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Fri, 01 Nov 2013 07:25:49 GMT

More (#2) from Command and Control:

Far from being grounds for celebration, the absence of a missile gap became a potential source of embarrassment for the Kennedy administration. Many of the claims made by the Democrats during the recent presidential campaign now seemed baseless. Although General Power still insisted that the Soviets were hiding their long-range missiles beneath camouflage, the United States clearly had not fallen behind in the nuclear arms race. Public knowledge of that fact would be inconvenient— and so the public wasn’t told. When McNamara admitted that the missile gap was a myth, during an off-the-record briefing with reporters, President Kennedy was displeased.

At a press conference the following day, Kennedy stressed that “it would be premature to reach a judgment as to whether there is a gap or not a gap.” Soon the whole issue was forgotten. Political concerns, not strategic ones, determined how many long-range, land-based missiles the United States would build. Before Sputnik, President Eisenhower had thought that twenty to forty would be enough. Jerome Wiesner advised President Kennedy that roughly ten times that number would be sufficient for deterrence. But General Power wanted the Strategic Air Command to have ten thousand Minuteman missiles, aimed at every military target in the Soviet Union that might threaten the United States. And members of Congress, unaware that the missile gap was a myth, also sought a large, land-based force. After much back and forth, McNamara decided to build a thousand Minuteman missiles. One Pentagon adviser later explained that it was “a round number.”

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Amid all the consideration of how to protect the president and the Joint Chiefs, how to gather information in real time, how to transmit war orders, how to devise the technical and administrative means for a flexible response, little thought had been given to an important question: how do you end a nuclear war? Thomas Schelling — a professor of economics at Harvard, a RAND analyst, proponent of game theory, and adviser to the Kennedy administration — began to worry about the issue early in 1961. While heading a committee on the risk of war by accident, miscalculation, or surprise, he was amazed to learn that there was no direct, secure form of communications between the White House and the Kremlin. It seemed almost unbelievable. Schelling had read the novel Red Alert a few years earlier, bought forty copies, and sent them to colleagues. The book gave a good sense of what could go wrong — and yet the president’s ability to call his Soviet counterpart on a “hot line” existed only in fiction. As things stood, AT&T’s telephone lines and Western Union’s telegraph lines were the only direct links between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them would be knocked out by a thermonuclear blast, and most radio communications would be, as well. The command-and-control systems of the two countries had no formal, reliable means of interacting. The problem was so serious and so obvious, Schelling thought, everybody must have assumed somebody else had taken care of it. Pauses for negotiation would be a waste of time, if there were no way to negotiate. And once a nuclear war began, no matter how pointless, devastating, and horrific, it might not end until both sides ran out of nuclear weapons.

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The lack of direct, secure communications between the White House and the Kremlin, the distrust that Kennedy felt toward the Soviet leader, and Khrushchev’s impulsive, unpredictable behavior complicated efforts to end the [Cuban missile] crisis peacefully. Khrushchev felt relieved, after hearing Kennedy’s speech, that the president hadn’t announced an invasion of Cuba. Well aware that the Soviet Union’s strategic forces were vastly inferior to those of the United States, Khrushchev had no desire to start a nuclear war. He did, however, want to test Kennedy’s mettle and see how much the Soviets could gain from the crisis. Khrushchev secretly ordered his ships loaded with missiles not to violate the quarantine. But in private letters to Kennedy, he vowed that the ships would never turn around, denied that offensive weapons had been placed in Cuba, and denounced the quarantine as “an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward... a world nuclear-missile war.”

...While the Kennedy administration anxiously wondered if the Soviets would back down, Khrushchev maintained a defiant facade. And then on October 26, persuaded by faulty intelligence that an American attack on Cuba was about to begin, he wrote another letter to Kennedy, offering a deal: the Soviet Union would remove the missiles from Cuba, if the United States promised never to invade Cuba.

Khrushchev’s letter arrived at the American embassy in Moscow around five o’clock in the evening, which was ten in the morning, Eastern Standard Time. It took almost eleven hours for the letter to be fully transmitted by cable to the State Department in Washington, D.C. Kennedy and his advisers were encouraged by its conciliatory tone and decided to accept the deal— but went to bed without replying. Seven more hours passed, and Khrushchev started to feel confident that the United States wasn’t about to attack Cuba, after all. He wrote another letter to Kennedy, adding a new demand: the missiles in Cuba would be removed, if the United States removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Instead of being delivered to the American embassy, this letter was broadcast, for the world to hear, on Radio Moscow.

On the morning of October 27, as President Kennedy was drafting a reply to Khrushchev’s first proposal, the White House learned about his second one. Kennedy and his advisers struggled to understand what was happening in the Kremlin. Conflicting messages were now coming not only from Khrushchev, but from various diplomats, journalists, and Soviet intelligence agents who were secretly meeting with members of the administration. Convinced that Khrushchev was being duplicitous, McNamara now pushed for a limited air strike to destroy the missiles. General Maxwell Taylor, now head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended a large-scale attack. When an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba, killing the pilot, the pressure on Kennedy to launch an air strike increased enormously. A nuclear war with the Soviet Union seemed possible. “As I left the White House... on that beautiful fall evening,” McNamara later recalled, “I feared I might never live to see another Saturday night.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis ended amid the same sort of confusion and miscommunication that had plagued much of its thirteen days. President Kennedy sent the Kremlin a cable accepting the terms of Khrushchev’s first offer, never acknowledging that a second demand had been made. But Kennedy also instructed his brother to meet privately with Ambassador Dobrynin and agree to the demands made in Khrushchev’s second letter— so long as the promise to remove the Jupiters from Turkey was never made public. Giving up dangerous and obsolete American missiles to avert a nuclear holocaust seemed like a good idea. Only a handful of Kennedy’s close advisers were told about this secret agreement.

Meanwhile, at the Kremlin, Khrushchev suddenly became afraid once again that the United States was about to attack Cuba. He decided to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba— without insisting upon the removal of the Jupiters from Turkey. Before he had a chance to transmit his decision to the Soviet embassy in Washington, word arrived from Dobrynin about Kennedy’s secret promise. Khrushchev was delighted by the president’s unexpected— and unnecessary— concession. But time seemed to be running out, and an American attack might still be pending. Instead of accepting the deal through a diplomatic cable, Khrushchev’s decision to remove the missiles from Cuba was immediately broadcast on Radio Moscow. No mention was made of the American vow to remove its missiles from Turkey.

Both leaders had feared that any military action would quickly escalate to a nuclear exchange. They had good reason to think so. Although Khrushchev never planned to move against Berlin during the crisis, the Joint Chiefs had greatly underestimated the strength of the Soviet military force based in Cuba. In addition to strategic weapons, the Soviet Union had almost one hundred tactical nuclear weapons on the island that would have been used by local commanders to repel an American attack. Some were as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Had the likely targets of those weapons— the American fleet offshore and the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo— been destroyed, an all-out nuclear war would have been hard to avoid.

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