Cuba: Triumph or.Tragedy?
Hagan, Roger
The fan-magazine treatment of the handful of men in the President's kitchen cabinet who steered the nation through the crisis of the Cuban blockade has become embarrassing. Washington had already...
...The situation was not dependably • This argument is spelled out in Hagan and B. Bernstein, "The Military Value of Missiles in Cuba," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February, 1963...
...The United States contention, shared by its allies, has always been that its overseas bases were established solely in answer to Communist aggressive expansionism and at the request of the countries concerned...
...Once again the Organization of American States was to be a rubber stamp or else ignored...
...But one turns back to one's fellow countrymen and finds them neither able to perceive the world differently nor urged to do so, unquestioning of the causes and objects of their belligerence, unlikely to behave differently or more humanely in the future...
...Although the theater of retaliation was specified to beCuba in Kennedy's warnings, the decisions were assumed to be solely Russia's...
...Where were our academic friends...
...Given the American, and his, attitude toward the Castro regime, we can admire his attempt to place a defensive, non-provocative interpretation on the arms buildup which was proceeding all summer long, and feel sorry that his interpretation finally trapped him out on a limb...
...It was an exciting vicarious experience, and not one to be questioned...
...This falsehood was contradicted by official sources shortly thereafter, but the Stevenson affair obscured the contradictions which undermined the argument from military peril...
...This contemptuous attitude, so resoundingly reaffirmed in the Cuban crisis, betrays a deadly failure to anticipate even the immediate future, as if the details of the moment are all we can concentrate upon...
...Making a similar observation, Aviation Week called the missiles PRBM's—Political Range Ballistic Missiles...
...Our tough and localized behavior was precisely what counterforce makes possible for us...
...For the Russians, the operative terms may have been in the September 11 statement of the Soviet Government that it had such powerful rockets in Russia that there was "no need to search for sites for them beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union...
...our slow or negative responses to Khrushchev's soft initiatives and our quick belligerence at his hard ones, we can be glad the President took Khrushchev up on his curious, still-secret letter of Friday night even after the tougher one of Saturday had arrived...
...The relative weight given this risk is one of the alarming aspects of the Cuban affair...
...Yet we take steps neither to give her this community of interest nor to involve her in disarmament aggreements...
...The smallest strategic warhead carried by any of these means is a half megaton, and they range up to 20 or 30 megatons...
...The subsidiary weaponry, such as our tactical air bases and radar installations in Turkey, which current discussion pretended would somehow necessarily be lost if we gave up the fifteen Jupiter missiles in Turkey, and Soviet MIG's and anti-aircraft missiles in Cuba, might well remain by agreement...
...Every meeting of the OAS is used to isolate Castro and deny him the collective security provisions of its charter...
...It was consulted at all only because Ambassador Thompson urged developing a legal grounding...
...Each of the great powers would say that while this is so, it must be weighed against the destabilizing effects of placing such weapons near the borders of the great nuclear powers...
...Given the history of NOTE: This article will be part of a book about the blockade crisis by Roger Hagan and Bart Bernstein to be published by BalIantine this Spring...
...They are slow-fueling and unhardened, so they are useless for a second strike...
...The key argument that the missiles in Cuba seriously altered the strategic balance is, as we shall see, a dubious one to those familiar with the logistics of the matter...
...As suppliers and presumably owners of these weapons, Russia and America would have leverage to use, as well as compensations to offer, and non-invasion pledges might be exchanged...
...The closer one looks, the more disturbing it is...
...Was this all false in the same way our claim not to have sent a photo-reconnaissance U-2 over Russia had been false...
...Most accounts of the crisis weeks, therefore, simply carried on in the Photoplay tradition...
...At the time it seemed a serious risk...
...Analysis of the Cuban affair since the crisis has been mostly in terms of operational style and technique, seldom substance— except in the matter of Stevenson...
...The case for claiming deception in the Gromyko interview was far from clear...
...The question of legality was considered ex post facto...
