Short History Of... - The Cuban Missile Crisis, Part 1 of 2

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

In October 1962, three men – Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro – hold the fate of the planet in their hands. A dispute over Soviet missiles in Cuba spirals out of control. Officials in the USA and the USSR prepare for a war that would end life on Earth as we know it. How exactly did it come to this? And just how close will the world come to nuclear Armageddon? This is a Short History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Part 1. Written by Joel Duddell. With thanks to Philip Brenner, Professor Emeritus at the American University School of International Service. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's October the 27th, 1962. An American naval destroyer, the USS Beale, chugs through the Caribbean Sea just off the coast of Cuba. Down below, deep beneath the surface, a Soviet B-59 submarine navigates the tropical waters. Both vessels are beyond the Red Line. They've broken the perimeter that marks the quarantine area recently put in place around the island. But while the US destroyer is allowed to be here, the Soviet sub most certainly isn't. It's carrying a torpedo. a nuclear-tipped torpedo. This device has the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb,

and the commander is mere minutes away from giving the order to fire. My name is Paul McGann, and welcome to Short History Of, the show that transports you back in time to witness history's most incredible moments and remarkable people. In this episode, we're in Cuba in the early 1960s, as a confrontation over missiles brings the world closer to nuclear war than any other crisis before or since. From Noisa Podcasts, this is a short history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Part 1.

On board the submarine, it's brutally, blisteringly hot. These vessels were built with Arctic waters in mind. This is the Caribbean Sea. The onboard cooling systems are failing. It's so sweltering, the crew cast off their uniforms, going about their work dripping with sweat in their underwear. Then, the explosions begin. in their underwear.

Then, the explosions begin. The standard operating procedure in the Navy was when you're in the vicinity of an enemy submarine, you try to get it to surface so that you can then attack it, or at least neutralize it. And so a naval commander started dropping depth charges, essentially huge drums filled with TNT, And so a naval commander started dropping depth charges, essentially huge drums filled with TNT, to bring up these submarines. The Americans aren't trying to destroy the target.

Rather, they're trying to force it to come to the surface. But on board the sub, it feels like the end is nigh. The engine room temperatures had gone up to 50 degrees Celsius and they were essentially going crazy. And all of a sudden, one of these depth charges lands near submarine and the commander describes this as being inside of a drum, an enormous sledgehammer being knocked against the side of the submarine. And it went, bong, bong. He literally went crazy. And he orders the nuclear engineer to arm the nuclear torpedoes that the submarine

was carrying. And he wants to fire these nuclear torpedoes at a U.S. destroyer. And he shouts, I don't know what's going on up there. I don't know if World War III has started, but I'll be damned if I'm going to die without taking down some of their boats. Looking back, we can hit pause here to take in the full terrifying might of what would have happened

had the commander gotten his way. With the nuclear torpedo armed, the B-59 fires upon the USS Randolph, a giant aircraft carrier leading the US Naval Task Force. America takes this act of aggression as their cue to unleash the full might of their atomic arsenal, with Moscow in their crosshairs. With their capital engulfed in a mushroom cloud,

the USSR returns fire with nuclear attacks on American troops stationed in the UK and Germany. They follow this with a wave of bombs dropped on civilians. More than half of the UK's population perishes. With much of Europe leveled, a new phase of the conflict begins, as the United States itself, having witnessed the apocalyptic demise of its closest allies, squares up against what is left of the Soviet Union. This is the most probable course of events, as the Soviet commander gives the order to arm the submarine's torpedo. It falls to one man to stop him. Vasily Arkhipov is the second-in-command on board the nuclear sub. Somehow keeping his cool in the punishing heat, he steps in and tries to reason with his commander.

The second-in-command, realizing what would happen if the Soviets had launched a nuclear bomb. Imagine nuclear bomb destroying two or three U.S. destroyers. That also could have triggered World War III. He gets the guy to step down and calm down. But you could also imagine that the commander of the sub might have pulled out a pistol and said, that's mutiny, and shoots the second in command and goes ahead and fires the nuclear torpedo. Arkhipov prevails, just. Its commander talked down, the submarine rises to the surface.

