A nuclear threat on par with Cuban missile crisis

WASHINGTON >> On Oct. 14, 1962, a Korean War veteran, breathing 100 percent oxygen at 72,500 feet, flew a U-2 spy plane from California across Cuba, his camera snapping 928 photos. On Oct. 15, the photos had been analyzed and the Cuban missile crisis had arrived. The fuse that led to this was lit in April 1961, when John F. Kennedy earned Nikita Khrushchev’s contempt with the Bay of Pigs debacle. Emboldened, the Soviet leader made a stupefying wager: He could sneak into Cuba dozens of 86-ton missiles (some dwellings on the island had to be demolished to truck the 80-foot-long cylinders to launch sites) and more than 40,000 Soviet military personnel, erect the missiles undetected, and reveal this geostrategic coup de main in a dramatic November United Nations speech.

This would present the Soviet Union to the world as something Khrushchev knew it was not — a peer of the United States. As Max Hastings, a British historian, reports in his upcoming “The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962,” in 1959, Khrushchev flew to the United States, at President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s invitation, in a new-model Soviet airliner. “So fearful were Soviet aviation chiefs of the risks of the trip by the unproven new aircraft that they stationed ships in a picket line along its entire ocean flightline to the U.S., a pitiful precaution against disaster.”

In the decade after Joseph Stalin’s 1953 death, the Soviet industry barely produced as many automobiles as Detroit produced in a week. Soviet families spent an average of at least 40 percent of their income on food. A ramshackle nation can, however, be dangerous.

Vladimir Putin’s nuclear arsenal is immensely more varied and formidable than Khrushchev’s. And Putin’s frenzy intensifies as his Ukraine blunder reveals the hollowness of the great-power strutting it was intended to validate. In contrast, Khrushchev quickly recognized that he needed what Kennedy ultimately provided — an escape from the strategic cul-desac into which his impulsiveness had driven him. Putin validates nostalgia for Khrushchev: The world today might be closer to a use of a nuclear weapon than it was then.

So, Hastings’s riveting chronicle of a calamity skillfully averted (Kennedy behaving deftly, his military leaders dreadfully) is mandatory reading. The president had what Hastings calls a “murderous grudge” against Fidel Castro, and both Kennedy and his brother Robert were obsessed with regime change in Cuba. (Robert conducted a meeting on the lunatic Operation Mongoose, which planned the harassment or murder of Castro, before the missile crisis.) Khrushchev’s mistake was stealth: If he had proclaimed a defense treaty with Cuba, which obviously was threatened by the United States, Americans would have had to live as Europeans did, within range of Soviet missiles, justified as defending an ally.

Combining perishable secrecy with detectable mendacity, Khrushchev instructed an intermediary to assure Robert Kennedy, and hence his brother, that “no missile capable of reaching the United States will be placed in Cuba.” This provocative lie — the intermediate-range missiles could have reached Washington — guaranteed that the president could not settle for less than complete removal of the missiles. The later withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey mildly assuaged Soviet humiliation, although in August, Kennedy had contemplated removing them because they were obsolescent.

In late-summer 1962, when surface-to-air defense missiles were spotted in Cuba, U.S. intelligence agencies were slow to answer this question: The SAMs were to prevent U.S. overflights from seeing what? Hastings says there were no technological safeguards to prevent Soviet commanders in Cuba from firing tactical nuclear weapons, or a Soviet submarine captain 600 miles at sea from firing, as some say he nearly did, a nuclear torpedo almost as destructive as the Hiroshima

bomb. Recklessness or an accident could have triggered a cascade of events impervious to diplomacy.

Today, Hastings writes, the delicate military and diplomatic task is to counter “Putin’s obsessive resentment, his craving for respect and willingness to take huge risks and to initiate hideous atrocities around Russia’s borders in pursuit of a pan-Slav fantasy.” So, “the scope for a catastrophic miscalculation is as great now as it was in 1914 Europe or in the 1962 Caribbean.”

Khrushchev was fond of a quote that Vladimir Lenin attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “On s’engage et puis on voit” — more or less, “Start something, then see what happens.” Putin has seen what happened after he started something in Ukraine — NATO energized, Russian power revealed as suited only for war crimes. What happens next, or doesn’t, will depend on the sort of skill and luck seen 60 Octobers ago.