...But it may be that, if other purposes had to be abandoned, he could still hold that the net effect would be positive, because withdrawal would give him the right to say "Look how reasonable I was, now at least give me something to take home to my people" when the discussion turned to Berlin or inspection later...
...righteous realpolitik is insufferable...
...It could be pointed out that nuclear weapons controlled too clearly by the great powers are dangerous to small host countries if they appear to make sense chiefly as part of the supplier's strategic force, because the host nation then becomes a prime target...
...We appear to be perpetuating the old system on the level of nationhood...
...Another major premise of the President's speech was that the Soviet minister had lied to him...
...We often say that "Kennedy's hands were tied," but one must ask: tied by what...
...Yet at the height of the crisis the Pentagon, or by some reports the White House, passed along, through the New York Times' trusting John Finney, an explanation for its concern about the missiles so obscure and confused as to give the impression that not only were we worried about losing our first strike capacity (and one of the headlines said precisely that, which must have given Marshal Malinovsky a new axe to wield over Khrushchev's head) but that we were even concerned that our retaliatory second strike would be reduced below the deterrent level...
...His greatness was the kind that sums up America while keeping it from tripping over its own feet...
...If that should be the case, we end having served no long-range pacific or legal goals, either externally or internally, and with our short-range victory turning bitter in our mouths...
...This could have been taken either of two ways (excluding the vague way most Americans interpreted it, as reaffirmation of some sort of bloodthirsty communist nihilism): that the Cubans intended offense, or that the Russians did...
...These could reach only Southern SAC bases most of whose planes would have been dispersed to hundreds of airfields at the first sign of tension anyway...
...This we have not been granted, and regardless of the urgency of the matter, the quality in question is apparently not to be called forth...
...But an understanding of the weapons' significance does effect the choice of means, and their rate of completion even at its worst hardly justified sudden unilateral action with any risk of immediate war, particularly action which to any extent left the choice, the way out, to the other side...
...All made the assumption that the Russian missiles were in Cuba against the will of most Cubans, solely as part of the Soviets' strategic network, and symbolized the enslavement of the Cuban people to an alien power...
...If he were host to the kind of force that could clearly play such a role—that is, a force much greater than what he had received—his entire island would certainly become a primary U. S. target, susceptible to complete destruction should Soviet rockets from any source in the world begin striking the U. S. In other words, if Castro thought that his island was being used to serve larger strategic purposes, he would have been a fool to accept the weapons...
...Coming on the heels of our righteous rage over Soviet deception in a diplomatic interview, the government's possible attempt to deceive the press and the Latin Americans at once, in this and other points, on the grounds that "news is a weapon," did not set well with the media...
...Where was Fulbright...
...the way the discussion in the National Security Council "executive committee" seemed to have been limited from the start to procedural questions, with no one asking whether unilateral action of any sort was appropriate...
...Furthermore, I for one am grateful to Robert Kennedy for saying that his brother would never be responsible for a Pearl Harbor...
...that the problems of nervousness, public pressure, misperception and the like must be given some weight...
...We have threatened the Cuban government and pretended that it exists only as a pawn of the Soviet Union...
...One doubts that it was to Rusk...
...The Russians, it seems, "had a feeling for 'legality...
...Three or four of the intermediate range (said to be 2200 mile) missiles were to have been completed by the end of the year...
...under American control...
...The stir over the second of these (containing the "Adlai wanted a Munich" charge) has led critics to ignore the first, which as an Administration apologia was actually the more important...
...President Kennedy has never taken back his pledge to rid the hemisphere of Castro and Communism...
...It has been a long time since a prize fighter thought he could overrule the referee, or a steelworkers' union a government injunction, on the basis of such a consideration...
...Furthermore, to have been assured at the time that the President's action was a safe and controllable measure, one must assume that, should the naval battle that could well have ensued have gone badly, the President would have had the freedom Khrushchev had to negotiate a settlement rather than try a bigger weapon...
