Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis

greetings from the national archives i'm david ferriero archivist of the united states and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with sergey plahi author of nuclear folly in october 1962 the world came the closest ever come to nuclear armageddon the discovery of soviet missiles being installed in cuba triggered the most dangerous encounter of the cold war rivalry between the united states and the soviet union after 13 anxious days the two nations reached a resolution both aware of the danger of mutual destruction but it wasn't just a showdown between two rivals it was a global crisis sirhi plowy offers an international perspective on the crisis in his new book nuclear folly one based on a range of archival documents including white house recordings in the john f kennedy presidential library and previously classified kgb records in moscow sir hiplawi is the mai halo rushevsky professor of ukrainian history and the director of the ukrainian research institute at harvard university a leading authority on eastern europe and russia is published extensively on the international history of the cold war his award-winning books include the last empire the gates of europe and chernobyl our moderator for today's discussion is michael dobbs dodd was born and educated in britain but is now a u.s citizen he was a long time reporter for the washington post covering the collapse of communism as a foreign correspondent he has written seven books including one minute to midnight on the cuban missile crisis which was a new york times bestseller his latest book king richard nixon and watergate an american tragedy will be published in may now let's hear from sirhi pelohi and michael dobbs thank you for joining us today well thank you very much uh for that uh introduction um congratulations sehi on joining the group of growing group of cuban missile crisis historians and on an excellent book about the crisis i think the qualities of a good book for me or good non-fiction book first of all that it's readable and it appeals to the general public and secondly that it adds something to our knowledge that can also appeal to experts and your book certainly does that so um the archivist said that uh this is the most dangerous uh period in history the closest we ever got to nuclear armageddon um assuming you agree with that you know why can you set the stage uh why did this happen in 1962 the u.s had exploded the first atomic bomb in 1945 the soviets uh responded in 1949 under stalin and truman but it takes another 13 years for this nuclear competition to come to a head why is that thanks thank you to the national archives for having this this event this discussion and michael thanks a lot for uh agreeing to to moderate it and to be to be a co-discussion here i really was very much influenced by your own research and the human missile crisis and i remember when we discussed your book when it appeared or was about to appear and probably you were one of the first people who told me that actually ukraine is part of the story with some people from your interview lived in ukraine and the kgb materials that were mentioned here really come from ukraine so for me it's it's really going going back to this best conversation and uh i'm i'm really very happy to be here in this discussion today uh the question about timing 1962 uh indeed indeed it's long after both superpowers acquired not just the atomic capabilities but also tested their hydrogen bombs what is specific and what is interesting about the early 1960s is that this is the period when for the first time the soviet leaders and khrushchev in particular decided that they could be or try to be on par in terms of the nuclear capabilities to the united states of america president kennedy campaigned under the and and took who took advantage of this misunderstanding where the claim was that there was a missile gap between the united states and the soviet union the missile gap was there but not in favor of moscow it was in favor of washington and khrushchev wanted to deal with that issue redress this disbalance he didn't have enough strategic uh uh intercon continental ballistic missiles but he had enough of medium range and intermediate ones and he decided to put them on cuba in that way being able to reach the american territory so that is one of the reasons why it happened in 1962 and let's say not not early in 1955 and then 1956. so the reason was that khrushchev believed that you could really do something about that right yeah so there was a nuclear imbalance in 1962 and uh christoph wanted to redress it but do you think he had other motivations i mean what about the defense of the cuban revolution which castro's certainly considered to be under threat from the united states and uh uh khrushchev as well presumably absolutely absolutely i was trying to keep my answers really short relatively short but thanks thanks for asking this follow-up question this uh ideological component component associated with cuba was an important part of the story show was concerned that he would lose cuba the the first as he believed communist revolution uh in in the western hemisphere through the attack from the united states and after the bay of pigs that happened in april of 1961 he believed that it's just a matter of time before kennedy finally would put his act together and there would be an invasion his other concern was that if he doesn't help castro he can lose not cuba to the united states but he can lose cuba and castro to china because again castro was trying to build also bridges with his beijing at that time and so there was this threat coming from beijing and washington at the same time as far as uh khrushchev was concerned and he decided to uh kill one bird with