Day Seven of the Cuban Missile Crisis: Crossing the Rubicon

Eighty-first Chapter in a Series Chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

Author’s note: From this point onward, the Cuban Missile Crisis becomes an avalanche of events that challenge the three governments’ ability to control them. Loss of control might well lead to a nuclear war.

Complicating the blur of events: Moscow’s clocks are seven hours ahead of Washington’s. Havana is one hour behind Washington.

Monday, October 22nd, 1962

Early morning. A New York Times article describes the “air of crisis” that pervaded Washington the previous evening.

Shortly before 11 AM: The Navy begins evacuating approximately 2,800 service wives and children from Guantanamo Naval Station.

11 AM: The President meets with State and Defense officers to discuss possible Soviet reprisals against Berlin once the quarantine takes effect.

Noon: As White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger announces the President’s 7 PM address, SAC places its entire B-52 bomber fleet on alert and begins dispersing its B-47 bombers to airfields around the United States. The Air Defense Command (ADC) also disperses its 161 fighters; all the fighters are armed with nuclear weapons.

Noon Washington (7 PM Moscow): Salinger’s announcement reaches Premier Khrushchev at the Kremlin. President Kennedy’s address will be broadcast live at 2 AM Tuesday Moscow time.

3 PM: The President meets with the National Security Council and members of the Office of Emergency Planning. The President wants everyone to stress that all decision-makers have agreed on the actions he is about to announce. Everyone is also to claim that the six-week delay in detecting the missiles was caused by bad weather. That was hardly the case.

The President signs National Security Action Memorandum No. 196 officially establishing EXCOM and naming its members. The President also orders low-level reconnaissance flights to begin on October 23.

3 PM Washington (10 PM Moscow): Premier Khrushchev convenes the Presidium—four hours before the President is due to speak. Realizing that the U.S. has discovered the missiles, the Presidium votes to order all ships still at sea to return to Soviet waters. Vessels in Cuban waters are to proceed quickly to the nearest Cuban ports.

• The Presidium’s decision is stunning: before President Kennedy has said one word, the fact that he is going to speak has frightened Soviet leaders into pulling back from the mushrooming confrontation between the two super powers.
• The members of the Presidium now know that Khrushchev, who arm-twisted them into Operation ANADYR in late May, has blundered seriously.
• Much later we learn that some of the ships ordered to turn back are carrying two regiments of intermediate range ballistic missiles to Cuba. IRBMs have twice the range of the medium range missiles already there. Had the IRBMs arrived, the Soviets could have attacked every American city and military installation except those in extreme northwestern Washington.
• However: one of the Soviet ships in Cuban waters is the Aleksandrovsk, carrying 24 1-megaton nuclear warheads and less powerful warheads for the tactical Lunas and FKR cruise missiles. After Aleksandrovsk docks in Cuba, the warheads for the MRBMs and the tactical missiles are unloaded and transported to their storage areas.

4:30 PM (11:30 PM Moscow): Defense Minister Malonowsky cables General Pliyev in Cuba to prepare his command “to repel the enemy by joint efforts of the Cuban Army and all units of Soviet troops” except the strategic missiles and nuclear warheads in Cuba. Now it appears that Moscow has withdrawn its earlier permission for Pliyev to use his tactical nukes when conditions warranted it.

5 PM: Seventeen Congressional leaders, summoned from all over the United States, arrive at the White House for a briefing. While most lawmakers seem supportive of the quarantine, some are appalled that the US is not going to strike at the missile sites.

As the President is briefing Congressional leaders, State Department emissaries around the world ask leading allies of the United States to support the blockade.

• President Charles de Gaulle tells former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “it is exactly what I would have done.…You may tell your president that France will support him.”
• Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, however, insists that he will not be able to support the United States unless he himself is allowed to show others the American photographs he has just seen. Otherwise, British subjects will not believe the threat. Macmillan also wonders why Americans are reacting so violently to the arrival in their backyard of the missiles Europeans have had to live with since the late 1950s.

6 PM: Secretary Rusk hands Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin a copy of Kennedy’s speech and a personal letter to Premier Khrushchev. Rusk personally warns Dobrynin that the U.S. means business. Rusk later wrote that Dobrynin, whose masters had deliberately kept him in the dark about the Soviet missiles in Cuba, aged 10 years during their meeting.

6 PM Washington (1 AM Moscow): Ambassador Foy Kohler delivers copies of Kennedy’s speech and letter to Khrushchev at the Kremlin.

Adlai E. Stevenson, ambassador to the United Nations, describes the contents of the President’s speech to acting Secretary General U Thant and asks for a meeting of the Security Council.

6:30 PM: Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) George Anderson formally asks the Royal Navy and Royal Canadian Navy to track Soviet ships and submarines.

6:40 PM in New York (5:40 PM in Havana, 1:40 AM on Tuesday in Moscow): Fidel Castro alerts Cuba’s military and activates her reservists.

6:45 PM: The Pentagon asks the nation’s railroads for thousands of units of rolling stock to move troops and military equipment to embarkation points.