...Between 30 and 40 medium range (said to be 1000 mile) missiles were installed or near completion...
...It was the argument of the demagogue, attempting not to explain but to cut off discussion by playing upon prejudice...
...Again the convinced are reconvinced, and the juggernaut hurtles on...
...the way we chose to handle it will prove to be more vicious than an open cynicism...
...Some analysts have gone so far as to suggest that he wanted things to happen precisely as they did, that withdrawal would make him look more interested in peace than thoughness and would restore negotiability to matters that had arrived at impasse...
...The crisis was passed and Cuba was still there, perhaps safer than ever...
...Kennedy spoke of medium-range missiles with a range of 1000 nautical miles and of bases for intermediaterange missiles capable of striking as far north as Hudson's Bay and as far South as Lima-2200 nautical miles, by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's count...
...the discussion was never to the point, neither during nor after the crisis...
...Guatemala may fall to revolutionaries within months...
...Joseph Alsop had made the same comment the day before, warning that, if things proceeded as they were, we might be able to get off "only" fifty warheads at the Russians, and assuming that this would not deter them...
...Instead we throw other societies out of our community, which we define ever more exclusively as Western "have" nations, strengthening both China's parochial hatreds and her influence...
...One of the strongest and probably most heartfelt things Castro and Guevara used to say to the peasants was that under the old system they had not been treated as men, sovereign and responsible...
...Who questions the premises of Ben Hur...
...Reasons and Reasons The official explanations of the situation disclosed the extent to which the entire justification for risking war had come to rest on shoddy and misleading argumentation...
...Certainly there is some pretense involved in treating Castro's Cuba as a stable autonomous society with a legitimated power structure...
...War was possible, one must recall...
...Regardless of what one makes of them, they would be an added impetus to the arms race and a possible cause of accidental war...
...These and others linger on as the celebration of our courage and good fortune dies away: the indictment of our political system inherent in the suspicion, despite all one's charity toward the President and his counsellors, that had Khrushchev been able to delay disclosure of his missiles until after the elections, we might have been willing to take the matter before the United Nations rather than acting unilaterally...
...Furthermore, if one can distinguish between strategists and • Newsweek of November 12 suggested that there was "some evidence that—deliberately or not—the reach of the missile threat was exaggerated...
...This is carrying things a bit far...
...Once again the U. N. was seen as useful only as a cover for an invasion or strong action taken unilaterally by the United States, to be bypassed if it could not so serve...
...Later, U Thant's effort to introduce arbitration techniques as the crisis was reaching its most dangerous point was seen by Washington only as an inhibition to its thrust...
...We, however, have no such sacramental event to count upon to cleanse the Soviet leadership of its sins, before we must begin discussing with it the thousands of matters demanding each its quantum of respect and good faith...
...The entire discussion had roughly the dignity of the use of the word "nigger...
...There would be some justification for ignoring Castro's probable purpose in the fact that the Russians showed no intention of turning the missiles over to Castro and laying themselves open to a war started by Cubans...
...If one looks at the missiles solely in their way, they were worth trying to get out of Cuba...
...It now appears that this has been the position of the ascendent theoretician Mikhail Suslov as well...
...It is not greater and is probably less than the pretense in treating Formosa, South Viet Nam, South Korea, or Bulgaria as such...
...But there is another kind of greatness that might have been evoked: that which not only epitomizes the weaknesses, strengths, and internal conflicts of a society but finds a new resolution for them, to carry the society beyond itself to a higher level of perception...
...But it is disturbing that he had to say it...
...The idea that Castro might make this type of threat with his island surrounded by Polaris-bearing submarines, or with even one U. S. missile aimed at Havana ready to punish such folly, seemed somehow credible to them...
...There is nonetheless something questionable about an attempt to discredit a major representative of Soviet leadership with an internally weak charge for the purpose of developing a righteous rage among the American people...
...The question is, can we afford to grant them...
...This has strong meaning to any socialist in a country where there are large numbers of exploited poor...
