The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [408]
While Kennedy was examining the U-2 photos and trying to put a damper on the whole uncertain business, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall was meeting with Khrushchev at his summer home on the Black Sea in Soviet Georgia. Khrushchev had decided that he needed a conduit to Kennedy, and Udall was the nearest available vehicle. The Soviet leader, a student of American politics, was perfectly aware of Kennedy’s obsession with the forthcoming election. He promised Udall that he would not create a crisis over Berlin before the American election. “Out of respect for your president we won’t do anything until November,” he said.
If shrewdness were the ultimate attribute, then no one would ever have bested Khrushchev. His salty aphorisms sounded like homespun peasant wisdom, but they were superb vehicles with which to promote his Marxist ideology, the metaphors carrying meanings within meanings. As the Soviet leader saw it, everything was all so simple and logical. The United States had put nuclear weapons in Japan, but all the Soviet Union was doing was giving Castro defensive weapons. “You have surrounded us with military bases,” Khrushchev said. “If you attack Cuba, then we will attack one of the countries next to us where you have placed your bases.”
As Udall listened, he was in essence merely holding a microphone so that Khrushchev could reach Kennedy’s ear. Udall pointed out that only a few members of Congress were spouting such craziness as to call for an invasion of Cuba. “These congressmen do not see with their eyes, but with their asses,” Khrushchev replied. “All they can see is what’s behind them. Yesterday’s events are not today’s realities. I remember Gorky recounting in his memoirs how he had a conversation with Tolstoy. Tolstoy asked him how he got along with women, and then ventured his own opinion. ‘Men are poorly designed. When they’re young, they can satisfy their sexual desires. But as they grow old, the ability to reap this satisfaction disappears. The desires, however, do not.’ So it is with your congressmen. They do not have power, but they still have the same old desires.”
As Khrushchev muttered his soothing shibboleths, he was orchestrating a deployment of Soviet military power in Cuba beyond anything even the most vociferous critic had imagined. Soviet plans were to install in Cuba twenty-four R-12 nuclear ballistic missiles with a one-thousand-and-fifty-mile range, sixteen R-14 missiles with twice that range, and eighty nuclear cruise missiles with a short range of about one hundred miles. From Cuba, the largest of these missiles could target American cities almost as far west as Seattle. A single missile could destroy one of the nation’s major cities with a force over seventy times that of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima.
The Soviet leader also planned to send eleven submarines sailing out of a new Cuban submarine base, each probably carrying one nuclear torpedo and twenty-one conventional torpedos. Seven of these would carry nuclear missiles. There were also plans to send a squadron of IL-28 light bombers carrying nuclear bombs and a large number of tactical nuclear weapons called Lunas by the Russians and Frogs by NATO. These weapons had a thirty-one-mile range that could be used against anyone rash enough to attempt an invasion of fortress Cuba. Traveling to Cuba with these missiles would be 50,874 Soviet troops, a force that even without the nuclear weapons would change the nature of power in Cuba and the price to be paid in any invasion.
With one bold action, the Soviets would more than double the number of Soviet missiles targeted at American cities. Communist Cuba, so threatened by an American invasion, would suddenly become impregnable to all but an American leader willing to set off nuclear war. The Americans would see and feel what the Soviet people felt: enemy nuclear weapons near enough to cast dark shadows across their border. Khrushchev’s nation was still no match for America in military might and nuclear weaponry, but this daring move would