THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100420002-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 16
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 13, 2007
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: October 22, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO N REPORTS, ~N~.
pRpG~ ABC Nightline STATION WJLA-TV
ABC Network
pA~ October 22, 1982 11:30 P.M.
SUB.IECT The Cuban Missile Crisis
Washington, D.C.
MAN: It was eyeball-to-eyeball. And I went to bed
several times during that week wondering whether the next morning
we were going to have a nuclear exchange,
TED KOPPEL: Tonight, the Cuban Missile Crisis, as
recalled by the men who dealt with it. Those 13 days in October
which began 20 years ago today. are described for Nightline by
former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, by President Kennedy's
National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, his special. assistant.
Theodore Sorensen, his press secretary Pierre Salinger, by the
U-2 pilot who flew photo reconnaissance over Cuba, by the CIA's
photo interpreter who analyzed those pictures. We'll here from
the man who was then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
from ABC's John Scali, who acted as secret intermediary between
the U.S. and Soviet governments. And analyzing the aftereffect
of the Cuban Missile Crisis, former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger,
KOPPEL: This was the time just 20 years ago when the
world quite literally seemed to tremble on the brink of nuclear
war. It was a time, difficult to 'remember now, when roughly a
quarter of a million American troops were assembled in Florida
for the possible invasion of Cuba. It was the first time in the
nuclear age that the United States and the Soviet Union came into
direct military confrontation. Those 13 days which have come to
be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis changed the way that the
U.S. and the Soviet Union perceived one another and the reality
of nuclear confrontation.
It's a small point, but symbolic, that as a result of
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the Cuban Missile Crisis, the White House and the Kremlin set up
a hot line. As a result of the events which began to unfold 20
years ago, Moscow and Washington came to understand that between
nuclear adversaries instant communication might be the only
defense against total disaster.
Those you are about to hear lived this crisis.
MAN: The Soviet Union has such powerful means of
delivery for these nuclear weapons that there is no need to seek
any further sites for them anywhere outside the borders of the
Soviet Union.
AMBASSADOR ADLAI STEVENSON: You, the Soviet Union, have
sent these weapons to Cuba. You, the Soviet Union, has upset the
balance of power in the world. You, the Soviet Union, has
created this new danger. Not the United States.
PRESIDENT JOHN KENNEDY: It shall be the policy of this
nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against
any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet
Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response
upon the Soviet Union.
MAN: It was eyeball-to-eyeball. And I went to bed
several times during that week wondering whether the next morning
we were going to have a nuclear exchange.
MAN: Throughout the summer of '62, the Russians were
sending materials to Cuba. And we did track the shipments at
sea. And then, of course, we looked for that same materiel in
the countryside.
MAN: And our interest began to peak around August the
29th, '62, when the aerial photography from the U-2 began to
reveal surface-to-air missile sites coming in.
RAY CLINE: I must give credit to my boss, the Director
of Central Intelligence, John McCone, who always had a hunch that
the reason the Soviet Union was moving all this equipment to Cuba
was that they intended to put the longer-range offensive missiles
there, because he was the person who insisted that we take a
look, even if there was a danger.
MAN: The approval was given on the 5th. But this was
the hurricane season, the bad-weather season in Cuba. And it
wasn't until the 14th that the weather cleared and we could fly
the mission. And Mission G3101, code named Victor, had as its
specific objective to take a look at a trapezoidal-shaped area in
Cuba in which an agent had reported that the Cubans were being
moved out and the Russians were being moved in. That mission was
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flown by Major Richard Heiser of the Strategic Air Command.
MAN: The flight was reasonably uneventful. The
navigation was always difficult. We sort of had the feeling
every time we flew down there that we could be shot at. And
there was always that wonder as we were flying up and down the
island, whether or not someone would decide on that given day to
push a button.
Just as soon as they could get the film out of the
airplane, they immediately flew it to Washington, where it was
processed and the photo interpreters went to work on it.
MAN: The things that are seen in this photograph are
alien to that environment. In this particular photograph, you
can see seven missile transporters and two missile ready tents,
and you can also see the missile erectors.
In the second photograph, we were very fortunate to
catch the convoy arriving at the site. And by midafternoon we
had come to the conclusion that these were indeed medium-range
ballistic missiles. And as we looked especially at the ground
photographs taken in the streets of Moscow, they helped immensely
in aiding us to come to that conclusion.