...Fidel himself cannot have believed that the missiles were to be simply part of the Soviet force, unless he sees himself and all his people as a Kamikaze pilot for the Soviet Union...
...He is probably the only person in Washington who does not have to wait and see which way the wind blows before he speaks his mind...
...The results were depressing...
...have come away from the nightmare of the last two weeks with a bitter recollection of what they regard as Soviet duplicity," wrote Max Frankel in the New York Times "News of the Week" for November 4. "They respect and are grateful for Premier Khrushchev's prudence in the face of disaster, but they are not likely again to think him incapable of the lowest punch in the cold war...
...Hagan and Bernstein, loc...
...The point is not that the National Security Council consciously contrived a false rationale while pursuing hidden purposes...
...It was hardly an elevation of public discourse...
...It can be said that the use of a naval blockade left the choice of whether or not to escalate the possible conflict partly to us, but this would have been so only if the Soviets chose to retaliate there...
...One cannot let this situation go without criticism, regardless of what one can realistically expect...
...Peasant riots were reported from Peru in November...
...President Kennedy and his most intimate advisors...
...Yet among the men in the top ranks of the Administration, none of them cheap politicians, there is probably not one who could separate out the several kinds of motive and say which most moved him or his chief into what history will probably record as a panic reaction...
...All this clouds one's thoughts of the future, but not so much as the fear, somewhat contradictory to the foregoing, that the Administration really believes the case it made for Russian evilness...
...or that the key men were ordered to have their bags packed for a quick trip to shelters in Maryland and elsewhere...
...If the real reason for our being disturbed over putting Soviet missiles in Cuba was that it constituted, as the first meeting of the National Security Council assumed, "a left hook designed to make Khrushchev look tougher when he comes at us in November, presumably on Berlin,"—and this would seem to be the best explanation for Khrushchev's part in the Soviet decision—then one would wish we might have argued the case on those grounds rather than cooking up the pretense that "offensive weapons" can be strictly so defined and spicing it with a mock rage about "deception...
...They were left to believe that the President endorsed the ignorant abuse of the Monroe Doctrine of Time and the Congress, and further that such unilateral declarations constitute international law...
...Thant asked Kennedy and Khrushchev on October 24 to suspend for two or three weeks both the blockade and the arms shipments while negotiations were held, and Khrushchev agreed...
...It may be that the prospect of losing fifty cities would not deter Joseph Alsop, but the Russians are something else...
...There is no reason to doubt that the Soviet leadership wanted to avoid a fuss in America about their missiles until after the latter were operational and the elections were over, and might resort to false leaks to keep one from developing...
...Righteous Realpolifik This is the first tragedy of the Cuban affair...
...These are far higher than previous military intelligence estimates for Soviet MRBM's (400 to 700 nautical miles) and IRBM's (1130 to 1300 nautical miles...
...It was American popular thought in a nutshell when he said that the worst thing we could do would be to do nothing...
...While the cautious moderates and occasionally corrupt reactionaries who now vote with us in the OAS may not be concerned about this, it is probably safe to say that in the Latin America of five years hence, there will be several countries led by men somewhere between moderate democratic socialism and Castroism...
...It should not be surprising that the Cubans have subsequently refused inspection and may be looking for ways to cheat on an agreement to which they were not a party...
...Nobody had told Adlai that the hardnosed look was the new style, so the poor fellow came wearing his old attire: nothing a quick trip to the tailor couldn't fix...
...One could argue that the buildup would continue, but the Alsop-McNamara view was that we could be vulnerable solely for those two or three early months until our missiles came in, after which our defense combination would be unbreakable...
...The President himself seemed afraid that he might indeed have committed himself not to invade...
...It has never been clear what good the missiles might have done to defend Turkey herself, since if Turkey were invaded and they were used in retaliation, the response would probably be against the U. S. and other lands harboring U. S. bases—which means that we probably would not have used them "first" (in retaliation for conventional armed aggression against Turkey alone) but only as part of a large, coordinated strike in response to a much larger act of aggression...
