One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

rockets themselves were still in the middle of the Atlantic.

Most worrying of all to Khrushchev was the Aleksandrovsk, a 5,400-ton freighter crammed with nuclear warheads. Her cargo included twenty-four 1-megaton warheads for the R-14 missile, each one of which contained the destructive force of seventy Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. The explosive power concentrated on board the ship exceeded all the bombs dropped in the history of warfare by a factor of at least three.

After a sixteen-day voyage from the port of Severomorsk, high above the Arctic Circle, the Aleksandrovsk was approaching the northern coast of Cuba. The ship was still in international waters, nearly half a day's sailing time from the closest Cuban port. She was obviously a prime target for interception by the U.S. Navy. Nuclear-armed submarines had escorted the Aleksandrovsk part of the way across the Atlantic, but she was now practically defenseless, accompanied only by another Soviet freighter, the Almetyevsk. If the Americans tried to board, the captain had orders to open fire with automatic weapons, blow up his ship, and send the equivalent of 25 million tons of TNT to the bottom of the sea. The Aleksandrovsk must not be permitted to fall into enemy hands.

In addition to the surface ships, there were also four Soviet submarines out in the western Atlantic. Khrushchev had initially planned to build a modern submarine base in Cuba, but had scaled these plans back in late September. Instead of nuclear-powered submarines, which were capable of remaining under the ocean for weeks at a time, he dispatched four Foxtrot-class diesel-electric submarines. The Foxtrots were larger, updated versions of the German U-boats that had harassed Allied shipping in World War II. The difference was that they each carried a small nuclear-tipped torpedo, in addition to twenty-one conventional torpedoes.

Recovering from his initial shock, Khrushchev began making a series of rapid decisions. He ordered a heightening of alert levels for Soviet military units. He dictated letters to Kennedy and Castro. He drafted a statement denouncing the blockade as 'an act of piracy' and accusing the United States of pushing the world to the edge of 'thermonuclear war.' But his anger was tempered with caution. To reduce the risk of a confrontation with American warships, he ordered the return of most of the Soviet vessels that had not reached Cuban waters. The recalled ships included the wide-hatch freighters Kimovsk and Poltava, both loaded with R-14 missiles, and the Yuri Gagarin, with equipment for one of the R-12 regiments. Ships with nonmilitary cargoes, such as the oil tanker Bucharest, were authorized to proceed to Cuba. The vessels closest to Cuba, including the warhead-carrying Aleksandrovsk, were instructed to head for the nearest port.

After earlier considering the idea of authorizing Soviet commanders on Cuba to use tactical nuclear weapons in response to a U.S. invasion, Khrushchev now rejected this option. He also decided against transferring control of Soviet weaponry to the Cubans or announcing a formal defense treaty with Cuba. Instead, he dictated an order to the commander in chief of the Soviet Group of Forces, General Issa Pliyev:

In connection with the possible landing on Cuba by Americans taking part in exercises in the Caribbean sea, take urgent measures to increase combat readiness and defeat the enemy, through the joint efforts of the Cuban army and all Soviet troop units, excluding the weapons of STATSENKO and all the cargoes of BELOBORODOV.

Major General Igor Statsenko was the commander of the Soviet missile troops on Cuba; Colonel Nikolai Beloborodov had responsibility for the nuclear warheads. Decoded, the message meant that Soviet troops on Cuba had orders to resist an American invasion, but were not authorized to use nuclear weapons of any kind. Khrushchev was determined to maintain personal control over the warheads.

Kremlin notetakers struggled to keep pace with a jumble of thoughts and instructions from the first secretary:

Order the return of the ships (those ships that have not yet arrived).(Everybody says this is the correct decision.)Issue a Soviet government statement ? a protest.The USA is on a course for preparing and unleashing the third world war.American imperialism is trying to dictate its will to everybody else.We protest. All countries have the right to defend themselves and to conclude alliances.The USSR is also armed, we protest these piratic actions….Let the four submarines continue. The Aleksandrovsk should go to the nearest port.Send Castro a telegram.We have received Kennedy's letter.A crude interference in Cuba's affairs.