It begins the long slog back to the Soviet Union, its perilous cargo intact. to the Soviet Union, its perilous cargo intact. One man's nerve has prevented all-out nuclear war. As we'll see in the course of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there are numerous instances like this, moments where life hangs in the balance, with humankind betting everything on the choice of a single individual, or finding itself at the mercy of pure luck. How and why did it come to this? Let's find out. January the 19th, 1961. Snow falls on Washington, D.C., as the nation prepares to swear in its 35th president. John Fitzgerald Kennedy's time in the White House will end in less than three years' time.

He will be assassinated in November 1963. Short-lived as it is, his tenure will go down as one of the most high-stakes and headline-grabbing of any president in U.S. history. In particular, his administration will be swept up in a crisis on a scale that few, if any, presidents before or since have ever had to face. At noon the next day, Kennedy steps up to the podium to deliver his inaugural address. The snow has desisted, but it's still extremely cold. The depths of midwinter. Even on day one of his presidency, John F. Kennedy acknowledges that the nuclear world is an extraordinarily dangerous place.

In his inauguration speech, nestled amidst the optimism, is a very different, a very chilling message. Reflecting on America's journey, Kennedy is clear how much the country has developed since the Declaration of Independence. Developed for good and for ill. The world is very different now, for man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. The Cuban Missile Crisis will be known as the October Crisis in Cuba. So called because there have been so many crises involving the US, they were marked out by the month in which they happened, rather than the location.

But this particular situation is not just one in a long list of nearly moments. It is the nearly moment. To begin to understand the missile crisis, you have to understand the key individuals involved, their backgrounds, their foibles, their insecurities. Firstly, Kennedy. Philip Brenner is an expert in U.S.-Cuba relations and professor emeritus at American University School of International Service. John Kennedy had been a member of Congress and then a senator and was the youngest person

elected president of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt was younger when he became president, but John Kennedy was the youngest elected president. His father was one of the richest men in the United States at the time and had been ambassador to England at the start of World War II. Kennedy was seen as a lightweight. Though he had been on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was more treated as a playboy, because in fact he was a playboy. Becoming president seemed to be something that was inappropriate for such a young man of so little accomplishment. The Democratic Party, at this moment in time, is widely viewed by the voters as weak on defense. Kennedy saw plenty of action in the Pacific theater of World War II.

Through his political career, he's been at pains to stress that he is tough when it comes to military matters. The desire to maintain a hard-headed reputation will inform Kennedy's thinking throughout the crisis to come. Kennedy only beat Nixon to the White House by 200,000 votes in 1960. He's wary of letting things slip, especially on defense. In his first year in office, Kennedy makes a series of speeches on the world stage, seeking to rally international opinion behind America. On September 25, 1961, he addresses the United Nations. For in the development of this organization

rests the only true alternative to war, and war appeals no longer as a rational alternative. Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer concern the great powers alone. For a nuclear disaster spread by wind and

water and fear could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind." Far away in Moscow, Kennedy's Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, at first glance at least, could hardly seem more different as a person and as a politician. So Kennedy comes into office with this self-image of not being deserving, actually, of this very young guy, relative speaking, he was 43 years old, and someone who had to prove his defense credentials. Khrushchev was old enough to be Kennedy's father.

He was another generation older. And he had fought in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and then had survived the various party purges by Stalin and had worked his way up through the party hierarchy khrushchev has been first secretary of the Communist Party since 1956. while JFK is young up and coming lean with a full head of hair khrushchev is wider set balding long in the tooth, but vastly experienced as a political operator. One of these men is leader of the Soviet Union, the foremost communist in the world. The other is the guardian of the capitalist West.

But for all their differences, the two leaders are subject to certain similar pressures. Like Kennedy, Khrushchev is under intense pressure to appear tough and uncompromising on the world stage. So the pressures on Khrushchev to not be pushed around by the United States and the Soviet leadership generally believed the United States was acting aggressively around the world. These two great powers, bastions of the global East and West, are locked in a new kind of war, a Cold War. Historians debate the origins of the Cold War. The United States didn't recognize the Soviet Union as a country until 1933. The United States kept troops in the Soviet Union after World War I in order to support the white Russians fighting against the Bolsheviks until the end of 1919. But more traditional historians date the Cold War to 1945. And even before the end of World War II, there were tensions

between the United States and the Soviet Union over what was going to happen after the war. In 1946, Winston Churchill talks about an iron curtain. He's the first to use the expression. That's come down between the East and the West in Europe. And that, in some sense, defines the start of the Cold War. And that, in some sense, defines the start of the Cold War. In the final days of World War II, as the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one conflict ended and another began.

