of them civilian, across the United States to guard against loss should the Soviets attempt a surprise strike against regular SAC bases. Their crews alternated between strip alert and necessary rest periods. Counting the Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman ICBMs, also now under Power’s command and likewise at full readiness, SAC had approximately 2,800 megatons, 224,000 equivalents of the Hiroshima bomb, to launch at the Soviet Union, at Russian targets such as air bases in its East European possessions, and at Mao’s China. The targeting scheme, the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, estimated that 175 million persons would be killed outright.

  Despite claims that he was an outlaw militarist, LeMay had always remained subordinate to civilian authority. Accusations that he had ordered reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory in violation of presidential restrictions were untrue. The flights had been secretly authorized by Truman and then by Eisenhower. Nor was he an advocate of preventive war like John von Neumann. But he was a firm believer in preemptive war. While commander-in-chief of SAC, he had said that if he was persuaded the Soviets were about to attack, he would strike first. Whether he would check to make sure the president agreed with him, LeMay did not say. If the Russian garrison on Cuba obliterated a beachhead with a two-kiloton Luna or the whole invasion fleet with a twelve-kiloton FKR cruise missile, these acts might have enraged him but not convinced him that the Soviets were preparing to assault the United States itself. If, however, amidst the mayhem, one of the Russian R-12 crews had decided to take as many of their opponents as possible with them into eternity, mounted a nuclear warhead on their IRBM, and fired it at an American city, one can say with some certainty that he would have been pushed over the edge. So would Power, who shared LeMay’s mind-set on this issue.

  One of the president’s military aides carried a briefcase containing the go codes (it was called “the football” in a bit of gallows humor) wherever the chief executive went because, under the Constitution, he alone as commander-in-chief had the legal authority to decide on an act of such momentous consequences for the nation and humanity. But the generals had the ability to act on their own. That alternative had to exist in case the president was incapacitated or beyond reach. Knowing the characters of LeMay and Power, one can again conclude that had an order to launch not been quickly forthcoming from the White House, they would not have waited. They would have turned everything loose and, in their ignorance of atmospheric radioactive fallout, nuclear winter, and the other doomsday aftereffects of nuclear war, destroyed the entire Northern Hemisphere.

  The recollection of a Russian officer who served in Cuba was that, if attacked, he and his comrades would have given LeMay and Power their opportunity. In October 1962, Viktor Yesin, who subsequently rose to colonel general and chief of staff of the Soviet Union’s Strategic Rocket Forces, was an engineer lieutenant with an R-12 missile regiment stationed near Calabazar de Sagua, about 160 miles east of Havana. The regiment was armed with eight launchers and twelve missiles, for an initial barrage of eight rockets followed by four reloads. Its position was the optimal launching point for America’s East Coast cities. Each night, when darkness hid them from the cameras of the U-2 spy planes, the crews would practice removing the one-megaton warheads from nearby vans, mounting them on the rockets, then transferring the nuclear-armed missiles to concrete launching pads and raising them into firing angle. Before dawn, all would be dismounted and hidden away. The crews knew what they wanted to hit. They had been issued targeting data for Washington and New York and other Eastern urban centers.

  Decades later, Michael Dobbs interviewed Yesin in Moscow for his startlingly detailed account of the crisis, One Minute to Midnight. He asked Yesin how the Soviet missile regiment would have reacted had the United States suddenly launched the air assault the Joint Chiefs were proposing as the opening blow of an invasion. “You have to understand the psychology of the military person,” Yesin replied. “If you are being attacked, why shouldn’t you reciprocate?”

  77.

  AVOIDING GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG

  To his credit, Khrushchev reversed course as soon as he realized his folly. By Thursday, October 25, he had made up his mind to remove the missiles from Cuba. “Once you begin shooting, you can’t stop,” he told his son Sergei. Humiliation was inevitable. What remained was to negotiate the most face-saving exit he could obtain from Kennedy. This turned out to be a public pledge by the president not to invade Cuba and a secret promise, conveyed by Robert Kennedy to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, to remove the Jupiters from Turkey within four to five months. Secretary of State Dean Rusk had warned the president that a public swap of the Jupiters for the IRBMs in Cuba would appear a betrayal of an ally, as Turkey was a member of NATO, and undermine the alliance. The Kennedy brothers were careful not to commit any mention of it to paper and Dobrynin was told that continued secrecy was a condition of its fulfillment, a stipulation Khrushchev scrupulously observed.

