This isn’t entirely true; while the Soviets realized they’d be at a disadvantage with regard to a nuclear exchange, they were fully prepared for a confrontation, to the point that they had submarines armed with nuclear-warhead torpedeos released to control by the boat commanders. (Even scarier, because the subs were out of contact with Moscow and the Red Fleet–no ELF or satellite communications at that time–they remained on alert for several days after the resolution of the CMC.)
What Triskadecamus says about the military realizing that they could not remain on alert indefinitely and the associated problems with remaining on alert are true, but even beyond that some military leaders (including, but not limited to, General Curtis ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay) believed that a nuclear conflict was inevitable, and that we should initiate it now while we had numerical superiority. Despite the fact that Kennedy campaigned on the issue of the “missile gap”, famously parodied in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, there was no significant gap, and any advantage was to the American side.
You have to understand that even in the early 'Sixties the notion of (Mutually) Assured Destruction was not the fixture that it became in the 'Seventies and 'Eighties; it was thought by many people, including RAND strategist and system theoriest Hermann Kahn, that a nuclear war would be survivable, again parodied by General Turgidson’s claim of “only modest and acceptible losses…ten to twenty million, tops. Depending on the breaks, of course.” Even better, prior to the development of effective over-the-horizon early warning systems and accurate submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) it was entirely possible for a unlaterial first strike to significantly damage an enemy’s retaliatory capability.
And while Western analysts in later decades continued to burble on about Assured Destruction (a philosophy with its genesis in the Eisenhower nuclear stockpile buildup, but first stated publically during Johnson’s term, with then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara using it as a reason to scale back and modernize conventional forces in Europe), Soviet theorists never accepted it as doctrine; in part, no doubt, because they were essentially unaccountable to their population, but also because they feared that it was a sham, that Western forces had or would gain the upper hand and initiate a secret attack, regardless of the size of the Soviet arsenal. In retrospect, the Soviets felt they they were always playing catchup with regard to nuclear delivery capabilities, and in a very real sense they often were; even much later, when they had ICBM parity with the United States, their missile forces were much more labor intensive (being largely storable liquid boosters), and when Reagan started harping on about a missile shield, obviating their newly acheived equality, they went ape.
This was much later, of course; during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets merely wanted something like the capability to strike at the U.S. mainland that the United States and enjoyed from its Jupiter intermediate range missile emplacements in Turkey and Italy, and the Thor IRBM squadrons in the U.K. This was less a strategic decision–the SS-4 and SS-5 missiles were insufficiently accurate enough to strike Washington or take out installations, and according to information from British mole Oleg Penkovsky the fueling systems for the installations in Cuba may not have even been fully operational, limiting their strike capability–than a political one, with Khrushchev trying vainly to maintain to vying factions in the Supreme Soviet that he was still strong on defense, even after his economic reforms cut into arms production. (Since Penkovsky was uncovered before the start of the CMC–possibly due to events leading up to the Crisis–we didn’t have up-to-date information on Soviet capabilities at that point, which might have altered Kennedy’s take on the situation.) Khrushchev was fully willing to deal with Kennedy on removing missiles tit-for-tat, and this would have been a win-win for everyone, since the emplacement of IRBMs in Turkey and Greece were stopgap efforts while the U.S. engaged in a crash program to develop the Atlas and Titan ICBMs, and the intended retirement date ended up being only spare months after the post-CMC removal secretly agreed upon by Kennedy and Khruschchev.
Instead, U.S. strategists and advisors to the President misread Soviet actions as preparations for war, and publically provoked Khruschchev, essentially forcing him to back down, which likely contributed to the coup a couple years later in which he was removed from power and his intended successor, Alexey Kosygin, was appointed Premier and head of government with almost no actual power, while the more hardline faction headed by Brezhnev took control and turned the Soviet Union inward, becoming paranoid and protective (or rather, brutally suppressive) of the Warsaw Pact states. In reflection, it was a bad move on the part of the Kennedy Administration, but nobody really understood what was going on internally in the Soviet Union at the time (at one point during the CMC, EXCOMM believed Khrushchev had been replaced in a coup by hardline militants who were attempting to provoke war) and they made the decisions that seemed right at the time.
As for Cuba, it was assumed in the first few years after the fall of Batista that the nascent Communist state would eat itself alive and Castro would be killed by one of his fellow fanatics (which didn’t stop the U.S. from trying to accelerate the process). Sooner or later, it was thought, we’d have to deal with Cuba–likely by annexing it and making it a protectorate–so invasion seemed a viable option. Nobody bar none thought Castro would still be in power in the 21st century; hell, many people figured that Cuba would fall in the post-Soviet environment. So much for foresight.
For what it’s worth, Castro recommended (possibly even demanded) the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the case of a U.S. invasion of Cuba (which seemed imminent due to the massive mobilization of U.S. conventional forces) with full knowledge that Cuba would be destroyed. In In Retrospect and the Errol Morris documentary, The Fog Of War, McNamara claims that everyone involved, were rational leaders: “Kennedy was rational, Khrushchev was rational, Castro was rational…and we came this close to nuclear war.” His point is that (at least as defined by Morris) “Rationality will not save us.” Personally, I don’t think Castro was being all that rational, but after the Bay of Pigs and several attempts by the CIA to execute him, one can excuse him for being more paranoid than a post-Watergate Richard Nixon on a bender. It’s not so much that rationality will not save us as that human beings–even, or perhaps especially the leaders of nations–simply don’t do rational very well, particularly when egos are involved.
Stranger