Humans are now capable of wreaking upon each other destruction on an unimaginable scale. And it's not just the initial devastation that these bombs bring, killing hundreds of thousands and annihilating entire cities in the blasts. It's the long-term horror that unfolds after the mushroom cloud subsides, the burns, the radiation sickness, the lack of safe food and water, the psychological scars. The lack of safe food and water.

The psychological scars. The explosion of the atomic bomb is now understood to be caused by the rationale less to end World War II and get the Japanese to surrender than it was to get the Soviets away from gaining any control over territories in East Asia. So we wanted the war to end to keep them out, and also to scare them. It was a signal to the Soviets that the United States would be ready to use nuclear weapons. And it was understood in the Soviet Union as a threat. In the years after 1945, as both East and West scrambled to assemble an arsenal of nuclear arms, the power of this technology just grows and grows.

By 1949, both the US and the Soviet Union have successfully developed nuclear weapons. At this point, if one side was to fire on the other, it would spark a tit-for-tat conflict that would level not just cities, but entire nations, entire continents. Nukes have become weapons that cannot actually be used, at least if humanity is to have any meaningful future. President Kennedy famously said the living would envy the dead. I talked to a Soviet general who was the last commander of the Warsaw Pact. We were standing next to a mock-up of the nuclear warhead that was on the missiles in Cuba. It was a large object. I mean, it extended for probably 50 meters. I said to him, tell me about these. And he said, these were so destructive that we

only needed nine of them to completely flatten the United States. And at the height of the Cold War, we had 10,000. He said, we were crazy. We were crazy. So by the early 1960s, this power struggle between East and West, this Cold War, has become first and foremost a war of perceptions rather than actions. One of the crazy things about the Cold War was that it was a war of perceptions. And this is largely because of the nuclear bomb. The nuclear bomb is a weapon you can't use because it will set off destruction of humankind. And so each side has to get the other to believe they would be willing to use. This is called credibility. And so protecting your credibility becomes the essence of each side's

strategy during the Cold War. Ultimately, to maintain the idea that they would be willing to use the nuclear bomb, which everyone felt was an horrific weapon, how could a human being kill so many other people? Given that you want the other side not to use it also, you have to create this impression you would use it. And so credibility becomes the basic strategy of the Cold War. But while Kennedy and Khrushchev may have no desire to actually use nuclear weapons, that's not to say it will never happen.

At a certain point, to convince someone that you would do something, you might have to actually do the thing. The Cold War is often painted as an arm wrestle between the Americans and the Soviets. East vs West, Capitalism vs Communism, Kennedy vs Khrushchev. Indeed at the time many in the United States view Communism as a single, indivisible entity. China, Vietnam, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, all are bent to the will of the Soviet leadership, so the thinking goes. But it's not always that simple.

In some places, the Cold War takes on a more nuanced form. One such place is the Caribbean nation of Cuba. By the early 1960s, the island is led by a young, bearded, cigar-smoking man in military fatigues. After Khrushchev and Kennedy, he will be the third key player in the story of the missile crisis. He is the revolutionary Fidel Castro. After overthrowing the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista, Castro himself now rules Cuba with an iron fist.

Castro was a little younger than Kennedy, and he was a revolutionary who had been in the upper middle class in Cuba in the late 1940s, and then ran for the Congress in Cuba in 1952, when Batista essentially canceled the election and took over military rule. Castro then organized a group of rebels to overthrow the Batista government. The pressure on Castro was first to begin to develop this country, which was per capita measures, one of the richest countries in Latin America, but had enormously unequal distribution of wealth and resources. And when he began to make moves to get out of the U.S. orbit, the United States quickly shut down on him. So he was feeling pressure how to achieve the goals of

his revolution surviving, and at the same same time helped to build it up. Castro is in his element, the scourge of America and the Pied Piper of revolutions across Latin America. In January 1961, Kennedy's predecessor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba. But while Castro is a leftist, at this stage he's not technically a communist. In Moscow, things move slowly. Power is wielded by staid committees. A vast bureaucracy controls life for the millions of citizens enclosed behind the Iron Curtain. Stability is what is desired. Castro, by contrast, is defined entirely by revolution.

