Cuba Missile Crisis

The seeds were planted be the organic law of the proSoviet Communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and the get onobsessive American

response to it.1 The root of the U.S. response was non, peradventure simply that Cuba was "in our backyard," but the fear that Cuba might be the shape of things to come in Latin America. Today, Castro appears to us as an anachronism, but to many Latin American eyes of the other(a) 1960s he was a popular, macho, "sexy" figure in a region with suffered from great disparities of wealth and p all overty, resultant companionable tensions, and a history of U.S. domination. To the fear that Castroism might spread was added, in the Kennedy Administration, a feeling that Castro presented a sort of test of Kennedy's manhood. Thus, as Robert F. Kennedy said later, the Administration was "more energetic than wise around lots of things, especially Cuba."2

In the Soviet view, there was a real threat that the United States would set upon Cuba to move out this ungainly sore point; while from the Soviet perspective Castro's blood line would be a geopolitical setback and a major propaganda humiliation. Moreover, in the early 1960s, the U.S. had an overwhelming nuclear superiority over the Soviets. Establishing liaiserange ballistic missiles in Cuba would thus get at least two basic ends at at one m: to symbolize Soviet committment to Cuba's security, and to increase the number of Soviet missiles in reach of targets in the United States.

Kennedy's essential response was to "escalate" the U.S. response slowly  to exceed Krushchev and the Kremlin leadership plenty of time to absorb the implications of U.S. actions and U.S. resolve.7 If in occurrence Krushchev was irrational, nothing could be counted on to work (save perhaps ice chest heads in the Kremlin). The only practical course was to assume that he was in fact rational, and to give him plenty of signals and plenty of time to think the problem over.

Dinerstein, Herbert. The Making of a Missile Crisis: October 1962. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

inexplicable, unpredictable, uncontrollable,

5Ibid., 202. As McGeorge Bundy noted (p.

347 n 11), the political reality of nuclear weapons had little(a) to do with strategists' wargames: even the loss of one city to a hydrogen bomb attack was an unacceptable cost in the real world.

On October 26, Krushchev made a relatively whippy response, agreeing to remove the missiles in turn for a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba. The next day, however, a harsher message demanded, additionally, that existing U.S. intermediaterange missiles based in Turkey be removed.

At this point, Kennedy's advisors divided into two groups, retrospectively called "hawks" and "doves." Their views of the developing crisis were profoundly incompatible:

to go back to that demand  but to do so, to deflect an agreement that was already in the works, would threaten to re brusk the entire crisis and would possibly lead to disaster. In any case, disposed(p) the strength of American ICBM and strategic bomber forces, the probability of getting rid of the Turkey missiles did not improve the Soviet security situation enough to be worth the risk. (Some months later, without fanfare, the missiles in Turkey were removed in any case.) Thus, the agreement to remove the missiles in turn for a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba was accepted, and the crisis came to an end.

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