The Cuban Missile Crisis Explained

Dan Snow's History Hit

This episode explores the terrifying reality of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, moving beyond the myth of calculated diplomacy to reveal a pe

Key takeaways

• The crisis was characterized by a lack of real-time intelligence, with both Kennedy and Khrushchev operating blindly.
• A pivotal moment occurred aboard the Soviet submarine B-59, where Vasily Arkhipov prevented a nuclear torpedo launch.

Main topics

• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Cold War tensions

Notable quotes

The truth is far, far more terrifying.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a sobering reminder that global survival often d

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History It and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com slash subscribe. Speaker 1 (0:30) 30 seconds away from total nuclear annihilation. Our world may have got to that point on a Saturday night on the 27th of October 1962. It was around 8.50pm. Aboard a hot, dimly lit submarine, three tired, scared, stressed men had an argument about firing a nuclear weapon. It all happened in the Western Atlantic. on the approaches to the island of Cuba. Now, there's a mythologised myth about the Cuban Missile Crisis. A wise young president, JFK, handsome chap, armed with a history book on the outbreak of World War I, staring down the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in a masterclass of calculated diplomacy. But in recent years, groundbreaking new research has revealed that that traditional narrative is a fabrication. The truth is far, far more terrifying. This was not a finely choreographed ballet of grand strategy. It was a blind scramble in a dark room. Both leaders, American and Soviet, pretty much lost control of what was happening on the ground, on the sea or under it. From rogue Soviet commanders shooting down American aircraft against orders to a crew trapped inside a depth-charged submarine debating the launch of a nuclear torpedo. humanity survived by a good dose of luck and by some common sense where Speaker 3 (2:15) it was needed most. Speaker 1 (2:16) So brace yourself, folks, because today I'm going to talk you through the terrifying reality of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Speaker 1 (2:29) It's 1962. The United States and the Soviet Union are locked in an intense ideological, strategic, military competition. A standoff. They're two superpowers, the likes of which the world's never seen before, armed with weapons of unimaginable power. They've got diametrically opposed worldviews. And for the rest of us, nearly all the rest of the world, are being... centrifugally sucked into this power struggle until that rivalry is truly globalised. Their respective allies, their clients are clashing from Southeast Asia to Berlin to Africa to South and Central America. Flashpoints are multiplying across the world. Berlin, for example, was a city divided down the middle by these two armed camps. In 1961, you get a concrete and barbed wire barrier, a wall smashed through the middle of the city, a very real wall, but also a metaphorical divide between those two worlds, East and West, Communist and Capital. West Berlin. Now a little pinprick of Western life surrounded by a sea of communism was terribly vulnerable. The threat of a Soviet blockade or a military move against West Berlin haunted policymakers in Washington and elsewhere because that was the lowest hanging fruit. That's where everyone assumed the great next clash would start, where East and West were eyeballing each other over the most fragile of front lines. That's where people expected the Cold War would go hot. But they were wrong. There were plenty of other places where that fuse could be lit as well. In the Middle East, American-backed Israel fought wars against its Soviet-backed neighbours, and those promised to spiral out of control and suck in the great powers, just as that terrible occasion in 1914 when the Archduke's assassination Sarajevo had spread monstrous violence far beyond the confines of Austria-Hungary and Serbia. There had been Korea, where Soviet jets had sparred with American fighters above that mountainous peninsula. And then there was Cuba, a place where the charismatic revolutionary Fidel Castro had landed on that Caribbean island in 1959 with just a handful of men. And bizarrely, the whole rotten superstructure of the state had collapsed. Castro had seized power. He'd confiscated American-owned factories and businesses. He'd made powerful enemies. And he needed a powerful friend. Moscow offered money. Trade. legitimacy, armed support. So now Cuba, which for the Americans is in their backyard, a place where the Americans have invaded and intervened several times over the last half century, and come to think of it as well within their sphere of influence, well suddenly Cuba is rolling out the red carpet for the American sworn enemy. It's now a Soviet foothold in America's backyard. Just after Castro seized his power in 1961, the US sponsored an invasion of Cuba, the so-called Bay of Pigs fiasco. It achieved absolutely nothing except it totally poisoned the very idea, the image of the USA in the mind of Castro and his ruling elite. The Cuban regime were now, understandably I suppose, paranoid about direct American military invasion, about regime change, about... losing their own lives, them being shackled, shot against a wall, taken to America for trial. Castro had a big shopping list for his new Soviet friends. He wanted a shield, he wanted protection, he wanted guarantees. The Soviets themselves, well, they wanted to catch a break. They were dangerously behind the USA in the madness that was the ballistics weapons race of the 1960s. The Soviets had hundreds of nuclear weapons, but their main delivery system was a bomber, an aircraft, specifically the Tupolev Tu-95, the Russian Bear. Now, this monstrous aircraft would fly on what was probably going to be a one-way trip to rain down nuclear weapons on the United States of America. But conceivably, those bears could be intercepted. They could be shot down. The Americans might be able to protect the homeland. And so the Soviets had also developed an operational Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Their version, in fact, had come on stream in 1960. They were the vast rockets at the Plezetsk Cosmodrome, a spaceport near Arkangel in the very north of Russia. Now, unlike planes flying over the Arctic to strike at the US, these were unstoppable. These ballistic missiles travelled at 8,000 metres per second. They could strike anywhere in the USA, but they were new. They were glitchy. Now, fascinating, one of the reasons that the Soviets and the Americans launched so many missions into space in these years, sending