American History Hit - What if the Cuban Missile Crisis Sparked WW3?

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

On October 22 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced that Soviet missiles has been discovered in Cuba. Over the following days, the fate of the Americas was on the line.In this episode, Don is joined once again by Renata Keller to explore the causes and events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to discuss what might have happened had the situation not been resolved.Renata's new book 'The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War' shows how this was not just a Soviet-US event. She explores how leaders and citizens throughout South America, the area at most risk from nuclear missiles, impacted on the events of October 1962.Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. 15 meters below the surface, diffuse rays of sunlight dance in the water. In the far distance, a shape approaches.

It glides forth, emerging, vast, dark, imposing, a silhouetted mammoth in the dim mineral blue. Moments later, we see. It's a massive craft with a towering sail of a submarine. Nearly 300 feet long, this is one of four Soviet Foxtrot-class subs deployed to these waters in support of Fidel Castro's Cuba and Soviet operations against its Cold War adversary, the United States. Each vessel, the B4, B36, B-130, and B-59 carries in its arsenal a single nuclear-tipped torpedo. Designed for stealth, these subs can remain submerged and unseen for up to five days. In October

1962, this flotilla of four submarines will become one of history's most infamous patrols here in the cobalt depths of the Caribbean on the brink of a crisis poised to become World War III. It's American history hit, and I'm Don Wildman. In October 1962, the world stood on the brink of its own destruction.

For 13 hand-wringing days, the United States and the Soviet Union faced each other down, two nuclear superpowers locked in a standoff that could have annihilated the planet. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a story that has been told and retold through countless books, films, and endless analysis. But nearly every time it's through the American lens. But the crisis was, in fact, a hemispheric one. It wasn't just Moscow and Washington.

At its very center was Cuba, of course, an island in the Caribbean, part of a vast web of nations across Central and South America that would have likely borne the shock and devastation of nuclear destruction had diplomacy fallen short. A brand new book from our guest today offers up this other vantage point. It's called The Fate of the Americas, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Hemisphereic Cold War. It walks us through those dramatic days in 1962, but shifts the narrative to the other Americas and allows us to ask the broader question of what would have happened to the world. Had the U.S. and Soviets not found their narrow escape. Renata Keller has joined us before on the pod. She's an associate

professor at the University of Nevada Reno. Welcome again, professor, and congratulations on the book. Hi, Don. Thank you so much for having me. The Cuban Missile Crisis, closest we've ever come to nuclear Armageddon, which, let's face it, we're still poised to create even today, which is why this is such a relevant and remarkable tale. Let's get the basics down. Castro's revolution happens in 1959, and ever since that time, I'm speaking in the context of then, the U.S. has attempted to overthrow his regime. We've had the Bay of Pigs invasion, CIA attempts on his life. But on October 22nd, 1962, JFK announces that the Soviet missiles have been discovered on Cuban soil, and that's when the crisis begins. Can you take us through the events as they unfolded from there?

Sure. I'd be happy to. So you mentioned the Bay of Pigs invasion, and that was where I would usually start this story, either with the Cuban Revolution or the Bay of Pigs. And so you get this very important revolution that sparks controversy in the United States and across the Americas. And you get the Bay of Pigs. The domino theory is happening right now, right in our front yard, yes. Yeah, the worries that other countries would fall to communism. So the United States was worried about that. And so we're the other countries in the Americas, or at least the leaders of the other countries. And so the United States collaborates with a few other Central American leaders. to organize the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.

And that fails narrowly. And the Qudans are able to defend themselves with the help of Soviet weaponry, not nuclear weaponry at that point, but significant Soviet weaponry tanks and stuff like that. And then that sends the message that the United States and neighboring countries are not going to tolerate the Cuban Revolution and Castro's government. And Khrushchev decides to offer new. nuclear weapons in the spring of 1962, and Castro decides to accept them because they both believe

that the Cuban Revolution is under attack. So Khrushchev insists on delivering the weapons secretly, and his idea is that once everything is set up, he'll make this big announcement to the world. It'll be a fate accompli, and the United States won't people to do anything. But as Castro predicted, the United States does discover the weapons while they're being delivered. And so in October, There had been reports about weapons, but in October, there's a U-2 flight that delivers the first definitive proof that medium-range and intermediate range ballistic missiles are being delivered to Cuba with nuclear warheads. And that sets off this almost a week-long discussion within the White House of what to do about the nuclear weapons, whether to have an airstrike on the bases to wipe them out before they're complete, whether to invade the island, get rid of Castro so they can't hide weapons and get new ones, or what they eventually decided to do, which was to set up a blockade that they called a quarantine,

