What a difference six decades makes.
The last time the two nuclear superpowers were locked in a standoff, the world held its breath.
In October 1962 a U.S. spy plane discovered the Soviet Union was secretly building missile bases in Cuba.
Over the course of 13 tense days, humanity’s future hung in the balance as U.S. President John F. Kennedy demanded the missiles be removed and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev refused.
In the end, Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the Cuban missile sites, and Kennedy agreed to quietly remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.
The latter is described in Thirteen Days, Robert F. Kennedy’s brief memoir of the Cuban missile crisis (which was unfinished when he was assassinated in 1968).
As hopes for a peaceful resolution faded, JFK asked RFK -- the president’s brother and closest confidante as well as the U.S. Attorney General -- to talk to Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington.
In that 11th-hour private meeting with RFK, with whom he was already acquainted, Dobrynin asked about the U.S. missiles in Turkey. Earlier in the crisis the Soviets has formally requested their removal, but JFK had no wish to acquiesce to Soviet threats -- even though he regarded those missiles as antiquated and useless.
NO QUID PRO QUO
In that evening meeting with Dobrynin, RFK told the Soviet ambassador there could be no quid pro quo.
“However, I said President Kennedy had been anxious to remove those missiles from Turkey and Italy for a long period of time,” RFK told Dobrynin. “He had ordered their removal some time ago, and it was our judgment that within a short time after this crisis was over, those missiles would be gone.”
Earlier in the book, RFK says JFK had -- on several occasions over the previous 18 months -- asked the State Department to reach an agreement with Turkey for the withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from that country.
“They were clearly obsolete, and our Polaris submarines in the Mediterranean would give Turkey far greater protection.”
Although they were adversaries, neither JFK nor Khrushchev wanted nuclear war. Each was willing to be flexible and to allow the other to save face.
COMPARE TO TODAY
Contrast the sense of urgency -- and willingness to compromise -- in 1962 with how both Russia and the U.S. are locked into a collision course over Ukraine in 2023.
Indeed, the roles are almost reversed. Instead of the U.S. protesting Soviet missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from Florida, Russia has for years opposed a de facto NATO presence on Russia’s border in Ukraine, a country through which Russia has suffered several catastrophic invasions. Hence Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine after its warnings went unheeded.
The world’s two nuclear superpowers move ever closer to a direct conflict as the U.S. has poured more than US$100 billion into Ukraine to fight Russia.
But unlike October 1962 no one seems to care about a looming collision of the nuclear superpowers.
So RFK’s short memoir of the Cuban missile crisis is even more relevant today than when it was first published in 1969.
The contrast between the key players in Washington today and the brain trust of 1962 couldn’t be starker.
NO “MISSILES OF OCTOBER”
Earlier in 1962, the most widely acclaimed book on the origins of World War I -- Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August -- rolled off the presses.
President Kennedy, who had majored in history at Harvard, read The Guns of August as soon as it was published and grasped its lesson on how the major European powers in 1914 inadvertently stumbled into what (until World War II) would be history’s bloodiest war.
The Guns of August “had made a great impression on the President,” his brother writes in Thirteen Days.
“I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, The Missiles of October,” RFK recalls the president saying on Oct. 26. “If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move.”
LESSONS LEARNED
So what was learned from the world’s near-death experience in October 1962?
In Thirteen Days RFK listed some of the key lessons:
--The time that was available to work “secretly, quietly, privately.”
--“How important it is that the president have the recommendations and opinions of more than one individual, of more than one department, and of more than one point of view. Opinion, even fact itself, can best be judged by conflict, by debate. There is an important element missing when there is unanimity of viewpoint.”
-- “The final lesson of the Cuban missile Crisis is the importance of placing ourselves in the other country’s shoes”
“MINUTES AWAY FROM ANNIHILATION”
The last time the world really seemed to care about the threat of nuclear war was the early 1980s. That was when Soviet and American experts agreed that such a conflict must be avoided.
That conference is featured in the 1984 documentary “On the 8th Day,” which describes what would happen of only a fraction of U.S. and Russian weapons were unleashed -- even if only one side did so. And those weapons packed only a fraction of the destructive force of today’s nuclear arsenals.
The current edition of Thirteen Days includes an afterword written in 1971, three years after RFK’s death. “Today,” it says, meaning 1971, “the explosive power of a single thermonuclear bomb exceeds the total explosive power of all bombs used in all wars of the past,” including the murderous 20th Century.
“Today,” the afterword to Thirteen Days adds, still referring to 1971, “no point on the globe lies more than minutes away from annihilation by a ballistic missile.”
World War I was called the war to end all wars, presumably to make the murderous bloodbath more marketable to ordinary people who paid the biggest price. But within a generation they were back at it, tripling or quadrupling the death toll of 1914-18.
Given that Russia and the U.S. have enough nuclear warheads to end human civilization, a war between those superpowers promises to be the real thing -- a war that will indeed end all wars by annihilating the species that fights them.
AN EASY READ
This book is an easy read. The part written by RFK is only about 80 pages and is uncommonly well written. Simple words. Short sentences. Right to the point. No padding with colour or background. This firsthand account of humanity at the precipice is a priceless resource for scholars but could be easily read by teenagers.
Obviously this isn’t an impartial account. RFK was writing about himself, his murdered brother and their close associates. This isn’t only one side of the crisis, it’s also only one side of the American side. Among the key players the only elected official was the president; Congress was informed rather than consulted, and then only as a last-minute formality.
But no one can argue with the outcome: nuclear war was averted.
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