Foreign Ministry officials worked on the draft letters overnight, transforming the premier's excited ramblings into bureaucratic prose. In the meantime, Khrushchev urged his colleagues to sleep in the Kremlin, to avoid giving the impression of undue alarm to foreign correspondents and any 'intelligence agents' who might be 'prowling around.' He himself retired to a sofa in an anteroom of his office. He slept in his clothes. He had heard a story about a French foreign minister who had been 'caught literally with his pants down' in the middle of the night during the 1956 Suez crisis. He wanted to avoid a similar indignity. As he later recalled, 'I was ready for alarming news to come at any moment, and I wanted to be ready to react immediately.'

When Kennedy and his aides pondered Khrushchev's motives for sending missiles to Cuba, their standard explanation was that he wanted to change the balance of nuclear power. The Soviet Union was at a serious disadvantage in long-range rockets and planes ? so-called 'strategic' weapons ? but had plenty of medium-range ballistic missiles, or MRBMs, targeted on Europe. Redeployed to Cuba, the MRBMs were magically transformed into strategic weapons, capable of hitting the territory of the rival superpower.

Achieving strategic parity with the United States was certainly an important motivation for Khrushchev, who deeply resented American nuclear superiority. He was eager to get even with the Americans for both political and military reasons. But declassified Soviet records show that his emotions also played an important role in his decision making. Castro and his barbudos had stirred the romanticism of the tired old men in the Kremlin, reminding them that they, too, had once been revolutionaries.

'He is a genuine revolutionary, completely like us,' reported Anastas Mikoyan, after becoming the first Soviet leader to meet with Castro in February 1960. 'I felt as though I had returned to my childhood.'

A 'heroic man' was how Khrushchev described Castro when they first embraced on September 20, 1960, outside the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. Both leaders were in New York for a United Nations General Assembly meeting, but Castro had left his hotel in midtown to protest the management's 'unacceptable cash demands.' The six-foot-four Cuban bent down and enveloped the five-foot-three Russian in an effusive bear hug. 'He made a deep impression on me,' Khrushchev recalled later. Eventually, he would come to love Fidel 'like a son.'

The Soviets had never been much interested in Latin America prior to Castro's rise to power. Moscow did not even have an embassy in Havana between 1952 and 1960. Totally unexpected by Soviet ideologists, the Cuban revolution permitted an encircled, economically backward colossus to feel that it could project its power to the very doorstep of the imperialist enemy. In 1960, the KGB began referring to Cuba by the code name AVANPOST, or 'bridgehead' into the western hemisphere. From the Soviet point of view, the Cuban revolution was not merely an opportunity to annoy Uncle Sam but proof that the worldwide 'correlation of forces' was moving in Moscow's direction.

The Cubans were well aware of the effect they were having on the Soviets, and used it to their advantage. 'Nikita loved Cuba very much,' Castro would recall forty years later. 'He had a weakness for Cuba, you might say.' When Castro wanted to get something out of his Russian patrons, he posed a very simple question: 'Are you or are you not revolutionaries?' Put like that, it was hard for Khrushchev to say no.

Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev saw no limits to the extension of Soviet power and influence. Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had once said that big powers had to 'understand that there are limits to everything, otherwise you can choke.' But Khrushchev was more of a dreamer than his predecessor. In some ways, his idealism was the mirror image of Kennedy's: the Soviet Union would 'pay any price, bear any burden' to defend the gains of socialism around the world. For Khrushchev, Cuba and Castro were as much a symbol of Soviet success as Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin.

After the failure of the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev was convinced it was simply a matter of time before the United States again attempted to overthrow Castro. He reasoned that 'it would be foolish to expect the inevitable second invasion to be as badly planned and as badly executed as the first.' Information was reaching Moscow all the time about American plots against Cuba, both real and imagined. Some of the alarming signals arrived directly