I’m reading about JFK and wanted to know about the Cuban Missile Crisis but I can’t seem to find anything on it that isn’t very long and way more involved than I need to know. I just need a simple (if possible) explanation of it. Particularly info regarding the loss of life because of a time zone miscalculation.
Thanx
Off the top of my head, here’s an anecdote or two.
You might find maps showing Cuba and the eastern United States, with concentric circles drawn on it centered on Cuba. The circles are marked in hours, meaning how many hours it would take a missle from Cuba to reach various places. I think Wash. D.C. was around the 3-hour circle, or so. NO WAY would a missile ever come anywhere even close to the West Coast.
Yet there was panic even in Los Angeles. People were buying back-yard bomb shelters. A neighbor on our block got one installed.
I was in 5th grade at the time. My mother came home from shopping one day and announced that the shelves at the supermarket were BARE. People were panic buying.
My father claimed right from the start that it was all a big dust-up over nothing. He claimed that there was no way Khrushchev would ever go to war over a little rock out in the Caribbean. Apparently, he called it right. Kennedy threw up a naval blockade around Cuba, and Khrushchev backed down.
Many years later, I came across some article about it, which described the whole incident as “The Biggest Cold War Crisis that Almost Was”.
Well, here’s a link, titled “An Overview of the Crisis”
http://library.thinkquest.org/11046/days/index.html
So if you’re looking for a brief summary, maybe this is a good starting point.
ETA: There’s much more to this site too besides this home page – Links to additional pages with more detail, if you want to read more.
While the public was worried (probably a little too much) about Cuba, the government was mostly thinking about Germany. Many in the administration were convinced that if Kennedy blockaded Cuba, the Soviets would retaliate by cutting off Berlin. Then NATO would oblige the US to beef up forces in Western Europe, which would eventually lead to a direct confrontation with the Eastern Bloc.
Cuba was the flashpoint, but the crisis was primarily about Europe.
I don’t know what maps you’re referring to, but this is flat out wrong. The Cubans had ballistic missiles, which travel at thousands of miles per hour. Flight time would have been minutes, not hours. Distance from Havana to DC is roughly 1100 miles, so maybe… 20 minutes or so? The height of the arc would make a significant distance in the travel time.
What kind of “time zone miscalculation” are you talking about? I have never read or seen anything close to this phrase used in an explanation of this event. I’m also not aware of any deadlines place on demands made by either side, which is the only kind of thing I can think of related to time. There was an blockade, which was related to distance – how close the US Navy would allow Russian supply ships to get to Cuba without challenge.
Don’t know anything about a loss of life because of a time zone miscalculation.
The crisis started when the USAF discovered from recon photos that the Cubans seemed to be installing ballistic missiles of a type that were known to be nuclear-capable. Further recon flights counted the number of installed sites.
The Kennedy administration responded by reporting the situation to the UN Security Council, and by declaring a quarantine around Cuba for vessels containing ballistic missiles or parts. The word “quarantine” allowed the US to sidestep the issue of declaring war on Cuba; declaring an “embargo” or “blockade” could have, in international law, been construed as a hostile action.
It was, of course, the Soviet Union that was bringing in the missiles. Castro had been pushing Kruschev for support, especially after the Bay of Pigs incident, and Kruschev himself was eager to push hard at the US. The Soviets also argued that having missiles in Cuba was just a response to the US having installed missiles in Turkey.
The quarantine and the Security Council discussion called the bluff of the Soviet Union. While the USAF (and Curt LeMay in particular) wanted to duke it out bomb-wise with the USSR, Kennedy just wanted the missiles out. Kruschev backed down rather than risk war. The US secretly assured the USSR that the missiles in Turkey would be removed, since Kennedy wanted them out anyway.
The incident actually killed Kruschev’s career. The Politburo had always thought he was too excitable and unpredictable, and the crisis “proved” it. Within a year they’d pushed him aside.
Some other random notes:
One U-2 pilot flying recon was killed when his plane was hit by a SAM. Yet again, the Soviets proved that they had AA capabilities that outdid the supposedly “invulnerable” U-2.