In both Washington and Moscow, he is seen as a wrecking ball, a destabilizing figure. Che Guevara and other revolutionary leaders begins to organize the government so that by 1960 they're getting into difficulty with the United States because they've expropriated some property from the United States. And he is seen as an anti-American demagogue. He was very fiery, and he was actually anti-communist. The Communist Party opposed his group, which was called the July 26th Movement. And so he actually distrusted and disliked communists.

From the Soviet perspective, they had looked at the Cuban Revolution as an oddball kind of thing. This was not a communist revolution. This was an adventurous, young rebel. And they tended not to favor those kinds of people. And so they had actually given very little support to Cuba. But an event is about to occur that will turn Cuba into a key global player and a vital new ally for the Soviet Union.

On April 15, 1961, eight aircraft take off from the Central American country of Nicaragua, bound northeast. They appear to be Cuban Air Force planes. Their tails have been daubed with the colors of Castro's flag, blue and white stripes, with a white star centered on a red triangle. In actual fact, these planes are defunct World War II bombers from the United States. They have been disguised and

dispatched by the CIA. Their mission is to attack Cuba and catalyze the overthrow of Castro's government. The bombers arrive in Cuban airspace. In their crosshairs are military installations, Cuban Air Force bases. They loose off their explosives and miss their targets. Well, some find their mark. But as the bombers splutter back out across the Caribbean Sea, the military installations behind them are still, for the most part, intact. This will prove crucial for what is to come. To the Cubans on the ground, looking at these enemy aircraft and to the watching international

media, the paint job is not enough to disguise the fact that these are CIA planes. Embarrassed by this failure, President Kennedy feels he has no option but to cancel a second planned airstrike. In so doing, he is reneging on a deal and leaving his allies in the lurch. On April 17th, Brigade 2506 lands at Beaches along a stretch of coast known as the Bay of Pigs. This brigade is comprised of anti-Castro Cubans, exiles who'd fled to the United States, and are now returning, with US government backing, to take back their homeland from the revolutionaries.

But as they debark onto home soil and begin to make their way inland, the brigade immediately comes under heavy fire from Castro's militias. With US air support pulled back, the exiles are in trouble already. To add to their woes, heavy rainfall has saturated their equipment, and their ammunition reserves are insufficient. Sensing momentum has swiftly swung his way, Castro dispatches 20,000 troops to the beachfront. John F. Kennedy was not the original architect of the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion, but it has fallen to him to oversee it.

He'd originally learned of the scheme during a CIA briefing, prior to his inauguration as president. The plan, as Kennedy inherited it, was for the CIA to train a group of Cuban exiles hostile to Castro's regime and ready them for an assault on power in Havana. The thinking was that an alternative provisional government could be established, thus displacing the left-wingers in power. President Eisenhower had given this mission the green light back in March 1960. And now, it's the new president's job to see it through. Word of the planned beach assault had spread in whispers and snatched conversation through Miami's population of Cuban expatriates. Castro's intelligence agents, embedded in this

community, had passed word back to their boss. As a result, Castro has had ample time to prepare both his military response and his newspaper headlines. The Bay of Pigs will be looked back on as a farce, a huge embarrassment for the United States and their young president, as well as an enormous strategic victory and PR boon for Fidel Castro. 1,200 members of Brigade 2506 are forced to surrender. Castro will hold them to ransom, using them to extract some particular commodities that Cuba needs.

The exiles' freedom will cost the United States $53 million worth of baby food and medicine. America has been forced to retreat, tail between its legs. But this is the beginning, not the end. And Castro knows it. It was a failure. Castro led military forces against them

and they were defeated in less than 72 hours. From Kennedy's perspective, that made him seem even weaker. Here, his first military activity, and it's a failure. And from the Cuban perspective, that seemed like Kennedy would not give up. And they saw the Bay of Pigs as the first strike in what was likely to be a war with the United States,

the most powerful country in the world. 6,000 miles from the Cuban capital, Havana. In Moscow, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, watches on. Pouring himself a vodka, he savors the kick of the first sip and allows himself a wry smile. Many in the USSR, Khrushchev included, have had serious doubts about Castro's regime. There's plenty of suspicion towards this almost but not quite communist government.

