The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  An American U-2 surveillance plane discovered the Cuban medium-range missile bases on October 14, 1962. A few days later, the U-2 uncovered IRBMs—intermediate-range missiles—with a range of twenty-two hundred miles, meaning they could reach any target in the continental United States save Oregon and Washington State. The discovery was debated at the White House by a group that would be called the executive committee of the National Security Agency—ExComm. During the first ExComm meetings on October 16, Kennedy said the situation was “just as if we suddenly put in a major number of MRBMs in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamned dangerous, I would think.” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy replied, “Well, we did it, Mr. President.”

  Bundy agreed with CIA director John McCone that Khrushchev “knows we don’t really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under fear of ours.” They were right, for Khrushchev felt that now Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.” Though publicly Kennedy called the Soviet missiles “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” on that first day of the crisis, he said, “It doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was ninety miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” When Bundy asked, “How gravely does this change the strategic balance?” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said, “Not at all. . . . I don’t think there is a military problem here. . . . This is a domestic, political problem.” Meaning that the administration couldn’t afford to look soft politically about the Kremlin’s planting missiles in Cuba pointed at American cities. The group did, however, worry about precedence, as McNamara later remembered: “There was a fear that if we did not force the missiles out, the Soviets would move aggressively elsewhere in the world against Western interests, and it was a very deep-seated fear.”

  “During its entire history Russia had been within range of hostile weaponry,” Nikita’s son, Sergei, said. “Russia had to rely on sound judgment on the part of opposing political leaders, on an American president’s not sending his squadrons to bomb Moscow without good reason. Father assumed that Americans—not just the president but ordinary people—would think more or less the same way . . . but Americans thought otherwise. They were fortunate. For more than two centuries wide oceans had protected their land from enemies. Unlike Russians, they were used to living in security and were horrified by the possibility, however remote, of any vulnerability. The presence of Soviet ballistic missiles near America’s borders evoked shock, and even psychosis. The press further inflamed emotions; the country lost its bearings; and the Cuban Missile Crisis became primarily an American psychological crisis. It seemed to Americans that they could continue to live as before only if the missiles were removed from Cuba, and removed at any price.”

  After nonessential personnel were evacuated from Guantánamo and American forces arrived en masse to begin combat training in Florida, on October 22 at 7:00 p.m., Kennedy told the world in a televised speech that nuclear missile sites had been detected in Cuba, that he had ordered a naval blockade of sixty American ships to quarantine the country, and that this quarantine would continue until the sites were dismantled and the missiles removed—the blockade was a tactical echo of what the Russians had done in Berlin. The speech said nothing about the missiles pointed at Russia from Turkey, or that the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal totaled 36 ICBMs, 138 bombers ferrying 392 warheads, and 72 SLBMs (sub-launched ballistic missiles), while the United States was armed with 203 ICBMs, 1,306 bombers with 3,104 warheads, and 144 SLBMs—nearly 600 percent more.

  SAC escalated from DefCon-3 (Defense Condition 3) to DefCon-2, the only time this happened in US history; DefCon-1 means nuclear war. LeMay ordered 136 ICBMs readied to launch and added 54 SAC nuclear bombers to the 12 already on around-the-clock alert monitoring the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Arctic . . . anywhere he could detect in advance a Soviet-launched strike.

  JFK’s special counsel Ted Sorensen remembered of one ExComm session that “Curtis LeMay called [the quarantine] ‘almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich’ and demanded ‘direct military intervention right now,’ while the Marine Corps’ commandant insisted that ‘You’ll have to invade . . . as quick as possible.’ . . . The Joint Chiefs discussed an annihilation bombing run by the 82nd Airborne which would ‘mop up Cuba in seventy-two hours with a loss of only ten thousand Americans, more or less.’ ” LeMay thought Kennedy was a coward, that Cuba was an excellent excuse to teach the Russians their place in the world: “The Russian bear has always been eager to stick his paw in Latin American waters. Now we’ve got him in a trap, let’s take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thought, let’s take off his testicles, too.” LeMay suggested the navy and SAC surround Cuba and if necessary “fry it,” then invade the island with ninety thousand American troops. “LeMay talked openly about a [nuclear] first strike against the Soviet Union if the Russians ever backed us into a corner,” McNamara said, and even after the crisis was resolved, LeMay insisted he was right: “During that very critical time, in my mind there wasn’t a chance that we would have gone to war with Russia because we had overwhelming strategic capability and the Russians knew it. . . . We could have gotten not only the missiles out of Cuba, we could have gotten the Communists out of Cuba.”