MAN: We were now instructed to proceed quickly to the
White House, and arrived over there about 8:30. And the
President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, wanted to see
far himself the evidences. And gathered around him at that time
was the Kitchen Cabinet, I guess it became known as. It
consisted of Bobby Kennedy, C. Douglas Dillon, Dean Rusk, Mr.
McNamara, and several others.
And I then went through my story as quickly as I could,
pointing out the salient features of Soviet medium-range
ballistic missile launching sites and confirming those
characteristics and the location and the identity on the
photography. And I would say they were thunderstruck,
incredulous and thunderstruck, particularly Bobby Kennedy, who
walked around the room very, very bitter about the whole thing,
uttering bitter epithets, which we all could sympathize with. It
was a bitter moment in history for this thing to be coming to
pass.
The President was slightly unbelieving, incredulous.
And at this moment in the briefing, the President turned in his
chair and he looked me straight in the eye and he said to me,
"Are you sure about all this?"
And I gulped and I said, "Mr. President, I am as sure of
this as a photo interpreter can be sure of anything. And I think
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you might agree we have not misled you on any of the myriad
subjects we have reported to you to date."
He said, "That's right."
He quickly turned from me and ordered that all of Cuba
be covered with multiple U-2 missions within the next seven days.
And that's how the crisis began.
MAN: On Thursday, October 18, Soviet Foreign Minister
Gromyko came to call upon the President, an appointment which had
been long scheduled, We speculated in advance that this is
likely to be the big personal confrontation, and he was going to
break the news to the President that missiles were in Cuba
pointed at the United States, and demand some kind of action or
statement from the President in response. At that time, the
Soviets did not know what we knew.
In fact, Mr. Gromyko had nothing whatsoever to say about
missiles in Cuba. And it requied the President to bring up the
subject about Soviet activities in Cuba, which elicited the same
response that Soviet officials had been giving -- namely, that
there were no offensive weapons in Cuba.
The President escorted Mr. Gromyko to the door, closed
the door, and was both amused and angered by the extent to which
Mr. Gromyko had attempted to deceive him.
FOREIGN MINISTER ANDREI GROMYKO: I think that the
exchange of views, exchange of opinion between the President and
myself is useful.
KOPPEL: Continuing now our look back at the Cuban
Missile Crisis. The crisis was still a secret, still a
confrontation between governments. The people of the United
States and of the Soviet Union did not yet know that their
governments were moving swiftly toward actions that could well
bring war.
The week of discovery was over. Now it was time for
direct talk and action. McGeorge Bundy knew the choices.
MCGEORGE BUNDY: Well, there was a wide range of
possibilities as to what we might do, all the way from doing
nothing, which was discarded pretty early, to using the occasion
for forcing a showdown and removing Castro, which was the
preference, certainly, of some, perhaps especially in the
Pentagon. But fairly quickly, from the point of view of the
President and his closest advisers, it narrowed down to a choice
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between an air strike with conventional weapons, iron bombs, on
the missile sites, or a naval blockade, which for political and
legal reasons came to be called a quarantine.
SORENSEN: I remember very well the advice which former
Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave to our group one afternoon.
He said the step, the only step that the United States could
logically take was an air strike against the missile
installations in Cuba.
"Mr. Secretary," someone said, "you know the Soviets
very well. What will they do?"
He said, "I think they will undoubtedly feel they have
to respond, and they will launch an air strike against our
missiles in Turkey or in Italy."
"Well," he said, "under the Atlantic Alliance, we would
then be compelled to knock out the Soviet installations inside
the Soviet Union."
"And what will they do then?"
"Well, then," he said, "we hope by that time cooler
heads will prevail and people can talk."
A shudder went through the room. No one felt that by
the time there had been that kind of exchange cooler heads would
prevail at all.
DEAN RUSK: Fortunately, President Kennedy had ice water
in his veins during that week. He took the time to look at all
the factors, to box the compass of all possibilities, to hear
from the points of view from all those in this group. And, of
course, he undoubtedly thought a lot about it just on his own,
because this was one of those crises where when all the advice is
in, the President is in a lonely position. He has to make the
ultimate decision as to what we do.