which was they set up a quarantine of ships around the island demanding that the Soviets stopped delivering weapons and that they remove the ones that were already on the island. And that's, you mentioned, October 22nd. That was when JFK gave his speech to the world, announcing that there were Soviet weapons, nuclear weapons. It doesn't get more dramatic than that. And, you know, the older I get, to realize there are younger people, you know, who are born long after me who are learning these stories. And oh, my Lord, it still has the incredible drama that it always has. It never diminishes. Let's stop there, you know, before we find out what happens. I want to ask myself,

you know, everything I know is this classic story that I have seen in bad movies. Some good movies. You know, like, it's just been told a lot. But the fact of your book is that your book reveals is that our understanding has been so myopic. Tell me how you approach that thinking. Why do you think that was necessary? I think it's necessary because it reminds us that what the United States does doesn't just affect the United States. And that what any of us do doesn't just affect our own lives or our own families or even our own countries, that we're all connected.

And so I wanted to see how people across Latin America participated in and were affected by the missile crisis. I started by looking at Mexico because my first book was on Mexico. And I was so surprised by what I learned about Mexico that I decided to look at the rest of Latin America took a while. It's a big place. But I learned that there was a wide variety of ways that Latin Americans helped cause the crisis and that people across the region participated in it. and that they were affected by it in a number of ways. And so it was really different than the story in the U.S. And so in the story in the U.S., everyone backs up Kennedy, right, and says, like,

we support our president and he's doing the right thing. And then they're also all panicking and, you know, stockpiling groceries and canned food and stocking up their shelters. But that's not what happened in Latin America. In Latin America, there were huge protests. There was sabotage. there were people saying that, no, we shouldn't be attacking Castro. He has every right to defend himself.

And so you get these big debates within Latin America, both between countries and within countries. There are 200 million South Americans within reach of these missiles, never mind the effect of whatever happens, you know, of course. Obviously, Cuba is in the crosshairs of all of this. They are, as you say, anticipating an invasion, if not worse. But other Latin America states are drawn in as well. Can you explain how Cuba is positioned in the matrix of Latin America at this time?

Sure. So Cuba is right in the middle of things, right? It's in the Caribbean basin. So these missiles, like you said, can reach almost everywhere in Latin America. And at the time, Cuba was having a lot of conflicts with other Latin American countries and trying to overthrow various other Latin American governments. And so it was plausible that some of the missiles could be directed towards Latin America, especially very attractive targets like the Panama Canal. which could have severely disrupted U.S. defense and Latin American defense. And so this was a big deal for Latin American countries, the fact that they were close enough to Cuba, but also that they had their own conflicts with Cuba. Wow, interesting. So they would have viewed this as a proxy, a communist proxy against them. Was that true of Mexico? I'm curious.

Mexico had a special relationship with Cuba. So Mexico probably would not have been targeted by Castro because Mexico was one of the few countries that was defending Castro's government and still maintained relations with Cuba. So Mexico probably wouldn't have been targeted. But if the United States had been targeted, Mexico certainly would have felt, you know, the radiation poisoning, the nuclear winter, all of the effects. So it wasn't like Mexico could have dodged anything if nuclear war had happened, even though they weren't a direct target.

And we're talking about the big war. I mean, it's one thing to have tactical. weapons in Cuba, which were very dangerous to a certain degree. But the point is, had those been fired or really the standoff was about a Soviet and American exchange of ICBMs and all of that stuff and everybody's going to suffer. But the South Americans have their own view of all of this, which is what's so interesting. The president of Mexico and the president of Brazil send their own messages to Castro, right? They do. Yeah. So Mexico, because of its special relationship, Mexico's president reaches out to Cuba's president, Oswalto Dorticos, and he says, please give up the missiles.

