Nonproliferation, Arms Control, and Disarmament

Coauthored with Andrew Reddie, research associate in the International Institutions and Global Governance program. Israel’s January 31 aerial attack on a Syrian  research facility and arms complex has raised once again the thorny question of when preemption against a developing threat may be justified under international law—as opposed to simply strategic calculation. Predictably, the Israeli bombardment elicited a hail of criticism from some regional and global players. Syria has threatened to retaliate, while Iran has suggested that Israel would regret its violation of Syrian sovereignty. The Russian response, however, was particularly intriguing, since it highlights an ongoing disagreement over the circumstances in which the use of force may be warranted. In the aftermath of the Israeli strike, Russia’s foreign ministry stated, “if this information is confirmed, then we are dealing with unprovoked attacks on targets on the territory of a sovereign country, which blatantly violates the UN Charter and is unacceptable, no matter the motives to justify it.” Russia, of course, has a long history of defending the principle national sovereignty, particularly as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. In their complaint, Russian officials invoked paragraph four of Article 2 of the UN Charter, which reads, “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state….” In Moscow’s view, this uncompromising statement renders the Israeli attack on Syria unacceptable under international law. In fact, international law contains greater ambiguities than Moscow admits. Article 2 must be read in conjunction with Article 51of the UN Charter, which reads, “nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”  From a legal standpoint, the question is, was the Israeli attack a legitimate response to a perceived threat? Judgement about the legality of armed force in instances of self-defense typically have to pass what is often referred to as “the Caroline test” of imminence. In 1837, British forces attacked a U.S.-flagged steamboat (the SS Caroline) being used to supply rebels in Upper Canada against the British colonial government. In his famous analysis of the incident, the U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster exculpated the British. “[E]ven supposing the necessity of the moment authorized them to enter the territories of the United States at all, [they] did nothing unreasonable or excessive.” The act was justified, inasmuch as the “necessity of self-defense was instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.”  Subsequent international legal development has generally embraced this idea insofar as self-defense is allowed in anticipation of attacks that are imminent, though the precise contours of this standard remain contested. Much more problematic is the launching of a “preemptive” attack against a threat that is developing but not yet imminent. A decade ago, in its 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States [PDF], the administration of George W.Bush enunciated a right to “preemption”. The basis of this controversial doctrine was that in an age of catastrophic threats, the United States needed the leeway to launch armed attacks to protect itself from catastrophic threats that were emerging but not yet fully realized. Israel has not acknowledged the strike, so it has not provided any legal justification, but its actions fall on the preemption side of the line. Experts speculate that it had three purposes. The first was to destroy Syrian heavy weapons, including SA-17 surface-to-air missiles, that Israel worries could be transferred to Lebanon, helping Hezbollah upgrade its offensive capabiltiies. The second was to warn Damascus not to use (or lose control of) its biological and chemical weapons, which had been the subject of research at the facility. The third was to signal to Iran Israel’s readiness to launch devastating attacks if the Iranians approach nuclear weapons capability. As outgoing Defense Minister Ehud Barak said cryptically in Munich, the attacks provided “another proof that when we say something we mean it.” From Israel’s perspective, the failure of the UN Security Council to act to stop the bloodshed in Syria—and prevent the spillover of weapons to its neighbors, mitigates the violation of Syrian sovereignty. The action should also be placed in the context of past missions targeting suspected nuclear facilities in Osiraq, Iraq, and Deir ez-Zor, Syria. Clearly, Israel holds a broad view of what constitutes its self-defense. This view is sustained by the fact that Israel and Syria have failed to sign a peace agreement following their most recent conflagration in 1982. For their part, Israel and Hezbollah have remained at odds following conflict in 2006 while Israel, along with the United States, has labeled them a terrorist organization. These geopolitical concerns explain the circumspect reaction from Washington. As Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta explained drily, “the United States supports whatever steps are taken to make sure these weapons don’t fall into the hands of terrorists.” Israel’s use of force may be a prudent act of statecraft. Whether it is formally legal is another matter, and doubtless of secondary concern in Jerusalem.  