Plenty of skepticism too about whether the new Cuba will fit with Soviet aspirations for the region. But now, after the Bay of Pigs, maybe, just maybe, this radical experiment in Cuba will survive. Perhaps Kennedy's humiliation is the chance the Soviets have been waiting for, to turn the Cold War decisively their way. For Khrushchev now, the key thing is to get a proper read on the man he's dealing with. The key thing is to get a proper read on the man he's dealing with. He wants to weigh up Kennedy and make a judgment as to his character, his temperament, and just how far he can be pushed. Luckily for the man in Moscow, the perfect occasion is about to arrive.

In June 1961, President Kennedy arrives in Europe, in the Austrian capital, Vienna, for his first and only summit with the Soviet premier. Nuclear testing and disarmament. Look to Vienna as the President of the United States arrives. I went to Vienna to meet the leader of the Soviet Union, Mr. Khrushchev. Mr. Khrushchev and I had a very full and frank exchange of views on the major issues that now divide our two countries. This meeting has come barely six weeks after the Bay of Pigs calamity. Many of Kennedy's most trusted advisers, including Llewellyn Thompson, soon to be a key figure in the story, strongly advised the president against it.

Their exuberant leader has, they feel, underestimated the steel that lies behind Khrushchev's disarming smile. Their concerns will prove to be well-founded. Speaking to a journalist, Kennedy will later describe the summit as the worst thing in my life. He savaged me. As we get closer to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev have a famous summit in Vienna. And Kennedy wants to show Khrushchev that he is tough, that he is deserving to be the leader of the United States. And he enters into a debate with

Khrushchev on the merits of communism versus capitalism. And he comes back after that debate to the house he was staying in, and he tells his aides, I think I lost that debate with Khrushchev. He thinks I'm a lightweight. And so it reinforced in Kennedy's mind that Khrushchev believed that Kennedy was not a substantial adversary, which meant that Kennedy would have to prove his mettle against Khrushchev in some other prove his mettle against Khrushchev in some other way. In fact, Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that he came to respect Kennedy very much in that debate. And so it was the opposite of what Kennedy perceived, but Kennedy's perception led to what he was going to do later. Kennedy didn't come to Vienna to debate the pros and cons of Marxism, but that's what

he's ended up doing, and Khrushchev is delighted. At one point in the discussion, Kennedy accepts that the US and the Soviet Union are equals on the world stage, in terms of the amount of power and influence that they yield. This may seem like an innocuous concession, but in fact it is music to Khrushchev's ears. He's used to dealing with US presidents and officials who treat the USSR like an inferior enemy, not a strategic rival of equal standing. Khrushchev may be a man of advancing years, but his vigor, his aggression, catches Kennedy off guard. His aggression catches Kennedy off guard.

As the two leaders depart the summit, both of them know full well that the scoreboard reads, One-nothing to Khrushchev. John Kennedy has only been president for eight months, but already when it comes to the Cold War, he cuts a somewhat beleaguered figure. The Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit, and now in September of 1961, the creation of a new global grouping called the Non-Aligned Movement. The next month, September of 1961,

25 countries get together and create the Non-Aligned Movement. So this was an expression of third world solidarity, saying we don't want to be dominated by either the Soviet Union or the United States. And the United States saw this as a very real threat, because from the perspective of the United States, the world was divided into what we call zero sum. If you think about a piece of pie, or pie as a whole, and you have part of the pie and I have part of the pie, any part of the pie that I get has to come from your portion.

Any part of the pie you get has to come from my portion. That's called zero sum. And we believe that if you were not with the United States, you were non-aligned neutral, you were actually against us. You had no choice. You were either with us or against us. There was no room for neutrals. And the United States demanded that no country in the Western Hemisphere join the non-aligned movement, except one country did, and that was Cuba. The Third World is a new battleground in the Cold War.

If the Bay of Pigs made Washington and Moscow really sit up and take notice of Cuba, now they can't take their eyes off the Caribbean. For Kennedy, the mounting pressure leads to a significant decision. To overthrow the revolutionary Cuban government once and for all. America might have toyed with this idea before, enabling the Cuban exiles and flirting with economic sanctions. Now it seems there is no turning back. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy decides he needs to overthrow the Cuban government.

This is now a thorn in his side in the Western Hemisphere. It's undermining the credibility of the United States as the leader of the Western Hemisphere. It's a country that is neutral nominally in the Cold War and is somewhat antagonistic to the United States. So it's the loss of U.S. credibility as the dominant player in the Western Hemisphere. That's the concern, not so much communism. And so Kennedy decides we have to get rid of this Cuban regime.