MAN: The President took one last look at the air strike
proposal on Sunday morning, the day before his speech. And on
that Sunday he talked with General Sweeney, who was one of the
Air Force commanders on the tactical air side, and found that the
kind of air strike that the Air Force was recommending was
neither all that surgical, quite a large-scale event, and they
did not give assurance that all the missiles or missile sites
would be put out of operation.
So he went with quarantine, which had a number of
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advantages. The most important, certainly to Bob Kenedy, was
that it did not require that we begin with a kind of small-scale
version of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a sudden surprise
air attack with inevitable destruction and loss of life.
PIERRE SALINGER: There were two newspapers that had
gotten wind of the situation, that it involved Cuba. They may
not have known about the existence of missiles in Cuba, but they
knew there was some confrontation underway with Cuba. One was
the New York Times, the other was the Washington Post. They were
going to publish Monday morning that information. In both cases,
they were kept from publishing, or decided not to publish it
after personal phone calls were made by President Kennedy.
We had held the thing a secret up till that time. But
President Kennedy wanted to speak to the nation as soon as the
American ships that were going to conduct the quarantine or the
blockade of Cuba were on station. And it was determined that he
could go on the air at 7:00 P.M. on October 22nd.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY: I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to
halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative
threat to world peace and the stable relations between our two
nations. I call upon him, further, toabandon this course of
world domination and to join in an historic effort to end the
perilous arms race and to transform the history of man. He has
an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of
destruction.
TRANSLATOR: But what of our weapons is for offensive
use? It never has been, because we have never had aggressive
intentions against anyone.
SOVIET NEWSMAN: Persons responsible for the policy of
the United States have got to think what their foolhardy actions
could lead to if a thermonuclear war was let loose. If the road
is not barred to the aggressive policy of the American
government, then the people of the United States, like other
peoples, will have to pay the price of millions of lives for such
a policy.
RUSK: There were some tense moments there over a period
of some hours when Soviet vessels that we were prepared to s-top
were getting up to the quarantine line. On one occasion
President Kennedy pulled that quarantine line somewhat further
south to give a little more time for longer thoughts to prevail.
You know, the Chinese have an ancient military doctrine
that you should not completely surround your enemy. If you do
that, that makes him fight too hard. You must always leave him a
route of escape.
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SORENSEN: President Kennedy knew that the peace of the
world, and perhaps the survival of the world, were at stake in
this confrontation. And he was going to make certain that no
accident, no miscalculation, no inept or hot-headed move on the
part of some local commander precipitated a war that could
otherwise be avoided.
There was tension because the blockade went into effect
and there was no sign whatsoever that the Soviet ships were
slowing down, much less stopping.
MAN: And along about Wednesday, the first Soviet ship
stopped in the water and did not dodge the blockade line. And
that was the point that I recollected where Dean Rusk said,
"We're eyeball-to-eyeball, and I think the other side just
blinked."
RUSK: Actually, that came from a children's game that
we used to play here in Georgia when I was a very small boy.
You'd put yourself about a foot apart and stare into each other's
eyes, and the first fellow who blinked lost the game.
I might add that that was almost the only leak during my
eight years in London that truly angered me. Because here we
were in the middle of a very tense crisis where any consideration
of face or prestige might have made a difference. And for some
stupid colleague to leak that remark under those circumstances I
thought was unforgivable.
MAN: The Soviet tanker which was intercepted shortly
after 8:00 o'clock Thursday morning by a U.S. naval vessel was
the Bucharest, en route from Russia to Cuba with petroleum. This
is the first and only intercept to date in the Cuban quarantine.
The Bucharest was not boarded because the Navy was satisfied it
carried nothing but oil.
Meanwhile, our continuing surveillance reveals that the
work by the Soviet technicians on missile sites in Cuba is
proceeding at the same rapid rate.
MAN: When the Soviets arrived in Cuba, they lived in
tents. And at the MRBM launch site, we could see indications
that they were planning to stay awhile, because here we see
permanent quarters under construction. Here we see the stacks of
lumber and building material.
This is the nuclear warhead bunker under construction.
And over here we can see the launch site.
AMBASSADOR STEVENSON: All right, sir. Let me ask you
one simple question. Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the
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USSR has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range
missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no? Don't wait for the
translation. Yes or no?
