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The Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, marked the height of the Cold War.
By all accounts, it is the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.
This was a showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union,
over new missile installations in Cuba.
And, people have used it to better understand how and
why countries act the way they do.
And we can borrow the frameworks used there to understand why organizations more
generally do what they do.
So, let's first run through at a very high level what happened
in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So this was the Kennedy administration, he had come into office in 1960,
the Bay of Pigs fiasco, you almost never day Bay of Pigs
without adding fiasco, was the year before in one of his first years in office.
And so Cuba had been an issue for the Kennedy administration from the beginning.
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And in the fall of 1962 in the routine spy plane flight over Cuba,
they discover, the U.S. discovered missile sites there.
And this was a great concern because of how close Cuba is to the U.S., and
so immediately the Administration starts gathering and
figuring out what they should do.
So, over the next 13 days, this crisis unfolded and
we're just going to quickly summarize what happened.
And then in the next session we'll drop more deeply into the details underneath
that and why we think it happened the way it did.
So Kennedy gathers his administration and
on the 16th of October to consider a response.
The debate in the administration was between the Doves and the Hawks.
This was the beginning of the term Dove versus Hawk, actually.
There were those who wanted to use diplomacy and there were those who
wanted to use military options including possibly a ground invasion in Cuba.
But at the very least, a surgical air strike.
So this was the big debate in the administration.
And of course, it all linked heavily on what they believed the Soviets would do in
response to however the U.S. responded.
So one of the critical moments was on the 17th that our intelligence services,
the US intelligence services.
Determined that these were intermediate-range nuclear missiles,
meaning they could reach all the way to the Pacific Northwest,
all the way up to Washington state.
So, essentially the entire lower 48 of the U.S.
were within range of the missiles that were being installed in Cuba.
So, obviously a critical moment for security.
Kennedy had put together what became known as Ex-Com,
Executive Committee of advisors, it was run, more or less, by his brother,
Robert Kennedy, who was Attorney General.
And interestingly, in the early meetings,
the feeling was that the group wasn't speaking as freely with Kennedy there, so
Kennedy excused himself from the rest of them, so they could debate more freely.
But over the next few days, Ex-Com was where the real decisions got hash through,
or not the decisions but at least keying up the decisions for Kennedy.
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Eventually, they decided on a blockade.
The blockade was a middle route, a blockade was setting up the Navy
some miles off of Cuba to prevent additional materials to come into Cuba.
It wasn't clear yet that they had everything they needed, and so
they didn't want anymore Soviet ships reaching Cuba and
they were going to do that with a naval blockade.
This was considered a middle option between mear diplomacy and
something more aggressive like surgical strikes.
So Kennedy makes a televised speech.
It was one of the bigger moments in Kennedy's administration to announce that
these missiles existed and that the U.S. was going to take action.
They sent the ambassador to the UN to challenge the Soviet Union over this, and
Kennedy also ordered low-level flights, instead of the high-level U-2 flights,
low-level flights to get closer pictures so
they could better understand what was going on there.
On October 24th the real height to this crisis was reached when
the Soviet ships got to the quarantine line, the blockade line.
No one knew what they would do, no one knew if they were going to run
the blockade or if they would stop and honor the blockade.
So this was when the, on the next day the U.S.
reached DEFCON 2 which is the military preparedness and awareness.
It's the highest it's ever been.
It's the closest we've ever been to actually being in nuclear war.
This was also When we got back, the US military got back,
the low level reconnaissance pictures and figured out for
sure that there were missiles already there.
They didn't have to wait to come in on the ships, they're already there an they were
very close to being prepared for use if they wanted to use them.
On the 26th, Kruschev, who was the premier of the Soviet Union,
sent a letter proposing an exchange.
That if the U.S. would promise not to invade Cuba,
that the Soviet Union would pull out the missiles.
This was preserving a victory of sorts for Chris Jeff and
it was a bit of an opening for the US Administration.
About this time some other things go a little bit wrong so for
example completely unrelated to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
A U-2 plane, spy plane flew over Russia was shot down over Russia because it flew
off course which was, to say the least, a horrible timing for US-Soviet relations.
And about this time, a second letter came across,
supposedly from Khrushchev that was much more bellicose.
Did not provide an opening for an exchange and those on the U.S.
side were left wondering what's the difference?
Why the friendly exchange the first time and
the more bellicose exchange the second time?
There clearly was discord among the Soviets on what was going on,
what how should they respond.
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Kennedy's way of dealing with this and the administration's way of dealing with this,
was to respond to the first letter, to basically ignore the second letter.
And to take Kruschev up on his exchange on his offer for an exchange.
And the fact that there's wrinkle in there.
Where the U.S. had military installations in Hungary,
missiles in Hungary that were obsolete.
And they were about ready to pull them out anyway, and they offered to,
as a part of this exchange, remove those missiles from Hungary.
But they also said that they wouldn't say that publicly.
They couldn't be seen doing that publicly, they promised they would get it done.
And so essentially Kennedy and Khrushchev reached this exchange.
And on the 28th of October, Khrushchev announced the removal of all missiles from
Cuba and the crisis was averted.
Incredibly tense time.
People have used it from all disciplines, people have used this moment,
these 13 days to understand politics and organizations.
And we think we can learn a lot about understanding politics and power and
influence, from studying it.
So in the next section, we'll drop a little more deeply into the details.
Cade MasseyPractice Professor