  On Sunday, October 28, a week of excruciating tension ended when Khrushchev sent Kennedy a letter, broadcast over Radio Moscow so that no time would be wasted in transmission, signaling acceptance of all terms. An enraged Castro, who, as the crisis neared its climax, had urged Khrushchev to ma
ke the suicidal leap of a full-scale nuclear attack against the United States if the island was invaded, was not interested in mitigating his would-be protector’s humiliation. He refused to allow United Nations inspectors on Cuban soil to either verify the dismantling of the missiles at the sites or the loading of dismantled missiles on board ships at dockside. The administration had demanded some form of verification and the United Nations had seemed the least offensive agency. Khrushchev was reduced to having the missiles loaded as deck cargo and then uncovered at sea so that they could be photographed by U.S. planes and helicopters. It was a moment of intense shame for the Soviet military. The scores of MK-6 surface-to-air missile batteries, the regiment of helicopters, and most of the men of the four motorized rifle regiments with their tanks and artillery and other accoutrements went home too. Kennedy lifted the quarantine on November 20, after Khrushchev also promised to remove the Il-28 light bombers within a month. Castro tried to hang on to some of the tactical nuclear weapons, but the Russians refused to hand them over and secreted them out of Cuba. All that was left behind of the 42,000-man task force was a lone brigade of 3,000 men. Its presence, a kind of protective trip wire, was meant to say that if the pledge not to attack the island was dishonored, the United States would have to contend with the Soviet Union. It became a forgotten brigade. Seventeen years later the administration of President Jimmy Carter discovered to its amazement that a brigade of the Red Army was still on duty in Cuba.

  Khrushchev actually gained little for an ungrateful Castro with the no-invasion pledge. As desperate as the Kennedy brothers were to get rid of Castro, they drew the line at invading the island, fearful that Castro would take refuge in the mountains and American troops would get tied down in a guerrilla war. Khrushchev also gained nothing he would not have soon gotten anyway from the clandestine commitment to take the Jupiters out of Turkey within four to five months. The deployment of Atlas and Titan and the fast coming on of Minute-man had made the Thors and Jupiters superfluous and the United States had already intended to remove them. McNamara had informed the British in May 1962 that the United States would cease logistic support for Thor when the basing agreement between the two countries expired in November 1964. As a result, the British decided to act sooner and the last Thor in England went off alert at RAF North Luffenham in the English Midlands on August 15, 1963. The Thors had by 1963 served their useful time. They had remained on fifteen-minute alert, 18.2 minutes’ flight from their targets, for more than three years. The old bomber fields that hosted them became ghosts once again.

  The day after the crisis ended, on Monday, October 29, 1962, McNamara did something he would have done in the near future in any case, but which he did now to keep the promise to Khrushchev. He signed a directive ordering the removal of the Jupiters from both Turkey and Italy by April 1, 1963. The deadline was more or less met for Italy. The thirty Jupiters there were all disassembled by April 23, 1963. In Turkey the dismantling went more slowly and the last of the sixteen there did not depart until July 26, 1963. What Khrushchev did salvage from his Cuban misadventure was the preservation of the Soviet Union from nuclear destruction and he owed that to John Kennedy, as the peoples of the Northern Hemisphere also owed their salvation to him.

  78.

  BUYING TIME FOR THE EMPIRE TO IMPLODE

  The most intractable problems of the Cold War, such as the division of Germany, the uncertain status of a splintered Berlin, and Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, could not be solved as long as a strong Soviet Union existed. Although no one could have foreseen it when Bernard Schriever assembled his small band at the Schoolhouse in Inglewood in the summer of 1954, their greatest achievement and that of all those who were to labor with them was to help buy the time needed for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own internal contradictions. Time was the only solution. A nuclear war was certainly not the answer. And until the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose attempts at reform hastened the collapse, the leaders of the Soviet state regarded the post-Second World War status quo as nonnegotiable. But they could not evade the cumulative effects of time.