Naval Preparations

The Cuban Missile Crisis is very much a Navy operation. When the President begins to speak,

• Some 150 Navy vessels are at sea or preparing to sail.
• Of these 150, 44 combat and support ships will enforce the quarantine.
• Two task forces based on the attack carriers Independence and Enterprise will lurk south of the Windward Channel ready to conduct air strikes if ordered.
• By Wednesday, when the quarantine takes effect, an invasion force of some 150,000 troops aboard four helicopter carriers and 60 assorted transports will be poised for action in the Florida Straits between Key West and Havana.

Some 156 land-based aircraft based in Florida are also ready to conduct air strikes against Cuban targets.

7 PM: President Kennedy begins to speak. (His historic speech will be discussed this coming Monday, the 50th anniversary of his address. That chapter will contain a link to a video of the full speech.)

As the President Starts Speaking…

• U.S. forces around the world go to Defense Readiness Condition–3 (DEFCON-3), two steps below the outbreak of nuclear war. U.S. ICBM crews (91 Atlases and 41 Titans) are included in the alert.
• DEFCON-3 means that SAC is able to launch its entire nuclear bomber fleet within 15 minutes of a Presidential order.
• United States Navy Polaris submarines sail to pre-assigned stations. Their missiles alone can destroy every major city in the USSR.
• In Florida, twenty-two fighter aircraft take off to intercept any strike the Cubans might mount.
• U.S. troops in Berlin go to combat alert.

No Turning Back Now

Jack Kennedy has crossed his Ruibicon. Either the United States or the Soviet Union will have to pull back from their confrontation over Cuba.

Email your questions to phufstader@sbcglobal.net or post a comment.

Sources and Notes

The Times “air of crisis” article datelined October 21, Washington, is an unsigned special: “Top Aides Confer. U.S. Forces Maneuver Off Puerto Rico—Link Is Denied.” The “link” refers to the common assumption that the US fleet “maneuvering” near Puerto Rico is preparing for military action against Cuba.

Unless otherwise noted, details of military activities in this chapter come from Chief of Naval Operations, “Quarantine, 22-26 October [1962].” Report on the Naval Quarantine of Cuba. http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq90-5a.htm

The State Department’s 10:55 activities are documented on p. 376-377 of Lawrence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Document Reader. New York: The New Press, 1998. Document 74 in Mary McAuliffe, ed., CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962. Washington, D.C.: October 1992, contains a sanitized version of the talking points for those briefings.

The President’s meetings beginning at 11 AM and continuing until his 5 PM meeting with Congressional leaders are described starting at page 350 in Dino Brugioni’s Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of The Cuban Missile Crisis (Robert F. McCort, ed.). New York: Random House, 1991. See also p. 377 of Chang and Kornbluh.

The evacuation of Guantanamo is described beginning on p. 338ff in Brugioni’s Eyeball.

SAC and ADC operations begun at noon are described on p. 377 of Chang and Kornbluh.

The source for the emergency meeting of the Presidium starting at 10 PM Moscow time on the 22nd is the minutes of the meeting posted on the website of the Kremlin Decision-Making Project at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia (http://web1.millercenter.org/kremlin/62_10_22.pdf).

The minutes of the President’s 3 PM meeting with NSC and OEM appear “Minutes of the 507th Meeting of the National Security Council,” document 41 of Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath (http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/frusXI/26_50.html).

The 4:30 cable to Pliyev is reproduced on p. 387 of the Cold War International History Project’s Bulletin 14-15, Winter 2003-Spring 2004.

The dispersal of U.S. tactical fighters with nuclear weapons loaded is described on p. 39ff of Michael Dobbs’ One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

The President’s 5 PM meeting with Congressional leaders is covered by many sources, among them One Minute, p. 40; Chang and Konrbluh, p. 378; and Eyeball, p. 355ff. McCone’s memorandum of this meeting is document 43 in FRUS Vol. XI (link just above)

Acheson’s meeting with DeGaulle is described on p. 377 of Chang and Kornbluh and p. 39 of One Minute.

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s hostile reaction to his briefing by U.S. Ambassador David Bruce is described in Eyeball, pp. 328-330 and p. 477 of Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

Rusk’s meeting with Dobrynin is described on p. 42 of One Minute and in p. 235 of Dean Rusk’s memoir As I Saw It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991. The usual caveats about memoirs are pertinent to Rusk’s.

The text of JFK’s letter to NSK appears as document 44 in FRUS XI (link just above).

JFK’s letter to NSK is printed as document 60 in Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges (http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/volume_vi/volumevi.html).

CNO Anderson’s request for help from the Royal Navy and the Canadian Navy is described on p. 363 of Eyeball.

Adlai Stevenson’s request for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council is described on p. 495 of James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch. Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002;and on p. 42ff of One Minute.

Castro’s placing Cuban forces on alert is described on p. 38 of One Minute.

The Pentagon’s request for help from the railroads and other military maneuvers on the 22nd are described on p. 371-2 and 378 of Eyeball. See also p. 51ff in Midnight; and pp. 365-366, 377, 379 in Chang and Kornbluh. The numbers of U.S. Navy ships involved in enforcing the quarantine and preparing for air strikes and invasion come from pp. 309-10 in Norman Polmar and John D. Gresham, DEFCON-2: Standing on the Brink of Nuclear War during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2006.