unfortunate dogs and guinea pigs and whatever else into orbit, was actually because they wanted to show the other side that their nuclear-capable ballistic missiles worked. Speaker 1 (8:01) The Soviets, though, only had a few dozen of these missiles, and they were unreliable. They did have, much more reliable, and they had hundreds of them, medium-range ballistic missiles. These were pretty useful. They could turn Alaska, they could turn Britain, they could turn Canada into glass. But they couldn't get far enough to hit the lower 48 states from their bases in northern Russia. In the terrifying event of war, these missiles would carry a hydrogen warhead, a hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear weapon, with a one... megaton warhead. A megaton is the explosive energy released by one million tons of conventional high explosives, of TNT. One million. By comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 0.015 of a megaton. So we are talking many, many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. I'm just... When I was researching this story, I was just so struck at just how fast history was coming to you in this period. 1957, the Soviets put Sputnik, the first satellite, into orbit. April 1961, just a couple of years later really, four years later, Gagarin becomes the first man in space. Now, he is sat atop a variant of the R-7 Semyurka, which is this enormous rocket that powers these intercontinental ballistic missiles. It's all happening at this time. It's all moving fast. As Gagarin goes into space, the Americans are taking countermeasures. They are moving rockets around too, but on the surface of the earth. In the early 1960s, the Americans really put pressure on the Soviets. They put their intermediate ballistic missiles on the very borders of the Soviet Union. In 1961, The Americans placed medium-range Jupiter ballistic missiles in Turkey. Now, these could easily travel the thousand miles to Moscow. They are an unstoppable dagger pointed at the heart of the USSR. So, the Soviets are thinking, could Cuba be the counterbalance here? The Americans had pushed their nukes to the border of the Soviet Union. Why shouldn't the Soviets do the same? So thought Nikita Khrushchev, the boss, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Soviet premier, a hardened veteran of World War II, a veteran of the Battle of Stalingrad. Now, he was erratic. He was ideologically minded. And he operated with immense personal power, with latitude. He did not have independent advisors who would stand up to him. He did not have to worry about what other politicians in the Soviet Union were thinking at the time. His decisions in this crisis went largely unchallenged by his hand-picked Politburo. And this freedom, it had strengths and weaknesses, I think, through this crisis. If he'd had strong independent-mind advisors, it might never have come around in the first place. They might have warned him that this was a crazy thing to do. And as a result, he got the Soviet Union into an existential crisis. He fundamentally misjudged how a constitutional democracy functioned. He mistakenly believed that he could push Kennedy into a corner and Kennedy, a democratic leader, would be forced to accept it passively. It was a terrible initial miscalculation. Speaking of which, let's say a little bit about John F. Kennedy, JFK, the American president. He's youthful. He's a relatively new US president. He's highly educated in history and international affairs. He's seen a lot of the world. He's very conscious of the dangers of missteps. He's very conscious of the power of these new nuclear weapons, the power that really no former human being had ever wielded in the history of our species. The prospect of nuclear war terrified him, as it should do with all. right-thinking people. At home, he faced immense pressure from political hawks on both sides of the aisle and inside his own military, who advocated for aggressive military responses to problems. Now, that's easy when you have elections to win. It's easy when you're not the man sitting in the nuclear hot seat. He really felt the weight of that responsibility. One of his key advisors is his brother, Robert Kennedy. You'll be hearing about him. He's the Attorney General. And he served as a core member of the President's crisis management team. And he would later author a very important account of what happened. Like Winston Churchill said, if you want history to be kind to you, make sure you write that history. Robert Kennedy wrote a heavily curated narrative about the events that we're going to discuss. Finally, let's not forget. We have the Cubans themselves. We've got Fidel Castro, the fiery, charismatic Cuban leader who sought protection from what he believed was an imminent American assault. And he wasn't wrong to assume that. The American government had backed an invasion of Cuba, the Bay of Pigs. It was running Operation Mongoose, a massive covert CIA campaign to sabotage the Cuban economy, to conduct psychological warfare and orchestrate assassination plots against Castro. Cuban intelligence was repeatedly intercepting reports of these operations, which Castro viewed as a threat to his own life, his regime, and a prelude possibly to full-scale war. With this in mind, Castro aggressively lobbied Khrushchev. He wanted an ironclad military alliance. He sort of positioned Cuba as this vulnerable client of the Soviet Union, a symbol of... communism right in the heart of the capitalist Western hemisphere. He wanted to force Nikita Khrushchev's hand, but I think it's funny, he sort of overshot the runway a bit, because Castro was not expecting the deployment of nuclear munitions. He'd asked for help, but maybe not that kind of help. Khrushchev said, fine, you want help? You're going to get help. Okay, let's get into the chronology here. In the late spring and summer of 1962, the Soviet Union launched a massive and highly secretive military deployment to Cuba under the codename Operation Anadyr. Under the guise of shipping commercial goods and basic defensive military aid, Soviet ships carried 40,000 troops and over 100 tactical nuclear weapons. And this is really important here because tactical nuclear weapons are small nuclear weapons. They are designed to be used on the battlefield. They're not strategic. They don't wipe out entire cities. They will smash amphibious forces. They will evaporate aircraft carriers. They will wipe out assault troops. But that means they're also deployable by people a lot lower down the military command structure. You've got nuclear weapons in the hands of potentially relatively junior people at that point. They're making some big decisions. Also shipped to Cuba are 60... medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles, the ones I've talked about. They've got the nuclear