Missile Crisis Research Articles

The human factor

Possibly lost in the news cycle was the death on July 6 of Robert S. McNamara at age 93. He was surely the most influential secretary of defense in U.S. history, serving from 1961 to 1968, during such events as the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis and the massive escalation of America’s involvement in Vietnam. While Mr. McNamara accomplished much in his remarkable life, filling top posts at Ford and the World Bank, his name will always be linked with the war in Vietnam (“McNamara’s War”).

Awaiting Armageddon: how Americans faced the Cuban Missile Crisis

Awaiting Armageddon: how Americans faced the Cuban Missile Crisis

Averting "The Final Failure": John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (review)

Averting "The Final Failure": John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (review)

The United States, Brazil, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (Part 1)

Though virtually ignored in the historiography, Brazil played an intriguing role in the politics and diplomacy of the Cuban missile crisis and in U.S. Cuban relations during the Kennedy administration. In the years after Fidel Castro took power, successive Brazilian governments tried secretly to mediate between the United States and Cuba as the two countries' mutual confrontation intensified. Newly available U.S., Brazilian, Cuban, and other sources reveal that this role climaxed during the missile crisis, as John F. Kennedy clandestinely sought to employ Brazil to transmit a message to Castro. In turn, Brazil, which was also promoting a Latin American denuclearization scheme at the United Nations as a possible method to resolve the crisis, sought to broker a formula for U.S. Cuban reconciliation that would heighten the prestige of its own “independent” policy in the Cold War. Ultimately, these efforts failed, but they shed light on previously hidden aspects of both the missile crisis and the triangular U.S. Cuban—Brazilian relationship. Thefirst part of this two—part article sets the scene for an in—depth look at the Cuban missile crisis, which will be covered in Part 2 of the article in the next issue of the journal.

Averting "the final failure": John F. Kennedy and the secret Cuban Missile Crisis meetings

Contents Foreword by Robert Dallek xi Preface: the JFK Cuban Missile Crisis Tapes xiii Listening to the JFK Tapes xvi Origins of the JFK Tapes xxi Opening the JFK Tapes xxiv The Historical Value of the JFK Tapes xxxvi Introduction: the Making of the Cuban Missile Crisis 1 The Cold War: JFK's Crucible 1 Nuclear Confrontation in Cuba 9 The Kennedy Paradox 32 Key Members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council 41 The Secret Meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council 57 Epilogue: The November Post-Crisis 403 Conclusion: Listening and Learning: Insights from the JFK ExComm Tapes 413 Appendix: The Published Cuban Missile Crisis Transcripts 427 Rounds One, Two and Beyond Bibliography 441 Index 451 Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, Kennedy, John F, (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963, National Security Council (U, S, ) History 20th century, United States Foreign relations 1961-1963 Decision making, National security United States Decision making

Policy Advice as Crisis: A Political Redefinition of Crisis Management

The ability of governments to discern and solve different types of crisis situations is a topic of long-standing academic interest (see, for example, Pal 1985; Pollit et al. 1990; Dimock 1991; Micklethwait and Wooldridge 1996; Roe 2001). In particular, we have the protracted debates surrounding Graham Allison's (1971) analysis of the Cuban Missile crisis (see also Allison and Zelikow 1999). In conceptual terms, Allison's (1971) original monograph provided theoreticians not only with general typological categories (Models I, II, and III) but also with connections between what had been up until that time disparate ideas. In this contribution to the forum, Allison's schema is instructive in three ways. First, it treats the Missile Crisis as a committee process—a topic well-known to management scholars, academics, and practitioners alike. Second, it provides an excellent starting point for students of comparative government to explore how cabinet governments work—an issue sometimes overlooked or minimized by scholars of Western parliamentary systems (Jarman and Kouzmin 1993). Third, it gives us insights regarding how the various players involved in cabinets and committees interact in crisis situations. The intention here is not to intrude presumptively into the intriguing and long-standing Cuban Missile Crisis debate. The objective is much less ambitious but perhaps more relevant: to study “crisis management” as a multifaceted topic in which crises are acknowledged as critical to a system's survival as well as in which crises are contrived so as to gain strategic or tactical advantage, or both (Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin, and Kakabadse 2002). Moreover, we are more interested here in exploring policy advice as political process than with administrative output or social outcomes, and we are more concerned with model building (as contingency theory) than with historic irony, paradox, nuance, or policymaking success at the top echelons of cabinet governments. Of interest …