  What the hawkish wing of ExComm did not know was that Cuba already had twenty nuclear warheads on its IRBMs ready to launch, as well as nine tactical nuclear missiles to use against invading American troops. If Washington had attacked as LeMay insisted it must, without question these would have been fired on American cities and American soldiers. Additionally, the United States thought there were eight thousand Soviet troops waiting to defend the island with the Cuban military. Instead, there were forty-three thousand. McNamara: “It wasn’t until nearly thirty years after [the Cuban missile crisis] that we learned . . . that the nuclear warheads for both tactical and strategic nuclear weapons had already reached Cuba . . . 162 nuclear warheads in all. If the president had gone ahead with the air strike and invasion of Cuba, the invasion forces almost surely would have been met by nuclear fire, requiring a nuclear response from the United States.” Presidential adviser Dean Acheson believed that, if the Americans bombed the Cuban missile sites, the Soviets would retaliate by bombing NATO missile sites in Turkey and Italy. The United States would then be forced by treaty to retaliate, bombing missile sites within the Soviet Union. And the real war to end all wars—as it surely would have resulted in the end of the world—would have begun.

  The Americans also did not know that the Soviet ships now arriving in the Caribbean were accompanied by nuclear-torpedo-bearing submarines. Just as there was to be a confrontation on October 24, Moscow ordered the Russian ships carrying military cargoes to reverse course. Then, on October 25, a US destroyer was ordered to seize a Soviet sub, which dove to escape. McNamara: “Later we learned that the submarine commander was likely out of communication with Moscow, and under those circumstances he had the authority to launch [his nuclear torpedo] if he believed it necessary. He could have started a world nuclear war. We were that close. That’s not wise management that avoided nuclear war, that’s luck.”

  On Friday, October 26, Khrushchev drafted a letter to Kennedy offering to pull the missiles from Cuba if the Americans guaranteed they would never again invade the island and withdrew NATO’s missiles from Turkey and Italy. Almost immediately after that letter was sent, Soviet military intelligence told the Kremlin that the Americans would invade Cuba in two days. Khrushchev was so alarmed by this news that he sent another offer, which removed the American missiles from the equation and only included the pledge never to invade. But there was a problem at the Central Moscow Telegraph Office. Sergei Khrushchev: “Everything came to a halt. Technical problems piled up, one after another. The letter that might decide the fate of the world could not reach Washington for a
t least six hours.”

  The arrival of two conflicting telegrams worried everyone at ExComm—was this a sign that Khrushchev had been deposed? The president sent his brother Robert to meet Ambassador Dobrynin at the Soviet embassy. The Russian confirmed that the Soviets would remove the Cuban missiles if Washington promised to never attack Cuba and to remove the US missiles from Turkey. Robert Kennedy went to the next room, called his brother, and came back to reply, “The president said we are prepared to examine the question of Turkey. Favorably.”

