The crisis had important consequences for the subsequent course of the Cold War and nuclear-arms race, and for the fates of its principal figures. Kennedy’s success in compelling Khrushchev to pull out the missiles struck most Americans as a glorious victory. He won kudos for toughness in domestic politics (the Jupiter deal remained safely buried) and gained confidence and stature for the duration of his shortened presidency, at home and abroad.
Khrushchev had a tougher time coping with the fallout. Castro was enraged at the Soviet leader both for his concessions to JFK and for his failure to consult before making them. To mollify him, Khrushchev sent Mikoyan to Havana for weeks of tense secret negotiations, a hidden November Crisis that buffeted Soviet-Cuban ties. The Kremlin’s decisions to extract additional hardware (the IL-28s, the tactical nuclear weapons) only intensified Castro’s fury, while Khrushchev grew increasingly exasperated at the Cuban leader’s intransigence. Though the alliance survived, the crisis’s humiliating outcome gravely impaired Khrushchev’s standing within the Kremlin. Together with other missteps, it solidified a sense that his erratic foreign policy had to end and ultimately hastened his ouster in October 1964. By contrast, Castro remained atop the Cuban government for decades. Despite chagrin at the way the crisis had ended, he owed his regime’s long-term survival partly to JFK’s noinvasion vow. Khrushchev’s claims to have "saved" Cuba, hollow at the time, in retrospect have some validity.
In the Cold War and nuclear arms race, the crisis heralded an era ofrelative stability in superpower relations. In June 1963, JFK made a singularly conciliatory speech toward the USSR, hailing its World War II role and emphasizing the two nations’ common humanity and interest in avoiding nuclear ruin. Shortly thereafter, Washington and Moscow established an emergency hot line - a step directly attributable to exasperation over the cumbersome methods used during the crisis - and agreed to a limited nuclear test ban, a major arms control advance that pointed the way towards a 1968 nuclear nonproliferation pact and also exacerbated the Sino-Soviet split as Beijing (nearing its own first atomic blast) decried superpower collusion.
Perhaps even more significant was what didn't happen after the crisis. Convinced now that "Imperialism, as can be seen, is no paper tiger [but] can give you a nice bite in the backside,"114 Khrushchev lost his appetite for a new Berlin showdown. Within a decade, Moscow and Washington ratified the status quo of a split Berlin and Germany. After Cuba, neither side wanted to risk a repetition along the heavily armed divide in Europe - as the Americans showed by wary responses to upheavals in Czechoslovakia (1968), Poland (1970, 1980-81), and all of East-Central Europe (1989).
The waning of superpower tensions fostered speculation that Kennedy and Khrushchev, had they lasted in power longer, might have ended the Cold War altogether. That seems unlikely. Neither yielded fundamentally incompatible views of ideology or the legitimacy of the postwar international order. Though military friction in Europe subsided, the superpowers repeatedly clashed indirectly in the Third World - and success in Cuba may have facilitated disaster in Vietnam. In 1965, when Johnson decided to bomb the north and send hundreds of thousands of US troops to the south, his entire national security team consisted of missile crisis veterans; McNamara later acknowledged that his experience with the quarantine directly influenced his thinking on the bombing.115 To the extent that Cuba inculcated confidence (or hubris) that calibrated force could compel a Communist adversary to capitulate, this may have been a fateful misreading: if Khrushchev had "blinked," Castro never did - and nor did Ho Chi Minh, demonstrating anew the ferocity of revolutionary nationalism and leaving Washington painfully quagmired.
In arms control, too, the consequences varied. Furious at being forced to back down - and submit to mortifying close-range inspection - Moscow resolved to catch up in the nuclear competition as rapidly as possible and never again be vulnerable to American pressure. US leaders rationalized the rapid expansion of the Soviet ICBM force as a stabilizing component of what McNamara dubbed mutual assured destruction (MAD), and Nixon and Brezhnev enshrined it in 1972 as a state of nuclear parity. Some scholars argue the crisis reinforced a process of superpower "nuclear learning" - increasing judiciousness and responsibility, cementing a stable "long peace" - but this runs up against evidence that in late 1983 nuclear tensions led to another comparably perilous trip to the brink.
More than any other single Cold War event, the Cuban missile crisis stimulated a voluminous historiography and contentious public debate, not only over what actually happened but its implications for national security policy controversies, international relations theories, bureaucratic politics models, and a host of other fields and sub-fields. Since the rise of Gorbachev’s glasnost and the fall of Soviet Communism, the partial yet substantial release of Russian, Cuban, CIA, and other formerly inaccessible primary source materials has spawned a new generation of accounts and arguments and allowed scholars to reconstruct and assess the crisis more deeply and broadly than previously possible.
While it is impossible to do justice in a few words to the richness ofthis new evidence and scholarship, one may advance two tentative hypotheses. First, both Khrushchev and Kennedy come off looking worse in terms of their actions before the crisis - more irresponsible and reckless, less heedful of the risks and potential unintended and disproportionate consequences of their actions (for example, Khruschev’s deployments of tactical nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed submarines; Kennedy’s obsessive anti-Castro campaign) - yet, once in the crisis, their shared achievement in escaping it appears even more impressive. It required not only bridging the gulf between them, but mastering their own bellicose initial impulses, and those of some in their own camps. And second, even with the Cold War a receding memory, the persistence of acute fears over nuclear proliferation and confrontation into the twenty-first century suggests that the missile crisis will retain its relevance, as well as its fascination, for the foreseeable future.
World History