Washington, DC was supposedly within range of the missiles. I was 9 years old at the time, living in the DC suburbs. I remember that we had “duck and cover” drills every day for a week, and even planned to have a drill where we’d be sent home from school. Fortunately, nothing happened; otherwise, someday an archaeologist would have found a line of black spots of tar along the base of some ancient, buried wall… 
Sounds like you’re thinking of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was a precursor to the Missile Crisis. There were many missteps in that operation, including a lack of air support due to ignorance of a time zone difference that led to the death of four U.S. airmen.
Overview/summary of Bay of Pigs invasion. Text just above 2nd photo tells of deaths mentioned above.
Specific mention of time zone mistake (scroll down to 6th paragraph).
Thank you, my people.
633squadron seems to have gotten it down pat. I think I have things confused with the ‘Bay of Pigs’ sitch as far as the time zone, but the book stated that JFK was so upset about the CMC that it made him ill, and that there was a significant loss of life because of it. HMMMM…
If a nuclear missile had been launched from Cuba and hit Washington, DC, it’s not like the whole thing would have just stopped there. Presumably World War III would have broken out at that point, and the Soviets would be doing their best to nuke everything from Maine to San Diego–obviously not all by way of Cuba, but with other longer-range missiles and with bombers and so forth–and the U.S. would be doing the same for everything from Leningrad to Vladivostok. And (one side or the other) Western and Eastern Europe, and Japan, and the Koreas, and maybe China too.
I agree with MEBuckner, I lived on the west coast at the time (I was 13 or so) and what we were worried about was not being hit by a missile from Cuba, but the start of global thermonuclear war (would you like to play a game?).
I recall being rather fatalistic about things at the time, thinking that I would rather be killed in the first strike than attempt to live through the aftermath. This might have been a rationalization for the fact that we were too poor to have a bomb shelter. I didn’t know anyone who had a bomb shelter, by the way.
Roddy
I wish I had a cite for this, but I guess it qualifies as a general question… I remember, not too long ago, there was a retrospective conference on the CMC, with old Soviet and U.S. cold warriors all talking about what happened, and bringing out until-then secret records, etc.
Someone said that the conference involved a lot of people turning very gray and saying, “My God, you did what? We had no idea…” The notion was that the world came much closer to war than anyone had known at the time…
Is there any validity to this…or is it even a meaningful question? (How do you measure “probability” of an unique event?)
The crisis really started when the US parked some Jupiter missiles in Turkey, not far from the USSR border.
I can’t comment on all its detail/accuracy, but I thought the movie “Thirteen Days” did a pretty good job of documenting the CMC.
Okay, mea goofa. I definitely remember seeing such maps, but I confess I was thoroughly unsure what the time frames were. Now I think I might have just pulled that 3-hours out of my ass. Still, no way they were going to blow Los Angeles away, but people were panic-buying even there.
I remember the same thing. There were several surprises from that conference. If I remember correctly, one big one was that the Kremlin had turned operational control of the nuclear missles over the the Russian military in Cuba. The Kremlin figured they would be out of communication if war was starting. The Cubans pushed hard for the local commander to launch right away. The compromise was that the missles would be fired as soon as the first conventional attack by the US. Washington didn’t realize that the crisis came down to one or two Russian military officers, surrounded in a strange country with the local hosts demanding action. They thought missle control was still held in the Kremlin.
Berlin was a different but related game. If this account is accurate, it was just as touchy and full of bull moves and bluffing.
I googled around and found this:
October 27, 1962. The most dangerous day in human history.
I was 10. On that day I had a less than 10% chance of living to 11.
I believe there was an event in late 1983 where we even came closer to war! I’ll have to research it a bit but here’s what I know.
Reagan came out with his “Stars Wars” SDI missile defense system and basically took a stance that the Soviets wanted war and we were ready for it. He called the USSR “The evil Empire”. That really torqued the Russkies. They thought the US was trying to provoke them.
The Soviets then “accidentally” shotdown a Korean airlines civilian jetliner that they “thought” was a US spy plane.
The US responded by launching war games (testing of ALL the communication gear, etc) in Eastern Europe which the Soviet’s thought was a massive troop build up on their borders in preparation for a ground assault. Apparently the USSR came within minutes of launching their missiles.
You’re thinking of Korean Air Lines Flight KAL-007, shot down on Sept. 1, 1983.
Wikipedia article: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 - Wikipedia