or two birds or maybe three birds with one stone and that stone were the nuclear missiles yeah i also think you know christoph was a very emotional type of leader and uh he um saw that the us was deploying uh similar missiles to turkey and as he put it one of the quotes i love from christoph he said he decided to put a hedgehog down down uncle sam's pants so how much did his kind of personal personality influence the development of the crisis do you think he is he was very adventurous type in general he was he was taking risk when he came for the first visit for the first and last visit to the united states in 1959 he was flying on yet untested soviet airplane because that was the biggest airplane in the world at that time but he was prepared to take this risk and the same pedigree is true with cuba there's one caveat he really believed that if he swallowed the pill of the of the american missiles next door in turkey that uh kennedy would actually do the same that the united states would not look at that as something completely extraordinary and that was his biggest there were a number of miscalculations and mistakes and misjudgments that he made during the cuban missile crisis but that was his biggest one he didn't realize that the american public the american political elite would not accept except the deployment of the soviet missiles 90 miles away from the american shores okay so we've talked about christian's miscalculations what about kennedy's was kennedy purely in the right here or did he mess things up as well well um kennedy had a lot of blind spots himself and uh one thing that he never basically he grasped eventually but it took him a while to understand that there was no connection in his mind between the american missiles in turkey and khrushchev's desire to put soviet missiles in cuba he was asking his advisor saying what what motivates him why he is doing that and it would look like we would put our missiles in turkey he says for almost forgetting that there were american missiles in turkey so that that was inability to read crucial and khrushchev's motivations and on the top of that kennedy found himself really in a situation where he believed that he was a hostage of the of the particular political environment in the united states we he was caught on tapes on his own tapes more than once saying that uh while uh the missiles they know really difference the soviet missiles make don't make much difference in terms of the balance between the two states uh mcnamara was saying the same and then kennedy said well last week when we were asked what you would do if there were missiles there we said that we would react the right answer last week was we don't care so um again he acted under this enormous political pressure and the the most most clear example of that is that it takes him one week to figure out what the policy should be visibility the missiles now why it is one week why not two weeks why not two days or 24 hours the point was that he believed that within one week and his advisers agreed with him the information about the spotting of those missiles on the island we've been linked to the american media so that defined his his horizon his time frame he was not concerned about what the soviets would do during that one week of his deliberations exactly one week that the soviets needed actually to complete the uh the the construction of some of their uh missile sites and get missiles ready to fire so by the time kennedy goes uh uh on tv and addresses the nation there are already at least a couple of the soviet missiles that are prepared to fire again the the the nuclear warheads are not delivered here to the sides but that that is the matter really of hours not days okay so let's back up a bit um i mean you as uh the archivist mentioned originally from ukraine and um i get i heard you once say that you actually uh lived close to where the missiles were constructed tell us about that missile that and why it was important uh well uh i i lived as a student and then as a young professor in the city that used to be called nipper petros today's dipra and it was on the street where the main entrance was to the largest missile um factory in in europe that's where the every single ballistic missile that was delivered to cuba were built there were two type of missiles the medium range ones which were called r12 and they were delivered to cuba and then there were r14 built at the same at the same factory that were in route when the blockade was announced so they never made they never made to to cuba and uh again it's it's really really for me it was it was a very interesting story so when i went to the now open kgb archives in ukraine to look for the for any traces of the cuban missile crisis i also looked at the materials kgb materials dealing with that particular factory and development and building of those of those missiles khrushchev is quite well known for those who who read about the period for saying that the soviet union was producing producing missiles like sausages so it's interesting that he made that statement which was not factually true at all right made that that statement after visiting that nipra petrovsk factory that again i lived he lived close to okay so uh khrushchev sent these r12 r14 missiles and he also sent actually tactical nuclear weapons which we didn't uh learn about until many years later and he sent an army of 43 000 men across the ocean observed by u.s reconnaissance planes i mean it's an amazing story this sort of rather primitive country manages to smuggle 43 000 men into cuba with nuclear weapons without the united states really knowing understanding what is going on but i'd like you to read a paragraph from your book um which uh drawing on the archives that you consulted which describes um the feelings