Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [167]
8. The limits of atomic weapons: The Cuban missile crisis
Nor had the Americans been above making nuclear threats, or privately and seriously considering the use of nuclear weapons—in Korea, China, and Vietnam. General Nathan Twining, the air force chief of staff, wished for the use of ‘three small tactical A-bombs’ against Viet Minh forces surrounding the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. His hope was to ‘clean those Commies out of there and the band could play the “Marseillaise” and the French would come marching out of Dien Bien Phu in fine shape’. But the gravest Cold War confrontation would come in Cuba. The revolutionary Fidel Castro had taken power on the island, just 90 miles from Florida, on New Year’s Day 1959. Historians disagree about whether Castro came into office committed to communism or whether opposition to his rule by the Eisenhower administration gave the Cuban leader no choice but to shift to the left ideologically and seek Soviet help. In either case, by 1961, when Kennedy took office, Cuba was under boycott by the United States and was receiving extensive economic and military aid from Moscow. The Americans tried to get rid of Castro, first by sponsoring an invasion of Cuba by disgruntled exiles that they hoped would inspire a general uprising (this ended badly at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961), then by orchestrating a series of comic but still nasty attempts to assassinate Castro. Reasonably fearing that his regime and his life might be in jeopardy, Castro asked Khrushchev for help.
Khrushchev had reasons of his own for placing Cuba under the Soviet nuclear umbrella. The Americans had recently made operational their medium-range Jupiter missiles in Turkey, and, while it was true that these weapons were less a military threat to the Soviet Union than were ICBMs based in the United States, their presence was nevertheless unsettling. Khrushchev wanted to even the score psychologically: ‘What if we throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants?’ he asked a colleague. He wanted to protect Cuba and to be seen as the island’s protector, by the Cubans, the Americans, and most of all the Chinese. He sought the instant credibility he thought putting nuclear weapons in Cuba would give him. He may have had Berlin in mind, for a harsh US response to the placement of Russian missiles in Cuba could have justified an equally tough Soviet move in Berlin. Most of all, Khrushchev wanted to rattle the Americans, to give them a dose of their own medicine, to put them in the penumbra of a nuclear shadow like the one that darkened the Soviet Union each day. Khrushchev hoped to slip missiles into Cuba— three dozen medium-range and two dozen intermediate-range rockets, along with warheads and over 40,000 troops to guard and maintain and maybe fire them—and have them fully installed before American overflights spotted them. Faced with a fait accompli, young Kennedy would surely acquiesce in their presence. Even if the Americans tried to take the missiles out, Khrushchev wrote later, some would no doubt remain intact. ‘If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left.’ Such a threat would, Khrushchev thought, ‘restrain the United States from precipitous military action against Castro’s government’.
The insertion of missiles did not, as it turned out, restrain the Kennedy administration from acting forcefully. ‘Oh shit! Shit! Shit! Those sons of bitches Russians!’ exclaimed Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General and the President’s brother, when informed, on 16 October 1962, that US intelligence had discovered the missile emplacements. The President did not immediately authorize a bombing raid to take the missiles out or an