Many in the United States of America blame what they interpret as societal ‘moral disintegration’ on the legacy of the war. Where, many ask, is the honour and the glory in celebrating, year after year, the extermination of an adversary that was so out-gunned? Would a super heavyweight boxer draw satisfaction from kneeling on a featherweight contender’s chest and pummelling him until his head was a red and grey pulp on the canvass and splintered fragments of skull were showering down upon the front rows of the crowd? What kind of big fight audience would applaud that kind of pure bloody murder to the rafters?
Yes, the Soviets did fire the first shot.
Yes, the Soviets (or the Cubans, nobody knows who) subsequently launched three medium range ballistic missiles at the continental United States because they probably believed they were under attack.
So what? That’s what the Europeans say and they have every right to ask it. Look at it from their perspective. A nuclear explosion in the sea north of Cuba destroys two American destroyers and badly damages a third. Let it not be forgotten that at the time those American destroyers were dropping depth charges — albeit practice ones — on a Soviet submarine in international waters.
In response to the sinking of their destroyers the American Navy and Air Force promptly scrambled scores of aircraft of all descriptions. It is unclear why they did this but panic and imbecility, rather than military calculation seem to have been the guiding martial principles invoked by senior US commanders on both land and at sea. Given that the Soviet and Cuban commanders, operating in a febrile operational climate that was even more paranoid than that of their American counterparts, suddenly saw their radar screens fill with enemy aircraft a reasonable person is bound to ask, what on the balance of probabilities were they likely to conclude? If you drive one’s quarry into a corner is it surprising that he should come out fighting?
This is exactly what the Soviets (or the Cubans, or perhaps, both of them) did. At least one missile blew up on the launch pad. Three were successfully launched. Each missile was armed with a warhead with a yield of at least 1 megaton. One missile detonated on the ground thirteen miles north of Tampa, Florida. One air burst at an altitude of approximately seven thousand feet above the Gulf of Mexico some forty-three miles south east of New Orleans. One weapon air burst almost exactly equidistant from Galveston Island and Texas City, Houston.
The Tampa strike resulted in less than a thousand documented deaths and damaged or destroyed some twelve thousand properties. There were no reported fatalities related to the strike south east of New Orleans although several hundred persons suffered minor flash burns and recent dives on wrecks in the area suggest a number of vessels may have been sunk by the detonation. Both Galveston Island and Texas City were completely devastated by the third strike. Subsequent analysis showed that 96 percent of the people (over 74,000 souls) in those towns were killed in the initial air burst. The blast severely impacted the southern suburbs of Houston, where some 63,000 fatalities occurred in the first moments of the strike. Total casualties in the Houston area in the first thirty days after the strike were later estimated as 213,000 to 224,000 dead, and 307,000 injured.
It is at this point that the role of General Curtis LeMay, the legendary master builder of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) whom the Kennedy White House had inherited as the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, becomes murky. When, in 1976, LeMay asked to appear before the standing Congressional Committee on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban War, he directly contradicted former Secretary of Defence, Robert S. McNamara’s previously stated account of the counter strike against Cuba. In McNamara’s version the White House ordered a retaliatory strike ‘only against missile sites, air bases and major troop concentrations, avoiding where possible centres of population’. McNamara stated that the reasons for mandating a ‘limited retaliatory strike were twofold: first, it was not believed that Cuban military personnel were capable of operating the SS4 MRBMs which had targeted Tampa and Galveston and therefore the blood of tens of thousands of Americans was mostly on the hands of the Kremlin rather than on the hands of the Cuban civilian population; and second, that a comprehensive strike package directed against Cuba risked exposing large areas of the southern United States and, or the rest of the Caribbean to unacceptably high levels of radioactive fallout’.
General LeMay, by then in retirement and embittered by his failed bids for the Presidency in 1968 and 1972, contemptuously dismissed McNamara’s testimony, and that of other members of the Kennedy Administration. He was particularly scathing about remarks about his own part in the ‘elimination of the Cuban menace for all time’ and the concurrent decision to proceed with an all-out first strike against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies consistent with the President’s statement of 22nd October 1962’, which had appeared in Robert Kennedy’s recent book ‘The Truth about the Cuban Crisis’. LeMay vociferously denied, not for the first time but for the first time unequivocally ‘on the record’ that his actions were driven by the receipt by coded protocol of the order to institute DEFCON 1. According to LeMay, President Kennedy had spoken to him by a secure telephone link and personally authorised him to execute Plan Alpha.
Then as now DEFCON 1 is that state of military readiness which assumes that nuclear war is imminent or that the continental United States is already under nuclear attack and requires all military forces to respond accordingly. Then as now Plan Alpha describes massive thermonuclear retaliation against whomsoever has, or is about to attack the USA.
To his dying day General LeMay was unwavering in his insistence that on that fateful evening of Saturday 27th October 1962 he was obeying orders personally enunciated to him by his Commander-in-Chief.
No member of the Kennedy family attended LeMay’s State Funeral in Washington. The feud over who actually pressed the ‘Armageddon button’ has raged for fifty years and neither the American people, or the citizens of the post-October War world know for sure what actually happened in Washington in the hours after the sinking of the USS Beale north of Cuba.
Nobody really knows if JFK’s death bed last words really were: ‘The mad sonofabitch killed eight hundred million people and tried to blame me!’ The only thing we can know for certain is that none of the players on Capitol Hill that day foresaw any of the consequences of their machinations, consequences that would be the bane of their children, and the children of their children.
It matters little at this remove who said what to whom for when all is said and done that is a thing best left to historians. Cuba’s nightmare fate was sealed. Within three hours of the Houston strike every city, town and area of settlement with a population of over five thousand, every suspected missile site, every port, every troop concentration on the island of Cuba had been targeted by at least two nuclear warheads. No inch of Cuban soil was not overlapped by simultaneous strikes. It is estimated that over 90 percent of the population of the island, over six million men, women and children died that day. When the first survey teams from the US Marine Corps arrived on Cuba forty days later, they discovered no living humans. Large areas of the island where ground bursts targeted suspected missile and air assets remain uninhabitable due to persistently high levels of irradiation to this day.