Washington and the world breathed a sigh of relief on Monday, October 29, 1962.  The day before President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had struck a deal to end the Cuban missile crisis. But the deal took several weeks to implement, and it came with a plot twist that the world wouldn’t learn about for thirty years. The initial plan was that UN inspectors would observe the removal of the Soviet offensive missiles and bombers. Cuban leader Fidel Castro, however, refused to allow UN inspectors into the country. So the United States was left to verify Soviet compliance with the October 28 deal by so-called national technical means, that is, by watching from the air and sea as Soviet ships entered and eventually left Cuban harbors. By the third week of November, the Kennedy administration was convinced that the Soviets had made good on their commitment. The quarantine of Cuba formally ended at 6:45 p.m. Washington time on November 20. What the Kennedy administration did not know at the time was that the removal of the SS-4 and SS-5 missiles from Cuba did not mean that all Soviet nuclear weapons had left the island. Remaining behind were nearly one hundred short-range tactical nuclear weapons. The White House in its communications with the Kremlin had stressed its concerns about Soviet offensive weapons, which was understood by both sides to be weapons that could reach the United States. JFK had not demanded that the Soviets remove all nuclear weapons. The ExCom hadn’t imagined that tactical weapons might be in Cuba, and U.S. reconnaissance flights had not detected their presence. Maj. Rudolph Anderson might have photographed evidence of tactical weapons on October 27, but his U-2 was shot down. Because tactical nuclear weapons were not part of the October 28 deal, Khrushchev was not inclined to remove them. Indeed, under the terms of an oral agreement that Moscow and Havana had struck that summer, control of the weapons was to be passed to the Cuban government. Aware that Castro was furious that he had cut a deal with the United States, Khrushchev dispatched one of his closest allies, Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan, to Cuba to soothe the Cuban leader’s anger. (Mikoyan carried out his three-week mission even though his wife of four decades died shortly after he arrived in Havana.) But Mikoyan became alarmed at Castro’s hostility toward the United States and feared that Moscow would not be able to control its supposed ally. So he decided on his own initiative that the weapons should not be transferred. He informed Castro on November 22 that the deal was off because it violated (an invented) Soviet law on transferring weapons. The tactical nuclear weapons left Cuba on December 1. The presence of the tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba was significant. Had JFK followed the initial advice of his advisers to strike Soviet missile sites, the Soviets would likely have retaliated with a nuclear strike against the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay. The Soviet commanders on the island did not need permission or launch codes from Moscow to fire their weapons. And if the United States had invaded Cuba, U.S. troops would almost certainly have been wiped out by tactical nuclear weapons. A full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union might have followed suit. The presence of the Soviet tactical missiles in Cuba was a secret for three decades. A Soviet general revealed their existence at a conference in Havana in 1992 marking the thirtieth anniversary of the missile crisis. Among the conference participants was former secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Upon hearing the Soviet general’s admission, he “had to hold on to a table to steady himself.’’ What about U.S. compliance with the terms of the October 28 deal? Khrushchev kept silent on JFK’s secret promise to remove the U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. By the end of April 1963, they were gone. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

Murphy’s Law holds that if anything can go wrong, it will. On Saturday October 27, 1962, the twelfth day of the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy might have been thinking about that famous law’s corollary: Murphy was an optimist. JFK had gone to bed the night before thinking that a solution to the crisis was in sight. But he awoke on what later was dubbed "Black Saturday" to a series of events that he had not anticipated and that threatened to plunge the world into a nuclear abyss. The bad news started arriving early. At 9:00 a.m., Radio Moscow began broadcasting a message from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev: the Soviet Union would remove its missiles from Cuba if the United States agreed to remove its Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey. The Soviets looked to have upped the price of a deal. Khrushchev’s letter the day before had conditioned the withdrawal of Soviet missiles solely on a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. The news out of Moscow dominated the 10:00 a.m. meeting of the ExCom, the first of three times the group met that fall Saturday. But first, CIA director John McCone informed the group that five SS-4 sites were operational and a sixth would be ready within twenty-four hours. JFK then learned something almost as dismaying: although a Soviet ship was one hundred miles out from the quarantine line and headed straight for it, the United States still had not told Moscow precisely where the quarantine line was located. The president’s solution was to pass a message through acting UN Secretary General U Thant to Soviet officials in New York telling them where the quarantine line was. As the ExCom was discussing the sudden change in tone out of Moscow, a new letter arrived from Khrushchev. It repeated the radio demand that the United States withdraw the Jupiter missiles