After spending the day hidden 200 feet below the surface, the Soviet submarines rose to shallow depth to recharge their batteries in the dark. The captains peered through the boats’ periscopes. They could see American planes patrolling overhead.
Very early on the morning of October 24, just hours before the blockade went into effect, the freighter Aleksandrovsk pulled into the port of Isabela de Sagua, Cuba. Take every bomb ever used in the history of war. Multiply that explosive force by three. That’s what was aboard the Aleksandrovsk.
“So you’ve brought us a lot of potatoes and flour,” Soviet General Anatoly Gribkov joked to the ship’s captain.
The captain had no idea who was allowed to know about his cargo. “I don’t know what I brought,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” said the general. “I know what you brought.”
* * *
Americans left for school and work that Wednesday morning not knowing if they would be coming home.
A weather forecaster in Columbus, Ohio, predicted: “Low today, 48: high, 4,800.”
Memphis, Tennessee, police stopped a man trying to pry up a manhole cover with a crowbar. He told the cops he was looking for somewhere to hide.
People walked the streets with portable radios to their ears. They bunched in front of TV displays in store windows. Announcers reviewed the air raid alarms that would be used in case of emergency. A steady tone meant an attack was one hour away. A rising and falling tone meant the bombs were already in the air.
Clear enough. But most people had nowhere to go.
A small minority of Americans had built home shelters. Most people didn’t have the space, didn’t see the point, or couldn’t afford their own bunker. Many public buildings were marked with black-and-yellow FALLOUT SHELTER signs, but most of these spaces were not stocked with food, water, or medicine. Some had cases of “survival crackers”—bulgur wheat blocks with an estimated shelf life of three thousand years. Others had drums of water that were supposed to become toilets when they were emptied. The country simply had not taken civil defense very seriously. Now it was too late.
“Iowa is not ready for a nuclear attack,” announced the state’s civil defense director.
As if striving to say something even less helpful, New York’s top civil defense official said, “As far as shelters for the majority of our citizens is concerned—of course, we don’t have any.”
Asked what Chicago residents should do in case of attack, the state’s civil defense director said, “Take cover and pray.”
“Shelters? There are none around here that I know of,” a Los Angeles police officer told a desperate caller. “If you find one, let me know.”
* * *
General Thomas Power—he had a shelter.
At the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, the SAC commander marched down a concrete ramp into the earth. Armed guards let him through a set of thick steel doors, and he continued deeper underground.
General Power had fought alongside Curtis LeMay in World War II. Like LeMay, he believed that only the threat of overwhelming force could save Americans from the Soviet Union.
“Why do you want us to restrain ourselves?” he’d erupted at Kennedy advisers when they’d questioned the military’s plans to launch thousands of bombs in one massive attack. “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards! Look, at the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!”
General Power walked through another set of steel doors into SAC’s cutting-edge command center. Busy specialists sat at panels of buttons and switches. The darkened space was lit mainly by the Big Board—a massive wall of screens displaying maps plotting the positions of SAC planes and enemy forces.
Power had two special telephones at his desk, one gold and one red. The red phone put him in direct touch with SAC wings all over the globe. The gold phone was his direct link to the president. It had to be answered within six rings, no matter what.
Power activated the red phone. A buzzer sounded at over two hundred bases, alerting personnel that the commander was on the line.
“This is General Power speaking,” he began. “I am addressing you for the purpose of reemphasizing the seriousness of the situation this nation faces.”
Power was broadcasting in the clear, rather than encoding his message. He knew the Soviets were listening. He wanted them to hear.
With a confrontation at the quarantine line only hours away, Power raised SAC’s state of readiness to DEFCON 2 for the first time in history. One step short of nuclear war.
“Review your plans for further action,” the commander continued. “If you are not sure what you should do in any situation, and if time permits, get in touch with us here.”
And if time didn’t permit? Power did not need to say the words. Pilots had their assigned targets.
* * *
Air Force flight crews jumped into planes and flew to civilian and military airfields all over the country, dispersing bombers so that no Soviet attack could hit them all. Sixty B-52s, loaded with hydrogen bombs, circled the outside edges of the Soviet Union—above the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland, above the Mediterranean Sea, above the western coast of Alaska. Until further notice, crews would fly twenty-four-hour shifts, refueled in the air, ready at a moment’s notice to proceed to their targets.
“They’re trying to intimidate us,” Nikita Khrushchev said.
This was an accurate observation.
At the White House, key staffers were handed envelopes marked TO BE OPENED IN EMERGENCY. Inside was a card with instructions on where to go to meet a helicopter in case of evacuation—essentially, a ticket out of town. A ticket for one.
Evelyn Lincoln felt a moment of doubt. As committed as she was to the president, would she really leave her husband behind?
Kennedy aide Larry O’Brien wanted to know what would happen to his wife. He was assured that she’d be given a special sticker to put on her car. In case of emergency evacuation, people in other cars would have to get out of her way. It said so on the sticker.