  At ExComm on Saturday morning, JFK said of the premier’s offer, “To any man at the United Nations, or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair trade,” but everyone else in the room—McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Bobby Kennedy—opposed it. The president let them bicker, then said, “Now let’s not kid ourselves. Most people think that if you’re allowed an even trade, you ought to take advantage of it. . . . I’m just thinking about what we’re going to have to do in a day or so . . . five hundred sorties . . . and possibly an invasion, all because we wouldn’t take the missiles out of Turkey. And we all know how quickly everybody’s courage goes when the blood starts to flow, and that’s what’s going to happen in NATO . . . when we start these things and the Soviets grab Berlin, and everybody’s going to say, ‘Well, this Khrushchev offer was a pretty good proposition.’ ”

  On October 27, another American U-2 approached the coast of Cuba to take surveillance photographs. Now, though, Soviet troops were manning SAMs (surface-to-air missiles), with orders to fire if the island was attacked. The men who had found the American plane on their radar were uncertain. They fired two missiles at the plane and destroyed it.

  Robert Kennedy again met with Dobrynin and explained that, after an American plane was attacked and its pilot killed, everyone was telling the president he should invade Cuba. Publicly, if the missiles were removed, the United States would promise not to invade. Privately, it would also remove the missiles from Turkey. Dobrynin reported back to the Kremlin. Sergei Khrushchev: “Father sensed that he was losing control of the situation. Today one general fires an antiaircraft missile; tomorrow another may launch a ballistic missile. As Father said later, it was at that moment that he understood intuitively that the missiles had to be removed, that real disaster was imminent.”

  On October 28 the Soviet leaders were meeting outside Moscow, as it was a Sunday, where an urgent message arrived from Havana: “Castro thinks that war will begin in the next few hours and that his source is reliable. They don’t know exactly when, possibly in twenty-four hours, but in no more than seventy-two hours. In the opinion of the Cuban leadership, the people are ready to repel imperialist aggression and would rather die than surrender. Castro thinks that in the face of an inevitable clash with the United States, the imperialists must not be allowed to deliver a strike. . . . [that Havana should be] allowed to be the first to deliver a nuclear strike.”

  At the Soviet meeting, Nikita Khrushchev flatly said, “That is insane. We deployed missiles there to prevent an attack on the island, to save Cuba and defend socialism. But now not only is he ready to die himself, he wants to drag us with him. . . . Remove them, and as soon as possible. Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens.”

  At four that afternoon, Moscow Radio announced a new letter from the premier to the president: “The Soviet government has ordered that these weapons . . . which you have characterized as offensive, be dismantled. We supplied them to prevent an attack on Cuba, to prevent rash actions. I regard with respect and trust the statement you made in your message of October twenty-seventh, 1962, that there will be no attack, no invasion. . . . In that case, the motives which induced us to render assistance of such a kind to Cuba disappear.”

  Never again would there be a moment when the world came so close to nuclear war. “In my seven years as [defense] secretary, we came within a hair’s breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three separate occasions,” Robert McNamara summarized. “Cold War? It was a Hot War. . . . [In Cuba] we literally looked down the gun barrel into nuclear war. LeMay was saying, ‘Let’s go in, let’s totally destroy Cuba.’ At the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close. Rational individuals . . . came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today. The major lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is this: the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations. Is it right and proper that today there are seventy-five hundred strategic offensive nuclear warheads, twenty-five hundred are on fifteen-minute alert, to be launched on the decision of one human being? . . . Any military commander who’s honest with himself will admit that he’s made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people . . . unnecessarily . . . through mistakes, through errors of judgment. [But] there is no learning curve with nuclear weapons. You make one mistake, and you’re gonna destroy nations.”

  When the crisis ended, LeMay called it “the greatest defeat in our history.” But in another case of a miracle with two faces, Kennedy and Khrushchev’s brush with holocaust led to a remarkable improvement in US-Soviet relations. In August 1963, the two superpowers signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, halting atomic tests in the air, in the oceans, and in outer space. Soon after, they installed a hotline teletypewriter between Moscow and Washington so that it wouldn’t take six hours to get a telegraph during a crisis.