...Were we naked...
...This is far from certain...
...The first would have been somewhat cynical but at least honest...
...If the former, it was downright silly, as silly as the photographs of soldiers stringing barbed wire along the beaches of Key West...
...The result, of course, was that a lot of flimsy arguments were swallowed whole...
...This is the point Bulganin tried to make to NATO countries in 1957, with some effect...
...There are unquestionably some impressive aspects of the President's performance...
...However, we did not acknowledge this to be the case...
...Most Americans were quite ready to support an aggressive action for the sole purpose of not allowing Khrushchev to strengthen his hand for the Berlin negotiations, and it would have been possible for those who opposed the diplomacy of righteousness and unilateral action to have helped the nation measure the gains from this procedure against the gains from designing a response to promote international legality...
...In short, negotiations need not have weakened our alliances, and they might have served many far-sighted purposes, among which one of the most vital would have been to further the idea, so essential to whatever world order is possible, of the juridical equality of states...
...The contention that the missiles were offensive as part of Russia's strategic network, however, cannot be totally dispensed with...
...Dean Rusk won a large vote in the OAS for our blockade and possible invasion by saying that intermediate range missiles in Cuba could also reach Latin American capitals.* That he could do so, incidentally, illustrated how little the statesmen of most countries know about strategic theory...
...If Berlin and disarmament negotiations show as negative a yield, and the Chinese make their predictable gain among the incipient revolutionaries in the Southern Hemisphere vis-a-vis the Russians, we may find Khrushchev forced into adventurist behavior which will make the Cuban blockade not the last but the first of a series of crises on a new level of peril for the world...
...Emerging leaders in these countries see the United States now treating Cuba as if it were a society not making its own choices, not to be held responsible for its own acts...
...And the atmosphere of snapping nerves, which The Economist reported during the blockade, coninues...
...If the most intellectual Administration in our history did not do this, it is fully as disturbing as if it had done it well and acted solely from cynical arguments...
...Kennedy's reaction, while moderate, was within the American consensus...
...This looks suspiciously like the way the United States always treated Latin Americans...
...One wonders whether Pravda was reporting similar disillusionment among Soviet leaders after Khrushchev had trapped—or been trapped into trapping— President Eisenhower in the U-2 affair...
...A few weeks later, Stewart Alsop gave what was meant to be the official McNamara view of the matter in the first of his two controversial Saturday Evening Post articles...
...This smug answer was made on the Senate floor by Senator Sparkman (to Senator Chavez), in the Pentagon booklet written for the U. S. troops to qualm any possible misgivings about their imminent invasion duty, and in Hanson W. Baldwin's retrospective analysis (New York Times, November 7) of the "debate on U. S. bases": "The real measure of the overseas base therefore is its purpose...
...The improvement in our legal position was hardly impressive, however, particularly when weighed against the effects in the most dangerous areas of the future of continuing the country club approach to international affairs...
...The worst statements that Kennedy could attribute to Gromyko were that Soviet assistance to Cuba "pursued solely the purpose of contributing to the defense capabilities of Cuba," that "training by Soviet specialists of Cuban nationals in handling defensive armaments was by no means offensive," and that "if it were otherwise, the Soviet Government would never become involved in rendering such assistance...
...Senator Sparkman and most of his colleagues could hardly object to that reasoning...
...Would not the Cuba-Turkey deal have made the same mistake of treating these countries as less than sovereign...
...the mechanical way in which we applied the lesson of the U-2 incident, in which Khrushchev disclosed what he knew slowly enough to trap us in false excuses, to the October 18 meeting with Gromyko, so as to develop the pretext of deception for an action that had been decided upon before the deception was produced...
...Obviously he could not use them for anything less...
...It may have been part of the equation which produced the decision in Moscow, although probably not the part most important to Khrushchev...