“Is this a joke?” O’Brien asked.
Not a joke. Absurd, but not a joke.
At an Army base in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, an elite helicopter squadron waited on high alert with one assignment. If called upon, they would land on the White House lawn, pull the president out of the bomb shelter, and whisk him to the underground command center at Mount Weather. In case Washington had already been hit, the soldiers would don radiation suits, smash down the bunker door, and wrap the president in protective clothing before heading out. A special briefcase with all of Kennedy’s medications was packed and ready. The president’s bed at Mount Weather even had a special mattress for his bad back.
At the Greenbrier, in West Virginia, the bomb shelter for Congress was stocked with food for sixty days. Most members of Congress had no idea the place existed. They were not trusted to keep the secret.
Soviet ships continued on their course to Cuba. A fleet of American ships blocked their path. Four Soviet submarines monitored the situation from below.
In Atlanta, a police officer directed traffic with a radio held to his ear.
“No,” he updated passing drivers. “They haven’t met the Russian ships yet.”
BLINK
AN AMERICAN REPORTER WALKED AROUND central Moscow, trying to gauge the mood on the street. He found a range of emotions: fear, anger, and most of all, grim determination. It was less than twenty years since the end of World War II. The Russians had endured devastation of their homeland far beyond anything most Americans could even imagine. If necessary, people told the reporter, they would do so again.
“War? I’ve been there,” a cab driver said. “I am used to fighting.”
An elderly woman put it more bluntly. “Your friend Kennedy is lucky he’s not here. We’d tear him to pieces.”
* * *
In the White House Cabinet Room, CIA D
irector John McCone reported that work at the missile sites in Cuba was continuing around the clock. More warhead storage buildings had been located. The Soviet military stood at an increased stage of readiness. Two large ships suspected of carrying weapons, the Kimovsk and the Yuri Gagarin, would be at the quarantine line in an hour. They were being escorted by four Soviet submarines. The American ships were in position and had their orders to intercept.
The president’s face tightened as he listened to these updates. His hand covered his open mouth. Everything he’d been dreading was coming together in one terrible moment.
And the next step—whatever it was going to be—was out of his control.
“How did it all happen?”
“Ah, if only one knew.”
Bobby Kennedy looked across the table to his brother. The two locked eyes for a long, private moment. Bobby knew exactly what his brother was thinking: Was there something further that should have been done? Or not done?
Some of the group began discussing procedures for stopping and searching Soviet ships when John McCone broke in.
“Mr. President,” he said, “I have a note just handed to me.”
All conversation stopped. All reading and note taking stopped.
“Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters—I don’t know what that means—have either stopped or reversed course,” McCone said, holding up a sheet of paper.
Several people gasped.
Someone said, “Phew!”
Secretary of State Dean Rusk raised the obvious question. Ships stopped—but were they heading to Cuba, or away from it?
The note didn’t say, McCone answered.
“Why don’t we find out,” Kennedy suggested.
McCone left the room. A few long minutes passed. He came back in.
“Whadda ya have, John?” Kennedy asked.
“The ships were all westbound, all inbound for Cuba,” McCone said. “They either stopped them, or reversed direction.”
“We’re eyeball to eyeball,” said Dean Rusk, “and I think the other fellow just blinked.”
Was that right? Had Khrushchev just blinked?
Maybe. Maybe not. An immediate confrontation at sea had been avoided, at least. That was something.
But the crisis continued.
And, over the next seventy-two hours, a series of moves and countermoves, mistakes and misunderstandings, would bring the most terrifying moments yet. If a novelist put some of this stuff into a fictional thriller, the reader would be justified in throwing the book aside and shouting, “Come on, that would never happen!”
But it did happen. It’s how the world nearly ended.
* * *
For instance: In Alaska, at the height of the crisis, the U.S. Air Force’s early-warning radar system picked up what looked very much like a Soviet missile attack.
Actually, it was a spaceship on its way to Mars.
Sergei Korolev, the brilliant rocket scientist behind Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin’s flight, had long dreamed of sending an unmanned probe to the red planet. Now, with American bombers stalking the borders of Soviet territory, he launched the rocket. The craft made it through the atmosphere but then blew up, showering fragments—which looked like missiles on American radar screens—back to Earth.
Only after racing to calculate the trajectories of the fragments could Air Force personnel report that the flying objects were not coming over the North Pole toward American cities.
At Baikonur Cosmodrome, Korolev’s team prepared another rocket for launch, ready to try again.
No, they were not really following the news.
New orders came in from Moscow: get the Mars probe off the next rocket and attach a 2.8 megaton warhead.
* * *
The four Soviet submarines, with their special weapons, remained on patrol in the warm waters east of Cuba. It was far too hot to cook. The crews lived on pickled vegetables and one cup of water per day.
Missile teams in Cuba spent a rainy night practice-loading dummy warheads on their rockets. The real hydrogen bombs were removed from storage bunkers and loaded onto trucks. Convoys drove through the night, at a maximum speed of twenty miles per hour, toward the missile sites.
