In May 1962, Khrushchev decided to deploy in Cuba a group of Soviet forces consisting of 50,000 troops armed with medium - and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, fighter aircraft, light bombers, cruise missiles, naval vessels, and submarines, as well as strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. It was planned to build a submarine base as part of the Soviet presence.624 The defense ofCuba against a US invasion was one crucial motive for this decision, but the composition of the group of forces suggests that a more important goal was to strengthen the Soviet strategic position vis-a-vis the United States. After the setbacks over Berlin, Khrushchev believed that it was important to increase pressure on the United States.625
Khrushchev wanted to present Kennedy with a fait accompli. The Soviet operation was organized in great secrecy, but on October 15 the Kennedy administration discovered that missile sites were being constructed in Cuba. The missiles were not yet operational, so the administration had several days to deliberate in private. Various responses were discussed, including air strikes against Cuba and an invasion of the island. On October 22, Kennedy announced that the United States would impose a naval quarantine on Cuba and insisted on the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles.
Khrushchev was in an extremely difficult position. His goal, he told the presidium, was not to unleash war but to deter the United States from attacking Cuba. The tragedy was, he said, that, if the Americans attacked Cuba, Soviet forces would respond, and that could lead to a "big war."626 The United States placed its strategic forces on higher alert and assembled forces in Florida to prepare for an invasion of Cuba. The Soviet Union also increased the readiness of its forces. The crisis, which had begun with a serious miscalculation by Khrushchev about Kennedy’s reaction to the placing of missiles in Cuba, was now acquiring a dangerous momentum, in which a further miscalculation by one side could elicit an unwanted reaction from the other, leading to an uncontrollable spiral ending in war. An accident or an
Unauthorized action by one side could produce the same result. The situation was in danger of slipping out of control.
Khrushchev expressed this fear vividly in a letter he wrote to Kennedy on October 26, objecting to the quarantine and proposing steps to resolve the crisis:
If, however, you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive of what this might lead to, then Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.627
Khrushchev understood how terrible a nuclear war would be and counted on Kennedy’s understanding of the same point. When Fidel Castro suggested in a letter to Khrushchev, on October 26, that the Soviet Union be prepared to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States if it invaded Cuba, Khrushchev reacted strongly. Such a strike would start a thermonuclear war, he wrote, explaining how terrible such a war would be. In a later letter he tried to convince Castro that Kennedy understood that too.628
The crisis was finally resolved on October 28 when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in return for a commitment by Kennedy not to invade Cuba. A secret agreement was also concluded in which Kennedy promised to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey as long as Khrushchev did not make that promise public. In October 1964, the presidium’s harsher indictment was direct in its condemnation ofKhrushchev. His decision to put missiles in Cuba (which almost all members of the presidium had supported) "caused a very profound crisis, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war; it gave a terrible fright to the man who organized this dangerous undertaking."629 The indictment went on to say that it was of course sometimes necessary to threaten the imperialists with the force of arms, in order to sober them up; but it was wrong to turn threats of war into a method for conducting foreign policy, as Khrushchev had done.
World History