AMBASSADOR ZORIN [translated]: I am not -- I am not in
an American courtroom, sir. And therefore I do not wish to
answer a question that is put to me in the fashion in which a
prosecutor does. In due course, sir, you will have your reply.
AMBASSADOR STEVENSON: I'm prepared to wait for my
answer until hell freezes over, if that's your decision.
MAN: We all were saying we must -- regardless of what
we do now, we must prepare to invade. We had about around
250,000 men, mostly in Florida, but in -- I'd say in the
Southeastern states. Most of those were Army because of the
invasion problem. And the Army had two airborne divisions and
one armored division ready to go for D-Day.
KOPPEL: The Cuban Missile Crisis had entered its most
dangerous stage, a quarter million fighting men ready to invade
Cuba. In the air, America's strategic bomber force dispersed
over Canada, armed with nuclear bombs, hours away from targets in
Cuba and the Soviet Union. War, big or small, we were ready.
Then the first clear break.
Ted Sorensen remembers the night.
SORENSEN: On Friday night, Or_tober 26th, a new message
had come in from Khrushchev. It appeared to be personally
written by the Chairman. It had that certain emotional rambling
nature which we had found in his confidential messages over the
past year. But it had in it what appeared to be the elements of
a solution.
RUSK: John Scali played a very useful role. He was in
touch with a member of the Soviet Embassy whom we had judged to
be a member of the KGB.
JOHN SCALI: We had lunch at the Occidental restaurant,
which is a historic eating place only a few blocks from the White
House. He came immediately to the point and said, "Could you
find out from your high Administration sources what they would
think of a proposal for settling the crisis which would include
the withdrawal of all Soviet missiles sent to Cuba, inspection by
the United Nations as this was being done, and a public pledge by
Moscow never to reintroduce such offensive weapons into the Cuba
area or the Western Hemisphere again? Would President Kennedy,
in turn," he asked, "be willing to pledge publicly on behalf of
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I recognized this as an amazing Soviet backdown, but I
said nothing except that I didn't know, but I thought that
perhaps this is a proposition that could be discussed. He urged
me to do this immediately.
RUSK: And John Scali's private talks with that
particular individual seemed to confirm, through that back
channel, through that under-the-cover channel, what was being
said to us officially.
SORENSEN: Saturday, October 27th, was the tensest and
ultimately the most decisive day of the entire crisis. Another
message came in from Khrushchev, this time by public
communication, in order to speed its delivery, he said. And this
was a totally different deal that he was proposing, requiring
that the United States pull its missiles out of Turkey in
response to the Soviet Union pulling its missiles out of Cuba.
And the fact is that the missiles in Turkey were outmoded,
unreliable, and due for replacement by Polaris submarines in the
Mediterranean. In fact, the Persident thought he had ordered
that some time earlier.
SALINGER: Several conflicting and inconsistent
proposals have been made by the USSR within the last 24 hours,
including the one just made public in Moscow. As an urgent
preliminary to consideration of any proposals, work on the Cuban
bases must stop, offensive weapons must be rendered inoperable,
shipment of offensive weapons to Cuba must cease.
SORENSEN: Then bad news began to come in droves. One
of our U-2 planes flying over Cuba was shot down by a Soviet
ground-to-air missile. And we had previously determined that
such an event would require a response, an attack by the United
States upon the Soviet missile downing our U-2 plane.
Then we heard that the Soviet ships had once again
started to steam toward Cuba, instead of lying idle out in the
Atlantic.
MAN: That afternoon we start receiving reports from the
low-altitude pilots that they were being fired upon by
antiaircraft and small-arms weapons. We immediately looked at
the photographs as soon as they were received, and we could
confirm that, indeed, men were running to the antiaircraft guns,
as seen in this photograph. We could also confirm that the MRBM
sites were being covered over. But the third thing, which was
the most astonishing of all, is that the Soviets had surged the
construction of the MRBM sites, and now we had 24 medium-range
ballistic missile sites that were operational.
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MAN: On the final Saturday, the 27th of October, a U.S.