You know, we can help you. He's treating the Cubans as equal members in this negotiation. And he's saying, you know, because of our special ties, we are speaking directly to you. We want you to give up the missiles. You are in control of this situation. And his reaction? D'Articose was not in control of this situation. But they also, Castro also ignores that message. And he also ignores the Brazilian message that was along similar lines, but the Brazilian message was secretly planted by the United States. And so the Brazilians sent this envoy to Castro,

who was supposed to be very quiet and hush, hush, but the Brazilians made a big deal out of it, and were very public about it, although they hid the U.S. participation. And their message was similar. They were asking the Cubans to give up the weapons. They were saying, this can help smooth your way to better relations in the hemisphere. You know, this, this is within your power to resolve the situation when actually their envoy doesn't arrive in time. He arrives after Khrushchev takes back the missiles, but it also is not a particularly successful mission. And I want to be clear with the audience, this is all happening after JFK's announcement, because the world doesn't know anything until that happens. So we're talking about everything, you know, all those 13 days is what's happening.

It's 13 days in Central and South America at the same time as it is in America. It's the same time as it is in America, for sure. It sparks marches in Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica. I mean, the whole bunch, Ecuador, Chile, everybody is marching in the streets for different reasons, I suppose, depending on the country. Yes, exactly. And even within countries, you can get marches arguing different goals. And so some of these marches are peace marches saying we need to find a peaceful resolution. Some of them are pro-quarantine and saying we need to get the nuclear weapon out of here and communism out of here. And some of the marches are saying, no, Castro should be allowed to defend himself. And this is an issue of sovereignty in the United States is impeding

on Latin American sovereignty and our ability to make our own decisions on the world stage. And then some of them devolve into riots when they clash, when they happen on the same time in the same place. In Bolivia, for example, right? Yeah, exactly. Five people died in Bolivia, which I was shocked when I found out because, you know, we always think of the Cuban Missal crisis as a near-miss, but one or two people dying. You know, there's the U.S. pilot, but actually five Bolivians died. More Bolivians than Cubans died. It's an interesting lens to look out. I mean, we've just recorded an episode about the CIA work in Central America during this time in the 50s, in Guatemala, of course, famously, and all sorts of stories that are coming to light at that time about how America is manipulative. these governments and so forth. So when you introduce the fact of nuclear warfare, it's really lights the powder cake, doesn't it, of all of this controversy that's been stewing for years?

Exactly. And it leads a lot of Latin Americans to say, why are you doing this? It's not on our behalf. We're the ones whose lives are at risk. Speaking to who? Speaking to their own national leaders, a lot of people were upset that their national leaders were supporting the quarantine and even joining the They're saying, why are we sacrificing or risking our lives for the benefit of the United States who's pushing us toward nuclear war? Yeah, exactly. It's exposing all the flax, the seams of these societies, political and otherwise. These nations also use this as leverage to impact their international powers. Take us through that.

I mean, there are this big anti-imperialistic quality to this, et cetera. There is. So some nations use it to improve. their relations with the United States. Argentina is a great example. Before the missile crisis, Argentina had had very little military cooperation with the United States. But then as soon as a crisis happens,

the Argentines are like competing with each other, at least within the armed forces to see, you know, is it going to be the Air Force? Is it going to be the Navy? Is it going to be the Army? Who's going to be most involved in the quarantine and getting the missiles? And that paves the way for much closer U.S. relations

with Argentine's armed forces, which then seized power in 1966 four years after the missile crisis. Wow, interesting. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Talk about the leaders who supported, like within these different countries, you have specific leaders who are really very charizmatically involved in this situation, right? Yeah, so some examples would be on the one hand, you get Samosa in Nicaragua, who's kind of leading the charge against Castro and sees this as an opportunity to finally get rid of Castro.

He says, I mean, this is clearly a red line that he's crossed. Now we're going to invade, right, again, and finish the job. And then on the other hand, you have Joao Goulor in Brazil who's trying to walk this fine line between like, you know, obviously we will support the quarantine, but we are not going to participate in it. We are going to fight for peace. we are absolutely not going to support an invasion of Cuba. They actually abstain from that part of the organization of American States' resolution. And so they supported the one establishing the quarantine, but they made sure to say,

we will not support any invasion or attack against Cuba. And so you get a really wide range of responses, even within among Latin America's leaders, not even getting into the public, but even among the leaders, you get a wide range of responses. What's so surprising is this is only two weeks. I mean, 13 days. So much is happening within that framework. I mean, understandably, this is a huge crisis. But all of that, it's a clue as to how much it was under, you know, right under the surface that was just waiting to come out. And once this happens, boom, here we are. It becomes big news in many different regards. Let's talk about the international organizations. Now, we live in a world at this time, early 60s, where the U.S. has been created in late 1940s. There's all kinds of the OAS is happening, you know, all kinds of organizations that have to, you know, now account for this major crisis. How does that play out?

