Soviet Missiles Research Articles

A Luce Connection: Senator Keating, William Pawley, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Documentation from unexpected sources sheds new light on a question that had seemed unresolvable: how Senator Kenneth Keating learned about the emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba well before the Kennedy administration did. The new evidence not only reveals the intricacies of this longstanding mystery, but also provides valuable insights about U.S. intelligence operations, the making of U.S. foreign policy, and the rich opportunities for research about the Cold War in the four million pages of documents gathered under the Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992.

Crises in U.S. foreign policy: an international history reader

This work focuses on seven of the crises that the US has been involved in with other countries in the 20th century. These incidents include: American entry into World War I; the origins of the US-Soviet Cold War; and the confrontation over Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Clear-Headed Answers to the Obvious Questions

and a modicum of good luck, the nation can choose the course and move toward the desirable state of affairs‐ lower infant mortality, better education, more effective defense, more readily available drugs, control over Alzheimer’s disease, reduced levels of cancer, lower health costs, and on and on. This is the kind of policy talk I call “crisis mon

Kathleen Gough's Fight against the Consequences of Class and Imperialism on Campus

In 1961 the Kennedy Administration gave the green light to the CIA to reclaim Cuba by force for democratic capitalism's interests. The Bay of Pigs invasion which followed was a flop that subsequent administrations and the CIA could never abide. In October of 1962 the Kennedy Administration, smarting from its defeat at the Bay of Pigs, revealed that Soviet missiles were destined to be installed on launch pads in Cuba and effected a blockade of traffic destined for that island. The Missile Crisis, as it is known, generated small protests on several campuses, including Brandeis University where Kathleen Gough, an assistant professor there, was asked by students to give a speech at an open forum on campus. Whereas the toppling of Arbenz's government in Guatemala and Mossadegh's government in Iran in the mid - 1950s had created mild protests here and there in American universities, the Cuban missile blockade signalled a change in the size and number of political protests on several American campuses against the United States' imperialist military adventures. Even free speech platforms, so common on campuses today, and professors willing to speak on controversial issues were few and far between three decades ago. Kathleen Gough was sought out by students because of a speech she had given the previous year denouncing the above - ground testing of nuclear devices at the Nevada test site. Kathleen complied and gave a speech lambasting the United States' government, expressing a hope that Cuba would successfully defend itself against an attack from the United States. She insisted that the United States was in violation of international law, and of Cuba's sovereignty, and threatened the world with a nuclear confrontation with the U.S.S.R. Kathleen Gough's protests of the blockade were based on scholarly critiques of Cuban political economic history and of the dictatorial regimes which had received succour and support from the United States. She sought fair treatment for Castro's socialist regime which had toppled Batista's dictatorship. By 1962 it was apparent that United States policies in Latin America favoured oligarchies and dictatorships(f.2) over socialist governments or governments which raised the spectre of socialism. Thus, from 1959 the United States had sought to undermine Castro's Cuba by refusing to grant it aid, to grant it trade status or to recognize its legitimacy. The U.S.A's second big moment for the toppling ofCastro's regime, the blockade, was not left to the CIA, but was delegated to the U.S. military and foreign affairs apparatus. The protest of U.S. practices toward Cuba during the missile crisis must be put into perspective: it was small, but noticed. It preceded the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley by over a year,(f.3) and it preceded the electrifying University of Michigan teach - in on the Vietnam War by two years.(f.4) Protests of the Cuban blockade in 1962 were in step with civil rights demonstrations in the deep south, and were harbingers of campus protests of U.S. imperialist foreign policies for the next three decades. Kathleen Gough's protests of United States' nuclear testing policies and its actions toward Cuba were regarded with repugnance by the Brandeis administration. She was called into the university president's office and upbraided. Kathleen was later given to understand that she had no future at Brandeis, but the president did not so inform her. Kathleen and her husband and colleague, David Aberle, decided to move from Brandeis. David was offered a position at the University of Oregon, which he accepted. There was no permanent ladder position available for Kathleen so she was made an Honorary Research Associate. Within a year after their arrival at Oregon, the United States, in violation of the Geneva Agreements and Accords, was hip - deep in open warfare against the revolutionary National Liberation Front insurgents and North Vietnamese troops. …

