Cuban missile crisis still a teachable moment

There are lessons for our Iran policy to be gleaned from archival documents just released for the 50th anniversary of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

A major one: Understand your enemy’s real views, especially on nuclear weapons. In October 1962, did anyone in Washington know that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev did not believe in “first strike,” the notion that Moscow could unleash a massive nuclear attack and destroy all America’s nuclear forces and thus not face a counterstrike?

Archive

• E-mail

Gallery

A first look at the Cuban missile crisis: Fifty years ago, Dino A. Brugioni and his colleagues at the National Photographic Interpretation Center in Washington made a startling discovery: Russian missiles were being deployed in Cuba.

Latest stories from Foreign

Over protests, Israel plans to double prayer space at Western Wall

William Booth

The plan is aimed at appeasing American Jews and accommodating liberal Judaism at the Old City wall.

IMF chief called to testify in French court about role in arbitration case

Edward Cody

Interrogation could result in malfeasance charges involving $520 million arbitration settlement.

Attack in Britain could be act of terror, Cameron says

Anthony Faiola

Two assailants hacked to death a man reported to be a British soldier on a busy East London street.

World Digest: May 22, 2013

Japanese lawmakers approve joining child custody pact; Kenyan leaders named in truth commission report.

Kerry promises wider U.S. support for Syrian rebels if diplomacy fails

Anne Gearan

At conference in Jordan, Kerry says peace process will be hard and slow but remains the best option.

Why would that have been important? Because U.S. policymakers spent billions before and after 1962 adding nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), strategic submarines and bombers to the U.S. arsenal. Additional billions were spent — and are still being spent — in an effort to construct an antiballistic missile system. In the Cold War, it was primarily to counter a possible Soviet first strike.

Tehran’s public rhetoric aside, what does Washington know about the real nuclear-weapon beliefs of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who apparently would make the decision to build and perhaps use any nuclear weapon?

Thanks to a document found in Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party archives and released by the Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project, we can go back to Oct. 30, 1962, and a conversation Khrushchev had in Moscow with then-Czech Communist Party leader Antonin Novotny. Among the Soviets present were Aleksei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev. Both eventually would succeed Khrushchev.

The Cuban crisis had just ended. Khrushchev had agreed two days earlier to take the Soviet bombers, missiles and nuclear weapons out of Cuba; the United States had agreed not to invade Cuba, and secretly President John F. Kennedy, through his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had told the Soviet ambassador in Washington that after time passed, U.S. missiles in Turkey, aimed at the Soviet Union, would be removed. Both sides could declare success.

Novotny prepared a record of Khrushchev’s statements as the Soviet leader discussed details of the Cuban crisis, according to the released Czech document. Khrushchev claimed he had put the nuclear weapons in Cuba to prevent a U.S. invasion. When the United States discovered them, Cuban President Fidel Castro sent Khrushchev a letter saying that “the USA would attack Cuba within 24 hours,” according to the Novotny document.

In the letter, Castro “proposed that we ourselves should be the first to start an atomic war,” Khrushchev said. That led him to say, “Do you know what that would mean? . . . We were completely aghast. Castro clearly has no idea about what thermonuclear war is.”

Khrushchev added: “It is clear that with a first strike one cannot today knock the opponent [the United States] out of the fight. There can always be a counter-strike. . . . There are, after all, missiles in the earth [American ICBMs were based in underground silos], which intelligence does not know about; there are missiles on submarines, which cannot be knocked out of the fight right away, and so on. What would we gain if we ourselves started a war? After all, millions of people would die, in our country too. Can we even contemplate a thing like that?”