Cuba was but the sickening overture to what followed.
Once appraised of the motive to retaliate the genie — or in this case the great monster of retribution — was let out of its cage. That terrible monster ran wild for fourteen hours, fifty-seven minutes and approximately thirty-four seconds and in that time committed an atrocity unparalleled in human history.
While a rational case can be made for a relatively limited retaliation against specific objectives in Cuba, had it been conducted in such as way so as to not annihilate all sentient life on that island, this author, in common with the majority of historians who have addressed these dreadful matters in the last half-century, can find no good — or sane — justification for the massive and inevitably overwhelming assault on the military, economic and social fabric of the Soviet Union and its allies.
The unimaginable human cost of this attack and the totally unnecessary catastrophe it inflicted on the European allies of the United States of America ought, long before now, to have made of this country an international pariah for all time. This may yet come to pass and for this reason I make no apology for restating the cold, hard facts behind Armageddon.
Had the Kennedy Administration held its nerve Nikita Khrushchev would have had no alternative but to back down; in fact there is evidence that it was in the process of doing exactly that as the first ICBMs ignited over Moscow and the as the first wave of B-52s pulverised Murmansk, Leningrad, Vladivostok Riga and Kiev. Had the Kennedy Administration offered Khrushchev so much as a crumb of comfort — say an undertaking that at some unspecified future date the removal of the obsolete Thor medium range missiles stationed in Turkey — to soften the pill, the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been just that. A crisis like most crises; resolved by realpolitik diplomacy. This was not a situation analogous to the comedy of errors played out by that imbecilic rag tag bunch of in bred, megalomaniac European princelings and their lap dog retainers in the summer of 1914. Nuclear war was not inevitable in October 1962 and crucially, neither of the main protagonists was under any real illusion as to the likely outcome of such a war.
The Kennedy Administration possessed intelligence that US forces alone — that is, without taking into account the 150 plus strong British V-Bomber Force — had a strategic intercontinental first strike capability that was between six and eight times that of the Soviets. This CIA assessment was broadly correct other than in terms of the actual scale of the American advantage. On paper we now know that US Forces alone actually enjoyed a capability advantage of approximately seventeen to one over their enemy.
In the Kremlin, Khrushchev knew that the Strategic Missile forces under his command had virtually no viable first strike capability against any target located in the continental United States. That was, after all, why the Politburo had so badly wanted to base a hundred SS-4 medium range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) with a range of 1,300 miles on Cuba in the first place in an foolhardy attempt to level the playing field and forestall the day when the perfidious Americans would wake up, smell the coffee, and exploit their overwhelming strategic power. Seen through the prism of the paranoia of those Cold War years, had the Soviets been able to base SS-4s on Cuba in the same way the USA had already based Thor MRBMs in Turkey and the United Kingdom, from the point of view of the Kremlin the world might, conceivably, have seemed a much safer place.
After all, it was only because it believed this that the fateful decision to mount Operation Anadyr — the Cuban Option — had been taken in the first place.
Chapter 6
Walter Brenckmann discovered later that the 1.2 megaton warhead of the Soviet ICBM — probably targeted on central Boston — had overshot its target by as many as ten miles to air burst at one thousand five hundred feet above the town of Quincy. Quincy was the birthplace of two former American Presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, a city in its own right but for over half-a-century a feeder commuter suburb of the Boston metropolitan area to its north along the curve of Quincy Bay where it merged into Boston Bay. Ninety-nine percent of its population of over seventy thousand souls died in the first second after the explosion, the few survivors who’d got down to their basements and cellars in time, died in the next few seconds, burned and crushed in the ruins. Momentarily the annihilating fifty million degree bloom of the airburst consumed Weymouth to the south, its thermal pulse flashing across and firing the southern suburbs of the great city to the north like the blowtorch of the gods. The firestorm scoured the surface of the Bay of all life for several miles out to sea before the tsunami shockwave of blast overpressure smashed into the southern suburbs and the port of Boston.
The flash turned night to day eleven-and-a-half nautical miles away in Cambridge as Walter Brenckmann bundled his complaining wife, Joanne, through the basement door and followed her down the flight of steps into the concrete sanctuary beneath the old house. The room had been the kids’ playground in the New England winters of their childhood; latterly it had become the family utility room. Washing machine, tumble dryer, a big Westinghouse larder fridge stood against one wall. Against another wall was a work bench with tools lying untidily on its top, a chair Walter had been attempting to repair perched atop it amid wood scrapings. The old, threadbare living room sofa they’d replaced upstairs three years ago sat in the middle of the cold room. It was bitterly cold because they didn’t bother turning on the heating now the kids were gone.
“What was that?” Joanne asked as the lights flickered.
Her husband didn’t reply as he calmly searched his toolbox for a torch.
The lights flickered again and then all was dark.
“Walter?”
“The electro-magnetic pulse of a big bomb trips the nearest transformers, after that the local grid shorts out,” her husband explained, gently, patiently. He switched on the torch, pointed it at Joanne’s feet, then towards the sofa. “We ought to sit down and wait.”
“Wait for what, Walter?”
The end of the world.
What he actually said was: “To see if the power comes back on, sweetheart.”
Together they settled on the sofa and drew the blankets they’d snatched from the airing cupboard on their way down to the bottom of the house around themselves.
Joanne leaned against her husband.
“Are you as scared as I am, honey?”
I’m so scared I’m surprised I haven’t evacuated my bowels!
“Naw,” Walter Brenckmann drawled, “we’ve done what we can do, sweetheart. The rest is in God’s hands.”
They were both Sunday Baptists. Neither of them were true believers. Their chapel, St Mark’s, had been the centre of their social orbit for some years and the congregation largely comprised couples like themselves, with kids in common, schools in common, jobs in the nearby city in common, with Democratic politics in common, and so on…