The carefully concealed truth did not emerge for more than a decade. Kennedy, it turns out, had made a secret deal with Khrushchev. He promised to remove US nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet removal of missiles from Cuba. So the crisis was ended not by threats of force, as Rusk suggested, but by the precise opposite: diplomatic compromise.
It’s been 60 years since our last brush with nuclear suicide. Humanity barely survived that encounter in 1962, known to history as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Never since then has nuclear apocalypse been as close as it is today. Take it from President Biden.
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Biden told a California audience a few days ago. His aides, The New York Times reported, have been studying the secret deal that averted catastrophe 60 years ago and “debating whether there might be an analogous understanding” to end the Ukraine war. The central lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis provides our only extant guide to defusing a nuclear crisis.
A generation of American politicians and strategic thinkers misunderstood this lesson. They may be forgiven, because our government covered up the real story for years. Americans were told that the missile crisis taught one lesson. Later we discovered that it taught the exact opposite.
The missile crisis seized the world’s attention in October 1962. President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States had discovered Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba “capable of striking Washington.” He demanded that the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, remove them. That led to the most crucial long-distance negotiation in human history.
All of Kennedy’s military advisers urged him to order massive bombing of Cuba. “The operation is fairly simple, it could be accomplished in a few minutes,” General Curtis LeMay assured him. “We see no problem with this.”
Kennedy did. He worried that subduing Cuba would require not just bombing but a full-fledged invasion, to which Moscow might respond with devastating force. His speech to the nation on Oct. 22, 1962, was delicately balanced. He repeated his demand that the Soviets remove their missiles from Cuba but said the United States would act with “patience and restraint” and not “prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.”
On July 20, 1961, at a National Security Council meeting, JFK was compelled to consider the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. This meeting occurred in the context of the escalating Berlin Crisis with the USSR. During this meeting he was briefed on the Single Integrated Operational Plan for general nuclear war, SIOP-62. [The SIOP plans were named after the fiscal year for which they were effective; fiscal year ’62 commenced in July 1961.] This plan represented the philosophy of General Curtis LeMay, promoted throughout the 1950s by SAC, and first implemented as a “SIOP” (a national plan for all the armed services) in 1960 by his chosen successor as SAC’s commander, General Thomas Power. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy later disapprovingly referred to SIOP-62 and its predecessors as “a massive, total, comprehensive, obliterating strategic attack … on everything Red.” It called for the overwhelming destruction of all Communist Bloc nations — both military bases and urban/industrial centers — in the event of war with any one of its members. (Thus, China would have been destroyed in the event of war with the USSR — as well as little Albania.) It allowed for no flexibility once nuclear general war — the use of strategic weapons — began.
A seminal article was written about this meeting in the fall 1994 issue of The American Prospect, co-authored by Heather A. Purcell and James K. Galbraith [the son of JFK’s former ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith], titled: “Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?” Key information in the article was obtained from a memo written for LBJ by his military aide, USAF Colonel Howard Burris, as well as from an oral history interview of Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatrick in 1970.
Historian James Douglass has written in detail about the meeting in his book JFK and the Unspeakable:
At the July 20, 1961 NSC meeting, General Hickey, chairman of the ‘Net Evaluation Subcommittee’ of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented a plan for a nuclear surprise attack on the Soviet Union “in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.” Other presenters of the preemptive strike plan included General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and CIA Director Allen Dulles. Vice President Johnson’s military aide, Howard Burris, wrote a memorandum of the meeting for Johnson, who was not present. … While the Burris memorandum is valuable in its revelation of the first-strike agenda, it does not mention Kennedy’s ultimate disgust with the entire process. We know that fact from its disclosure in an oral history by Roswell Gilpatric, JFK’s Deputy Secretary of Defense. Gilpatric described the meeting’s abrupt conclusion: “Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it.”
Kennedy’s disgusted reaction to this National Security Council meeting was also recorded in books written by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; McGeorge Bundy; and Dean Rusk. None of them, however, identified the first-strike focus of the meeting that prompted the disgust. They describe the meeting in only the most general terms as “the Net Evaluation, an annual doomsday briefing analyzing the chances of nuclear war” (Schlesinger) or as “a formal briefing on the net assessment of a general nuclear war between the two superpowers” (Bundy). However, as much as JFK was appalled by a general nuclear war, his walkout was in response to a more specific evil in his own ranks: U.S. military and CIA leaders were enlisting his support for a plan to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Kennedy didn’t just walk out. He also said what he thought of the entire proceeding. As he led Rusk back to the Oval Office, with what Rusk described as “a strange look on his face,” Kennedy turned and said to his Secretary of State, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
The attitude behind the recommendation at the July 20 NSC meeting to seriously consider launching a pre-emptive first strike in 1963 was that which had been advocated by Curtis LeMay throughout the 1950s. Robert McNamara summarized LeMay’s philosophy in the documentary Fog of War, when he said: “LeMay believed that ultimately we were going to have to confront these people [meaning the Soviet Union] in a conflict with nuclear weapons, and by God, we’d better do it when we have greater superiority than we will have in the future.” At various times during JFK’s Presidency, Dean Acheson (one of the “Wise Old Men” of Washington), Paul Nitze, Roswell Gilpatric, and many others within the policy-making apparatus felt the same way.
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