Ontologies, Problem Representation, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

“Problem representation” and “ontology” are introduced as concepts critical to understanding foreign policy decision making. The article explicates these concepts and their relationship and focuses on such issues of representation rather than veridical descriptions of reality, thereby shifting attention away from concern with misperception and toward attempting to understand how these representations are socially constructed and modified. It is argued that the conflict resolution process can be enhanced by inclusion of concerns with “problem representation” and “ontology” along with traditional interest in “option selection.” These concepts are then related to decision making in the cuban missile crisis. Two different ways of using new information on the crisis — and more generally understanding foreign policy decision making — are presented. The first is deemed an “option selection” perspective. A second approach expresses a theory of foreign policy decision making in a model of one important aspect of the Cuban missile crisis — the debate over whether Soviet missiles in Cuba were offensive. That model illustrates why focusing primarily on options or alternatives may obscure the most critical determinants of decision making. By focusing on ontologies and problem representations, the new model illustrates an approach to understanding and representing why some decision makers are predisposed to particular options over others.

Close to the brink? Britain and the Cuban missile crisis

In October 1962 the world went to the brink of nuclear war when the American government discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba. A year earlier the United States and the Soviet Union had already stood ‘eyeball to eyeball’ over Berlin. Europe had long been the frontline of the East‐West confrontation. But what was Britain's role during the Cuban missile crisis? Only recently have we begun to learn something about what happened, but we still do not have an accurate and comprehensive account of the diplomatic and military action taken by the British government. This article draws upon recent British and American literature to pose some questions about the British government's attitude and behaviour during the crisis in advance of the release of the official papers. These should be of interest and concern both to historians and to the general public.

A fast-neutron detector used in verification of the INF Treaty

We describe the design and calibration of the neutron-detection equipment used in support of the INF Treaty, and some measurements made on Soviet missiles. The fast-neutron detector, consisting of twelve 3He gas proportional tubes in a cadmium-covered polyethylene moderator, produces about 67 counts/s in a flux of neutrons from 252Cf equal to 1 neutron/cm 2s. This detector is used to determine the spatial pattern of neutrons emitted from the nuclear warheads on the missiles.

Dean Acheson and the ‘Special Relationship’: The West Point Speech of December 1962

Dean Acheson, an influential architect of U.S. foreign policy in the decades following the Second World War, was secretary of state under President Harry S. Truman (I949-53). Acheson was instrumental in the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the rebuilding and rearming of Germany. Perhaps more than any other American statesman, Acheson believed that the North Atlantic Community represented the culmination of human cultural, economic and political development. Acheson left office at the end of the Truman administration to return to his private law practice in Washington, D.C. He continued speaking out on foreign policy issues and served as an unofficial adviser to the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations. President John F. Kennedy (I961-3) often consulted Acheson on NATO matters or when international crises struck. It was on 5 December I962, shortly after the U.S.-Soviet near-confrontation in October over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, that Dean Acheson made his now infamous West Point speech which led the way in debunking the so-called special relationship between Great Britain and the United States. By early December I962, the Cuban Missile Crisis was already deemed an American success. Although Acheson had advocated an air strike on the Cuban missile sites and strongly disagreed with Kennedy's blockade decision, he had 'gained respect for the President' during those tension-filled days of October.' He was looking forward to getting out of Washington in two months for his annual January hiatus to Antigua and the Southern Windward Islands. But first Acheson had to finish writing two articles and deliver a speech. 'Three things of my own are about to burst on the world,' Acheson wrote Lady Pamela Berry, wife of W. Michael Berry, editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph and a respected observer of British politics in her own right, on 3

Third World Pollution

Third World Pollution

Soviet Missile on Display

Soviet Missile on Display

Soviet Missile on Display

Soviet Missile on Display

Cuba and the Missile Crisis

On 16 October 1962, President John F. Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was building bases in Cuba for ballistic missiles that could destroy major US cities. In the days that followed, US officials focused nearly all their attention on strategies for removing the Soviet missiles, on Soviet motives, and on the Soviet Union's reaction to the naval quarantine. Cuba was the locus of this most dramatic superpower confrontation, but Cuban perceptions, motives, and reactions were largely ignored.

