Hi, welcome back. Make yourself comfortable. In this presentation, we're going to to see how the world came to the edge of global nuclear war. The context is a period of time between about 1958 and 1962 that historians think of as the years of maximum crisis during the Cold War. A curtain raiser for that is in 1957, when the Soviets begin demonstrating their capability to launch heavy missiles and put things into space. The first thing they put into space in 1957 is an earth orbiting satellite called Sputnik. That the Soviets could do this, was of course, the cause of great excitement in the United States, as you can see from this banner headline. Or you can see in this cartoon by Edwin Marcus, the beep beep from the Russian satellite is definitely shaking Uncle Sam out of his complacency. In 1958, there are a series of crises. In Iraq, for example, the monarchy that had long been supported by the British and by the Americans was violently overthrown, the ruler murdered. What takes its place is a nationalist dictatorship. The Americans are worried that this will create an opportunity for Soviet meddling in the Middle East. They even land troops in Lebanon in 1958. No opposition there, but just to kind of show American support for some of the existing governments, as America is trying to balance how to stay on the right side of Arab nationalism while also supporting its other friends and building up a new anti-communist bulwark against Soviet penetration there. And then there's a new crisis as communist China and the exiled government of the Republic of China are in a military stand-off over some islands in the Taiwan Straits. The United States, defending the Republic of China with its treaty of alliance and its warships, finds itself in a low-grade military confrontation to deter a communist Chinese attack. The communist Chinese, meanwhile, are secretly pleading for the Soviet Union to give them nuclear weapons so they'll be in a better position in this confrontation. The Soviet refusal to give them those nuclear weapons intensifies the split between Mao and Khrushchev. And then there's a crisis over Berlin. Berlin, remember, is that great city of Germany, sitting divided in the middle of a new communist East German state. Here's an image of divided Berlin. Remember, surrounding Berlin is a Communist state, East Germany, supported by the Soviet Union, ringed by Soviet and East German forces. These Western military zones of occupation are again feeling beleaguered, as Khrushchev and the East Germans say we're going to liquidate the postwar status of West Berlin and make all of Berlin part of East Germany. Because right now, West Berlin is a kind of hole in the East German state through which more and more Germans are leaking away, fleeing to the West. Khrushchev wants to convert this embarrassment to East Germany into a triumph for Soviet power. By forcing the West out of Berlin, he'll have forced the West to symbolically climb down from this exposed position, showing his power and influence. In effect, the new Communist leaders of the late 1950s have come out of their crisis period in the mid 1950s, after Stalin's Death, with some grand designs. In Mao's China, he's has a new revolutionary goal of a Great Leap Forward, I talked about that in the last video Presentation, convulsing his country in an effort to rapidly industrialize it, with more tense relations with all of his neighbors, including India. Meanwhile, Mao's revolutionary ambitions are colliding with Khrushchev's goals. Khrushchev doesn't want Mao to get in a war with the United States. He doesn't trust Mao enough to give them Soviet nuclear weapons that would just be turned over to the Chinese, giving the Chinese the technology. And Khrushchev wants himself and the Soviet Union to remain the leader of the international communist movement. The result of these tensions is a Sino-Soviet split, largely in secret, but which breaks open by 1960. That creates a kind of dangerous triangle, United States and its allies, Soviet Union, China, because the Soviets and the Chinese are now competing with each other to show who is the true inheritor of the great Communist legacy. Who should lead the communist movement? And as Khrushchev travels around the communist world, visits the United States, he's increasingly developing his own grand design. If you want to understand Khrushchev's grand strategy in these crisis years, his grand design, let's break it down into four pieces. In other words, this is the solution to his problem. His problem: How do I demonstrate leadership with the communist world? How do I reinvigorate my country? How does he solve these problems? One, increase his nuclear missile power, or at least the appearance of his nuclear missile power, to make the Soviet Union look strong. Use this to win a huge symbolic victory over the exposed Western position in Berlin. Meanwhile, cut spending on the huge Soviet military, the conventional Forces, which make up make up most of the spending in his military budget. And, with that money