  But the most dramatic change was the American public’s attitude about nuclear war. Before Cuba, it was common US wisdom that another world war was in our future, and that armed conflict with the Soviet Union, likely nuclear, was certain. For thirty years, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was published with a doomsday clock set at minutes to midnight; in 1960, C. P. Snow called atomic war a mathematical certainty, and many others, including Albert Einstein, had a similar outlook. In 1959, 64 percent of Americans said “war, especially nuclear war” was their country’s biggest problem . . . but by 1965 it was 16 percent. The Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature cites north of 400 articles on the subject “nuclear” for each year from 1961 to 1963 . . . but by 1967, there are around 120. Atomic worries revived somewhat in the 1980s, a confluence of NATO’s 1979 plan to install nuclear missiles in Europe, Reagan’s comments that these could be used without targeting either superpower, Jonathan Schell’s bestselling contemplation of nuclear holocaust, The Fate of the Earth, and ABC’s TV movie on the same topic, The Day After. But ever since, the US citizen’s fear about nuclear weapons has declined.

  In America, the removal of the missiles was portrayed as a remarkable triumph. But it so humiliated the Soviets that they ratcheted up the arms race all over again. Soviet lieutenant general Nikolai Detinov: “The results were very painful and they were taken very painfully by our leadership. Because of the strategic [imbalance] between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union had to accept everything that the United States dictated to it, and this had a painful effect on our country and our government . . . [to such extent that] all our economic resources were mobilized to solve this problem. . . . [A]fter the Caribbean crisis all production and other areas started going down thanks to the fact that all factors were mobilized in the name of military technology.”

  Remarkably enough, US military chiefs had the same reaction. If the Soviets could so easily sneak such a threat in under their noses, the nation needed a far greater atomic arsenal to defend itself. Commentator Louis Menand: “What drove the Cold War . . . was not business or science. It was . . . politics—the opportunities for partisan gain made available by gesturing toward the ubiquitous shadow of an overwhelming emergency. And the manipulation was not all on one side. If the United States assigned the Soviets the role of mechanized Enemy Other, the Soviets did their best to play it. The occasional hyperbole of the [American] Committee on the Present Danger was nothing compared with the bluster of Khrushchev and Gromyko, men who had their own domestic constituencies to worry about. It served both sides in the
Cold War to take each other’s rhetoric at face value. We have yet to learn how not to do this.”

  13

  Too Cheap to Meter

  FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT always planned to share the Manhattan Project’s final blueprints with Britain and Canada. After all, they had contributed scientists and money to the research. But after FDR’s death, the United States instead forbade the sharing of secret atomic-energy information with any foreign country, including Britain and Canada, on pain of death. It didn’t actually matter for the allies as they had been involved enough to know the fundamentals, but since the USA had a monopoly on uranium enrichment, the British were forced to engineer reactors that used natural uranium metals, moderated by graphite but cooled by gas. France followed Britain’s design in their own burners, and Canada used similar fuels, but moderated with heavy water. In the end, America’s attempts at safeguarding her atomic secrets hurt only her own allies. When in 1960, Argonne, Westinghouse, and Oak Ridge proudly displayed the first US pressurized- and boiling-water reactors for civilian utilities, they were six years behind the Soviet Union in nuclear power. The American design was much safer than the Soviet’s, however, for the simple reason that it was originally created to propel a submarine.

  The system began when an American naval officer spent the years before World War II working in a sub that used diesel engines when surfaced and electrical motors when submerged. The officer was disturbed by how frequently his crew’s life was imperiled by the battery’s willingness to set itself on fire. When this captain, Hyman Rickover, was then assigned duty with the Manhattan Project, he dreamed that one day there might be a nuclear-powered submarine, which he called Nautilus after Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Since the state-of-the-art wartime sub was the Nazi Unterseeboot, Rickover followed many German design ideas for his own ship, including a twenty-eight-inch-wide hull. This meant that he needed a reactor core about the size of a garbage can. And to keep his crews safe, he used water as both moderator and coolant—meaning that in any radioactive crisis, the engine would automatically shut itself down—with the coolant in a sealed plumbing loop to minimize the danger of radioactive leaks.