Operation Mongoose will be the largest CIA operation ever undertaken up to this point. It will become the template for many other covert regime change operations that the United States will lead throughout the Third World. Operation Mongoose is a four-point plan. One was regular covert action, subversive activities, where the United States would go in and attempt to blow up factories, railroad stations, electric towers. They poisoned sugar that was waiting on the dock to be exported. They killed local leaders. Part two is an economic embargo, essentially a way of cutting Cuba off from much of the rest of the world.

So an informal embargo begins in 1960 when the United States cuts off buying sugar from Cuba. But the formal embargo, which continues today, gets put in place in February of 1962 as a way of essentially destroying the Cuban economy. Think about the fact that Cuba had 85% of its trade with the United States. So all of its machinery, all of its cars, all of its buses, trucks were U.S. And in order to buy spare parts for these things so that they'd break down, you had to buy it from the United States. So if there's an embargo, you can't buy spare parts. And there was no market any longer.

Cuba couldn't sell things to the United States or buy things like oil. And so this was a major effort to overthrow the Cuban regime. Parts three and four comprise political and military pressure. In January of 1962, the U.S. has Cuba suspended from the Organization of American States. This is followed by tub-thumping military exercises in the region. The most famous of these was a military exercise of 20,000 seamen that attacked an island off the coast of Puerto Rico in a mock exercise. The island is actually Vieques, but they named the island in this exercise Ortsac,

O-R-T-S-A-C, which is Castro spelled backwards. And the Cubans got the message that the United States was preparing for an invasion of Cuba. Covert missions will begin to assassinate Castro and other Cuban leaders. Castro will later comment, if surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, then I would win the gold medal. He will dodge an incredible 638 attempts on his life. Some of these are scarcely believable. Colorfully painted conch shells, filled with TNT,

will be dropped into the waters surrounding the Hilton Havana, where Castro and his harem of women live. He'll receive a brand new wetsuit from a secret admirer, with a rare fungus sewn into the material, designed to give him a chronic skin disease. A former girlfriend will attempt to take him out with a tub of cold cream loaded with poison. All of these attempts will fail. But before long, in financial terms at least, Castro is feeling the pinch.

As the Cuban economy begins to grind to a halt, the revolutionary strongman turns to the only man he believes can help him, the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Castro wants to become a member of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet equivalent of NATO. But from Khrushchev's position, this would then obligate the Soviets to come to Cuba's aid, where they attacked. It would tie the two nations together. Khrushchev wants more flexibility than that. So in lieu of packed membership, he offers Castro something rather different. Missiles.

Missiles are the currency of the Cold War, the means by which each side weighs itself against the opponent. The missile gap has become the key barometer of progress. Before coming to office, JFK had believed that the gap favoured the Soviet Union. He'd campaigned on the theme that President Eisenhower dropped the ball in allowing the enemy to pull ahead. But once in office, the Democrats were surprised to find that the complete in allowing the enemy to pull ahead. But once in office, the Democrats were surprised to find that the complete opposite was the case. On October the 23rd, 1961, Roswell Gilpatrick, the Deputy Secretary of Defense,

gives a speech that sends a chill down the spine of Khrushchev and his team. And now Gilpatrick, in October of 1961, announces, well, in fact, the United States is way ahead of the Soviet Union in terms of not only warheads that we had. We had 500 nuclear warheads, and they had 50. Not only were we way ahead of them, but we had more abilities to launch an attack because we had intercontinental ballistic missiles, we had long-range bombers, and we had nuclear submarines. And he said, but you know what? The missile gap is actually in our favor.

We're going to be building up even more. We're going to be so tough that you'll see how powerful we are. Remember, it's all about perceptions now. It's not so much about guns, ships, tanks, planes. It's about deterrents, threats, proxy conflicts, red lines. It's about demonstrating your power to the world but holding back from unleashing Armageddon. It's about missile tests which paint a picture for your enemy, showing them what to expect if they push you too far. It falls to the Soviet Union to return serve.

Both sides have been exploding nuclear bombs in the far-flung regions of their respective territories. Just days after the Roswell speech, one particular Soviet missile test stuns American observers. On October 30, 1961, the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed is set off far out in the icy depths of the Russian Arctic Sea. The Tsar Bomba, as this device is known, is so powerful, some genuinely fear its detonation threatens the health of the planet itself. They explode the largest hydrogen bomb that had ever been exploded in history. Before or since, 50 megatons.