released, devote more attention to developing the Soviet economy, providing more consumer goods, and actually maybe even allowing a bit of a thaw in Soviet domestic and literary life. So, it kind of creates a bit of a paradoxical image. Here's Khrushchev brandishing his missiles, trying to have a showdown over Berlin. But partly, so that he can release funds in other parts of his military establishment and actually reinvigorate and renew the Soviet experiment. Khrushchev and Eisenhower are headed toward a summit in Paris in the spring of 1960, where they're going to have it out over a number of issues, principally Berlin, when the Soviets shoot down an American reconnaissance flight, secretly taking photographs to try to understand just how many missiles the Soviets do have. The Soviets keep the shoot down a secret. The Americans don't acknowledge that it's happened. Then Khrushchev triumphantly unveils that he actually has captured alive the CIA contract pilot who'd been flying the aircraft, now a Soviet prisoner, Francis Gary Powers, later returned in a spy exchange. And here you see him inspecting the wreckage of the downed American aircraft. The summit with Eisenhower is canceled, Khrushchev waits for the next American president to bring his plans to fruition. Meanwhile, one of the background factors in 1961 is yet another crisis over the new revolutionary regime in Cuba. Fidel Castro's Cuba more and more tightly aligned with the Soviet Union. The Americans, hostile now to this new Communist bastion right off their shores, sponsor, secretly, an attempted invasion of Cuba by a group of Cuban exiles, because, of course, a lot of Cubans were deeply disillusioned by the way Castro, they thought, had hijacked their revolution. The Cuban exiles invade Cuba. They're defeated by Cuban forces. The Americans who had been backing them do not come to their aid. They allow the exiles to be rounded up, slaughtered, and captured. But it's a huge embarrassment to the Kennedy Administration which has to acknowledge its sponsorship of this misbegotten venture in April of 1961. Castro comes out of this believing that the Americans are going to be after him somehow. And Khrushchev comes out of it thinking that his alliance with Cubans helped deter the Americans from doing anything to invade Cuba with their forces. Kennedy, for his part, wants little to do with Cuba as possible. He thinks Cuba as an annoyance, a distraction from the great superpower issues. But members of his administration continued to be obsessed with it, coming up with scheme after scheme to try to use the intelligence services to get rid of Castro in some way. Khrushchev and Kennedy then have their summit meeting. It takes place in Vienna, June 1961. The summit meeting is a complete failure. Khrushchev browbeats Kennedy, Kennedy comes away convinced that the superpowers are heading toward an even greater confrontation centered on Berlin. In the fall of 1961, Khrushchev and the East Germans actually build a physical wall cutting off West Berlin from East Berlin, shooting down anyone who attempts to climb over the wall to escape to freedom in West Berlin. A grim symbol of the Cold War, that Berlin Wall, but that doesn't end the Berlin Crisis. It's cauterized the communistic wound, but it hasn't eliminated it. And indeed Khrushchev is going forward in 1962 determined to get his triumph on Berlin. Alright as if this were not enough, here's one more compelling factor. The American's are realizing that the Soviet brandishing of their missile power is kind of a bluff. The Soviets don't have as many long range missiles as the Americans feared they might. Khrushchev, trying to show off his power in other ways, ends a moratorium on open air nuclear testing with an astonishing series of test nuclear explosions in the fall of 1961, which the Americans follow in turn. Indeed, the largest nuclear weapons ever detonated in human history were detonated by the Soviet Union in the fall of 1961. You remember in an earlier presentation, I showed you the effects of a one megaton Soviet nuclear blast. The Soviets are testing devices with 50 megatons of explosive power and beyond. So all of these interlocking issues, Cuba, Berlin, whether or not the Soviet missile power can be believed, all converge in a set of decisions that Khrushchev makes in May 1962 to try to reverse the course of the Cold War. Khrushchev's master plan is this: He's going to secretly deploy scores of nuclear ballistic missiles, intermediate range ones called IRBMs and medium range ones called MRBMs, and actually tens of thousands of Soviet troops to defend the bases and defend Cuba. He's going to deploy them to Cuba, making that a missile base right off shore with credible striking power in the United States. Why? What good would that do? It would mean the United States could no longer effectively defend Berlin. Wait, stop, what do you mean by that? The United States could not defend Berlin with conventional forces. Everybody knew that. Berlin's right in the middle of East Germany. The only