of the soviet uh officers um at during this moment as reported by the kgb it's on page 92. so if you just like to read that paragraph sure absolutely i'm happy to do that so it starts with a quote and quote comes from a kgb kgb report it's offensive that our fate was decided somewhere over a glass of water and we have to pay the bill by heading off to cuba which is of no use to anybody and of course wrote an officer to his wife before the departure soviet army officer not only had he criticized the government and questioned its policies but he had also divulged a secret about his destination the letter was intercepted by the kgb and brought to the attention of the officers senior commanders but they decided to send him to cuba anyway and again i quote from a kgb document in the hope that after appropriate explanatory work he will understand the need to help the young cuban republic end of the quote captain suzov this is a kgb officer who was traveling to cuba on the ship nikolai bordenko was even more outspoken again there is a quote uh you know we are being taken for slaughter he told the fellow officer who turned out to be a kgb informer i am ready to lose my party card as long as i get back to the union continued sizzle who was sorry he wasn't a kgb officer who was a deputy head of his unit's party cell and then continuation of the quote the best thing to do on encountering americans is to surrender and be taken prisoner end of the quote okay so you found these um uh reports in an archive in the ukraine not in moscow um tell us how that happened why were they in the this archive in the ukraine uh well uh it turned out again i didn't know that before i started that research that uh approximately 75 to 80 percent of all missiles that were moved to cuba were moved from the military districts in ukraine and approximately 80 percent also of the personnel was moved from ukraine it was done through the black sea ports in the crimea and also odessa mikolai and each of those ships that were bringing either missiles equipment or personnel to cuba had a kgb officer kgb officers then upon return were filing reports on the expedition they were reporting on the attitude of the of the personnel of the army personnel of the navy man on the encounters with the american ships and surveillance of the of these ships by the by the american airplanes some of those ships would make more than one trip to cuba and back during the crisis so it's really it's really a unique source of the of the documents very specific type of documents that we didn't have before we knew certain things from the memoirs of the soviet officers and you did an excellent job in your book tapping into those sources but now we also have reporting that was happening at that time and again it it sheds in your light right the entire story so it turns out that quite a few of the people who went over that were not really happy about this mission and they thought it's pretty useless to um you know send all this equipment to the cube a place like cuba actually this sort of prefigures the collapse of the soviet union when there was a great deal of discontent about all the money that was being wasted um on the fraternal countries and this contrasts with a kind of uh nostalgia for the you know the good old days uh that we hear now from a lot of soviet vets but do you think these people that are quoted in the uh kgb reports are representative of the opinions of the you know the rest of the 43 000 uh soldiers who went there and or are they just a small minority well it's really very difficult to to judge that on the basis of kgb reports in general they are quite formally they certainly go about and and look at the examples where there is some form of the disloyalty and potential uh quote-unquote betrayal of the motherland and they report on that that is their job but what we know from other sources confer or suggest that this this wasn't a small group of people that those were thoughts and attitudes that were relatively widespread we have a number of commanders that refuse to go to cuba for example the first the first uh regiment missile regiment that was delivered that came to cuba the commander was his name was lieutenant colonel ivan siddharth well he was already appointed at the last moment when the original commander of the of the um of the regiment refused to go sighting site in all sorts of reasons including family reasons we have other other examples as well we also know that the the commanders would send to cuba troublemakers people who didn't want to be around which increased the percentage of people who questioned soviet policies on the other hand we have an example where the the uh were unhappy sometimes i'm happy not for ideological reasons but for many of them the term of their service was extended and uh recently i was in in touch with one of the american american military who was at that time in reserve and he was telling me that that was also a major concern among the american american servicemen so some things certain concerns were shared by the two sides right i'd say there's a difference between the ordinary russian soldier or ukrainian soldier and the elite who were in the nuclear forces i mean the soviet union sent i mean in addition to you know tens of thousands of just ordinary soldiers they sent elite people to uh to cuba including you know well-known mathematicians rocket experts and and so on um do you see this difference between the two groups uh well um what we see is that the kgb reports on on this uh critical attitude both when it comes to the officers like the captain's resolve that i just quoted and just recruits and and and and officers who again the the soldiers who were there just for the three year period in terms of the uh of the top commanders my my sources