Why did the US miltary actively promote confrontation in the Cuban missile crisis?

The film 13 Days unambiguously depicted the senior US military as deliberately ratcheting up the tension and stakes during the Cuban missile crisis, by scheduling missile launches and giving uncompromising orders to the airforce overflying the island, in order to force JFK’s hand and invade.

Ernest May (the Harvard professor who wrote the book the movie was based on) says

which defends their motives but seems to say the movie was pretty much factually correct. I can’t say I understand his implication that a sense of duty meant that they saw war as the only way forward (and therefore that nuclear war was an acceptable price to pay). So what was their motive? Did they really think nuclear war was preferable to a negotiated solution?

During the period leading up to the final confrontation, US Nuclear forces were at the highest levels ever, before, or since. Military planners new that such a level of readiness was not sustainable, and either our ability to respond would be degraded, or militarily unproductive deployment of ready nuclear forces would place the US and its allies within eight minutes of destruction. It turns out that the Soviets were not willing to enter nuclear confrontation, especially since it become more and more obvious that the possibility of non nuclear involvement was far lower than their expectation.

It is much easier to critique the past than it was to sit under the mountain, and listen to ongoing reports that no incoming missiles had been detected.

Tris

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McNamara says in his* In Retrospect* that there were three assumptions that drove the Cuban Missile crisis:

  1. America believed Russia would never deploy nuclear weapons on foreign soil.
  2. Cuba believed America would try to invade again.
  3. Russia believed it could deploy nuclear weapons secretly and when discovered America would not risk confrontation to remove them.

All three parties were wrong.

They believed that the missile silo’s weren’t yet operational and once they were would be controlled by a revenge seeking Castro, not a Super Power worried about mutually assured destruction.

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

We also need to remember that all the military (and civilian, for that matter) leaders were of the World War 2 generation.

Negotiated settlements had failed with Hitler. The attack on Pearl Harbor came while the Japanese ambassador was on his way to a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State. The Soviet Union had an unfortunate record of not leaving central European countries after the war ended. And South Korea was under a very uneasy truce.

In other words, negotiated settlements weren’t considered to be all that effective in many cases.

Given that experience and mindset, it’s perfectly logical to conclude that the best way to deal with an emerging first-strike capability is to blow it to kingdom come before it becomes operational and the other side blows YOU to kingdom come.

Not according to the Wikipedia article

What’s your source?

I’m not quite clear what you are saying here. The public provocation of Khruschchev was a bad move? What are you suggesting would have been a better alternative?

And yet, as you say, the civilians who drew the US back from the brink were of the same generation as the military leaders who seemed to want war. JFK actually fought in WW2.

I guess that’s what interests me here; when you read memoirs of WW1 and WW2 military commanders they almost invariably say what a dreadful thing war is and it should be avoided if at all possible, yet here we have them champing at the bit to get their country involved in what would have been an unnecessary war. I was interested in why they were so hawkish in this particular case, with the stakes so high. Was it really uncontested military doctrine in the US high command that a nuclear war was a valid option in this case, that it was survivable and winnable, that is was in the US’s best interests in any circumstance at all?

You say it would have been “an unnecessary war.” Given the mindset at the time it would as easily be seen as “an inevitable war.” If you think you’re about to lose 100 million people in a first strike, better to take out the first strike and lose 20 million in the aftermath.

And someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a fact that no U.S. President has ever categorically ruled out a first-strike nuclear attack if they thought it necessary?

Thanks, it looks indeed like Gen Jack D Ripper was a large part of what I was looking for:

Good grief, what an individual.

I realise some people at the time saw a nuclear war as inevitable, but they were wrong, weren’t they? I guess I’m hypothesizing that their conviction that this war was inevitable was more to do with some excessively aggressive temperament reqired to get to the position they did, or some other systemic factor.

It is generally an element of military preparedness that you do not publish the limits of your military options before hostilities commence. Tell your enemy you won’t use x weapon, they can plan accordingly. For instance, massive non nuclear military action against an enemy who has stated that he will not use nuclear weapons is an excellent way to maximize conventional force superiority, while awaiting the tactically most advantageous moment to use nuclear weapons against him.

Planning your defense strategy in public is not all that useful.

Tris

“People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.” ~ Lao Tzu ~

“First strike” became impractical by the mid-1960’s. I don’t know that any American president ever renounced it, but they didn’t have to. As this article in Foreign Affairs (my bolding) puts it,

First strike is sometimes confused with “first use”, which is any first use of nuclear weapons, whether targeted at enemy nukes or not. Certainly, the United States never renounced first use; we were quite open, during the Cold War, that we would use “tactical” nuclear weapons as necessary to repel a Soviet invasion of western Europe.

If would have been better, again in retrospect, to have dealt in diplomatic backchannels, agreeing to remove IRBMs in Southern Europe in exchange for keeping missiles out of Cuba. This was quite possibly what Khrushchev actually wanted to begin with. However, the CMC started at a nadir of U.S.-Soviet relations, when open communication, even along normal diplomatic channels was iffy. Oleg Penkovsky had just been arrested, and only a few months before the Soviets grudgingly traded U-2 pilot Gary Powers for Rudolph Abel. Conflict over the increasingly sophisticated Berlin Wall (the Soviets…well, the East Germans, but really the Sovs) were replacing the original construction with more complex, permanent, and threatening structures, making the post-war division of Germany a permanent fixture rather than an interim step to repatriation as had been done in Austria. Kennedy was still feeling aftershocks from the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion, and Khrushchev was under pressure after the West acknowledged the lack of a missile gap to demonstrate a strong nuclear stance.

In an ideal world the two leaders and their diplomatic functionaries would have gotten together and rationally discussed why placing barely operational and likely inaccurate IRBM squadrans in Europe and Cuba were strategically, politically, and economically bad ideas, but in that environment there probaby wasn’t a chance in hell of such occuring. It was actually a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, not a member of EXCOMM, who recommended a soft-petal response and secret offer of dismantling the Jupiter squadrans (which, again, were due to stand down in a few months when Atlas became an American-based operational ICBM) in exchange for removing facilities from Castro. Had it not been for this level-headed recommendation from the one person in the room who’d lived and worked with Khrushchev, and recognized that the U.S.S.R. was in the midst of a power struggle, it’s quite likely we would have gone to war with the Soviets. The United States would have been seriously damaged; the Soviet Union would have been devistated, and Cuba would have been essentially wiped off the map.

Knowing what we know now, the Cuban Missile Crisis was completely avoidable. Of course, Kennedy et al didn’t know any of this, and responded based upon the limited knowledge of Soviet thinking and intentions and political pressure to appear hard on Communism.

Stranger

I read it in one of my books, right now my bookshelf is on the other side of the world so I’ll have to get back to you.