...It is sobering to learn that the "Damage Assessment Center," a unit "crammed with computers and civilian experts and scattered through underground sites around Washington" and "designed to keep the President's nuclear balance sheet up to date, listing the targets destroyed and resources remaining for postattack operations," was put into full operation during the crisis...
...If we grant the existence of a crisis demanding immediate and dangerous action, we can celebrate that Kennedy chose the moderate and cautions course of a naval blockade on arms shipments...
...Within Russia, Khrushchev has not staked his reputation on military superiority so much as on proving that peaceful coexistence is possible, that Russia will prosper under such conditions, and that the rest of the world would then come its way...
...The implication that the Jupiters are essential to our defense commitments to Turkey was another of the little fibs which filled the news during the crisis to make an easy case for our action...
...All this is not to say that it was not desirable to have the missiles removed from Cuba...
...When Is a Country a Country...
...or that we had already decided on an invasion of Cuba for the following week that would involve killing Soviet personnel, and were not sure what the Russian response would be...
...But even there, where a substantive question was raised, it was treated as a case of social obtuseness...
...It alone reaches new level in each crisis...
...It is entirely understandable that he should suppose more aggression to be underway than actually is...
...but the President did not refer to this, probably because it was more a "leak" than an official statement, the sort of deception that all governments including our own find useful...
...There is a more clear-cut case of deception in the assurances made to Robert Kennedy by the Soviet embassy official which Alsop and Bartlett report in their partly discredited article...
...The higher figures, obviously, would tend to strengthen the U. S. hand at home and in Latin America...
...In the vast public relations game which is the cold war, in which each elite must manipulate its own public for every inch of leeway, we do our motivational research very badly...
...The missiles and bombers did not add to the Soviet strategic force anything so suddenly destabilizing as had been contended...
...But even assuming that a Soviet first strike or the threat of one was the motive—and this means assuming an irrational motive of a low order of probability—the means were utterly incommensurate with the end...
...If Cuba and Turkey were present at the meetings of Soviet and United States negotiators, each would object that it has a right to its own defense...
...Now that other missiles have superseded them the use of which is more credible, Turkey would actually be safer with them off her soil in order to be removed from Russia's prime target list should nuclear war break out elsewhere...
...The signs are that we held to the on-site inspection demand in Cuba less because of the objective needs of the case than as a precedent to use later in inspection negotiations concerning the test ban, and to delay unto oblivion the non-invasion pledge...
...The White House was "dismayed by the barrage of criticism...
...As such their removal would have been a proper aim of negotiation...
...The phoenix has not quite made it through the fire—another American tragedy...
...Since things turned out well, it seems to be assumed that he chose the right risk...
...An avowed Marxist, Miguel Arrais, has been elected Governor of the State of Pernambuoco in northeastern Brazil...
...Though it still looked as if the confrontation that might lead to war was immediately ahead of us, the Administration was annoyed with Thant's proposal because it was thought it would (again in the words of the Times) "surely disarm [our] powerful diplomatic and military initiative...
...The right-wing conterattack against Kennedy's moderation began very early to dissipate the liberating feeling of victory, and with it probably any magnanimity...
...By that time the United States was to have 144 Polaris missiles under the seas, about 200 land based intercontinental missiles installed within the United States, sixteen attack carriers with more than 400 attacks bombers, 700 SAC B-52 and B-58 long-range bombers and 700 B-47's which can reach Russia with air refueling...
...This would be clear as soon as they reached the conference tables...
...One focuses, fascinated, on the figure of Kennedy struggling with great problems and threats, one man in battle with vast forces, and the word "greatness" comes easily...
...Still the rightists felt betrayed...
...Castro's own simpleminded hope was probably to threaten American cities if the U. S. threatened to invade, holding out the prospect of at least a mutual Gotterdamerung...
...One early test of what hopefulness remained in these inauspicious circumstances would be our ability to respond to the newly-expressed interest of the Russians in the "black-box" proposal worked out by the Pugwash group to detect underground tests...