way the United States defends Berlin is with this threat: If you attack Berlin, that will be general war. If you attack Berlin, we, the United States, will escalate to using nuclear weapons. We, the Americans, will use nuclear weapons first. That's the bluff that defends Berlin. So, how do you checkmate the American bluff to start a nuclear war in defense of Berlin? The way you checkmate that is saying, if you threaten to start a nuclear war, I've got these dozens of missiles in Cuba right off your shores that can devastate your country. That cancels out the American ability to start that because the Soviet retaliatory capability is just minutes away. At that point, the United States bluff that defends Berlin, the bluff everyone was debating about, becomes manifestly incredible. The western position in Berlin, therefore, diminishes and Khrushchev works out a plan in which, after the missiles are deployed, in November 1962, he's going to whip the covers off, show the missiles, bring the Berlin issue to a triumphant conclusion. He actually explains to the Americans, later in 1962, that he is going to bring the Berlin issue to a head in November. He just doesn't tell the Americans that when he brings the issue to a head in November, he plans to have these missiles unveiled in Cuba as part of that move. That's Khrushchev�s extraordinarily ambitious plan, but you might then think, why would the Cubans go along with this plan? The Cubans, after all, aren't asking for nuclear missiles. Their worry is that that will make them a target, it won't help defend them. But Khrushchev is convinced that because he's giving so much other help to the Cubans to defend their country, in return the Cubans will do this for the Soviets. And besides, Khrushchev will justify the deployment as something that's just being done to defend beleaguered Cuba. He's right about that. The Cubans do go along with the Soviet proposal, though they are confused about why the Soviets were asking them to do this. They do go along, they accept the risk, along with the Soviets. The plan goes ahead. As the Soviets begin moving these huge amounts of military equipment into Cuba, the Americans, of course not really believing that the Soviets would put nuclear missiles in Cuba, because that would seem so rash, do notice that a lot of stuff is going in. They have to decide how they're going to react publicly to that. In September of 1962, Kennedy gives a press conference where he says, in effect: I'm going to tolerate it if you're just giving the Cubans conventional military supplies. Where I draw the line is, don't put in any offensive systems there, by which he means missiles that can strike the United States. He draws that line precisely because he's been told by his intelligence officials that the Soviets don't plan to do that. But at the very time he's drawing that line, it's exactly what the Soviets are intending to do. The ships are already on the way to do it. But then what happens? The Soviet plan is discovered before Khrushchev was ready to unveil it. He was going to unveil the deployment when it was all ready in November. But after a prolonged argument about whether to fly more of these risky reconnaissance flights, like the one that had been shot down over the Soviet Union, advocates for those flights win the argument. One flight goes over Cuba in the middle of October. It spots the missiles being prepared for deployment. The Soviets don't know their plan has been discovered. The Americans know it. Now they have a chance to prepare their own countermove, in secret, to try to regain the strategic initiative. And that brings us to Act Two of this crisis. Kennedy is debating: Do I just invade Cuba? Or do I throw some sort of blockade around it and negotiate some deal with the Soviets to get the missiles out in exchange for something else I'll give them in return? As Kennedy is hosting this secret debate among his advisers, he has an extraordinary meeting on Friday morning, October 19, 1962. And because he was running a taping system in the White House, and I was actually one of the people who edited the transcripts that published this material, I can take you in this time machine inside the White House on that morning. Now here are the people in the room. Only five people in the room, President Kennedy and his four military leaders, the chairman and other members of the joint chiefs of staff. In that small group, Kennedy explains just how he sees this problem. His explanation, the way he appreciates this situation is complex, but rarely do you get such a deep glimpse into the way the leader of a superpower is appreciating a moment in world history. So, let's go into this time machine and listen to the way President Kennedy outlines the way he's viewing the world at this moment when he's deciding between war and peace on the morning of October 19th. I'm going to take you slowly through this, because I want to take the time for you to understand Kennedy's reasoning. Now first he'll start out by explaining why he thinks the Russians did