It was so large that some people thought it might even set the Earth's atmosphere on fire. So it was 50 times bigger than the warheads being sent to Cuba, which was 50 times bigger than the warhead that destroyed Hiroshima. We're talking about a bomb that is unimaginable. And they exploded. If you can get missiles within striking distance of your enemy's home territory, even if you have no real desire to actually use them, then that changes the terms of the game. America already has Jupiter ballistic missiles positioned in Italy and Turkey, pointing straight at the Soviet Union. As it stands, in the event of all-out war, the US could likely destroy much of the USSR before the Soviets could even react.

In addition, since Kennedy launched the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose, it's no great secret that the United States is working night and day to topple Castro. From a Soviet perspective, what kind of damage would that do to the morale and confidence of would-be left-wing revolutionaries the world over? Castro has proven that he is able to resist US military and political pressure to no small degree. From Khrushchev's point of view, Cuba's relative strength and its desire for an allyship has created a crucial tactical opening. If the Soviets can get missiles into Cuba, then in the war of perceptions, they will hold the upper hand, or at least even out the balance of power. It changed the ability of the Soviet Union to respond to a U.S. threat.

In the jargon of these people, they talk about first strikes and second strike. A first strike is an aggressive move where you hit first. A second strike is the ability to strike back after you've been hit. The idea is that if you don't have that ability, then you're vulnerable to a first strike by the other side because the other side won't be deterred from waging

war against you. The Soviets had medium-range missiles that could hit both China or Europe in a defensive manner, but they did not have the long-range missiles sufficient to attack the United States, that's to say, sufficient to act as a deterrent against the United States directly. And so the only way they could have done this is by increasing the number of long-range missiles they had or moving their short-range missiles closer to the United States. And Cuba was that kind of platform. And these were on ballistic missiles that could hit cities on the east coast of the

United States all the way up to New York within a matter of eight minutes after they were fired. And certainly enough to destroy New York, Washington, all of the east coast and further west as well, New Orleans, the major infrastructure of the United States east of the Mississippi. And so for one thing, that was seen as a threat because the Soviets had never done anything like this before. All their missiles were housed inside the Soviet Union. On top of that, the presence of Soviet military hardware in the Caribbean will, they believe, strengthen the Communists' hand thousands of miles across the Atlantic in Europe.

Since August 1961, the German city of Berlin has been riven in two by the Berlin War. The Cold War in Europe is a story for another day, but, in short, Berlin is now two cities, a communist and a capitalist one. East points towards Moscow, West towards Washington. The struggle for control of Berlin has become a mighty symbolic battle for hearts and minds in Europe. For President Kennedy and his advisers,

and for many who share their ideals, West Berlin is a beacon of light, surrounded on all sides by the communist territory of the GDR, the East German state. America's entire Cold War credibility, they feel, rests upon protecting West Berlin. In August 1961, the Soviets put up the Berlin Wall, which becomes a symbol of the Cold War. In the West, it was treated as a horrendous activity, stopping these people who wanted freedom from going into West Germany. And it became another crisis for Kennedy. They

believed that actually the Soviets might be willing to bargain away these missiles in return for the United States to give up Berlin. And now Berlin had become a kind of symbol of U.S. willingness to defend Europe in the face of alleged Soviet aggression. And so if the Soviets got the United States to give up Berlin and let East Germany take it over, this would be seen as a major loss for the United States. And so the reasoning on the part of U.S. officials was the Soviets wanted a bargaining chip, and this would be a great bargaining chip putting missiles in Cuba. Under pressure from his generals, Khrushchev accepts the notion of planting missiles in Cuba. You might wonder why Castro is so acquiescent in this Soviet scheme. Surely this puts a massive target on Cuba's back,

setting them on a collision course with the world's most powerful military. Well, from where Castro's standing, a full-blown US invasion of Cuba seems only a matter of time away. The presence of Soviet military hardware, however, might just dissuade the Americans from taking that fateful step. It's a calculated risk. But how to go about doing it? How to get the missiles set up? Some feel that the USSR should do it brazenly. Cuba is a sovereign state and has a right to defend itself. Castro wants these missiles. Under international law, surely, he's allowed them. Khrushchev is far more cautious.