...One reads with uneasiness that "there was some acceptance [in Washington circles] of the contention that political considerations had played more than a minor part in the blockade decision," that "the President, and many of those closest to him in the White House, are known to have been smarting under Republican jibes at his 'indecisiveness' in dealing with Premier Fidel Castro and his Soviet allies...
...Khrushchev could of course wait until Kennedy replaced Eisenhower and begin again...
...Kennedy could argue that he had already made the distinction between ground-to-air missiles (defensive) and ground-to-ground missiles (offensive), but the distinction breaks down when applied to any other missileequipped nation and Gromyko may have been rejecting it...
...As a result, the liberals concluded that toughness won, and the conservatives concluded that moderation failed...
...It justified our urgent maneuver by saying that our deterrent still depended upon SAC bombers and the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, a combination alleged to be easily broken by Cuban missiles, and that our missile strength was still negligible at the time of the crisis...
...Four of the thirty 1L-28 bombers (range 700 miles) had been assembled...
...In ignoring the contention of both Russia andCuba that the missiles were to help deter aggression, in making our case rest solely on assumed Soviet designs, we confirm our treatment of the first social-revolutionary government in Latin America as a non-country...
...Prominent Senators have been calling for invasion...
...If the Soviet military's answer is weapons dispersal to extra-territorial trouble spots, and if the political result of the Cuban affair is now to make Khrushchev put up or shut up, we may find that our demonstration of resolve has precisely the opposite * Cf...
...Since we insist that Cuba has nothing to deter, and furthermore has no right to deter it, this idea has not been seriously entertained...
...We argued that the weapons were offensive...
...His astonishing freedom to withdraw as he did can be explained only by assuming that a core interest was not threatened by doing so—which would be the case if the chief military value of the weapons was to defend Cuba—and that this possible outcome had been programmed in advance and seen as a less desirable but not wholly negative outcome...
...The legalists might have lost the argument, but the argument would at least have been to the point...
...Through the slick media, every mannerism of the first family and other Administration personalities reverberates through the suburbs of the land...
...Raul Castro spent almost all his time with military men in his early summer visit to Moscow...
...Is this the kind of judgment that the times demanded...
...Washington had already become the Hollywood of the upper middle class, and fashion magazines now have their girls model sweaters playing touch football...
...Realpolitik is bad enough, but at least retains reason...
...These, then, are some of the matters of concern that strike one in reviewing the Administration's handling of the crisis of the Cuban blockade...
...Washington was apparently not confident that they would, fearing action at Berlin or some other sort of escalation...
...Alpha 66 has made raids out of Puerto Rico...
...Politics, toughness, a sense of nakedness and military peril, a sense of being tested, silly rage, all were probably mingled into an unanalyzed conviction of the necessity of our action...
...There is another disturbing portent in our decision to treat the missiles solely as part of the Soviet strategic network when the objective case for it was poor...
...Where were the great liberals...
...If our demand to remove the IL-28's from Cuba proved embarrassing when it came to what type of plane we might base in Turkey, we might do either of two things: change the Turkey-based planes, or, if we still saw long range planes based there as vital to deterring Soviet expansionism in the Middle East, accept the bombers in Cuba...
...It can be argued on military grounds that the counter-escalation factors in our developing counterforce capability invite the non-counterforce nuclear power to spread its arms to local areas of tension in order to forestall a series of local defeats and humiliations without risking the destruction of its homeland.* Cuba, it can be argued, was the first place where this was to be tried, and presumably the theory was not disproved by Russia's being forced to withdraw while the weapons were still being shipped and installed...
...When one reflects on the ignorance of the most cosmopolitan Latin American leaders and of most of the AmericanCongress on matters of nuclear strategy, one realizes how unlikely it is that China will ever play the cautious and subtle game of deterrence as the United States and Russia have developed it over the years—particularly when China, unlike Russia, is aware of no community of interest with the West...
...The point is rather to remind us that the task of intellect is to dispel fog, to clarify and evaluate the sources of action—hopefully in time to affect it...
