Gambling with armageddon: Nuclear roulette from hiroshima to the cuban missile crisis, 1945-1962

The United Nations, for example, played a far greater role in the crisis than either the United States or the Soviet governments were willing to acknowledge. It provided a global forum that forced the superpowers to proceed more cautiously, and to explain their policies on a world stage. And offstage, UN Secretary General U Thant played a critical role as both mediator and moderator. It is sobering to contemplate that if the United Nations had not existed, the crisis might not have ended without violence.

In a recent war game 7 million kilotons of nuclear explosives had been detonated. Anticipating the concept of nuclear winter by decades, Cutler worried that “the effect of any such exchange is quite incalculable. No one knows what the concentrated explosion of 7,000,000 KTs involving nuclear material would do [to] the weather, to crop cycles, to human reproduction, to the population of all areas of the world….It is possible that life on the planet might be extinguished.”

The politics of national security always touched a sensitive administration nerve, but Keating’s charges, presented so brazenly in the run-up to the 1962 midterm elections, had struck Bundy as political huckstering.

The clarity of Stevenson’s response on Tuesday, and the focus of his memorandum on Wednesday, October 17, was the vital role that world opinion would play once the crisis became public. Dealing every day with 109 UN ambassadors made him particularly alert to the role that credibility played in international affairs.

president’s shift away from the air strike option during the next fortyeight hours suggests that Adlai’s strong and early advocacy of “explor[ing] the possibilities of a peaceful solution” provided Kennedy with a blueprint to do exactly that. In fact, Stevenson’s suggestions of October 16 and 17 were congruent with nearly all the steps that the president followed in resolving the crisis.

It further encouraged the president to ask the JCS for their views on three issues: (1) an advance warning to Khrushchev; (2) the necessity of follow-up sorties to an initial “surgical” attack; and (3) the possibilities of a commando-type raid by parachute or helicopter.

intolerable, and an effort to remove them by bombing missiles, or even SAM sites, airfields, and other military targets (plans I, II, and III) was inadequate. Eisenhower believed, McCone stated, “that it should be an all-out military action.” Still the general in outlook, he recommended going “right to the jugular.” Attack Havana directly and take out the government.

“Why are you so concerned with saving their lives?” he famously responded at a Rand Corporation briefing on counterforce. … “The whole idea is to kill the bastards,” and added: “Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.”

However, on Wednesday, October 24, at 10:00 a.m., as the quarantine commenced, General Power advanced SAC’s forces to DEFCON 2, one condition short of nuclear war, the first and only time that level of nuclear alert has been instituted.

Tellingly, he neglected to mention the most important “known”—the one that led the George W. Bush administration astray, namely, the things that we know, but don’t know are false.

It goes without saying that in the event of an invasion we would have had nuclear war.

Harried but blustering, Khrushchev cited Lenin’s actions during World War I to explain (and justify) his exit strategy. In March 1918 Lenin had agreed to surrender Russian territory for peace with Germany. The treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been a retreat, but it had saved Bolshevism. “Our interests dictated that decision—we had to save Soviet power. Now we found ourselves face to face with the danger of war and of nuclear catastrophe, with the possible result of destroying the human race,” Khrushchev said. “To save the world,” it was necessary to follow Lenin’s example.

In other words, what became the alternative history of the crisis— invading Cuba—was the one that would have unfolded if President Kennedy had not insisted on the blockade, and if Khrushchev had not accepted Kennedy’s public pledge never to invade Cuba, along with his secret commitment to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey.