Within days, the Castros were informed. ‘The best way to safeguard Cuba,’ replied Fidel. ‘We’re willing to accept all the missiles.’ Khrushchev told his comrades he was stuffing ‘a hedgehog’ down Uncle Sam’s pants. In July as plans were made, Raul Castro and Che Guevara visited Moscow, asking, ‘What precautions have you taken in case the operation is discovered?’
‘Don’t worry,’ beamed Khrushchev, ‘there’ll be no big reaction and if there is, I’ll send the Baltic Fleet.’ Later he suggested, ‘I’ll grab Kennedy by the balls and make him negotiate,’ adding that, like a peasant who brings his goat into his hut for winter and gets used to the stink, Kennedy would ‘learn to accept the smell of the missiles’.*
On 26 July 1962, a Soviet armada departed from Odessa bearing 44,000 troops and six atomic bombs, along with eighteen nuclear cruise missiles, three divisions of tactical nuclear weapons and six bombers. In August they started installing the missiles: it is likely Khrushchev permitted his commander to use the tactical weapons – if necessary. American intelligence noticed activity in Cuba but had missed massive activity in Odessa and never realized the full extent of the Soviet deployment.*
On 14 October, a US spy plane revealed some of the missiles in Cuba, throwing JFK into an existential world crisis. He had found the hedgehog in his pants. ‘He can’t do this to me,’ he said, calling Khrushchev ‘a fucking liar’, an ‘immoral gangster’. It was the biggest crisis any president would face, and ultimately he proved his acumen, telling his Executive Committee, ‘Gentlemen, we’re going to earn our pay today.’
Kennedy listened as his hawkish aides proposed surgical attacks on the missiles, a plan supported by nine members of his Executive Committee against seven who supported a blockade. But he quickly switched to blockading Cuba and announced a press conference. In the Kremlin, Khrushchev panicked: ‘That’s it! Lenin’s work has been destroyed.’ Mikoyan and the Presidium, all Second World War veterans fearful of war, were alarmed by his recklessness. Khrushchev was afraid that an invasion was imminent, and admitted, ‘The tragedy is they can attack and we’ll respond. This could escalate into large-scale war.’ Khrushchev urged his commanders to ‘Make all efforts initially not to use atomic weaponry,’ and now stressed that Moscow’s authorization would be required for their deployment.
In Washington, JFK announced instead a quarantine of Cuba and demanded removal of weapons. At the ExComm, ‘we’d taken the first step,’ recalled Bobby, ‘– and we were still alive.’ JFK permitted his trigger-happy generals to plan air strikes – all of them unaware that a full nuclear arsenal was on the island – but ‘it looks like hell’, he told Bobby, ‘doesn’t it!’ JFK was obsessed with a history book, The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, about the start of the First World War, which he and his aides had read. ‘They somehow seemed to tumble into war,’ he said, through ‘stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur’. Never has a historian been so important.
In Moscow, a jumpy Khrushchev ordered some of the Soviet ships to turn back; in Washington, keen to test the quarantine, JFK was delighted to see the six ships turn, but ordered the stopping of all of them. ‘His face seemed drawn, his eye pained,’ noted Bobby. The order to stop the other ships, which would have led to confrontation, was withdrawn just in time. ‘For a moment the world had stood still and now it was going round again.’ In Moscow, a sleepless Khrushchev ‘swore at Washington, threatened to nuke the White House’, but then calmed down and led his comrades off to watch Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi. ‘It’ll have a calming effect,’ said Khrushchev. ‘If Khrushchev and other leaders are sitting in the theatre, then everyone can sleep soundly.’ But the next morning, when he learned of a tightening of the blockade, he cursed ‘like a bargeman’, stamping his foot. ‘I’m gonna crush that viper!’ he bellowed. JFK was ‘a millionaire’s whore’.
While Khrushchev was calming down, Kennedy sent Jackie and the children out of Washington and raised DEFCON (Defence Readiness Condition) to Level 2,* just short of war, a move that so alarmed Khrushchev that he told Mikoyan he was withdrawing the missiles in return for ‘promises the Americans won’t attack Cuba’. He dictated a long, meandering letter offering a mix of peace and defiance. But the crisis was still escalating: Castro ordered the shooting down of any US aeroplanes and prepared for an imminent American invasion, staying up all night at the Soviet embassy, drinking beer and eating sausages. It was now he decided that the best course was nuclear war.
Khrushchev had been reading translations of articles by the powerful Washington Post columnist Walter Lippman, who had suggested a solution: removal of American missiles from Türkiye in return for removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. No journalist in history has ever been so influential. With this idea, Khrushchev sent a second less conciliatory letter to JFK, who dispatched his brother to discuss the plan with the Soviet ambassador. As the president relaxed somewhat, Special Assistant Dave Powers summoned his teenage lover, the intern Mimi. Yet though he chatted to her, JFK’s ‘expression was grave … even his quips had a half-hearted, funereal tone’: ‘I’d rather my children were red than dead,’ he said before sending her alone off to bed while he watched a movie, Roman Holiday.
The leaders were moving towards the deal, yet soldiers and weapons were still moving towards war. Khrushchev now received Castro’s letter: ‘the imperialists might initiate a nuclear strike against the USSR’, suggested Fidel, so the ‘moment would be right’ to launch nuclear strikes on America. ‘However difficult and horrifying this decision may be, there is I believe no other recourse.’ It remains the most terrifying letter ever written by a leader. Khrushchev was horrified: ‘When this was read to us, we, sitting in silence, looked at one another for a long time.’
‘You proposed we carry out a nuclear first strike,’ he wrote to Castro. ‘This wouldn’t be a simple attack but the start of a thermonuclear world war.’
‘We knew we’d be exterminated … should a thermonuclear war break out,’ responded Castro, ‘and if such an event occurred, what would one do with the madmen who unleashed the war?’
Soviet troops were permitted to resist with anything non-nuclear – and they shot down an American plane and killed a pilot. Bobby told the Soviet ambassador that his brother could withdraw the Turkish missiles in ‘4–5 months’ but ‘can’t say anything public’, adding, ‘Time is of the essence.’ This was no exaggeration: off Bermuda, US ships dropped non-lethal depth charges to signal to a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine, the B-59, that it should surface. Yet the officers of B-59 had had no contact with Moscow and only knew of negotiations from American radio. Around midday on 27 October, Captain Savitsky, believing the two superpowers were at war, ordered the launch of a T5 nuclear missile: ‘Prepare [nuclear] torpedo tube 1 and 2 for firing!’ But his commander, Akhipov, using the sub as a command centre, overruled him and convinced him to surface, where an American ship flashed its searchlights in a friendly gesture. Savitsky understood and ordered: ‘Stop preparations for firing.’ It was the closest the world came to nuclear war.
At his dacha at Novo-Ogarevo outside Moscow (later Vladimir Putin’s residence), Khrushchev persuaded his comrades, Mikoyan and his protégé, the titular head of state Leonid Brezhnev, to take JFK’s offer of Cuba for Türkiye: ‘To save humanity, we should retreat.’