The Thirteen Days in October 1962 When the World Came Closer to Nuclear War Than Either Side Knew at the Time

The Cuban Revolution under Fidel Castro had taken power in January 1959. By 1961 Castro had aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union. The American Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 had failed and had reinforced Castro’s alignment.

The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided in spring 1962 to install medium-range nuclear missiles on Cuba — approximately 100 nautical miles from the Florida coast. The strategic objectives were substantial:

— To defend Cuba against American invasion — To achieve nuclear parity with the American Jupiter missiles installed in Turkey along the Soviet border — To enhance Soviet bargaining position generally

Soviet engineers began constructing the missile sites at four locations across Cuba in summer 1962. The first R-12 medium-range ballistic missiles (range 2,000 km, capable of reaching Washington DC and the American midwest) were installed by mid-October.

14 October 1962

An American U-2 reconnaissance flight over western Cuba on the morning of 14 October 1962 photographed the San Cristobal missile site. The photographs were analysed by the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center across 14-15 October. The identification was confirmed at approximately 8:30 p.m. on 15 October. President John F Kennedy was informed at approximately 8:45 a.m. on 16 October 1962.

ExComm

The Kennedy response was coordinated through a special advisory body — the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm). The ExComm met continuously from 16 October to 28 October 1962.

The military alternatives were substantially:

— Substantial air strike to destroy the missile sites before they became operational — Substantial full invasion of Cuba — Substantial diplomatic negotiation — Substantial naval blockade (called a “quarantine” for legal reasons; a formal blockade would have been an act of war)

The joint chiefs advocated the air strike followed by invasion. Kennedy chose the quarantine, announced in a televised national address on 22 October 1962. The quarantine began on 24 October 1962 at 10 a.m.

What did not happen

The 14 days from Kennedy’s televised speech to Khrushchev’s 28 October withdrawal included multiple moments at which nuclear escalation could have occurred and did not.

The most-discussed single moment is the 27 October 1962 incident involving the Soviet submarine B-59. The B-59 — a diesel-electric submarine equipped with a nuclear torpedo — had been submerged in the Atlantic for multiple days under American depth-charge harassment from the USS Beale. Conditions inside the submarine had deteriorated to approximately 50°C interior temperatures, low oxygen, and near-zero radio contact with Moscow. The submarine captain Valentin Savitsky concluded the war had begun above and ordered the nuclear torpedo armed.

The submarine’s chief of staff Vasily Arkhipov — who had veto authority over the firing decision because of a unusual command-structure detail of this particular flotilla — refused authorisation. The nuclear torpedo was not fired. The submarine surfaced and identified itself.

Arkhipov survived the encounter. He died of kidney cancer in 1998, aged 72. The National Security Archive subsequently identified him as “the man who saved the world” — a possibly hyperbolic but defensible characterisation given the likely consequences of a nuclear-torpedo detonation against the American carrier group above.

28 October 1962

Khrushchev’s public concession came on the morning of 28 October 1962 via a Radio Moscow broadcast. The public terms were:

— Soviet withdrawal of all missiles from Cuba — American public pledge not to invade Cuba

The private terms — negotiated secretly between Robert Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin — included American withdrawal of the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, with the timing calibrated to preserve the public American appearance of unconditional Soviet retreat. The Turkish Jupiter withdrawal was completed in 1963 and was attributed in the public account to routine obsolescence rather than Cuban-crisis quid pro quo.

The Cuban Missile Crisis produced the Moscow-Washington direct teletype “hotline” agreement of 1963, the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, and the broader detente that structured Soviet-American relations across the 1960s and early 1970s.