actually don't have much information on that know from their memoirs that they were extremely critical of two things first of their own commanders who came to cuba and assured them that one could uh the camouflage and and hide missiles in cuba and eventually turned out that it was impossible to do marshall beerus of the commander of the soviet rocket forces was the one who assured khrushchev that that was possible he was telling the leader what the leader wanted to hear and then the the soviet brass was really very unhappy about that and then the second situation where they were extremely unhappy was the way how the withdrawal from cuba was exercised and we know that from from the kgb sources that in particular that i consulted because they were um exposed to the what i call the strip search of the of the ships when they were ordered to open their twin decks to show their missiles that they were bringing back to the soviet union and some of the kgb sources say that the captain of the ship once he received the order was prepared to to do that when the commander of the military contingent on the ship would refuse to do that and there were conflicts between those later when crochet was removed from power two years after the crisis the soviet minister of defense marshall malinowski who was very supportive of everything that his leader was doing at that time when the leader was removed and that the coup was backed by the by the military uh malinowski told the general staff officers that uh never in the history of uh either russian army or the soviet army the soldiers and the officers suffered that kind of humiliation that took place during during this withdrawal from cuba so not withdrawal per se but the way how it was conducted and the reason why those ships were searched while already in the sea in the ocean was because uh khrushchev never was able to convince castro to go along with the deal that he struck with kennedy castro just refused to refuse to go along right okay we better turn back to the famous 13 days um but uh we're going to i'm going to wrap this up in a few minutes but if any of our viewers have questions um then please feel free to submit them and we'll spend the last few minutes um uh trying to respond to reader's questions um what do you think was the most dangerous aspect of the crisis um i mean was it you know this conflict between kennedy and christianoff or do you think uh it was uh something else the problem of miscommunication and escalation happening quite by accident well in a situation like like the one that that developed during the cuban missile crisis uh anything could again either miscalculation at the top level decision made by kennedy or khrushchev or the decision made by the officer on the ground could eventually lead to the to the war so i'm not prepared to prioritize one over another but uh what i can say is that in the in the mainstream narrative of the cuban missile crisis too much attention is paid to the agony of the decision making in white house in washington and it's not like that is not important but that was not the only thing that was happening at that time and again your book is one of the first books who tries to to broad the school and to bring in people uh on the ground and also bring in the soviet the soviet side of the story and for me the the uh if you're thinking relatively in broad terms about what what were the most the most problematic issues during the crisis was the first one was the the miscommunication and misunderstanding on the top level just inability of the leaders to to understand the logic of the actions of the other side the second issue was the inability to communicate in timely manner it was taken up to 24 hours to the letter to the official letter of the leader to be sent from kremlin to to white house and vice versa that's why crucial medan was saving time by transmitting through radio moscow his response is to to cavity so that was another issue and the third was losing control on the ground and that what happened on both sides again on the soviet side the best example would be the two military commanders to generals ordering to shoot down the american u2 airplane over cuba despite very clear orders from moscow not to shoot unless you are attacked and those generals made that decision at the time not consulting even with their top commander on cuba who was at that time he was a sick man he was taking rest after the sleepless night so really really khrushchev lost control over his troops and there was a case again very well described in your book about the youtube plane going into the soviet airspace possibly sending the soviets a signal that this is the last requirements flight before an attack on the soviet union nuclear attack on the union on the soviet union itself so uh and both kennedy and and mcnamara were terrified when they learned about that what the consequences of that could be so again uh the command and control issue well it was a major major major problem at the time okay as interesting in a sentence you wrote at the beginning of the epilogue john kennedy and nikita khrushchev managed to avoid nuclear war after making almost every mistake conceivable and every step imaginable to cause it very briefly because um we need to come on to the i want to uh talk about the present day situation but what do you mean by that uh sentence every mistake conceivable uh but in the end they managed to avoid nuclear war so you see them as somehow being allied together in that even though they did not know it absolutely in terms of their misunderstandings miscalculations and losing control i i already addressed that study there is much more about that in the book because i i at least intended that that would be one of the main contributions of the book to the big and very rich and very good historiography of the crisis but the question that i asked myself after that was okay if they made all those mistakes what what at the end saved the world from the third nuclear war and the explanation the best explanation that i was able to come up with was that despite all the differences between these two leaders there was something that united them that something was their fear of the nuclear war they they lived that that was the generation that lived through the second world war the generation that on on their eyes and their memory uh hiroshima and megasaki took place the castel bravo test which went wrong the tsar bombay explosion of 1961 so they knew what what nuclear weapons can bring and they at the at the end they they did their best to to stop whatever whatever the price was political price for them to stop the the crisis from escalating into into the nuclear war and i it's it's exactly that kind of um fair a positive fear that they shared that i think is is really very important factor in the story i dedicate this book to those who had the courage to step back and ironically this is the very same people who created this crisis right um who do you think was the winner in the end i mean was it uh christianoff was deposed a couple of years later um kennedy had to uh give up any idea of overthrowing castro but castro is still there or the castro family is still there all these years later even though castro was furious with christians it is it is a great great question and on the one hand if you look at that objectively in terms of what what happened at the end the biggest uh winner and i i'm taking that that that that line from you is of course kastra his regiment revolution was saved the irony is that he felt to be betrayed and defeated and that's that's uh because again he was he called himself a communist but really he was the leader of this anti-imperial revolution for him to be ignored uh when the negotiation was taken place between moscow and washington and to be dictated of what what the agreements was was a major defeat the second the second person in terms of winners would come up in the second place would be kruschev really saved cuba for for communism whatever that means and he got rid of the american missiles in turkey but the world looked at khrushchev as as a loser and eventually he was skipped out from office in 1964 partially because his own underlings believed that the this brinkmanship nuclear britain that that was a step too far that he brought the world to the to the brink of nuclear inhalation and then the person uh president kennedy who is believed to be the winner by the world uh i don't call him uh basically a loser in any way i don't think i think at the end of the day he handled the crisis really very very well but he would be the distant third in terms of the winners this is but there is no irony his win it was recognized by the by the country by the united states and his win was recognized by the world and that will change dramatically relations between him and crucial even if before the cuban missile crisis it's crucial who is on the offensive who is driving the agenda after the crisis the situation changes it's kennedy who is in control with a senior member in that in that door that keeps talking keeps negotiating and eventually negotiates the first arms control agreement the partial test ban that was signed in 1963. well we could say we all won because there wasn't a nuclear war and you know that was the main thing that was gained from the missile crisis the two sides came very close but uh thankfully they pulled back now we have a a few questions here um uh can you speak about the bear pigs but um perhaps you could just briefly say how the bear pigs related to the missile crisis rather than the bear pigs itself i mean why was one event related to the other event i honestly believe that there would be no cuban missile crisis without the bay of peace and the reason for that belief is really twofold the first thing is that um khrushchev decided that in kennedy he really faced a very weak and indecisive president that he couldn't really believe that kennedy would not follow through with the support for that for the invasion and that convinced khrushchev that he could uh push kennedy around and the that he could actually place the the missiles in cuba i don't think that he would he would dare to do that without without the bay of peaks another important factor is that the bay of pigs really terrified castro who emerged from victorious he he repelled the the invasion the aggression but he was absolutely convinced that another better prepared more determined invasion was coming immediately after the bay of fix he declared himself to be a communist establishing this lincoln connection ideological connection with crucial and using it to demand protection and uh eventually again this this concern of khrushchev that he can lose castra was another contributing factor to the uh to his decision to deliver missiles on on to cuba so in both cases the roots of that khrushchev's decisions are in the bay of pig's bay of pig's invasion and its outcome so i i really start my book with discuss in that situation making that argument maybe not as as as explicitly as i am doing that now and then another story that i think was very important for the cuban missile crisis is the berlin and berlin wall and by happening there okay um i mean talking about berlin would france and west germany have been among the first europe soviet targets if they decided to start a war someone else asks well one of chapters in my book the title is the hostage of berlin and the chapter is about kennedy berlin was on canada's mind all the time here during the first week of the crisis he advocated strike against the um against the soviet