The World

‘Don’t worry,’ beamed Khrushchev, ‘there’ll be no big reaction and if there is, I’ll send the Baltic Fleet.’ Later he suggested, ‘I’ll grab Kennedy by the balls and make him negotiate,’ adding that, like a peasant who brings his goat into his hut for winter and gets used to the stink, Kennedy would ‘learn to accept the smell of the missiles’.^*

On 26 July 1962, a Soviet armada departed from Odessa bearing 44,000 troops and six atomic bombs, along with eighteen nuclear cruise missiles, three divisions of tactical nuclear weapons and six bombers. In August they started installing the missiles: it is likely Khrushchev permitted his commander to use the tactical weapons – if necessary. American intelligence noticed activity in Cuba but had missed massive activity in Odessa and never realized the full extent of the Soviet deployment.^*

On 14 October, a US spy plane revealed some of the missiles in Cuba, throwing JFK into an existential world crisis. He had found the hedgehog in his pants. ‘He can’t do this to me,’ he said, calling Khrushchev ‘a fucking liar’, an ‘immoral gangster’. It was the biggest crisis any president would face, and ultimately he proved his acumen, telling his Executive Committee, ‘Gentlemen, we’re going to earn our pay today.’

Kennedy listened as his hawkish aides proposed surgical attacks on the missiles, a plan supported by nine members of his Executive Committee against seven who supported a blockade. But he quickly switched to blockading Cuba and announced a press conference. In the Kremlin, Khrushchev panicked: ‘That’s it! Lenin’s work has been destroyed.’ Mikoyan and the Presidium, all Second World War veterans fearful of war, were alarmed by his recklessness. Khrushchev was afraid that an invasion was imminent, and admitted, ‘The tragedy is they can attack and we’ll respond. This could escalate into large-scale war.’ Khrushchev urged his commanders to ‘Make all efforts initially not to use atomic weaponry,’ and now stressed that Moscow’s authorization would be required for their deployment.

In Washington, JFK announced instead a quarantine of Cuba and demanded removal of weapons. At the ExComm, ‘we’d taken the first step,’ recalled Bobby, ‘– and we were still alive.’ JFK permitted his trigger-happy generals to plan air strikes – all of them unaware that a full nuclear arsenal was on the island – but ‘it looks like hell’, he told Bobby, ‘doesn’t it!’ JFK was obsessed with a history book, The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, about the start of the First World War, which he and his aides had read. ‘They somehow seemed to tumble into war,’ he said, through ‘stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur’. Never has a historian been so important.

In Moscow, a jumpy Khrushchev ordered some of the Soviet ships to turn back; in Washington, keen to test the quarantine, JFK was delighted to see the six ships turn, but ordered the stopping of all of them. ‘His face seemed drawn, his eye pained,’ noted Bobby. The order to stop the other ships, which would have led to confrontation, was withdrawn just in time. ‘For a moment the world had stood still and now it was going round again.’ In Moscow, a sleepless Khrushchev ‘swore at Washington, threatened to nuke the White House’, but then calmed down and led his comrades off to watch Boris Godunov

at the Bolshoi. ‘It’ll have a calming effect,’ said Khrushchev. ‘If Khrushchev and other leaders are sitting in the theatre, then everyone can sleep soundly.’ But the next morning, when he learned of a tightening of the blockade, he cursed ‘like a bargeman’, stamping his foot. ‘I’m gonna crush that viper!’ he bellowed. JFK was ‘a millionaire’s whore’.

While Khrushchev was calming down, Kennedy sent Jackie and the children out of Washington and raised DEFCON (Defence Readiness Condition) to Level 2,^* just short of war, a move that so alarmed Khrushchev that he told Mikoyan he was withdrawing the missiles in return for ‘promises the Americans won’t attack Cuba’. He dictated a long, meandering letter offering a mix of peace and defiance. But the crisis was still escalating: Castro ordered the shooting down of any US aeroplanes and prepared for an imminent American invasion, staying up all night at the Soviet embassy, drinking beer and eating sausages. It was now he decided that the best course was nuclear war.