What was the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Why “thirteen days”

The count starts on Tuesday, October 16, 1962, a little before nine in the morning, when the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, brought President John F. Kennedy aerial photographs of missile sites in western Cuba. It ends on Sunday, October 28, when Radio Moscow read out Nikita Khrushchev’s promise to take the missiles home. Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, called his memoir of those days Thirteen Days; it came out in 1969, the year after he was killed, and the name stuck.

Each capital has its own name for the same events. In the Soviet Union they were the Caribbean crisis; in Cuba, the October crisis. Moscow dated its worries from the threat it saw to Cuba, Washington from the morning the photographs arrived.

The crisis, stage by stage

1. Why the missiles came (1961–1962). After the CIA’s failed landing at the Bay of Pigs, and with American missiles standing in Turkey, Khrushchev decided in May 1962 to ship nuclear missiles to Cuba in secret. His reasons have a page of their own.
2. The photographs (October 14–16). Major Richard Heyser flew a U-2 spy plane across western Cuba on Sunday, October 14, and his camera took 928 pictures in six minutes. Analysts working above a Washington car dealership found medium-range ballistic missiles near San Cristóbal.
3. The quarantine (October 22–25). Kennedy went on television and ringed Cuba with warships, under a word chosen with care, explained in why he called it a quarantine. On October 24 the Soviet ships stopped short of the line.
4. Black Saturday (October 27). A U-2 was shot down over Cuba and its pilot killed, and a Soviet submarine came close to firing a nuclear torpedo. The day is told hour by hour in what happened on Black Saturday.
5. The deal (October 28). Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles; Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba and, in secret, to pull American missiles out of Turkey. Both halves are in the deal that ended the crisis.
6. The aftermath (1963). The scare left a direct line between the capitals, a treaty against nuclear tests in the air, and a grim name for the standoff, mutually assured destruction.

DEFCON 2: one step short

DEFCON, short for defense readiness condition, is the American military’s alert scale. It runs from DEFCON 5, peacetime, down to DEFCON 1, nuclear war. As Kennedy spoke on the evening of October 22, American forces around the world went to DEFCON 3. On October 24, as the quarantine began, Strategic Air Command, the force of long-range bombers and missiles, moved to DEFCON 2, for the only time in its history.

How close did it come?

Closer than anyone knew at the time. The CIA expected about ten thousand Soviet troops in Cuba; there were some forty-two thousand. Soviet units also held battlefield nuclear weapons, unknown to Washington until veterans of both sides met in 1992. Each of the four Soviet submarines near the quarantine line carried a nuclear torpedo. And on Black Saturday, Soviet officers in Cuba fired on an American plane without asking Moscow.

Kennedy later put the odds of war somewhere between one in three and even, by the account of his aide Theodore Sorensen. On the night of the quarantine speech he had already named the stakes:

We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.

Nobody fired. The Doomsday Clock stayed at seven minutes to midnight throughout, and went back to twelve after the 1963 test ban.