The Luckiest Generation

The Luckiest Generation

Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis, and: Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba, and: Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989-2001 (review)

Reviewed by: Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis, and: Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba, and: Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989-2001 Michael Erisman James G. Blight and Philip Brenner. Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 352 pp. Juan J. López . Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 232 pp. Morris Morley and Chris McGillion. Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989–2001. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 253 pp. According to Webster's Universal Unabridged Dictionary, "asymmetry" is best defined as "the want of proportion between the parts of a thing." In a political sense, however, the term is commonly used to refer to a relationship wherein there are major inequities (e.g., in power) between the parties involved, and it is this concept that provides the common thread linking the three books under consideration here. In other words, the three studies exhibit a thematic convergence in the sense that all of them, despite differences in their analytical emphases and priorities, are examining the dynamics of the asymmetries in the Cuban Revolution's foreign relations. As might be expected, there are significant variations in their attitudes toward these asymmetries; both the Blight-Brenner and the Morley-McGillion volumes are basically sympathetic with regard to the difficulties that Havana has confronted while López is quite forthright in his desire to see Washington take full advantage of the situation to destroy Castro's government. Undoubtedly the Blight-Brenner effort is the most conceptually ambitious and analytically elegant of the three books. Its main thrust focuses on Cuba's perceptions of and reactions to its asymmetrical association with the USSR and the implications thereof with respect to current U.S.-Cuban relations. Within this context the authors emphasize the 1962 Missile Crisis as an extremely traumatic primal event that triggered well-established and deeply rooted Cuban fears about the dangers inherent in any asymmetrical relationship. It is, they stress, very important to understand that there inevitably were tensions between Moscow and Havana—the Missile Crisis did not create them, but rather they were inherent in the relationship because of its asymmetrical nature and would have had a negative impact in any case. What the crisis did was to function as a catalyst that brought these preexisting strains to the surface and severely exacerbated them. Among the Soviet actions during the crisis that infuriated the Cubans were such moves as reaching an agreement with the United States to end the crisis without ever consulting Havana about the terms of the settlement or even informing the Cubans that a deal had been made. Likewise Moscow's decision, in response to pressure from Washington, to withdraw bombers and troops from Cuba was seen in Havana "as tantamount to inviting a U.S. invasion, because it demonstrated to the United States that the Soviet Union would not stand with Cuba in the face of U.S. threats" (31). These developments generated, say Blight and Brenner, a poisoned climate wherein Havana would never again really trust Moscow. In other words, the relationship would never escape the pall cast over it by the Cubans' conviction that they had been betrayed by the USSR at the height of the Missile Crisis. Indeed the basic lesson that the authors believe the Cubans took away from the Missile Crisis was that they could not trust and had to protect themselves against both of the superpowers, and that henceforth their cold war foreign policy became characterized by an [End Page 143] effort to maximize the political maneuvering space available to them within the context of these two asymmetrical relationships. This analysis of the Missile Crisis's legacy works very well when dealing with the cold war period. The epilogue then tries to incorporate the contemporary U.S.-Cuban relationship into this framework, arguing that the essential nature of the cold war Cuban-Soviet relationship that flowed from the crisis (i.e., serious tensions rooted in a mutual lack of empathy) is...

