A definitive account of the Cuban missile crisis

Nuclear Folly. By Serhii Plokhy. W.W. Norton; 464 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £25

On october 27th 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, it was only the purest luck that saved the world from nuclear catastrophe. Five days earlier President John Kennedy had announced a naval blockade of the island to force his opposite number in the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev, to withdraw the medium-range nuclear missiles he had sent to Cuba in the summer of that year. us Navy anti-submarine warfare patrols were hunting down Soviet nuclear-armed subs that posed a threat to the blockade.

The plan was to “pressure” the submarines into leaving the area of operation by dropping practice depth charges and grenades, but not to destroy them unless absolutely necessary. Submarine b-59 had experienced the effects of that pressure for two days and its crew were growing desperate from intense heat and toxic levels of carbon dioxide. When it surfaced for air, b-59 found itself harassed by American planes firing tracer bullets and flares.

Convinced that his ship was under attack and that war had broken out, the sub’s captain, Valentin Savitsky, gave the order to dive and prepare to launch a nuclear-armed torpedo. With ten kilotonnes of explosive power, it would produce massive waves and sink or incapacitate any nearby American warships. Two things stopped the order from being carried out.

The commander of one of the American destroyers, the Cony, realised what was about to happen and flashed an apology for the aggressive behaviour of the planes. The apology would never have been seen had the sub’s signals officer not got stuck with his searchlight in the shaft of the conning tower. That gave the commander of the submarine task force, Vasili Arkhipov, who was behind him, the chance to countermand the order. If the nuclear torpedo had been fired, Kennedy would have had little choice other than to order a strike against Soviet targets with the inevitable consequence of escalatory retaliation.

A few hours earlier, ignoring orders from Moscow, a Soviet surface-to-air missile battery had shot down an American u2 spy plane over Cuba. Soviet forces on the island were jumpy, fearing that an invasion was imminent. The leaders on both sides were fast losing their grip on what was happening on the ground.

The next day, an increasingly alarmed Khrushchev announced that he was taking his missiles out of Cuba. In return he had received the commitment from Kennedy that America would abandon any idea of invading and deposing the country’s revolutionary Marxist leader, Fidel Castro. There were some tricky moments still to come, but the world breathed a collective sigh of relief.

It has become conventional wisdom that disaster was never all that close because both Kennedy and Khrushchev were equally fearful of the nuclear Armageddon their actions could trigger. “Nuclear Folly”, Serhii Plokhy’s new history of the Cuban missile crisis, not only casts fresh light on what happened that autumn but strips away any such comfort.

It is a story of intelligence failures, misperceptions and miscalculations on both sides that had the potential at almost every step to lead to disaster. The American side of that story is relatively familiar from previous accounts of the crisis. What makes this the definitive history is Mr Plokhy’s telling of the tale in gripping detail from the Soviet perspective. A professor of history at Harvard who made his name with a prizewinning book about the Chernobyl disaster, Mr Plokhy realised that the Ukrainian revolution of 2014 could lead to an opening up of former kgb archives. Nearly all the missiles dispatched to Cuba came from Ukraine, while every ship transporting them and the 40,000 Russian military personnel needed to build, man and defend the launch sites carried a kgb officer who filed meticulous reports.

Mr Plokhy vividly describes the lengths the Soviets went to in their effort to keep the mission secret: men (and missiles) were kept between decks away from prying American eyes for the duration of the voyage. The crews encountered difficulties working in unfamiliar tropical waters. Commanders on the ground were convinced they would have to repel an American invasion at any moment. Prepared for combat, they felt deep humiliation when ordered to pack up and go home.

The fog of war

But it is the picture Mr Plokhy paints of the complete failure of the key decision-makers to get inside the minds of their counterparts that is most telling. Khrushchev had convinced himself that Kennedy was a callow patsy who would back down when push came to shove. He reckoned that Kennedy would see there was an equivalence between the Jupiter nuclear missiles America had based in Italy and Turkey a few years before and the missiles the Soviets were sending to Cuba. Khrushchev failed to understand that, facing congressional elections in November, Kennedy would have been indulging in political suicide to have shown such weakness.

For his part, Kennedy was bamboozled by Khrushchev into thinking that a confrontation over Berlin was much more likely than over Cuba, which he believed the Kremlin understood to be in America’s backyard and thus off-limits. Even when Khrushchev’s reckless gambit was belatedly revealed to Kennedy, faulty intelligence suggested that the Soviet force on the island was a quarter of its actual size. It was not until very late in the day—October 20th—that the president learned some of the missiles were operational.

Until then, Kennedy had kept open the option of a full-scale invasion of the island, a course of action his military chiefs strongly favoured. One of Mr Plokhy’s most unsettling revelations is the extent to which Soviet commanders on the ground had delegated authority, if attacked, to use tactical nukes that Washington knew nothing about until 30 years later. If Kennedy had listened to his generals, they would have been used. Even if Kennedy and Khrushchev were both determined to avoid nuclear war, they were not in control of the events that could easily lead to it.

That realisation was the wake-up call that the two superpowers needed to create the protocols and communication channels required to avoid annihilation by misunderstanding in the future. Khrushchev was ousted two years later and in 1972 the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement was signed, paving the way for subsequent arms-control agreements, all of which have been aimed at enhancing strategic stability. Those arrangements have still left huge nuclear stockpiles on both sides, but the verification procedures they established helped build a degree of mutual trust that was a factor in ending the cold war. So much so that today existential dread about nuclear war has been largely replaced by anxiety about climate change and, more recently, pandemics.

Such complacency is ill-founded. The era of arms control is unravelling. In 2019 the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty of 1987 collapsed after well-grounded American accusations of Russian cheating. This was a harbinger of worse to come. The New start (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreement has been extended until 2026, but it will be difficult to replace it.

Meanwhile, both Russia and America are renewing their nuclear arsenals at vast expense, while the deployment of new technologies (such as cyber-attacks on nuclear early-warning satellites, or a new breed of fast and accurate conventional missiles) threaten both side’s retaliatory capabilities as well as their command-and-control apparatus.

With relations between the major nuclear powers more fraught than they have been for decades, there is growing potential for a dispute leading to a crisis, and a crisis leading to a war. Meanwhile, other nuclear weapons states—China, Pakistan, India and, particularly, North Korea—are expanding their nuclear forces. Iran’s intentions remain a cause for concern.

In 1962 the world got lucky. But the lessons learned from that narrow escape nearly 60 years ago are in danger of being forgotten. With his masterly book, Mr Plokhy has sounded a warning bell.