Relentless: JFK on Cuba - Putin on Ukraine

This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

On Oct. 6, President Joe Biden warned:

"First time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use (of a) nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going. I'm trying to figure out what is Putin's off ramp?"

Biden did well to cite the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and compare it to the 2022 crisis in Ukraine. The analogy is apt; whether the President understands the important implications is not so clear. Suffice it to say that in each case, one major power saw an existential threat and was willing to risk nuclear war to thwart it.

Cuba

Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev's took a gamble 60 years ago when the Soviet Union secretly deployed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, catching U.S. Intelligence by surprise. The following paragraph is from One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, page 217. (The authors add that the US was "unaware of the Soviet freighter's cargo.")

"The first shipment of nuclear warheads, on the Soviet freighter Indigirka, reached Mariel, Cuba on October 4, 1962. On board were 45 one-megaton warheads for the R-12s [MRBMs], twelve 2-kiloton warheads for the Luna [short-range] tactical weapons, six 12-kiloton bombs for the IL-28 bombers and thirty-six 12-kiloton warheads for the cruise missiles [to defend Cuban shores]. In sum, the ship carried the equivalent of roughly 45,500 kilotons of TNT, over twenty times the explosive power that was dropped by Allied bombers on Germany in all of the Second World War."

On the evening of October 15, the day after a U-2 reconnaissance mission over Cuba, President Kennedy's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy was briefed on the findings, including two 70-foot-long MRBMs at San Cristobal. Bundy briefed the President the next morning, and Kennedy convened the first "ExComm" meeting that day.

Damage to the reputation of CIA analysts, who had failed to predict Khrushchev's dangerous move, was somewhat attenuated by Arthur Lundahl, head of the CIA's National Photographic Intelligence Center (NPIC), who briefed the President and the rest of ExComm.

Again, from One Hell of a Gamble:

Kennedy wanted to be sure:

"How do you know this is a medium-range ballistic missile?"

"The length, sir," Lundahl explained.

"Is it ready to be fired?"

None of the president's advisers could tell him with any confidence whether the nuclear missiles were armed. At the time, Washington did not know that some were already armed. That was learned only decades later at a conference to mark the 30th anniversary of the missile crisis, when a Soviet general revealed the presence of Soviet tactical missiles then in Cuba. Among the conference participants was former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara who, upon hearing the Soviet general's admission, "had to hold onto a table to steady himself".

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).