installations in cuba missile installations and not blockade because uh when blockchain they called it quarantine not not to trigger in legal terms the war because brigade it's an act of war so the quarantine when his aides suggested to him that his immediate response was well if we do that if you do duplicate of cuba the soviets will do the blockade of berlin and what is next next i'm sending the planes there and the next day shooting the planes what i am doing after that so really at some point at least kennedy was much more concerned about the possibility of nuclear war over berlin than the possibility of the nuclear war over cuba and that that was at the time of the cuban missile crisis so again the the the confrontation in around berlin in central in central europe was extremely important part of that story yeah but the question is would if the soviets had decided to start a war would france and germany have been among their first targets do you think or would it okay okay well uh this is uh this is a good question and i would say that um most likely yes and my gas is based not so much on some particular or inside knowledge of the soviet thinking at that time but given the kind of missiles that they had and those were medium range and intermediate and they could get up to up to madrid so the france and britain certainly would be would be targets and to london as well they had only seven or six at that time ballistic ballistic missiles that could theoretically reach the united states so i'm pretty sure that in case of the nuclear confrontation the the soviet response heavier response would be again an attack attack of the us nato allies turkey as well given of course the jupiter missiles were there okay someone else asked uh what were the reactions from other warsaw pact countries to the soviet withdrawal from cuba e.g poland and uh czechoslovakia and the other soviet countries well um one thing that we know that it depended really on the relations that the east european countries had with the soviet union the the romanians for one were quite critical i quote in my book memoirs of the romanian security chief who was the the leaders romanian leaders were talking about extremely hectic uh behavior on part of khrushchev they were of course building bridges at that time with china so they were quite critical in terms of the rest everyone was terrified like we were terrified the closest advisers and and and members of khrushchev's politburo but they they kept silent that they really couldn't say to khrushchev they couldn't say to the soviets they couldn't say publicly what they felt about that but the attitude was very very critical we have the reports of the czechoslovak delegation and other delegations who visit moscow soon after the resolution of the crisis right and what they report on is actually khrushchev spending almost hours trying to sell to them they cuban crisis and resolution of the cuban crisis as a great success for communism and his personal great success and that is that is very clear that he felt that he had to get engaged in that in that exercise that the attitude was critical okay hey um i have uh we need to wrap up now but i have one last question for you um uh you know this was said to be the most dangerous uh moment in history um what do you think of the situation we're living in today um is it a more or less dangerous world than it was back in 1962 if you could be quite succinct about that well uh i uh i certainly thought about that and i i discussed that degree possible in the introduction and conclusions my uh feeling is that we are really in a world which resembles very much the pre-1962 world what i mean by saying that pre-1962 this is the world of this kind of a wild nuclear arms race uncontrolled nuclear arms race which creates the crisis with crucial trying to regress this balance between between churchill referred to that as balance of terror so the balance of turn was not there krishna was trying to to create that balance and then after the cuban missile crisis the the first traitors are signed and that is the uh partial uh test ban treaty then before the end of the decade before the end of the 1960s there is a non-proliferation treaty and then salt or two and finally agreements between reagan and bush on the one hand and gorbachev at the very end of the war now we live in the world where every last every single agreement arms control agreement with the exception of the partial ban treaty which became complete ban treaty all of those treaties are gone the last one signed by um gorbachev and reagan in 1987 on the intermediate missiles expired in 2018 expired because two sides the united states and russia left it there are a number of other agreements but generally we are back in the new nuclear arms race which is not regulated that means we are in pre-cuba cuba situations another cuban missile crisis can fortunately unfortunately and not only with the soviet union but with north korea iran possibly iran many other countries china of course i mean there are many more countries that have become nuclear that are now nuclear than there were back in 1962 which was relatively absolute absolutely more more drivers on that nuclear driveway than it was the case in 1960 or 1960 right well thank you sergey for sharing um these uh your very interesting book with us and i think all uh authors about the cuban missile crisis can agree that there are lots of lessons to be learned from it so i urge people to go out and buy this book and read it and you'll find many uh interesting parallels uh uh and lessons for today thank you very much sahih and thank you very much michael and thank you very much to the national archives for hosting this event you

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Published: Thu Apr 15 2021