So the international organizations are really important in laying the groundwork for a peaceful resolution. The organization of American states is the one that Kennedy turns to to establish the quarantine. And this makes it a legal, a legal act of hemispheric defense instead of a U.S. unilateral declaration of war, which is what they would have had to do if the OAS had not established the quarantine. And the fact that it was unanimous sent a really clear message to the rest of the world that this wasn't just a U.S. or Cuba issue or even just a U.S. and Soviet Union, but that the entire hemisphere rejected the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. And so that sent a really important message to everyone. And it helped lay the groundwork to

avoid war. And then the United Nations steps in. And the leader of the United Nations, Uthant, helps organize negotiations. He helps introduce Cuban aspects into the negotiations, even though the Cubans were formally excluded. He introduces Cuban proposals into the negotiations. And so he also helps include Cuba and he helps find ways to voice ideas that the leaders themselves of the three countries couldn't. The second appeal from Uttan to Khrushchev is actually a proposal made by Kennedy, right? Yeah. So he's using the UN as a mouthpiece.

Exactly, yes. The Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Kachar are all using the UN as a way to put forward proposals that might be embarrassing for them to make, but that they wanted out there. on the table. No, it's so interesting. When was it at its worst? I mean, when did we not truly know when this was going to turn one way or the other, when that button might have been pushed? The closest was October 27th, Saturday. People who studied the muscle crisis, call it Black Saturday. That was the day that various things happened. A lot of things happened on that day. Khrushchev sent a new message to Kennedy, upping, upping his demands. And that sent the White House and the

excom into this like frenzy of like what is going on in the kremlin who are we even talking to at this point and then they get the news that that the cubans and the soviets are opening fire on their flights up until that point reconnaissance flights had been allowed to fly over cuba without being shot at um but then fast show opens he opens the door he says he tells his men you can shoot at the low level flights and he encourages the soviets to shoot at the upper level flights, the U-2s. And the Soviets, there's a break in the chain of command, and they end up shooting down a U-S. U-2 flight. And when Kennedy learns about that, he thinks, well, I guess they've decided war, right? Like, that's a clear indication. The pilot is killed, right? Yeah, the pilot's

killed. Rudolph Anderson is killed. And the White House is concluding, well, I guess the Soviets are tired of negotiations. They're shooting down our flights. They don't know that there's been a break in the chain of command. And so they had already decided that if any of our flights get shot down, we will retaliate. And then Kennedy is forced to think, well, am I actually going to do that right away? And unbeknownst to them, they're also like dropping depth charges on a nuclear armed Soviet submarine that same day that came very close to shooting back with nuclear weapons. And so all of these things are happening on Black Saturday. And that's when Kennedy sends this public message. You know, not public, but like an official diplomatic correspondence to Khrushchev saying,

you're running out of time. Like, this is going to have to get resolved right now. And he decides that he's going to respond to the message Khrushchev sent on the 26th that didn't mention Turkey at all. The Hedgesa said, we will retrieve our missiles if you promise not to invade Cuba. And Kennedy decides to take that offer. Right. And he also sends his brother to negotiate directly with a Soviet envoy to say that you are running

at a time. It's 12 to 24 hours before we're going to. to have to take action. This is often overlooked by people when they talk about the Cuban missile crisis, that it was a quid pro quo of, you know, don't send these things in or take these things out, but we'll also take our own missiles out of Turkey. So in a sense, Khrushchev does get something out of this. He does, but it's secret.

So that's what the things Robert Kennedy offers. This is we can't do this publicly. We have commitments to our NATO allies, but we don't want those missiles in there anyway. We don't care. We were trying to get rid of them earlier. So they will be gone soon, but we can't make this agreement public. Whenever we consider this crisis in the back of your mind is always the unthinkable. You know, what would have happened? It's the Dr. Strangelove scenario. Missals to every major city, military installations throughout the U.S. and Russia. But there's the broader effect throughout the whole Western Hemisphere.