October Missiles and November Elections: The Cuban Missile Crisis and American Politics, 1962

I told you that the President would move on Cuba before [the] election, Sen. Norris Cotton of New Hampshire reminded his constituents a week after President John F. Kennedy had dramatically announced that the United States was imposing a quarantine against Cuba to force Soviet missiles from the Caribbean island. Another Republican standing for reelection in 1962, Rep. Thomas B. Curtis of Missouri, told voters in his district that the Cuban missile crisis was phony and contrived for election purposes. Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, like many others, suspected that the Kennedy administration had played politics with foreign policy to help Democrats in the congressional elections of November 6.1 The claim and fear that presidents play politics with foreign policy, especially in electoral seasons, is familiar and often well founded. Throughout American history, suspicions have flourished that presidents take unusual and sometimes extreme diplomatic or military steps, utter hyperboles, practice deceit, or manufacture foreign crises to improve their own and their party's chances at the polls. Like political leaders before him, Kennedy had invited imputations that he exploited foreignpolicy issues for political gain or that he made diplomatic decisions in response to domestic political pressure. Indeed, about a month before the missile crisis, Kennedy had made a conspicuous political decision in foreign affairs: to sell Hawk missiles to Israel. American Jews had lobbied intensely for the sale; some of them had even withheld contributions from congressional candidates until they saw Kennedy act on the deal. The sale of those short-range missiles, the administration

A New Soviet Missile Angers the White House

A New Soviet Missile Angers the White House

The diplomacy of compliance and modern arms control: problems of third-party participation*

In his discussion of his 1978 arms control negotiations with Andrei Gromyko, Cyrus Vance refers to 'telemetry encryption'1 at missile testing-the encoding by a testing nation of the data on its missile performance which is being monitored by an observing nation-and describes how difficult it was to go beyond the apparent tautology that 'telemetry encryption was prohibited if it impeded verification'. The Soviet version of this was, of course, that 'encryption was permitted unless it impeded', and so on. The question of what kind of encryption would impede what sort of verification was precisely what the United States was not willing to discuss. The Soviet Union was left wondering if the United States was serious in negotiation.2 The reason for this impasse was not new. The United States did not want to disclose to the Soviet Union the extent to which it was capable of monitoring Soviet missile tests even after the telemetry message had been partially encoded by the Soviet Union. Such a disclosure would have been equivalent to revealing US intelligence capacities in the general field, which would have exposed its monitoring system to interference and led to enhanced Soviet capabilities for confusing future verification procedures. On the other hand, a total ban on encryption was not acceptable to the Soviet Union because the telemetry involved in missile testing included a considerable amount of data which was not included under the SALT limitations. The United States also had reasons for wanting to reserve the right to conceal this kind of telemetry data. With such a history of negotiating difficulty behind the provisions which prohibit any interference with verification activities conducted by national technical means (NTM)3 and (in the case of SALT II) the agreed statements and common understandings associated with Article XV of the Treaty, any third party not fully familiar with all the details would be completely at a loss if it tried to assess the charges and counter-charges of violation in this area. Without the benefit of full comprehension of all the nuances of these agreements, and often lacking the technological means to carry out independent verification, all a third party can do in this area, if it wishes to investigate compliance with the SALT limitations, is to acknowledge the claims of the two sides, the Soviet Union and the United States. Debates between the two superpowers on non-compliance with the SALT