The Cuban missile crisis: strategy formulation in action

The Kennedy tapes of the meetings on the Cuban missile crisis are evidence of the strategy formulation process. Analysis of the interventions in these meetings reveals that President Kennedy had adopted a questioning, Socratic approach. Conclusions are drawn on President Kennedy's leadership style. The methods employed in 1962 are compared with ideas from strategic management: positioning; resource‐based view; top‐down or bottom‐up; deliberate or emergent; and rational or generative. The author deduces from this evidence: the collective strategy process cannot truly begin until a collective aim has been decided; the strategy process is best led by a facilitator, rather than an authoritarian; both positioning resources need to be considered; strategy formulation is an art, guided by whatever science can be brought to bear.

October 1962: The "Missile" Crisis as Seen from Cuba (review)

Reviewed by: October 1962: The "Missile" Crisis as Seen from Cuba Virginia W. Leonard Tomás Diez Acosta . October 1962: The "Missile" Crisis as Seen from Cuba. New York: Pathfinder, 2002. 350 pp. Tomás Diez Acosta is well positioned to write this book. A 37-year veteran of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), since 1987 he has headed the [End Page 152] Department of Military History at the Institute of Cuban History, Havana. He has published four books on Cuban military history, including one on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He has used Cuban and American archives and the Fidel Castro–Nikita Khrushchev 1962 letters that were published in 1990. Missing is the secret speech made by Fidel Castro in January1968 to members of the Central Committee that documented the high-handed way the Soviet Union treated the Cubans during the "October Crisis." Diez conveys well the betrayal felt by the Cubans who were prepared to die to defend their national sovereignty and the worldwide socialist revolution (11–12, 101). The Soviets, who were not ready to die for Cuba and world socialism, left Cuba out of the decision to withdraw not only most of their troops, but the missiles and IL-28 jets. Instead of relating how "disillusionment and bitterness" (199) upset relations with the Soviets, and how the Soviets were ready to cut off aid to the Cubans by 1967–68 (as described by James Blight and Philip Brenner in Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis), Diez saves his ire for the United States. Hence this book gives Castro's version of events, which is important for an American audience that has focused on reactions of the Soviets and the United States. In 1962 the Cubans were being harassed by John Kennedy's administration. In addition, Cuba had been expelled from the Organization of American States; was negotiating over the fate of the Cuban exiles taken prisoner in Cuba during a U.S.-backed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961; was facing a stepped-up U.S. trade embargo; and was being sabotaged and terrorized by Operation Mongoose, a covert operation against Cuba headed by Robert Kennedy. Soviet and Cuban intelligence took seriously the threat of an imminent U.S. invasion. This threat loomed larger during the "Caribbean Crisis" (as the Soviets called it) and led to Castro's accepting Soviet missiles, rocket launchers, and 40,000 troops on Cuban soil. Soviet acquiescence to U.S. demands left Cuba vulnerable to a U.S. attack. Diez reasons that the United States did not invade because it was afraid of the casualties it would receive from the patriotic and mobilized Cuban masses (13– 14). U.S. actions are simplistically categorized as sheer imperialism. Diez does not understand U.S. perceptions of Cuban behavior in the cold war context. He forgets that the Soviet Union also was imperialist, as Castro charged in his 1968 speech, kept secret because Cuba depended on Soviet aid. In the end, both larger countries ignored Cuba, the fate of smaller nonnuclear countries when superpowers lock horns. For the Soviets, rapprochement with the United States took precedence over dying for the Cuban cause. From the beginning, the Soviets ignored Cuba, discarding Castro's advice to publicly announce the placement of missiles in Cuba. As a result, Cuba-U.S. relations remained tense, and the Torricelli and Helms-Burton acts tightened the trade embargo in 1992 and 1998 (57). However, Diez overlooks efforts by Jimmy Carter and Bill [End Page 153] Clinton to loosen the embargo, attempts that were rebuffed by Castro. He fails to note that Gerald Ford relaxed the trade embargo. Simultaneously ignoring the interests of the great powers in avoiding a nuclear confrontation, and praising the willingness of Castro to expose Cubans to a nuclear attack as a sacrifice for sovereignty and socialism, Diez provides an unbalanced and biased account of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Virginia W. Leonard Western Illinois University Copyright © 2004 University of Pittsburgh Press

The Relevance of International Law for Foreign Policy Decision-making When National Security Is at Stake: Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis

The Relevance of International Law for Foreign Policy Decision-making When National Security Is at Stake: Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis

Dispelling the specter of nuclear holocaust.

