Cold War Follies
In October 1962, after the
Soviet Union stationed nuclear missiles in Fidel Castro's Cuba, President John
F. Kennedy called upon Dean Acheson for advice. With typical self-assurance,
the grand old man of the Cold War bellowed his recommendation at a meeting of
the so-called ExComm of top Kennedy aides: a swift U.S. airstrike to take out
the nukes. When asked what the result would be, Acheson replied that Moscow
would then destroy a cache of NATO nuclear missiles in Turkey. Then what? he
was asked. Under our NATO obligations, Acheson said, Washington would have to
attack a nuclear base within the Soviet Union itself. And then? Acheson paused.
"That's when we hope," the magisterial wise man said, "that cooler heads will
prevail, and they'll stop and talk."
Mercifully, the end of the Cold War has brought an end to this type of
hair-raising exchange. But those readers looking to remember the bad old days
can find this sort of thing, and plenty of it, in Aleksandr Fursenko and
Timothy Naftali's important new book on the Cuban missile crisis, "One Hell
of a Gamble ." It would be nice to report that their account packs
the pleasure and thrills of a spy novel, but that's not exactly the case. Spy
novels induce a frisson of tension that's enjoyable because the reader
knows nothing is really at stake. But Fursenko and Naftali's book, while it
will leave readers' knuckles white, is no fun at all to read, because the
events it describes are so frightening.
Their impressive account is one of the best of a flood of
new books about the Cold War, triggered by the end of the superpowers' long
struggle. These have ranged from the triumphalist (such as Jay Winik's On
the Brink , a hagiographic account of the Reagan-era officials he sees as
the Cold War's victors) to the tendentious (say, Peter Schweizer's simplistic
Victory , giving all the credit, again, to Reagan) to the thoughtful
(such as We Now Know , by the dean of Cold War historians, John Lewis
Gaddis). "One Hell of a Gamble" belongs in the last category. Fursenko
and Naftali resist the urge to gloat or sermonize, and instead let their
research speak for them. It has quite a bit to say, little of it soothing.
Fursenko, a leading Russian historian and member of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, and Naftali, a fellow in international-security studies at Yale, add
much to what we know about the coldest days of the Cold War from careful
digging in newly opened Soviet archives.
In
particular, the popular image of the missile crisis as a triumph for JFK's
diplomacy gets badly dented. Kennedy began his term hoping to establish a new
detente with Moscow, but he also sought to rid the Western Hemisphere of
communism by ousting Castro. These goals soon proved incompatible. In his 1960
campaign, Kennedy talked up a fictional missile gap in order to show up the GOP
as flaccid on communism. During the Eisenhower administration, Castro had begun
moving deeper into the Soviet orbit out of fear of a U.S. invasion; Kennedy's
failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 aggravated Castro's anxieties and gave him
a rallying cry for a pro-Soviet tilt. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, fearing
the loss of his model for a new path of socialist development, got mischievous.
"Why not throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam's pants?" he asked, and decided to move
missiles into Cuba. The gambit would, at a stroke, deter Kennedy from invading
Cuba, cement Moscow's alliance with Havana, and shift the world strategic
balance. Washington would learn to live with the missiles, Khrushchev figured,
just as Moscow lived with NATO's nuclear missiles on its Turkish frontier.
But Kennedy had no intention of doing so.
Instead of Acheson's airstrike, the ExComm chose to blockade Cuba with
warships. After several harrowing days, Khrushchev blinked and agreed to remove
the missiles in return for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret
pact to remove the Turkish missiles. The superpowers subsequently entered a
brief era of eased tensions, installing the famous Kremlin-White House hot line
and signing a nuclear test ban treaty. " 'One Hell of a Gamble,' "
writes Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Camelot's court historian, shows "an American
president doggedly bent on the avoidance of nuclear war." Actually, it shows
that mixed politics send mixed signals. True, the planet was not destroyed, for
which we should be grateful, but Kennedy's maladroit foreign policy helped
create the conditions for the crisis. The world was brought to the verge of
nuclear catastrophe because of a missile gap that did not exist, Turkish
missiles that were not supposed to be there, and an invasion that was not
coming.
Khrushchev doesn't come off looking any better. Fursenko and Naftali offer a
wealth of new details about Soviet and Cuban motives, including the most
comprehensive picture yet of Havana's slow entry into the Soviet orbit. We also
get a better look at the roots of Khrushchev's decision to back down. In the
"X" article, the landmark 1947 essay that spelled out the fundamentals of
America's Cold War strategy, George Kennan argued that "the Kremlin has no
compunction about retreating in the face of superior force. And being under the
compulsion of no timetable, it does not get panicky under the necessity for
such retreat. ... [I]f it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts
these philosophically and accommodates itself to them." Sure enough, confronted
with such a barrier in 1962, Khrushchev decided to give way. He retreated as
philosophically as he could, although he described his reaction to the setback
in rather less elegant language. There was no need for the Kremlin, he said, to
"act like the czarist officer who farted at the ball and then shot
himself."
Fursenko and Naftali's book is full of this type of
gripping new detail, including the book's biggest, scariest revelation. The
Kremlin, we learn, had decided to use tactical battlefield nuclear weapons
against U.S. troops if Kennedy invaded Cuba. Had Kennedy not opted for the
blockade, it's clear that the first combat use of nuclear weapons since
Nagasaki could have prompted a terrifying cycle of escalation. The Cuban
missile crisis, it seems, may have been even worse than we had thought.
Facing a more complex world,
some diplomats and conservative scholars seem to long nostalgically for the era
of Mutual Assured Destruction. "One Hell of a Gamble" comes as a welcome
corrective. Bad as today's global uncertainties may seem, the Cold War system
always had an even more dangerous potential for getting out of control. Even
after the superpowers' 1962 showdown led to an easing of tensions, the planet
still had a series of nuclear scares, such as the October 1973 nuclear
alert--which happened on the detente-minded watch of Henry Kissinger and
Richard Nixon. The inherent problem with Cold War brinkmanship, as the Harvard
theorist Thomas C. Schelling has noted, is that it could elicit concessions
only if one's opponent didn't know exactly where the brink was. "One Hell of
a Gamble" reminds us just how terrifying that game could be. "Any fool
could start a war," Khrushchev used to like to say. In 1962, Khrushchev,
Castro, and Kennedy almost did.