U-2 is discovered to be flying over the Soviet Union, over an
area in which there are important Soviet targets, and in an
unauthorized fashion. Khrushchev becomes alarmed, thinking that
this is a last-minute observation of Soviet targets before the
U.S. strikes. Soviet fighter planes are scrambled. They may --
perhaps to shoot down or perhaps to escort out of the Soviet
Union this U-2. Someone comes in and informs President Kennedy
in the Oval Office of this. And first there's a look of shock on
his face. But then he rocks back in his chair and says, "Well,
there's always some son of a bitch who doesn't get the word."
SORENSEN: By this time, those who later would be called
hawks were in the ascendancy once again. They were disappointed
that the President had not immediately ordered and air strike
against the missile, the Soviet ground-to-air missile which had
knocked out our U-2. They were impatient to move ahead with the
air strike and invasion of Cuba because they were certain that
the quarantine was a failure.
Ultimately, the President ended the debate on how to
respond to the two letters by asking Robert Kennedy and me to
prepare a draft to letter number one, adopting the tactic which
we had urged -- namely, ignoring letter number two.
JOHN ROLFSON: Here is a special bulletin. This is John
Rolfson at the White House in Washington.
President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev, in an exchange
of letters, have apparently reached an agreement on some
principles for the settlement of the Cuban crisis. The first
thing that needs to be done, however, says President Kennedy, is
for work to cease on offensive missile bases in Cuba. The
continuation of this threat, says President Kennedy, .would surely
lead to an intensification of the Cuban crisis and a grave risk
to the peace of the world.
SALINGER: It was decided that those of us, many of the
people who had been working around the clock at the White House
for five-six days, hadn't even gone home, should go home, at
least, have dinner with their families, and that we would all
convene the next morning. And the decision was made at that
evening meeting on Saturday that if no stop had come in the work
to make these things operational -- they were very close to
operational -- at the Sunday morning meeting we would decide on
the next step that we would take in the missile crisis, which was
definitely an escalation of the crisis, either an air strike
against Cuba or an invasion against Cuba. And, of course, that
would have brought us closer yet to the possibility of nuclear
confrontation.
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SORENSEN: After the meeting of the EXCOM had recessed
for the evening, the President asked a few of us to come into his
office to instruct Robert Kennedy about his forthcoming meeting
with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin, in which Robert Kennedy was to
deliver to Dobrynin a copy of the President's reply to Chairman
Khrushchev that Robert Kennedy and I had drafted that afternoon.
MAN: Robert Kennedy went to visit Dobrynin, and he
said, "Let me communicate to you clearly the following things.
In effect, there's the stick and there's carrot. The stick is to
communicate clearly to the Soviet Union that early next week we
will conduct an air strike which will destroy the Soviet missiles
in Cuba. The carrot is that we will withdraw our Jupiter
missiles from Turkey, but privately and after the missile crisis
is successfully withdrawn."
SORENSEN: We could not publicly announce our intentions
to withdraw those missiles from Turkey because that would seem to
be undermining the alliance, it would require the consent of all
members of the alliance, it was likely to create a storm both in
Europe and at home, and that therefore that would simply be a
private understanding which the President was fully prepared and
able to implement, but which he would have to deny and indeed
cancel the whole deal if the Soviets ever referred to it
publicly.
MAN: Saturday night was not a happy night. But it was
quite the other way around on the Sunday morning, when I was able
to call the President and tell him about Khrushchev's message.
SOVIET NEWSMAN: I respect and trust the statement made
in your message of October 27th, 1962 that no attack will be made
on Cuba, that there will be no invasion, either by the United
States or other countries in the Western Hemisphere, as was
pointed out in your message.
Then, the motives which prompted us to render Cuba
assistance of this kind no longer exist. Therefore we have
instructed our officers to take proper measures to stop the
construction of installations, dismantle them, and bring them
back to the Soviet Union.
SORENSEN: We lived in 1962, as I'm sorry to say we live
in 1982, under the terrible paradox that the only way to prevent
nuclear war is to risk nuclear war. A President who is going to
prevent Soviet missiles from being launched against the United
States must be prepared to launch missiles against the Soviet
Union. That is, and was then, the most fragile basis for a peace
imaginable.
RUSK: Whatever one thinks of the Soviet Union -- and I
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abhor so many of their policies in this postwar period -- at the
end of the day, we and they have still got to find a way to
inhabit this speck of dust in the universe. So we have to be a
little careful. And that's what the Cuban Missile Crisis means
to me.