this. This is a very interesting habit of Kennedy. He clinically, coldly empathizes with the other guy, tries to work through their calculations. He sees three reasons that they did this. Let's listen to him explain the first one. >> Firstly, I think we ought to think of why the Russians did this. Well, actually, it was a rather dangerous but rather useful play of theirs. If we do nothing, they have a missile base there with all the pressure that brings to bear on the United States and damage to our prestige. >> Got that? Now, he's about to explain a second point, which is if he does anything about the missiles, it gives the Soviets an opening to do it back to him, except he'll do something about Cuba. They will retaliate on Berlin. And Berlin is really important to the whole American position in Europe. And the Europeans regard Cuba as trivial. Let's listen. >> If we attack, Cuba, the missiles, or Cuba, in any way, then it gives them a clear, line to take Berlin, as they were able to do in Hungary under the Anglo war in Egypt. We will have been regarded as--they think we've got this fixation about Cuba anyway--we would be regarded as the trigger-happy Americans who lost Berlin. We would have no support among our allies. We would affect the West Germans� attitude towards us. And that we let Berlin go because we didn't have the guts to endure a situation in Cuba. After all, Cuba is 5, 6,000 miles from them. They don't give a damn about Cuba. And they do care about Berlin and about their own security. So they would say that we endangered their interests and security and reunification and all the rest, because of the preemptive action that we took in Cuba. So I think they've got...I must say I think it's a very satisfactory position from their point of view. If you take the view that what really. And thirdly, If we do nothing then they'll they'll have these missiles and they'll be able to say that any time we ever try to do anything about Cuba, that they'll fire these missiles. So that I think it's dangerous, but rather satisfactory, from their point of view. >> Now, Kennedy reveals to you the basic premise behind this analysis. >> If you take the view, really, that's what's basic to them is Berlin and there isn't any doubt. In every conversation we've had with the Russians, that's what...Even last night we talked about Cuba for a while, but Berlin--that's what Khrushchev's committed himself to personally. So, actually it's a quite desirable situation from their point of view. >> Now let�s listen to Kennedy explain to the Joint Chiefs how he's worked through the policy options. The advantage of acting, but also the danger of acting. Because if he acts, whatever he does, whether it's a strike or a blockade, he fears the Soviets will do exactly the same thing back at Berlin. Let's listen. >> That's what makes our problem so difficult. If we go in and take them out on a quick air strike, we neutralize the chance of danger to the United States of these missiles being used, and we prevent a situation from arising, at least within Cuba, where the Cubans themselves have the means of exercising some degree of authority in this hemisphere. On the other hand, we increase the chance greatly, as I think they-- there's bound to be a reprisal from the Soviet Union, there always is-- of their just going in and taking Berlin by force at some point. Which leaves me only one alternative, which is to fire nuclear weapons--which is a hell of an alternative--and begin a nuclear exchange, with all this happening. On the other hand, if we begin the blockage that we're talking about, the chances are they will begin a blockade and say that we started it. And there'll be some question about the attitude of the Europeans. So that, once again, they will say that there will be this feeling in Europe that the Berlin blockade has been commenced by our blockade. So I don't think we've got any satisfactory alternatives. When we balance off that our problem is not merely Cuba but it is also Berlin and when we recognize the importance of Berlin to Europe, and recognize the importance of our allies to us, that's the what has made this thing be a dilemma for three days. Otherwise, our answer would be quite easy. >> So it looks like Kennedy's stuck, there's nothing he can do. Except Kennedy also recognizes that he has to do something or else Khrushchev's plan to spring this is November and win the Berlin Crisis will succeed. Let's listen. >> On the other hand, we've got to do something, because if we do nothing, we're going to have the problem of Berlin anyway. That was very clear last night. We're going to have this thing stuck right in our guts in about two months. And so we've got do something. >> So what is Kennedy going to do? Does he attack, or does he negotiate? The answer actually is he develops a third, middle option, a fusion that's developed by a few of his advisors between just blockade and negotiate and a strike and an invasion. Instead, it's a blockade, but the blockade is a first step that might lead to an invasion. It's