This “image of health” is the inverse of a peace image, but it is also a powerful reminder of how crusading anti–nuclear-war physicians and others in the public health community banded together in the midst of the Cold War to extend the peace and reduce the threat of the world’s disintegration into nuclear holocaust. The medical and public health campaign against the proliferation and possible use of nuclear weapons began in earnest in the late 1950s. Among its early leaders were psychiatrist Jerome Frank and pediatrician Benjamin Spock. In response to growing fear of radioactive fallout from the atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons, the US Public Health Service started monitoring the nation’s milk supply in 1958.1 Tensions increased in the early 1960s, when President John Kennedy’s call for a massive US fallout shelter campaign intensified fears that the nation was preparing for nuclear war, and public concern rose to new heights in 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of an actual nuclear exchange.2 The most effective and influential response by the medical and public health community was led by a new organization formed in the early 1960s, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR). This group published an influential book, The Fallen Sky: Medical Consequences of Thermonuclear War,3 and an important series of articles in the New England Journal of Medicine.4,5 In 1963, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited atmospheric or undersea nuclear testing. Concerns over radioactive fallout and nuclear weapons proliferation now abated, partially displaced by concerns over civil rights and the Vietnam War. Nuclear tensions returned at high pitch in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One of the reasons for this was worry about the environmental dangers of nuclear power, a concern that greatly intensified in early 1979 with the Three Mile Island disaster. In addition, the Carter administration in its last years took a more aggressive nuclear posture, which included contingency planning for limited nuclear war.6 When the Reagan administration took office, anxieties multiplied as key officials issued statements about waging nuclear war “rationally.” In 1982, President Reagan proposed a $4.3 billion civil defense program centered on the “crisis relocation” of America’s urban population, which would supposedly allow 80% of the US population to survive a large-scale nuclear attack.2 Once again, physicians and others in the public health community mobilized against the threat of nuclear holocaust, this time on an international scale. PSR, which soon grew to more than 40 000 members, helped create International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Bernard Lown of Harvard, one of PSR’s original leaders in the 1960s, worked out a multinational governing structure for IPPNW that included PSR as the North American affiliate and in which he served as copresident with Yevgeny Chazov of the Soviet Union. IPPNW became influential worldwide and held a series of international conferences that drew participants from more than 30 countries. In its publications and at its conferences, IPPNW made a powerful case that there could be no adequate medical response in the aftermath of nuclear war and that prevention of nuclear engagement was the only meaningful medical and public health response to the threat. On December 10, 1985, Lown and Chazov accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of IPPNW.

Race, Water, and Foreign Policy: . The Tennessee Valley Authority's Global Agenda Meets "Jim Crow"

On 22 June 1963, less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis, the United States acquired a new “diplomatic weapon.” In his formal remarks dedicating the Tennessee Valley Authority’s new International Visitors Center in Knoxville, Tennessee, Robert I. Biren, the director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), reassured an audience of “citizen diplomats” that in “a divided nuclear-armed world” the new center would have a “real and lasting effect on international relationships.” According to Biren, 10 percent of all government-sponsored foreign visitors to the United States came to Knoxville to witness firsthand the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) internationally acclaimed successes.1 Indeed, since the late 1930s thousands of foreign visitors had come to see and to study TVA facilities and programs. By the 1960s, Knoxville had become one of the top five most frequented cities by foreign visitors to the United States, ranking behind Washington, D.C., Detroit, San Francisco, and New York.2 As early as the 1950s, however, hosting these visitors had begun to create a financial strain on TVA resources. Foreign visitors were overtaxing both TVA budgets and personnel. Seemingly always short of funds and constantly under political attack, the TVA needed assistance to meet its growing obligations.

