
Philip Zelikow, White Burkett Miller Professor of History, says the Cuban missile crisis started in Berlin. (Photo by Dan Addison, University Communications)
“This kind of hole inside the Soviet bloc was no longer tolerable,” Zelikow said. “Khrushchev delivered that ultimatum beginning in 1958. And the Americans were in a position where, from a conventional point of view, they didn’t have the forces to stop it. The only way to keep the Soviets from doing that was to threaten to start a nuclear war.”
Zelikow said Khrushchev regarded this American position as incredibly risky and arrogant. One way to bring American leaders to reason was to make it clear the Soviet Union, too, had plenty of nuclear weapons that could easily threaten the United States, Zelikow said.
“A deployment to Cuba would demonstrate that,” Zelikow said.
But Khrushchev knew the deployment had to be done secretly, until he was ready to unveil the missiles in November 1962. “At that time, he planned to bring the Berlin crisis to a victorious conclusion, and repeatedly, in quite crude and emphatic ways, secretly warned Kennedy and the West Germans that he would do this in November.” Zelikow said.
Tens of thousands of Soviet troops and weapons accompanied the missiles to Cuba. It was the largest deployment of troops outside of Europe in the Soviet Union’s history. The buildup also included anti-aircraft missiles, which were among the first missiles that they deployed there before the nuclear missiles arrived.
The U.S. could see the Soviets were shipping weapons and people into Cuba, though the Soviets downplayed the deployments. CIA director John A. McCone was skeptical of the official Soviet explanation and persuaded Kennedy to order a U-2 spy-plane flight over Cuba.
“And the flight, to everyone’s shock except McCone’s, confirmed that Soviet ballistic nuclear missiles were, in fact, being deployed in Cuba,” Zelikow said. “Kennedy’s reaction, of course, was of surprise and real concern.”