a blockade and an ultimatum. I'm stopping this thing with a blockade. You get those missiles out or else. Clearly implied is a readiness to attack Cuba and start a war if the Soviets do not withdraw their missiles. The world understands that it's just been taken to the brink of the nuclear war it's been dreading for more than ten years. Then the next stage of the crisis becomes the spring of the American move. The Americans launch a diplomatic offensive. The Soviets don't know that their plan has been unmasked by the Americans, so it's their turn to be caught off-guard when the Americans hit them with a diplomatic offensive with all the Latin American countries inside the United Nations. Envoys sent to the nations of Western Europe, all explaining the American move, rallying international support. At the same time they're orchestrating an extraordinarily difficult naval blockade of Cuba to freeze the situation and keep more missiles from coming in. That itself puts in motion an enormous movement of military forces, heightened states of alert as the military machines move closer to war and it becomes harder and harder to control them, raising the risk that war might break out through inadvertent actions or accident. That brings us then to act three of the crisis. In Act Three, Moscow, first of all reacts. Caught off guard, their first inclination is: We're going to have to step down somehow, but how do we salvage some measure of our prestige? The Americans, meanwhile, are worried about not letting the situation freeze so that the missiles already in Cuba become a kind of fait accompli. How do they keep edging this along so this situation doesn't harden into one where they've got this standoff. Then comes Saturday, October 27th, the most dangerous day of the crisis. Castro expects an invasion, he's already ready for war. The Soviet military commanders on the scene sympathize with this, and as American surveillance aircraft continue to fly over Cuba, the Soviets, as well as the Cubans, start shooting at them. One of the American aircraft, another U2, is shot down. Its pilot is killed. Meanwhile, another American surveillance aircraft on a totally unrelated matter blunders into Soviet airspace, is chased by Soviet aircraft and is able to escape. Meanwhile, the forces of the two sides are coming closer to confrontation. Castro's writing a letter to Khrushchev, which some historians call the Armageddon letter, essentially saying the invasion is coming, you might as well get ready for a nuclear war with the Americans. As Khrushchev�s absorbing all of this, the Americas are saying, gee we were prepared to end this crisis on terms in which we agree not to invade Cuba, which is what you said you're interested in doing. On October 28th, alarmed that the situation is getting out of hand, Khrushchev capitulates and says he's going to withdraw the missiles. The Americans had quietly said, by the way you've raised an issue having to do with some of our missiles in Turkey. We're not going to do some negotiated deal about that in which we have quid pro quo. But we're going to get those missiles out of Turkey eventually. Let's just get that off the table. All that, too, is part of the settlement. What happens, then, is the world sighs with relief. Castro is fuming with rage. The deal that would have gotten the missiles out of Cuba with United Nation's verification immediately falls apart. And then that brings us to some of the aftermath. In the aftermath, there's actually a quiet crisis for nearly a month. Since Castro has blown up the original deal, the Americans and the Soviets quietly negotiate a way for the Soviet missiles to leave, for the Americans to monitor that without Cuban cooperation and an understanding of what stuff has to go. The Soviets, meanwhile, are also deciding that they're not going to publicize the business about American missiles in Turkey. They're not going to do things to embarrass the American government. They really are going to climb down. The crisis becomes an enormous turning point. Well for one thing, the world is saved from global war, from World War III. But for another, with both superpowers having stepped up to the brink, there's clearly some sense that we need to keep this from happening. We need to do more to try to start managing the arms race. Those kinds of tensions slowly, slowly begin to diminish. In Europe, the Berlin Crisis simply comes to an end. It comes to an end with no grand flourish, and no noise. The Soviets simply don't make that move in November '62 that they've been planning to make. They simply say by 1963, well, we built the Berlin Wall. That's enough. There is no more Berlin Crisis. In effect the Soviets quit trying to do anything to change the status quo in Europe. In Europe, the Cold War settles down into grim routine. That means that the basic emphasis of superpower confrontation goes back to proxy battles in the Third World. So, with a little bit of sigh of relief of our own, that's the subject we'll be talking again about next time. See you then.