Mentors and Monsters

I was never as brave as my characters turn out to be. In my fiction, the fearful boy can get back on his horse. The procrasti­ nating mom can get a life. The shy girl can learn to ask ques­ tions. How on earth did I-the fearful, procrastinating, shy author-finally achieve what my characters were born to do? How else? Through writing. And something more. In 1994, looking for story ideas, I read a news report about the second annual -a humanitarian aid shipment to Cuba sponsored by the ecumenical group Pastors for Peace. Hurricane Andrew had re­ cently hit, and the trade embargo largely prevented Americans from helping families in need. On the Friendshipment, volunteers physi­ cally collected medicine and other goods along a dozen caravan routes from Canada (giving the issue inter­ national significance) down to Laredo, Texas. There the cargo was escorted across the border into Mexico for shipment to Cuba, per u.s. regulation through a third coun­ try. The caravans gathered needed commodities for everyday Cubans, challenged u.s. travel and trade re­ strictions, and raised awareness of U.S.-Cuba relations in each of the cities and towns they passed through. (The Friendshipment has since become a semiannual event.) I wondered if any teen­ agers had participated, so I contacted my local Cuba group and found out that some had. This struck a chord. Here was my story. I needed some context, so I pooled sources and began research. I knew next to nothing about the history of the Cuban nation or the relationship between our two governments. I had no idea what life was like on the island under the embargo. I was surprised, upon reading about the humanitarian effort, that people who were not of Cuban heritage were involved in a risky activity collecting contraband with the intent to ship it to the island. In my ignorance, I was like most other Americans born after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Except that I am Cuban American. My father, Henry, came to this country from Cuba long before the revolution, as a replacement for u.s. doctors who were over­ seas during the Korean War. By the time I came along in 1961, sandwiched between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis, Cuba had become a painful topic in our house. Growing up, I was the shy girl who learned not to ask questions. So, thirty-.some years later, when I had to research Cuba for my new story, the whole reality of what had happened-what I had unwittingly lost-came crashing down around me. 19.9.94: I thought, What if things had been different? What if our government had negotiated with Castro? I could have grown up in two countries. I'd be able to speak Spanish. I'd know Mama [my grandmother] and my other Cuban relatives . .. things I'll never know. A life I'll never have. [from my journal]

Island Paradise, Revolutionary Utopia or Hustler's Haven? Consumerism and Socialism in Contemporary Cuban Rap

IntroductionThe contemporary period of economic crisis in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union, known as the ‘special period’, has seen the rise of consumerism, particularly as Cuba begins to open up to a global market. In comparison with the largely empty government ration stores, the new dollar-based shopping complexes such as La Epoca and Carlos III witness a steady stream of customers, particularly before events such as Mother's Day and Christmas. As dollars begin to flow into the economy once again through tourism, remittances and investments of foreign firms in Cuba, those with access to dollar incomes now have a disposable income and the desire to spend. This period has also seen the rise of rap music among young Afro-Cubans, a musical form that has been associated in the West with conspicuous consumption and commodity fetishism. Yet this turn to consumption is at odds with the continued focus of the Cuban political leadership on socialist ideology and practice. This essay looks at contemporary debates and struggles within Cuban rap to find out how the contradictions presented by consumer culture are being negotiated by Afro-Cuban youth within the subculture of hip-hop.In this essay, I argue that rap music is one of the crucial sites within Cuban society where young Afro-Cubans are reinventing contemporary political values and ideologies. Attracted by the music of certain politically engaged African-American rappers who have coined the term ‘underground’ or ‘conscious’ rap, Cuban ‘underground’ rappers offer strong criticisms of neoliberal globalization and they object to consumerism and the spread of market ideologies. In the lyrics of those groups who identify as ‘commercial’, consumerism and activities such as hustling are presented as strategies for black youth to survive in the special period. Different tendencies within the Cuban rap movement are engaged in a struggle over the political values that shape the culture of hip-hop, and an analysis of their debates can give us a window into changing utopias, desires and ideologies in a period of crisis and transformation in Cuban society.

