Why did Kennedy call it a quarantine, not a blockade?

Six days of secret debate

From October 16, 1962, a dozen or so advisers met around the Cabinet Room table, a group soon called the ExComm, while hidden microphones recorded them. Their first instinct was to bomb the missile sites. Then the options multiplied: air strikes, an invasion, a blockade, a bargain. The Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted force. On October 19 the Air Force chief, General Curtis LeMay, told Kennedy that a blockade would be “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara argued the other way. A blockade would give Khrushchev time to think and a way to back down, he said; bombing would leave him none. Robert Kennedy opposed a surprise attack, and the president chose the slower road.

Blockade or quarantine?

A blockade is an act of war under international law, and the United States was not at war. State Department lawyers looked for firmer ground. On October 19 Leonard Meeker, the department’s deputy legal adviser, recorded his view that “a defensive quarantine of Cuba would involve a use of force,” and so would need the backing of the American republics under the Rio Treaty, as a regional measure the UN Charter allows. The Organization of American States voted that backing on October 23.

The minutes of the National Security Council for October 21, the day before the speech, record the choice:

The question of whether our actions should be described as a blockade or a quarantine was debated. Although the legal meaning of the two words is identical, Secretary Rusk said he preferred “quarantine” for political reasons in that it avoids comparison with the Berlin blockade.

So the honest answer has two layers. In law, the softer word changed little, and Kennedy noted that a total blockade could still come later. In politics it changed a great deal. A quarantine stopped only offensive weapons, not food or fuel, and it did not invite comparison with the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948. The word even had an American pedigree: in 1937 Franklin Roosevelt had called for a “quarantine” of aggressor nations.

The speech and the proclamation

Kennedy announced the measure on television at seven in the evening on Monday, October 22:

To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back.

Two sentences later he made the Berlin comparison himself: the United States was not “denying the necessities of life as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948.”

The formal order, Proclamation 3504, signed the next evening, uses neither word. It tells American forces to “interdict” the delivery of offensive weapons, names them, from surface-to-surface missiles to bombers, and adds that force “shall be used only to the extent necessary.” It took effect at 2 p.m. Greenwich time on October 24, ten in the morning in Washington.

Eyeball to eyeball

That Wednesday, American warships waited on the line far out in the Atlantic, and Strategic Air Command went to DEFCON 2. Then word arrived that the Soviet ships had stopped. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said, as the Saturday Evening Post reported that December: “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”

The famous blink had come a day earlier. Soviet records opened after 1991 show that Khrushchev, after a night in the Kremlin waiting for an invasion that did not come, ordered the ships carrying missiles home on October 23. The quarantine stopped new weapons, but not the missiles already in Cuba, where crews worked through the night. The way out came only after Black Saturday, and the whole story is in what was the Cuban Missile Crisis.