Why did the Soviet Union put missiles in Cuba?

Moscow’s reasons, in its own words

Nikita Khrushchev told his side of the story in memoirs he recorded on tape after his fall from power, smuggled to the West and published as Khrushchev Remembers in 1970. He gives two reasons. The first was Cuba itself: after the failed landing of April 1961, he expected the United States to try again, this time with its own troops. The second was the balance of power. American bases and missiles surrounded the Soviet Union, and Soviet rockets could not answer in kind. His medium-range missiles could reach Western Europe but not America. From Cuba, about 145 km (90 miles) from Florida, they could reach Washington.

The idea came to him in May 1962, on a visit to Bulgaria, Turkey’s neighbor on the Black Sea. His memoirs sum up the mood in one sentence: “it was high time America learned what it feels like to have her own land and her own people threatened.”

Defending Castro

The fear of invasion had grounds. The Bay of Pigs landing had been planned, trained and paid for by the CIA, and it was only the beginning. In November 1961 Kennedy approved Operation Mongoose, a secret campaign “to help Cuba overthrow the communist regime,” run with his brother Robert’s backing, and the CIA tried to have Castro poisoned. In Havana and in Moscow the conclusion was the same: the Americans had tried once with exiles, and next time they would come themselves. Castro accepted the missiles to protect his revolution.

The Jupiters and the missile gap

The second reason stood right next door to the Soviet Union. In 1962 fifteen American Jupiter missiles became operational at Çiğli air base near İzmir, in western Turkey, within range of Moscow; thirty more stood in southern Italy. Washington saw the parallel, on tape. On October 16, wondering why Khrushchev would take such a risk, Kennedy told his advisers, “It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey.” His national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, answered: “Well, we did, Mr. President.”

Behind it lay a lopsided arms race. Kennedy had campaigned in 1960 on a supposed missile gap in Moscow’s favor, but in October 1961 his deputy secretary of defense, Roswell Gilpatric, made clear in public that the gap ran the other way. It did: American nuclear warheads outnumbered Soviet ones by roughly 25,000 to 3,300. Historians often add that missiles in Cuba offered a shortcut, narrowing the gap at once instead of after years of building long-range rockets.

Why in secret: Operation Anadyr

Castro would have preferred to do it openly, with a published treaty, as the Americans had done with Turkey. Khrushchev insisted on secrecy: the missiles had to be ready before Washington found out. If the Americans discovered them only when they could already fire, he reasoned in his memoirs, they “would think twice.” Some in Moscow doubted the plan, and he overruled them.

The operation was named Anadyr, after a river and town in the Soviet Far North near Alaska, to fool even the troops. Soldiers boarded ships with skis and winter coats and opened sealed orders only at sea. About 42,000 men went to Cuba, with medium-range missiles and, unknown to Washington until 1992, smaller nuclear weapons for the battlefield.

The plan depended on not being seen, and it failed. On October 14, 1962, an American U-2 photographed the sites before they were finished, and the crisis began. When Kennedy revealed the missiles on October 22, he called them a “clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.” Moscow had called them defense.