AMERICA: Dramatic events that unfolded over 13 days in 1962 took the world to the brink of disaster
AS DINO BRUGIONI and two fellow photographic analysts studied the grainy black-and-white images in a nondescript building in downtown Washington half a century ago, they realised the gravity of what they were seeing: a medium-range ballistic missile site in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, with the potential to strike the US capital.
“I was answering phones, but I also got down on my knees and prayed,” Brugioni, now 90, told the Washington Post.
In the hottest episode of the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union flirted with a nuclear war that might have killed 200 million people. The Cuban missile crisis lasted 13 days, from October 16th, 1962, when President John F Kennedy was informed of the missiles’ deployment, until October 28th, when the Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev announced he was crating the weapons up and shipping them back to Russia.
Kennedy came under intense pressure from military advisers and Congress to bomb or invade Cuba. “We’re either a first-class power or we’re not,” the Senate majority leader Richard Russell told him. The president waited six days to tell the American public that he was putting Cuba under “quarantine” to prevent the delivery of further missiles.
Kennedy cautioned his speechwriter Ted Sorensen to remember he was “announcing a blockade – not Armageddon!”
But in California, Kennedy’s admission that the world teetered on “the abyss of destruction” struck panic in the heart of my recently widowed mother. She decided to take her four children to Santiago, Chile, where she thought we’d be safe. Had my half-brother’s father not refused to sign documents allowing him to leave the country, I would probably be working in Spanish.
In my earliest childhood memories, Jean consumed large amounts of coffee and chain-smoked against a permanent background of radio newscasts. We sought instructions on how to survive a missile strike from the local civil defence office. Mom ordered a pre-fabricated metal shelter which was lowered into a hole in our back garden. A flight of stairs led down to our bunker, which was stocked with bottled water and tinned food.
We children would have preferred a swimming pool, but we made the best of the bomb shelter, transforming it into a pretend airplane or submarine. Jean channelled her anxiety into study of the Book of Revelation.
My father’s death, talk of radiation sickness and Mom’s belief that a lake of fire was about to consume the sinners of the world stamped my childhood with a sense of impending doom. Thirty-five years later, I was strangely moved, at a ceremony in the Elysée Palace marking a treaty between Nato and Russia, to be told that future generations would not live under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.
Back in October 1962, both sides prepared for conflict. The US evacuated women and children from Guantánamo. Bombers were diverted to civilian airports and put on “red alert”. US intercontinental ballistic missiles were primed for launch, while Russian technicians worked by the light of flares to ready missile sites whose existence the Soviets still denied.
Kennedy’s UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson showed those grainy black-and-white photographs to the world body. US aircraft buzzed the missile sites from 700ft in the air every two hours. Kennedy had five million leaflets printed in Spanish, explaining why the US was invading Cuba.
At the peak of the crisis on October 27th, the US lost two U2 reconnaissance planes, one over Cuba, the other over Russia. A US warship aimed depth charges at a Soviet submarine, which nearly fired its nuclear torpedoes. In the words of one historian, the US warned the Soviets that their superior fire power would transform the USSR “into a radioactive heap of rubbish within 30 minutes”.
Staff in the Soviet embassy allegedly burned documents, a last step before war. Dino Brugioni called his wife and told her to be ready to jump into the car and break for Missouri.
Three days earlier, secretary of state Dean Rusk had uttered the most famous quote of the crisis: “We’re eyeball-to-eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.” In US popular mythology, a Soviet warship turned around just short of the blockade line. In reality, Krushchev had recalled his ships the previous day.
But the myth of a bold US president staring down the Soviets prevailed. In 2002, George W Bush claimed JFK was the father of his pre-emptive war doctrine. Republican candidate Mitt Romney peddles a similar line – that if you walk tall and wield a big stick, the other side will cave in. Only last month, the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, pleading for action against Iran, told the UN General Assembly that “President Kennedy set a red line during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Contrary to the myth of brinkmanship and confrontation, historians now say, it was secret negotiations between JFK’s brother Bobby and the Soviet ambassador that defused the crisis. Krushchev agreed to remove the weapons in exchange for a public US promise not to invade Cuba and a secret commitment to dismantle US Jupiter missiles that threatened Russia from Turkey. Kennedy probably would have rejected that deal at the beginning of the crisis. But, by October 28th, it was far more appealing than nuclear war.
Fidel Castro (86) is the only one of the chief protagonists still living. Krushchev’s son Sergei is a US citizen employed by Brown University. This week, he and Caroline Kennedy commemorated the 50th anniversary together in Boston.