American bombers continued circling their spots along the Soviet border. If the order to attack was to come, it would be in the form of a six-character string of letters and numbers sent by radio from Strategic Air Command in Omaha. Working independently, two crew members in each plane would compare the code to the codes in sealed envelopes they’d been given before takeoff. If everything matched, the plane would proceed to its assigned target.
Late that night, in a Washington, D.C., bar, two American reporters talked about the possibility of being sent to cover a potential American invasion of Cuba.
“It looks like I’m going,” one of the reporters said.
He meant he was going if there was an invasion.
The bartender, a Russian informant, missed that second part. He reported to his contact, a KGB agent, that the American reporter was on his way to Cuba to cover the war.
The agent rushed to the Soviet embassy with this alarming news. Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin encoded the message using a one-time pad. He called the telegraph company, Western Union, which sent a bicycle messenger. After picking up the note, the messenger cycled around town, picking up other telegrams, before returning to the office.
Incredibly, with the world on the brink of annihilation, this is how information was sent between Washington and Moscow.
* * *
The bartender’s tip had not yet reached the Kremlin when Presidium members gathered the next morning, Thursday, October 25. Nikita Khrushchev opened with a joke.
“The Americans have chickened out,” he said, chuckling. “It seems that Kennedy went to sleep with a wooden knife.”
Nothing. Crickets.
Soviet officials were used to Nikita’s pithy proverbs, but no one got this one.
“What do you mean, ‘wooden’?” asked the deputy prime minister.
“They say,” Khrushchev explained, “that when someone goes bear hunting for the first time, he takes a wooden knife with him—so it is easier to clean his pants.”
Now it made sense. Sort of. Another day had passed without an American attack on Cuba. President Kennedy had blinked.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Kennedy was still insisting the Soviet missiles had to be removed from Cuba. And it was Khrushchev who had ordered his ships to turn around. All part of the plan, Khrushchev insisted. There were plenty of missiles and warheads already in Cuba. He was merely buying time to get everything set up.
* * *
That evening, as he walked with his son near their home, the Soviet leader let his guard down. The missiles, he told Sergei, might have to come home.
Sergei was shocked. Why the sudden retreat? Why even consider such a humiliating step?
Khrushchev talked about the pressure President Kennedy must be under. The U.S. military was surely pushing him to take those missiles out by force. That must not be allowed to happen.
Here was the key. Here was a confession he dared make only to his son. The missiles in Cuba had always been a bluff.
The goal was to give the Americans a taste of their own medicine, to make them live with a bit more fear. That would even out the global balance of power. The Soviets could refocus on driving the Americans out of Berlin, and the march to Cold War victory could continue from there. The flaw in the plan was that if the Americans attacked in Cuba, Khrushchev had no real answer. What should he do, fire the missiles? That would be the end of everything. He could go on the offensive in Berlin, where he was stronger. But that would also quickly escalate to nuclear war.
And yet, if the Americans attacked Cuba, how could he not answer?
Like Kennedy, Khrushchev was under constant pressure to be tough, to never back down. If the Presidium and military leaders lost confidence in him, they’d yank him from power, even throw him in jail
. Like Kennedy, he had to balance fears about his own future with the danger of blowing up the world.
When they got back home, Khrushchev sat in his favorite chair. He sipped tea with lemon and flipped through the newspaper. Finally, he walked up the stairs to bed.
* * *
At Duluth Airport in northern Minnesota, a few minutes after midnight, an Air Force guard spotted some sort of dark figure climbing a fence around a building that housed vital radar equipment. The guard fired at the intruder, then ran to sound the alarm.
The alarm was connected to other bases and airports all around the Great Lakes region. At Volk Field in Wisconsin the wrong alarm sounded. Instead of the sabotage siren, a louder horn woke everyone—the order to launch bombers immediately. Pilots, who’d been sleeping in their flight suits, jumped into their planes and warmed up the engines. The planes were already loaded with H-bombs. Crews taxied onto the runway, believing war had already begun.
As the first jet was about to take off, a jeep sped onto the runway, flashing its headlights to get the pilot’s attention. An officer jumped out of the jeep and explained to the pilot that they’d checked with Duluth. The United States was not at war.
Back at Duluth Airport, soldiers searched for the saboteur. They inspected the damaged fence he’d tried to climb. They found footprints leading to and from the perimeter of the airfield.
Someone recognized the shape of the prints. They were the tracks of a black bear.
* * *
On Friday morning, October 26, the Presidium listened to the latest intelligence from America. Troops were openly massing in Florida. American politicians, the press, people on the street—everyone was talking about a U.S. invasion of Cuba.
It was at this point that the message arrived from the KGB source in Washington, the intelligence from the bartender who’d overheard newspaper reporters saying they were leaving soon to cover the war. Nikita Khrushchev had heard enough.
Fallout Page 18