Remembering the Thirteenth Day

WHAT
For a several decades, the United States has not marked any particular conflict, including World War II, with a national day of remembrance. (The last occasion was Armistice Day, which originally commemorated the end of WWI before it was converted after World War II into Veterans Day.) Since Americans now live in a time when we are intensely focused on our current wars, it's worth resurrecting the tradition of marking past  conflicts with a day of remembrance. Generic holidays, like Memorial Day and Veterans Day, serve their own, somewhat different function, reminding us of the sacrifices that the men and women in our armed forces have made on our behalf. A national day of remembrance for a particular conflict would remind us of the lessons of a past war. There is no better way to ensure that the blood and treasure spent in these struggles will benefit more than a single generation.

I therefore propose a day of remembrance for the Cold War, the most recent of our past conflicts. It also more closely resembles our current antagonisms than the massive clashes across entire continents that characterize the two World Wars and the American Civil War. If there's a lesson to be learned from past wars, we should look back on those that most resemble our current generation of conflict.

Although you might pick many dates to mark the Cold War—for example, the day the Berlin Wall went up, or the day it came down—I propose October 28th, which in 1962 was the thirteenth and final day of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

WHY
The US and USSR came the closest to the "doomsday scenario," a strategic nuclear attack and counterattack, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet Union smuggled intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs), IL-28 bombers, MiG fighters, and anti-aircraft batteries into Cuba, under the noses of the US military and intelligence services. The Cuban Missile Crisis began with an intelligence failure that was the reverse mirror image of what occurred in Iraq. In September, the US Intelligence Board (USIB) submitted a report that noted a number of Soviet ships entering and leaving Cuban ports, but it missed the clues that they were carrying nuclear weapons. A few weeks later, the intelligence community pieced together a more accurate picture of what was happening from aerial photographs, signal intercepts, and other sources. Revolutionary Cuba had gone from an annoying mosquito close to America's shores to a deadly threat. The intelligence community corrected a grievous error, but no witch hunt resulted from their failure. The missile deployments had occurred under such secrecy that even the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, did not know about them until US Secretary of State Dean Rusk told him an hour before Kennedy told the world of their existence.

Once it learned the awful truth, the Kennedy Administration immediately took action. The US Navy set up a blockade around Cuba, threatening to sink the Soviet cargo ships, en route from the USSR, loaded with further missiles. The Administration demanded the immediate removal of the missiles. American missile silos, bombers, and submarines were put on high alert. A tense series of threats and counter-threats began between the White House and the Kremlin.

The world was genuinely on the brink of nuclear war. Decades later, at a conference where Soviet and American leaders in the Crisis exchanged notes, there was mutual agreement that the risk was higher than any other time during the Cold War—as high a probability as one out of three. As simultaneously determined and fearful as the two adversaries were, the top decision-makers in both governments enforced caution and level-headedness among their own ranks. The White House extended that principle to the American public, preferring to announce the Soviet missiles in Cuba in the most sober fashion possible. (I recommend that you listen to Kennedy's remarkable speech, available at the Kennedy presidential library's web site.)

In spite of the conflict—in fact, because of it—the two sides in the Cuban Missile Crisis agreed to joint measures, such as the famous "hot line," to keep communications open, instantaneous, and clear. With only minutes from the launch of a nuclear missile to its detonation over a target, the time in which to order a response to a presumed attack was dangerously compressed. A radar glitch might end civilization on both sides of the Atlantic.  In We Know Now, Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis summarizes how real this danger was:

The Strategic Air Command immediately dispersed long-range bombers and fighter-interceptors from their normal bases, but it failed to inform air defense units—also on high alert—about these flight plans. It more than quintupled the number of B-52s kept airborne, but in order to do so may have flown some with nuclear weapons whose arming circuitry had not yet been certified as safe. Minuteman missile crews, under pressure to bring these new silo-based ICBMs on line as quickly as possible, bypassed normal safety procedures, in effect "hot wiring" their weapons in ways that risked unauthorized launches. Cape Canaveral continued missile tests during the crisis: one of them caused a New Jersey radar unit to conclude—fortunately, only briefly—that a Soviet missile was on its way from Cuba. Reports of saboteurs attempting to penetrate an air force facility near Duluth set of an aircraft launch alarm at another base in Minnesota where nuclear-equipped F-106s scrambled, only to be stopped from taking off at the last minute when the Duluth infiltrators turned out to have been a lone inquisitive bear.

