Hot Havana nights

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Michael Dobbs.  One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the brink of nuclear war.  Alfred A. Knopf. 2008.  426 pages.

In the Cold War, the most famous eyeball-to-eyeball showdown was the American naval blockade in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.  This fame, of course, is circumstantial evidence that no eyeball-to-eyeball showdown occurred.  Michael Dobbs of The Washington Post provided the evidence.  Unlike prior historians, he charted the paths of the two Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles with a 2,800-mile range to Cuba, 90 miles south of Florida.  On the day following President John Kennedy’s televised ultimatum, the Kimovsk and the Yuri Gagarin reversed course more than 500 miles east of the blockade, at the behest of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. 

Believing that a confrontation was minutes away, the secretary of state in Washington, Dean Rusk, had observed, “we’re eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked.”  One hates to eviscerate a great quote like that, so no one did.  In the best-known account of the crisis, Thirteen days, Kennedy’s brother wrote that U.S. and Soviet ships had come within a few miles of each other.  John Stuart Mill would not have been surprised by the mass addiction to error: The tales that no one disputes, he wrote in 1859, are the ones most apt to be myths.

Dobbs, more interested in facts than in theories, may subscribe to a few urban legends himself.  He writes that the crisis did not erupt into war, because both leaders were prudent though ill-informed.  “[Their] initial reactions…had been bellicose.  Kennedy had favored an air strike; Khrushchev thought seriously about giving his commanders on Cuba authority to use nuclear weapons.  After much agonizing, both were now determined to find a way out that would not involve armed conflict.  The problem was that it was practically impossible for them to communicate frankly with one another.  Each knew very little about the intentions and motivations of the other side, and tended to assume the worst.  Messages took half a day to deliver….Once set in motion, the machinery of war quickly acquired its own logic and momentum.”

MAD math

I think that Kennedy and Khrushchev had the vital facts.  For each, the question was whether to launch missiles.  Suppose that Kennedy concluded that whether or not the USSR launched, the best American option was to attack.  Also suppose that Khrushchev concluded that whether or not the U.S. launched, the best Soviet option was to attack.  Then both leaders would have attacked, even though both would have preferred a joint peace.  Even had they spent all day on the telephone, reassuring one another of their commitment to peace, this would not have changed the logic of immediate attack. 

In reality, neither leader struck because it was neither’s best option.  An all-out assault would have left the rival with scores or hundreds of nukes to launch.  The certainty of retaliation deterred attack.  MAD worked.

Dobbs makes clear that Kennedy understood this irony.  When the Pentagon told him that one Soviet missile could kill 600,000 Americans, he noted that this would be more deadly than even the Civil War.  “As he later acknowledged, the 24 intermediate-range Soviet missiles in Cuba constituted ‘a substantial deterrent to me.’  He had privately concluded that nuclear weapons were ‘only good for deterring.’  He thought it ‘insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.’” 

That last sentence is a non sequitur.  What is truly disturbing – if not insane – is that a man sitting in Central Asia today can plant a dirty bomb in New York City without fear of an instant and proportionate retaliation. –Leon Taylor, tayloralmaty@gmail.com

Note

A few days after Kennedy’s TV speech, the spaceport in Kazakhstan, Baikonur, prepared to launch a missile to a U.S. metropolis like Chicago, Dobbs reported.  The only rocket available was the antiquated R-7, which had boosted Sputnik.  In October 1960, a more advanced rocket, the R-16, blew up on the launch pad, killing 126.  How another explosion, this time with a nuclear warhead of 2.8 megatons, might have affected the Baikonur environs is, fortunately, a question that never had to be answered, since the rocket was never launched.           

             

Good reading

Mill, John Stuart.  On liberty.  1859.  On line.

Schelling, Thomas C.  Arms and influence.  Yale University Press.  2008.  Readable game theory.

References

Robert F. Kennedy.  Thirteen days: A memoir of the Cuban missile crisis.  W. W. Norton.  1969.