The limits of correctness

On October 5, 19601, the American Ballistic Missile Early–Warning System station at Thule, Greenland, indicated a large contingent of Soviet missiles headed towards the United States2. Fortunately, common sense prevailed at the informal threat–assessment conference that was immediately convened: international tensions weren’t particularly high at the time. The system had only recently been installed. Kruschev was in New York, and all in all a massive Soviet attack seemed very unlikely. As a result no devastating counter–attack was launched. What was the problem? The moon had risen, and was reflecting radar signals back to earth. Needless to say, this lunar reflection hadn’t been predicted by the system’s designers. Over the last ten years, the Defense Department has spent many millions of dollars on a new computer technology called “program verification” a branch of computer science whose business, in its own terms, is to “prove programs correct”. Program verification has been studied in theoretical computer science departments since a few seminal papers in the 1960s3, but it has only recently started to gain in public visibility, and to be applied to real world problems. General Electric, to consider just one example, has initiated verification projects in their own laboratories: they would like to prove that the programs used in their latest computer–controlled washing machines won’t have any “bugs” (even one serious one can destroy their profit margin)4. Although it used to be that only the simplest programs could be “proven correct” — programs to put simple lists into order, to compute simple arithmetic functions –slow but steady progress has been made in extending the range of verification techniques. Recent papers have reported correctness proofs for somewhat more complex programs, including small operating systems, compilers, and other material of modern system design. 5 What, we do well to ask, does this new technology mean? How good are we at it? For example, if the 1960 warning system had been proven correct (which it was not), could we have avoided the problem with the moon? If it were possible to prove that the programs being written to control automatic launch–on–warning systems were correct, would that mean there could not be a catastrophic accident? In systems now being proposed computers will make launching decisions in a matter of seconds, with no time for any human intervention (let alone for musings about

A New Strategic Arms Agreement: Taking the Long View

A NEW STRATEGIC ARMS AGREEMENT: TAKING THE LONG VIEW Theodore H. Moran and Peter A. Wilson .he Reagan administration is now embarked on its second major attempt to negotiate a strategic arms agreement with the Soviet Union. Like its predecessor, the new proposal is vast in scope and requires substantial changes in the Soviet nuclear arsenal, especially with regard to the heavy missiles that endanger our own fixed land-based deterrent force. The Soviets rejected the last American approach, so the Reagan administration has softened its position under pressure from Congress to be more "realistic." However, the Soviets are again dismissing the American proposal as "nothing but words." How far can the United States go, and on what issues, to conclude a successful negotiation? Conversely, what are the dangers to the United States if it keeps failing to reach an agreement? Given the linkage between the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks and the controversial plan for deploying new intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe, what strategy would preclude another negotiating failure? The United States faces two threats to its strategic force posture, and the Reagan administration has focused onjust one of these: the growing vulnerability of the fixed land-based missile system—one leg of the nuclear triad. The second threat is posed by the longer-term vulnerability of the other two legs of the triad—the American bomber force and the nuclear missile submarines. The United States must assess the threat posed to all three legs of the nuclear triad in determining the need for an agreement on arms limitations—nay, reductions—and what will happen if it does not reach one. The Reagan administration's principal preoccupation when it came Theodore H. Moran is Landegger Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Peter A. Wilson is a consultant on defense issues. 117 118 SAISREVIEW into office was the so-called window of vulnerability, a term used to describe the Soviets' increasing accuracy and the heavy megatonnage of its missiles, thus putting the U.S. fixed land-based system at serious risk. The Scowcroft Commission tempered the discussion about the growing Soviet capabilities, arguing that Soviet advances would be slower and more uncertain than the administration's early rhetoric implied. Undisputed , however, was the commission's conclusion that—independent of partisan debates about how best to deal with the Soviets—the techniques of atomic destruction on both sides are outpacing the ability of civil engineers to protect fixed land-based missiles.* This, of course, has substantial adverse implications for the U.S. strategic posture. Fixed land-based systems are far more responsive to command and control, they can be retargeted faster and more easily, and their survival status is more dependably monitored. Most important, as the third leg of the American nuclear triad, they provide a synergism with bombers and submarines that renders the other legs of the triad much more secure against the sinister or desperate designs of would-be Soviet attackers. This combination of several different U.S. weapons systems diffuses and dilutes the Soviet military effort and helps ensure against the possibility of technological breakthroughs that could suddenly alter the East-West equation (i.e., in antisubmarine warfare). The land-based missile system, specifically, provides a timing problem for Soviet attackers that would enormously complicate a hypothetical Soviet first strike: A launch of Soviet missiles against U.S. silos provides thirty minutes' warning time for retaliatory bombers to take off; a quick submarine strike from close, onshore positions against American airfields , in contrast, provides an unambiguous signal to launch retaliatory American missiles. For this reason, the whole of the triad is greater than the sum of its parts—the loss of one leg would significantly reduce the efficacy ofthe other two, thus diminishing the retaliatory capability ofthe United States. The conclusion is inescapable: Without some form of the triad, the United States would be weaker and far less secure. Ideal negotiations with the Soviets would seek to achieve such large cuts in the Soviet counterforce capability that the U.S. land-based missile systems would remain invulnerable. The Reagan administration has consistently pushed for such reductions throughout the negotiation process, whether in the context of...

