In October it will be 60 years since the Cuban missile crisis, which has been called the most dangerous crisis in recorded history. The Soviet Union had secretly placed missiles in a base in Cuba; the U.S. discovered them through secret aerial photographs. What would President
John F. Kennedy
do, less than two years into his presidency and 1½ since the botched Bay of Pigs invasion? It is a famous story told in books, movies and monographs, but it bears another look and deeper reflection as
threatens nuclear use in Ukraine.
Weeks ago Ukraine’s top military chief warned that there is “a direct threat of the use . . . of tactical nuclear weapons by the Russian armed forces.” Gen.
Valery Zaluzhny
wrote: “It’s also impossible to completely rule out possibility of the direct involvement of the world’s leading countries in a ‘limited’ nuclear conflict, in which the prospect of World War III is already directly visible.”
What can we learn from what happened 60 years ago? The JFK Library website has transcripts, tapes and documents of White House deliberations as the crisis played out. What strikes you as you read and listen is the desperate and essential fact that they were groping in the darkness to keep the world from blowing up.
From the transcript of a White House meeting the morning of Oct. 16, the first day of the 13-day crisis:
Secretary of State Dean Rusk: “Mr. President, this is a, of course, a [widely?] serious development. It’s one that we, all of us, had not really believed the Soviets could, uh, carry this far.”
JFK asked why the Russians would do this. Gen.
Maxwell Taylor
suggested they weren’t confident of their long-range nuclear weapons and sought placement of shorter-range ones. Rusk thought it might be that
Nikita Khrushchev
lives “under fear” of U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey and wants us to taste the same anxiety.
U.S. officials knew where most of the missiles and launchers were in Cuba, but not where the nuclear warheads were, or even if they’d arrived.
Should the U.S. attack the bases? If so, should it warn the Soviets first?
JFK: “Warning them, uh, it seems to me, is warning everybody. And I, I obviously—you can’t sort…
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