KOPPEL: Joining us now to discuss the aftershock of
those 13 days in October some 20 years ago is former Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger.
Dr. Kissinger, the revisionist thinking these days, or
the revisionist history of those events is that it had less to do
with the nuclear strategic superiority of the United States 20
years ago -- that is, the Soviet backing down -- than the overall
conventional superiority in this region. Your response.
HENRY KISSINCER: My view is it had to do with both. We
had a tremendous conventional superiority in this region. But
the Soviet Union had a tremendous conventional superiority in
Europe. They had Berlin surrounded. They had the great capacity
against Iran and in many other places around the world. The
Soviet Union could not compensate for our threat against Cuba by
mounting a similar threat, for example, against Berlin, for fear
of triggering an American nuclear attack under circumstances
where the Soviet Union had about 50 delivery vehicles and we had
4000, and the Soviet delivery vehicles would take ten hours to
fuel.
So I think it was our nuclear superiority and our
conventional superiority that accounted for the victory.
KOPPEL: How closedid the world come to a nuclear war at
that point? Again, the conventional wisdom is that we were that
close.
KISSINCER: First of all, let me say I think that the
actual technical handling of the crisis was extraordinarily well
done. Within the terms that -- within the objectives that the
Administration then in office had for itself.
I do not believe we came that close to a confron -- to
an ultimate showdown, because the balance of power was
overwhelmingly in our favor. The Soviet Union had made a
horrendous mistake. It had misjudged President Kennedy on the
basis of previous crises in which they thought he had backed down
from threats he had made. He restored that psychological balance
and handled the crisis during that week very effectively. But I
do not believe that the Soviet Union ever seriously considered
going to nuclear war when the balance of forces was so
horrendously against it.
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KOPPEL: What would have happened, do you think, if the
Soviets had been successful in keeping those intermediate-range
missiles in Cuba? One of the questions that's always, I must
confess, puzzled me is what advantage would it have been to them,
what difference is it whether the United States is attacked by
ICBMs from the Soviet Union or by intermediate-range missiles
from Cuba?
KISSINGER: Well, at that time the Soviet Union had, at
most, 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles. They were
liquid-fueled. It took them ten hours to get ready. They had
something like 75 or 90 missiles in Cuba. So they would have
more than doubled their capability against the United States.
Secondly, the symbolic effect, after a series
of threats
that had been made over Laos, over Berlin, the building
the
Berlin Wall, of them installing Soviet missiles in
the
Western
Hemisphere would have been quite catastrophic. So
that
I believe
that the political impact would have been greater
than
the
military impact.
The risks the Soviets were running were out of
proportion to the purely military objectives to be gained. But
the political gains would have been enormous.
KOPPEL: Another piece of conventional wisdom, and that
is that
in
the wake of being forced to back down by President
Kennedy
in
1962, the Soviets then decided, "This will never
happen
to
us again." And indeed, the enormous strategic nuclear
buildup
in
which the Soviet Union has engaged was the direct
outgrowth of that particular event.
KISSINGER: I think this is substantially true. I think
that the Soviet Union learned quite the opposite lesson from the
one with which you started your questioning -- namely, that they
would never again be in such a position of strategic inferiority
that they could not use their local forces at some other point to
counter an American threat, say, in the Western Hemisphere. And
I believe that the Soviet missile buildup was vastly accelerated
after the Cuban crisis.
KOPPEL: So, in that sense, it may have been one of the
most disastrous events in recent memory.
KISSINGER: Well, the Soviets always had the capability
to engage in such a missile buildup. And after any confrontation
in which they became conscious of their inferiority, they were
likely to engage in it.
I think the mistake that we made in that period was that
it took us nearly ten years after they started their buildup to
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believe that they were really engaged in a massive buildup. As
late as 1965, Secretary McNamara was saying that he did not
believe, in his public statement, he did not believe that the
Soviet Union would ever attempt to match us in numbers. When I
came into office in 1969, the intelligence briefings were still
highly ambiguous on the question of whether the Soviet Union was
attempting to match us in numbers.
But in any event, over a period of ZO years, the
evolution of technology would have tended towards some form of
parity. We could not maintain the advantage we had in 1962
indefinitely. And even without the Cuban Missile Crisis, the
Soviet Union would certainly have engaged in a buildup, maybe
over a longer period of time.