Euromissiles: The Only Alternative or a Big Mistake?

Although I agree with many of Gregory F. Treverton's observations in his article in the Spring 1983 International Security, Managing NATO's Nuclear Dilemma (Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 93-115), I disagree with his in favor of Euromissile deployment. Treverton argues that a military rationale for deployment exists, despite his awareness of the possibility that the missiles may be irrelevant (p. 96). He speaks of the Euro-Soviet area as a theater (often linked with conceptions of limited nuclear war), even though the Euromissiles have clearly strategic implications. He argues (again incorrectly, I believe) that the new missiles are a useful and necessary way to tighten the link between Europe and American strategic weapons and strengthen deterrence (p. 101), and he suggests that the Euromissiles are not primarily needed to deter the Soviets (I agree) but to reinforce Europe's trust in the American nuclear guarantee (which they cannot). Finally, he indicates that no U.S. president would fire nuclear weapons from Europe without consulting his counterpart in the host country (p. 102), but he does not appear to consider the possibility that a president might refuse to fire them despite a request by the host country. In order to understand the ultimate political and military-strategic irrelevance of the Euromissiles, one should guard against preoccupation with Soviet SS-20s aimed at Europe, serious though their challenge may be. They are not the first Soviet missiles to be targeted on Western Europe. To make the problem one of West versus East obscures a much more fundamental European-American dimension, and this has been the basic mistake of supporters

The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading the Lessons Correctly

lessons of the Cuban missile crisis occupy a central place both in United States foreign policy and in international relations theory. For policymakers, the crisis confirmed a number of tenets about the utility of power in a nuclear world and the ways in which relations with the Soviet Union should best bc managed. Theoreticians have thoroughly examined the case for generalizations about crisis decision-making, bargaining theory, and the role of nuclear weapons in foreign policy. How valid are these lessons? In recent years, a burgeoning revisionist literature has challenged the prevalent view that the crisis represented a necessary and successful response to a Soviet challenge of vital American interests. 1 John F. Kennedy has been charged with overreacting to the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba and even with provoking a confrontation with Moscow for domestic political reasons. Unfortunately, most of this literature is highly polemical and thus of little analytical value. There are some important exceptions, among them an article by James A. Nathan, The Missile Crisis: His Finest Hour Now, which raises some interesting questions about the policy implications of the crisis.2 Nathan's article

The Nuclear Freeze: The freeze and the counterforce race

President Carter, in a 1980 report to Congress, speculated on how the Soviet Union might respond to the deployment of US weapons capable of destroying Soviet missiles in their silos: “…adopting a launch-on-warning posture is perhaps the least expensive but the most potentially destabilizing and dangerous response option available to Soviet leaders.”