Was the Cuban Missile Crisis resolved by judgment or luck?

The short answer

• Why Khrushchev sent the missiles. Moscow faced a strategic imbalance: it had 26 reliable ICBMs against hundreds of American bombers and missiles, including weapons stationed from Turkey to Britain. The Soviet Union possessed many medium-range missiles, but they could not reach the United States from Soviet territory. Cuba changed their reach. Khrushchev also feared a second, more serious invasion of the island and saw the deployment as protection for Castro. Both purposes depended on keeping the operation secret long enough for the missiles to become effective. With some 40,000 troops and 100-foot missile trailers exposed to aerial surveillance, that was a fragile plan.
• What the Bay of Pigs taught the leaders. The failed April 1961 invasion left Castro expecting another attack and looking for protection. Khrushchev drew a different lesson: Kennedy could be pressured. Their Vienna summit reinforced that impression; Kennedy later said, “he savaged me,”. Kennedy had his own reason to reconsider confident advice after the Bay of Pigs. In October 1962 his advisers did not know that Soviet tactical nuclear weapons were already on Cuba, where an invasion urged by the chiefs could have encountered them.
• Pressure with time to decide. An airstrike would probably kill Soviet soldiers immediately, putting Moscow under pressure to respond. The blockade worked at a different pace. Soviet ships could approach, and Khrushchev would have to choose whether to challenge the line; meanwhile both sides could consider alternatives. Washington called it a “quarantine,” since a formal blockade raised the legal problem of an act of war. ExComm could adjust pressure while leaving an exit open. Compare the Yalu in Chapter 4, where the momentum of military success helped shape policy. Here the speed of events was itself a choice.

What it changed

A link and a limit on tests. After the crisis, both governments sought ways to handle future confrontations. The direct teletype link agreed in June 1963 made faster communication possible. In August the Limited Test Ban Treaty ended atmospheric nuclear testing among its parties. These measures helped establish an arms-control practice that later included SALT, the ABM Treaty, and INF. The arms race went on, but its participants had begun to agree on limits to particular dangers.

The rivals draw different lessons. Washington saw grounds for confidence in resolve backed by flexible options. Moscow saw the disadvantage of negotiating from weakness. A Soviet diplomat told an American counterpart, “you Americans will never be able to do this to us again,”. The USSR expanded its naval and missile forces and reached approximate strategic parity by 1970. That buildup contributed both to stability in the 1970s and to the cost of the arms race in the 1980s.

Castro’s course after the settlement. The settlement protected Cuba from invasion, but Castro learned of the missile withdrawal from the radio. He had urged Khrushchev to accept nuclear war rather than retreat, and he resented being left out of a decision affecting his country. In the decades that followed he supported revolution abroad, from Bolivia to Angola, sometimes moving ahead of Moscow’s wishes. Soviet assistance did not make Cuba’s aims identical to those of its patron.