ON the night of October 15, 1962, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, chief of Britain’s Defence Staff, gave the first in a series of lectures on defence, at Edinburgh University. The West, he warned, was about to enter a new phase in defence, “when the Russians will have a nuclear sufficiency and there will be deadlock.
“This means,” he added, “that it will be no use for the West to have enough nuclear weapons to destroy Russia several times over if Russia has enough to destroy the West once.” Because a third world war would be suicide, conventional forces would be more important. Thought would eventually have to be given to disarmament, he said.
What no-one reading the Glasgow Herald account of Mountbatten’s speech the following morning - October 16 - was that both Russia and America were about to embark on a perilous game of nuclear brinksmanship that, in the words of a much later author, would give the human race its closest-ever brush with nuclear destruction.
Today the Herald looks back at how we covered those dark ‘13 Days’ of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 55 years ago. It comes, of course, as the world looks on with apprehension as President Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un embark on their own game of brinksmanship, publicly threatening each other with annihilation, with North Korea having tested two intercontinental ballistic missiles and intermediate-range missiles and also carried out nuclear tests.
The US had been eager to terminate the Communist regime of Fidel Castro from power in Cuba. After the humiliation of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, the Kennedy administration launched a secret operation, Mongoose, to remove Castro from power.
How The Glasgow Herald reported Mountbatten’s speech on October 16, 1962
But, as Bridget Kendall says in her oral history of the Cold War, the failed invasion encouraged Castro to cement his relationship with the Soviet Union and he asked Moscow for weapons to protect the island against any further US attack. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, painfully aware that US nuclear warheads were located in Turkey and elsewhere, saw an opportunity to station missiles on Cuba, from where they could reach Washington. “Why not throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam's pants?” he asked his defence minister.
At first, says Kendall, the US “looked the other way” and accepted Soviet pledges that the weapons being transported to Cuba were anti-aircraft defensive missiles. But all of that changed when U2 reconnaisance photographs indicated that missiles sites were being built for offensive nuclear weapons that would be able to reach targets in America.
The photographs were among more than 900 taken in the space of a few minutes over Cuba by Major Richard Heyser in his U2 plane on October 14. Two days later President Kennedy was informed that the Soviets had installed surface-to-surface nuclear missiles on Cuba.
In his book One Minute to Midnight, American journalist Michael Dobbs quotes a CIA finding that the missiles had a range of 1,174 miles and were capable of reaching the eastern seaboard. “Once armed and ready to fire,” Dobbs adds, “[the missiles] could explode over Washington in thirteen minutes, turning the capital into a scorched wasteland.”
Over the last two years, Dobbs added, JFK and Khrushchev had engaged in nuclear oneupmanship but Kennedy thought they had an understanding that Khrushchev would do nothing to embarrass him politically before the midterm elections due on November 6. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert, the Attorney General, were enraged by what they saw as Khrushchev’s duplicity.
The President, says Dobbs, asked when the missiles would be ready to fire. The experts said it would depend when the missiles were coupled with their nuclear warheads. Once that happened, they could be fired within a couple of hours.
In the words of the JFK Presidential Library and Museum: “President Kennedy and principal foreign policy and national defense officials are briefed on the U-2 findings. Discussions begin on how to respond to the challenge. Two principal courses are offered: an air strike and invasion, or a naval quarantine with the threat of further military action. To avoid arousing public concern, the president maintained his official schedule, meeting periodically with advisors to discuss the status of events in Cuba and possible strategies.”
There was no question that a serious international crisis was brewing, a period described by Norman Mailer later wrote,“when the world stood like a playing card on edge. . . . One looked at the buildings one passed and wondered if one was to see them again.”
*Tomorrow: Up to 32 missiles, and new missile sites, are discovered in Cuba as the US military mobilises.
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