Khrushchev had ordered missiles to Cuba in part for the simple reason that, despite Kennedy’s claims on the campaign trail that the Soviets had more and better missiles than the US, in reality Moscow did not have sufficient capabilities to strike the US mainland from Russia.
Caught in a similar situation five years earlier, the Americans had placed medium-range missiles in Turkey, which borders the USSR, giving Khrushchev another reason to act.
Khrushchev faced a young, inexperienced president whom he had defeated only a year earlier at the Vienna summit, where Kennedy admitted that the Soviet leader had “beat the hell out of me” in the failed West Berlin talks.
Khrushchev miscalculated, but nuclear confrontation was never his intention.
Some in Washington were unfazed. Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, opined early in the crisis that “they’ve got enough to blow us up anyway.” Yet politically Kennedy could never allow the missiles to remain, and for several days the US military’s preference for striking Soviet facilities seemed to prevail.
Add Comment