What would have happened elsewhere? I mean, you can only speculate, but what do you think? Well, and that's what they were doing at the time. too. So I found a lot of newspaper articles in Columbia where people in Columbia were trying to calculate, you know, if the Panama Canal gets bombed, are we going to suffer radiation poisoning? Do we need to go to our shelters? Like, do we even have shelters? They didn't. And so that was another thing was that most people in Latin America did not have shelters. There weren't big public fallout shelters or anything like we had in the United States. And so they would have been much more exposed in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war or a nuclear attack. They didn't have anywhere

to take shelter. But that's just the immediate aftermath. They also would have been heavily exposed to radiation sickness and especially to nuclear winter. If it had, if enough material from an attack had gone into the upper atmosphere and caused global cooling, that would have killed crops everywhere. It would have caused famine. Latin Americans were particularly exposed to things like famine and famine-based illnesses like cholera. And so millions or hundreds of millions of people would have died not just in the United States, not just in the Soviet Union, but in Latin America and around the world. It amazes me every time we talk about this kind of thing, how we could have even created this scenario, you know, that we still teeter upon all the time.

obviously Cuba would have been invaded we would have just taken that place over I imagine if not destroyed it outright but as you mentioned there are military bases of course all over the places. Monro Doctrine World Panama, Puerto Rico down in South America scientists say it would take 10 minutes for a missile launched from Cuba to reach Bogota Columbia

that's a good example of how immediate this really was and how completely it would And then as you say, the environmental catastrophe, which is just a terror. Do you consider in your book how South America would have looked in the aftermath, politically speaking? I mean, this is the question. The aftermath of nuclear warfare, are there pockets of civilizations still left to reorganize? You know, I mean, how would South America have absorbed this and changed, do you think? There were people contemplating that.

They were trying to figure out, so would human civilization survive? There are some pretty racist articles where they're saying only the yellow race, like this nuclear war will only benefit Africa and China. But there were also some more serious people saying, you know, this is incredibly destabilizing. It's not just nuclear danger. It's not just environmental. It's economic. We're not going to have anyone to trade with if the United States disappears off the map. It's so absurd, isn't it?

I mean, when you get to that point, you're like, why are we even, how do we even absorb this? It's so insane, the blank slate that this causes, which is part of the reason we're still here talking about it, of course, because nobody ever wants this to happen. Did new voices emerge in Central America? And I'm talking even beyond the politics and culture itself as a result of this crisis. Did it shake things up to the very root of the cultures? It did. It showed, I think, it showed people that the Cold War wasn't somewhere else, that they were. all involved in the Cold War. It really brought them home. And it made them question their

understandings of their security. So it made them realize that they weren't secure in a world where there's nuclear weapons, where there's all this ideological warfare that Latin America was at the center of it. And so it really shook their foundations of how do you find safety? How do you pursue solidarity? And so a lot of people were saying that like, we're not going to get safety through nuclear weapons or through military alliances, we're going to find safety by working with our neighbors and pursuing peace. But they found out they weren't necessarily under the protection of the nuclear umbrella that the United States was perhaps offering.

Yeah, and they decided to get nuclear weapons out of the region. And so Latin America was the first world region to sign what they called the Treaty of Tuala de Loco, which established a nuclear weapons-free zone across Latin America. They said this was too close of a brush for us, and we do not want any more nuclear weapons in the region. So they were the first part of the world to do that. The read, your book is a very exciting read, and even the formatting is cool. It's a good read, and it unfolds like this does, you know, in a very interesting and unique way, but it's not the typical story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which so many of us are very, very familiar with.

Still important to read, still important to understand, but to understand it in the broader world context. is what you get from reading your book. Renata Keller is an associate professor at the University of Nevada Reno. She previously joined us to talk about the history between Mexico and the U.S. Episode 284. I love citing these specific episodes.

Google it up. Be sure to look for her new book, which we discussed today, The Fate of the Americas, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Hemispheric Cold War. Thank you so much, Renata. Nice to see you again.

You too. Always a pleasure. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements, to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on.

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