Looking for the Real Lyndon

Reaching for Glory is the second volume of Lyndon Johnson’s White House telephone-call transcripts edited by Michael Beschloss. It covers the period from December 1964 through the end of July 1965 (with three extras, about which more presently). The publisher’s advertising materials contend that the book is “must reading” for historians, political scientists, politicians, and journalists, and invites the question of whether such an assertion is accurate. This essay will discuss the nature and utility of the source material, survey the Beschloss tape project, and examine the specific value of the book for diplomatic historians. Illumination is certainly on offer here, but among the more interesting issues are for whom and about what. The entire question of tapes and taping systems used by presidents has been attracting increasing interest in recent years. Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes have long been known. With the release of their full contents, they are clearly a gold mine of material on the inner workings of Nixon’s White House, as well as on the politics of that era. More recently, with new accessions at the National Archives, it has become clear that Nixon taped his meetings, too, and that will be a similar trove for all sorts of policy issues. Beginning with the revelation of John Kennedy’s tapes of meetings of his National Security Council (NSC) Executive Committee meetings during the Cuban missile crisis, there has been a succession of releases, to the point that the oral record has become virtually a field of inquiry on its own. The Miller Center at the University of Virginia has made a major and continuing effort (and contribution) on the Kennedy and Nixon tapes. Michael Beschloss’s endeavor on the Johnson tapes does not possess quite that scope, but is a huge project for a single researcher.

Avoiding a Nuclear Catastrophe: Arms Control after the 2002 India–Pakistan Crisis

Regional Armageddon in South Asia is a real danger — one that argues for a comprehensive nuclear arms control regime as the best strategy to avoid a nuclear exchange in a future Indo-Pakistani crisis. Without a nuclear arms control regime, India and Pakistan are condemned to live in a situation resembling a permanent Cuban Missile Crisis. Confidence-building measures (CBMs) and nuclear risk-reduction measures (NRRMs) are necessary, but they must be seen as building blocks to negotiate a robust nuclear arms control regime. Unlike CBMs and NRRMs, a nuclear arms control regime could start a process of nuclear rollback and ultimately eliminate nuclear weapons from South Asia. This article examines the past obstacles to a nuclear arms control regime, and argues that slow-motion nuclear weaponization opens a window of opportunity for nuclear arms control, if India and Pakistan can reach a verifiable agreement not to deploy nuclear weapons. The concluding section outlines the main elements of a robust nuclear arms control regime in South Asia.

Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War

Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War

Presidential Policymaking in Crisis Situations: 9/11 and Its Aftermath

This paper compares the decision‐making approaches of two presidents, John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, in relation to unanticipated international crises. One, President Kennedy, employed a broad body of expert opinion and entertained a wide range of options in meeting the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963. The actions taken avoided a potential worldwide nuclear war. The other, George W. Bush, consulted only a few, like‐minded colleagues and appears to have decided early on that a war directed against Iraq and Saddam Hussein was a necessity. The administration's justifications for the war were difficult to prove and the administration chose an essentially bilateral (as against a multi‐lateral) approach. The Iraq War was won fairly easily, although its long‐range consequences remain unclear. The two styles of decision‐making present polarized approaches to international crisis situation management.

Confrontation in the Sargassso Sea: Soviet Submarines During the Cuban Missile Crisis

Confrontation in the Sargassso Sea: Soviet Submarines During the Cuban Missile Crisis