...The diplomatic gamble paid off and brought the crisis to an end...
...They could claim not to have put the missiles in for their own purposes but at the request of the Cuban government, and that they were therefore defensive in intent...
...More to the point, however, the figure was patently wrong, as will be seen...
...Maybe he will save us all, depending, of course, on what is on his mind...
...As it was Cuba might have gotten one from us while Turkey got none from Russia...
...By and large it has come to be the manner of the operators in Washington that is important to most college-educated Americans, so they were pushovers for the Cuban blockade...
...It was a dissimulation to imply that the missiles and bombers in Cuba, even added to Russia's fewer than 100 ICBM's and inferior force of longrange bombers and missiles-firing submarines (Russia has no aircraft carriers), posed a sudden threat to America's deterrent capability...
...New York Times, October 23) To the extent that such considerations were pivotal, it appears that the President was confronted with two alternative kinds of risk: he could take a course that would risk war, or a course that would risk his political future and that of his party...
...They know now that playing "chicken" pays, and the half-hearted disclaimers of the President and his aides and journalists will not deceive them...
...affect from that intended...
...There are reasons and reasons...
...In fact, a lot of alarming limitations have to be granted before one can locate what one admires in the conduct of the Cuban blockade affair...
...China should be giving us nightmares, yet once again the message from the top is that we can pretend that troublesome societies do not exist, and that governments are legitimated by seeing things our way on crucial matters...
...And there is the reemergence of Dean Acheson as a "hawk" (urging strong interventionist measures), which suggests a sense in which the crisis of the Cuban blockade represents the reassertion of the seaboard aristocrat's claim for leadership on terms set by the arriviste pseudo-conservative who fought him in the fifties and made Acheson's "giveaway" of mainland China one of the rallying cries of the decade...
...It might be worth imagining a hypothetical negotiated settlement to see if the Munich analogy need be applied...
...Current estimates are that China may test a nuclear weapon in 1963...
...In fact, this combination existed at the time the crisis developed...
...Role of the U. N. What of law...
...And how many can Khrushchev afford...
...We cannot afford many such triumphs...
...The point, as the Times reported the meeting in which he said this, was apparently taken to mean not that we should too, but that we could get more play out of the Russians if we considered this idiosyncracy of theirs...
...Let us face facts: Cuba has something to deter...
...The whole question of why the missiles were assumed to be offensive simply because they could reach into our heartland, while our soft intermediate range missiles in Turkey should be assumed to be defensive, never surpassed the level of "because we know our intentions are not aggressive...
...If anything, their most inappropriate habits of response have been confirmed...
...After all, they pose a far lesser problem to our warning mechanism than did the missiles, they are vulnerable to anti-aircraft missilery already perfected as well as to standard jet fighter defense, and they have a shorter range than even the medium range missiles were said to have...
...Castro (by Newsweek's report) had never even been allowed to set foot an a missile site, much to his fury, and Khrushchev took pains to tell William Knox, the Westinghouse vice-president he saw during the crisis, that Russia would retain control of the missiles...
...One possible purpose of addressing Russia, the lawyers tell us, was to put our blockade on slightly firmer legal grounds: if we had addressed ourselves to Cuba, we would have been stopping the ships of a third party...
...simpler military minds, it can be argued that a Soviet strategist would not have found the number or type of weapons in Cuba, or even three times that number, a sufficient increment to justify a first strike, nor even to make Russia substantially more secure from a U. S. first strike.* But some military men believe that more is always better, and their kind of thought cannot confidently be ruled out of the decision process that sent missiles to Cuba...
...The Administration "doubted that it could ever again regain momentum if negotiations failed, as it was expected they would...
...The returns are not all in, but chances are they were proven wrong...
...This may be the greatest tragedy of the Cuban blockade...
...If ever an incident demanded that the role of cheap politics in dictating or restricting policy be isolated, it was the Cuban missile showdown...
Vol. 10 • January 1963 • No. 1