KOPPEL: We're going to take a break now. But when we
came back I'd like to talk to you about some of the lessons,
indeed, that have been learned and some of the aftershock that
may still be reverberating from the Cuban Missile Crisis of ZO
years ago.
KOPPEL: Back once again with former Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger.
Dr. Kissinger, what was learned from the Cuban Missile
Crisis in terms of crisis management? To what degree did you,
for example, and the Presidents you served go back to the minutes
of those fateful days in 1962 and say, "This is something from
which we can learn"?
KISSINGER: I was always very impressed, and I'm sure
the Presidents I served were impressed, by the careful
preparation prior to the unfolding of the crisis. One doesn't
always have that leisure. One doesn't always have that
possibility. But I think that the meetings of that group before
President Kennedy's speech were very careful, very instrumental
in the skillful handling of it. And I think that had an impact
which we, at least in the crises in which I was involved,
attempted to emulate.
The outcome of the crisis, I always thought, even from
the very beginning, I did not think we achieved what the military
situation would have warranted. I believe we should have
achieved a clearer definition of what was prohibited in Cuba.
There was a vast hole left about what kind of airplanes, with
what kind of weapons could be based in Cuba. There was...
KOPPEL: You're talking about the so-called deal that
came out of it.
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KISSINGER: The so-called deal that emerged from it.
KOPPEL: There is some -- and again, this may be just
one of the legends that's grown up about this whole event. There
is some suggestion that the Soviets were prepared to do
everything that they finally did without the withdrawal of those
missiles from Turkey and Italy, but then they read an article
that I believe Walter Lippmann wrote in which he proposed that as
a solution to the crisis, and they then came back and said,
"Ah-ha. Not a bad idea."
KISSINGER: I believe that the Soviets were prepared to
do everything that they ultimately did, and probably go a little
further in giving guarantees about the reintroduction of any
nuclear-capable weapons without our having offered this.
But I also must say it's easy to say this after the
event, when you are not in the hotseat, as the President and his
advisers were.
KOPPEL: To what degree was that the point in history,
if it's possible, indeed, even to pinpoint something at which we
say -- at least the notion of military parity between the United
States and the Soviet Union came into being?
KISSINGER: Well, I think that the two sides drew
entirely opposite conclusions, and that from this point of view,
it may be [unintelligible]. The United States drew the
conclusion that the Soviet Union had learned that nuclear
confrontations were too dangerous and that an era of peace could
begin. And when it was followed by the nuclear test ban, we
thought that the Soviet Union had learned our lesson of equality.
The Soviet Union, on the other hand, drew the conclusion
that you have quoted, that never again must it be in the same
position, and frantically built up its strategic forces, which
had the objective consequence not so much of being able to
threaten our strategic forces, but of liberating its local forces
for the .kinds of pressures that they were not able to engage in
previously.
So that the '70s saw a period of Soviet
political-military expansion that may have been made in part
possible by some of the complacency that was engendered by the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
The second aspect was that under the particular
conditions of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the slow escalation, the
careful communication, the manipulation of all aspects of policy
was very effective; and, I repeat, very brilliantly done. But we
drew from it the conclusion that this was a general rule that
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could be applied to all circumstances. And I have the impres-
sion that when the same people, more or less, got involved in the
Vietnam War and attempted to apply the same methods of gradual
escalation, careful communication, indirect messages, that when
they were up against somebody determined to prevail, that they
slid into a morass that became more and more unmanageable,
because they overlooked that there was a time pressure on the
Soviets in Cuba, there was not the same time pressure on the
Vietnamese. And the methods that were appropriate in the
Caribbean was not appropriate in Vietnam and other crises.
KOPPEL: Also because of a difference in geography.
KISSINGER: A difference in geography. And much more
was at stake for the other side in Vietnam than was in Cuba. We
were not facing a superpower that defer the showdown to another
day.
For all of these [unintelligible], I have the impression
that some of the lessons learned were contributing to some of our
difficulties later on.
KOPPEL: So, in summary, then, perhaps a tactical
victory, but not an undiluted triumph over the long haul.
KISSINGER: I think a brilliantly-handled tactical
victory, but with major flaws in its conclusion and with major
penalties when we tried to apply the lessons as general princi-
ples.
KOPPEL: Dr. Kissinger, thank you.
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