  The Soviet society that Joseph Stalin fashioned was not sustainable. The three pillars of the state—the Communist Party, the military, and the secret police—were costly to maintain. The precise figure is difficult to arrive at, but a high percentage of total production went to the military. To urbanize and feed the workers in his new heavy industries, Stalin had utterly destroyed initiative in Soviet agriculture with his forced draft system of collective and state farms. Russia, once the breadbasket of Europe through its possession of Ukraine, no longer grew enough food to feed itself. Khrushchev’s effort to revitalize agriculture, constrained as it was by this straitjacket of state control and centralized planning, failed, and he began the imports of American corn and wheat that were to continue under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev. The system produced no products that could be sold abroad to renew wealth that would offset such imports and help pay the costs of maintaining this expensive state. The Soviet Union’s only exports were raw materials, such as petroleum and natural gas. Much of the latter two were wasted providing cheap energy to its East European possessions to try to keep their restive populations from rising as the Hungarians had in 1956, and in subsidizing client states like Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which had its own unworkable Marxist economy. Once a source of power and prestige, the empire had become a costly burden.

  The Soviet Union, as heir to czarist Russia, was the last of the great multinational empires. The restiveness of its many peoples extended from Ukraine in the west through Kazakhstan and the other former khanates of Central Asia in the east that the czarist army had sabered into submission. Stalin kept the ethnic tensions under control through terror, but his successors were less hard men and tensions grew with the years. The rot fully set in after Brezhnev’s overthrow of Khrushchev in 1964. He and his associates were stand-still men who wanted to enjoy their perquisites, in Brezhnev’s case young mistresses, a tame form of wild boar shooting, and a collection of expensive foreign cars.

  “All that stuff about Communism is a tall tale for popular consumption. After all, we can’t leave the people with no faith,” he once said to his brother, Yakov, shocking his sibling, who was a firm believer in the Party line. One would have thought Brezhnev might have learned something from watching the American debacle in Vietnam. He did not. Instead, he demoralized his own army by sending it into a fruitless war in Afghanistan in 1979 to rescue Afghan Communist protégés who had seized power and provoked tradition-bound Muslim tribesmen into revolt against unbelievers. The Soviet empire was like a house whose beams have been consumed by powderpost beetles. From the outside, the beams appear sturdy. Yet when the point of a knife is thrust into one, the thin crust cracks open to reveal nothing but the powdered wood residue the beetles have left inside. Gorbachev’s endeavors at reform during the latter half of the 1980s brought civil liberties, but also wrought a plunge in the already marginal living conditions of ordinary Russians as his tinkering made the sclerotic economic system worse. In 1989, in his desperate attempt to hold the Soviet Union together, he let Eastern Europe go and the Berlin Wall was torn down. Enraged, the old guard of the Party attempted to overthrow him in August 1991, in a coup that failed. Boris Yeltsin then led the Russian Republic out of the Soviet state and the empire that so many had for so long thought invincible broke into fragments.

  In doing so much to foster a nuclear stalemate, Schriever and his associates contributed mightily to buying the time necessary for the Soviet Union to exhaust itself. By starting in the mid-1950s, before it was too late, and then winning the race for a practical ICBM, they warded off the possibility of blackmail that Trevor Gardner had so dreaded and also discouraged nuclear adventures by the Soviets. After Khrushchev’s humiliation in the Cuban Missile Crisis, no Soviet statesman would ever again dare such a gamble. Nor could any Soviet leader hope to prevail in a surprise attack after the deployment of Minuteman in 1962 and
the growing presence beneath the seas of the Navy’s Polaris missile-firing submarines. The same dilemma applied to the United States once the Soviets reached parity with their own solid-fuel ICBMs and missile-firing submarines around 1970. No American leader could contemplate a first strike, as it was called, against the Soviet Union without knowing that enough of Russia’s nuclear arsenal would survive intact to destroy the United States in turn. A nuclear stalemate was complete.

  The strategists referred to the condition as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. There was nothing mad about the grim equation. It made perfect sense by enforcing a nuclear peace. The arms race should have ended there. It was senseless to go on, but go on it did on both sides at the cost of trillions. Technology was in the saddle of a horse named Fear in a race of human folly. Minuteman went through two transformations into missiles always bigger and better. Minute-man II, with its range of 7,021 miles, a more powerful warhead, and accuracy to within a mile, was succeeded in 1971 by Minuteman III. It could fly 8,083 miles and was the first ICBM to carry multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, called MIRVs. Its warhead was fitted with three MIRVs, each yielding 375 kilotons, the equivalent of thirty Hiroshima bombs, and each released at timed intervals onto a different target with an accuracy of 800 feet. The 1,000 of these third-generation Minutemen deployed by the United States thus became the equivalent of 3,000 rockets. The Soviets were always matching, and to humanity’s ultimate good fortune always deepening the stalemate, until time could do its work.