He's wary of provoking the US unnecessarily. He prefers a more covert plan. He wants to sneak the weapons into Cuba. That would present Kennedy with a fait accompli. The missiles are here. Now you can't do anything about it. Imagine, Khrushchev says, if we pull this off, we can announce the missile's presence in Cuba on the 45th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.

How about that for symbolism? A huge foreign policy victory, presented to our people on the proudest day in our calendar. Fidel Castro is unconvinced. No matter how the Soviets spin it, he knows the United States will view this as a sneaky move, as going behind their back. Castro even sends his brother, Raul, to the Soviet Union in person to demand that Khrushchev makes the missile plan public.

After consulting with his advisors, Khrushchev sticks to his guns, or rather his missiles. The team tells him that the missiles can be hidden, obscured from any surveillance by the dense palm tree forests in Cuba. Well, palm trees don't grow in dense forests. And Khrushchev didn't understand this. And so he was misled by his own people into thinking he could hide it from the United States. It's late July 1962. A group of Soviet ships makes its way through the azure summer waters of the Caribbean.

On board are materials to construct military bases, as well as component parts of missiles, ready to be assembled when the ships make land. But watching on as this convoy approaches Cuba, you'd never guess what cargo the vessels are carrying. The missile components, the parts for the base, start arriving in late July. Soviet soldiers are decked out in Hawaiian shirts, going on seeming a vacation to Cuba

when in fact they were carrying missiles. But at this stage, Kennedy and his advisers do not believe that any significant offensive weapons have arrived on the island. And any missiles that are there, they say, are purely defensive ones. Even as word of the weapons's arrival filters out of Havana and across the sea to Miami, U.S. policymakers hold firm to their initial mistaken assumption. Word gets out by some Cuban that, in fact, the Soviets are putting in missiles,

huge missiles. People describe these large missiles on flatbed trucks going in small country roads. Because every Cuban exile who came to the United States was interviewed by intelligence agencies to find out what was going on. And the CIA calculated that, in fact, these stories were not accurate because they had been hearing the same stories since 1959. And now they were hearing them again. It's because of this false assumption

that Kennedy makes one of his most significant missteps in his handling of the brewing crisis he's been coming under a lot of pressure from military Hawks in Congress and the Senate because he believes that Cuba does not yet have offensive missiles Kennedy is happy to draw a red line. It's a red line that will come back to haunt him. Senator Keating, a New York senator, believed these stories, and he started making speeches attacking the Kennedy administration for not protecting the United States. Again, this idea that Democrats aren't good on defense. And so in response to Keating's speeches, Kennedy, on September 4th, 1962, gives a press conference where he announces that he will not allow any missiles, any offensive missiles, meaning ballistic missiles, to be brought to Cuba.

They could bring surface-to-air missiles, which are wholly defensive, but they could not bring any offensive missiles to Cuba. Zero. Nada. Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy's chief counsel and speechwriter, said years later that had he thought the missiles were being actually brought there, Kennedy would have said something like, no more than 50. I won't allow any more than 50 offensive missiles because he did not want a confrontation with Khrushchev. But he was told by the CIA that, in fact, there were none, because the CIA didn't believe these reports. You can imagine, then, the sinking feeling the CIA analysts feel in their stomachs

when, on October the 15th, they realize that the missiles are in fact in situ. American U-2 reconnaissance flights have been circulating Cuban airspace, photographing any suspicious locations on the ground. On the 15th, as the analysts gather round to scrutinize the latest batch of images, they discern the unmistakable outline of a missile base. They now have photo evidence of likely medium-range missiles being installed. There is no knowing at this stage whether or not these missiles are atomic weapons. The images offer no clear evidence of nuclear warheads. But clearly, these are offensive ballistic missiles.

McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor, is informed that evening about the discovery, and he decides not to tell Kennedy on the 15th. He said it was because he knew the next day would be very tough, and he wanted Kennedy to get a good night's sleep. More likely, Kennedy had some paramour over at the White House, a lady of the night, and McGeorge Bundy didn't want to disturb Kennedy under those circumstances. The news is broken to the president at 9 a.m. the next day, October the 16th. After the shadow boxing and gamesmanship of the preceding months, things are suddenly very, very real. The Cuban Missile Crisis is well and truly underway.

Tune in next week for the second and final part of the Cuban Missile Crisis story.