Another such measure was Kennedy's decision to move the naval blockade closer to Cuba. This redeployment put American warships within range of enemy aircraft in Cuba, but it also gave the Soviets more time to reconsider turning back their cargo vessels before they reached the American cordon.

Eventually, the Soviets backed down, agreeing to remove the missiles from Cuba, under humiliating US supervision. The common verdict on the Cuban Missile Crisis, as reported by journalists at the time, was that the Soviets had "blinked," caving to US pressure. As is usually the case, the first news reports were wrong—or, at least, missing important pieces of the story.

To borrow Gaddis' phrase, we now know that the Soviets were far weaker in a strategic nuclear conflict than the general public at the time realized. Although Kennedy was elected on the platform of a presumed "missile gap," with American nuclear forces weaker than the Soviet arsenal, the reverse was actually true. The Soviets had the weaker hand to play, from Kennedy's election through the Cuban Missile Crisis itself. In fact, one of the Soviet motives for deploying the missiles in Cuba was to offset this nuclear imbalance.

While the real missile gap might reinforce the conclusion that the Soviets "blinked," that conclusion would be largely wrong. The true story of the Cuban Missile Crisis is not as simple as the steely-eyed Kennedy forcing a crushing, embarrassing diplomatic defeat on the supine Nikita Khrushchev. In fact, Kennedy made concessions to Khrushchev, such as the removal of American Jupiter missiles that had been recently deployed in Turkey. (According to Gaddis, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev asked guests at his dacha what they saw from his view of the Black Sea. When they didn't produce the desired answer, Khrushchev would give it for them: "I see US missiles in Turkey, aimed at my dacha.") Although the United States had already tried to depose Castro once, in the humiliating Bay of Pigs incident, and could easily have tried again after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States left the USSR's revolutionary ally in Cuba relatively unmolested. (The CIA did continue to work to depose, assassinate, or embarrass Castro, a secret program that was revealed during the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s.) Kennedy worked hard behind the scenes, often against his more hawkish advisors, to ensure that the Soviets had a way of retreating with at least some of its dignity and interests intact. Had the Soviets been completely cornered by American threats, the Cuban Missile Crisis might have had a far worse conclusion.

Even if you factor these concessions, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a major triumph for the United States. The outcome was an undoubted success—the Soviets removed the missiles. Equally important was the way in which the Kennedy Administration handled an explosive situation, with the worst calamity in human history looming as a real possibility. Decisiveness and flexibility, courage and caution, open-mindedness and skepticism, coercion and compromise—rather than seeing these as contradictions, we should understand them as the capabilities we want in our leaders and government, at any time, but especially during a crisis. When the stakes are high—and they were arguably higher in 1962 than any time in human history—we need our leaders to be have whichever among these skills the moment requires. Had Kennedy and his closest advisors (the Executive Committee, or "ExCom") lacked even one of these skills, the events of October 1962 might have turned out far worse.

WHY NOW
As I argued at the beginning of this piece, the Cuban Missile Crisis is worth commemorating as the signature moment of the Cold War, which is itself worth regularly pondering for the lessons that great conflict offers. Here are a few of them:

• It is possible to handle the threat of nuclear weapons without exaggerating that threat.
• Those who use the threat of violence, from a suicide bomber to the head of a nuclear-armed government, cannot be defeated unless the target of their attacks refuses to be frightened by them.
• During times of national crisis, leaders and their subordinates need to be constantly checking each other's assumptions and information. Too many great historical failures to ignore were the tragic result of the statement, It must be so, because we want it to be so.
• The threat or use of force is only justified if it produces the desired outcome. Acting tough is a means, not an end, even when dealing with our most mortal enemies.

The immediate relevance of these lessons is obvious. If you agree with my argument for marking October 28th as an important anniversary, I urge you to make the case in other online forums, conversations about current affairs, letters to newspapers, or wherever else may be appropriate. The lessons of the famous Thirteen Days in October 1962 are too important to forget.

Comments

[oakley frogskins]

Ought to be short and concise while hitting the major issues of proportional response a la "Arms and Influence." See here for an interesting discussion.

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