as the price for resolving the crisis. Such a trade was only fair, Khrushchev argued: You are disturbed over Cuba. You say that this disturbs you because it is 90 miles by sea from the coast of the United States of America. But Turkey adjoins us; our sentries patrol back and forth and see each other. Do you consider, then, that you have the right to demand security for your own country and the removal of the weapons you call offensive, but do not accord the same right to us? You have placed destructive missile weapons, which you call offensive, in Turkey, literally next to us. How then can recognition of our equal military capacities be reconciled with such unequal relations between our great states? This is irreconcilable. The Jupiter missiles had gone into Italy and Turkey only a year earlier. Even as they were being deployed, administration officials had been discussing whether to remove them; they were already obsolete and had little military utility. Nothing had changed on either score in the intervening year. But the ExCom agreed that withdrawing them now, under Soviet pressure, would be a diplomatic disaster. It would shake the confidence of NATO allies and encourage Moscow to push for the denuclearization of Europe. Kennedy took a break to take his usual mid-day swim.  He returned to the Oval Office and received a phone call from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at 1:45 p.m. The news was bad. A U-2 pilot flying a routine mission to collect air samples over the North Pole for evidence of Soviet nuclear tests had apparently become disoriented by the aurora borealis and strayed into Soviet airspace. Moments later, Roger Hilsman, the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, confirmed that the U-2 had entered Soviet airspace—by more than three hundred miles it later turned out—and that the Soviet air force had scrambled planes to intercept it. JFK responded with gallows humor: “There is always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.” By the time Kennedy cracked his joke, the U-2 had already exited Soviet airspace. The pilot, Maj. Charles Maultsby, had eluded the Soviet interceptors because his U-2 flew at an altitude they couldn’t reach. He eventually landed his plane, which had run out of fuel, at an isolated air field in Alaska. However, while he was still in Soviet airspace, the U.S. Air Force scrambled two F-102 fighters to provide a possible escort. Because the United States had gone to DEFCON 2, the fighters were not equipped with their normal conventional air-to-air missile interceptors but rather with nuclear-tipped ones designed to take out a fleet of Soviet bombers. Had the U.S. interceptors engaged their Soviet counterparts that day, their only weapons were nuclear ones. (Khrushchev would write in a letter to Kennedy the next day, “Is it not a fact that an intruding American plane could be easily taken for a nuclear bomber, which might push us to a fateful step?”) Although Major Maultsby managed to land safely, halfway around the world another U-2 pilot was not as fortunate. Maj. Rudolph Anderson was piloting his U-2 on a reconnaissance mission over eastern Cuba when his plane was struck by a Soviet surface-to-air (SAM) missile. He became the only person to die from enemy fire during the crisis. (President Kennedy posthumously awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal.) The decision to fire on Anderson’s U-2 was made by Soviet generals in Cuba and ran contrary to Khrushchev’s orders. The Soviets had deployed short-range nuclear-armed cruise missiles to Cuba and by coincidence had positioned them on October 27 fifteen miles from the U.S. base at Guantánamo. Anderson’s flight path took him right over the missiles, raising fears that he would discover the deployments. With the commanding Soviet general in Cuba nowhere to be found and with no time to contact Moscow for directions, Soviet officers on the scene decided to fire on the U-2. (The U-2 incidents weren’t the only ones that day that had the potential to trigger a war. Off the coast of Florida late that afternoon, the destroyer USS Cony dropped depth charges to force a Soviet submarine near the quarantine line to surface. What neither the Cony’s commander nor U.S. officials back in Washington knew was that the sub carried a nuclear-armed torpedo and was authorized to use it if fired upon.  A clash was averted only because one of the Soviet officers refused to agree with his two comrades on the need to return fire. The sub surfaced and sailed away without incident.) Kennedy learned of Anderson’s death at the second ExCom meeting of the day, which began at 4:00 p.m. The tone of the discussion immediately turned dark. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell D. Taylor recommended that the U.S. Air Force attack the SAM site the next day. Secretary McNamara argued that an invasion of Cuba had become inevitable. Kennedy adjourned the meeting without deciding on either request. While events on the ground seemed to be spinning out of Washington’s control, JFK was struggling with a dilemma: how to respond to the conflicting letters that Khrushchev had sent. Over the course of the day the ExCom gravitated toward an idea that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had suggested and that came to be known as the “Trollope ploy”: the United States would formally respond to the first, more conciliatory letter and ignore the second, harsher letter that demanded the removal of U.S. missiles from Italy and Turkey. (The Victorian writer Anthony Trollope had used a plot device in which a single woman deliberately construed a bachelor’s harmless words as evidence of a marriage proposal.) So JFK instructed his brother to hand deliver a letter that night to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin stating that if the Soviet Union agreed to a verified withdrawal of its nuclear missiles and bombers from Cuba, the United States would agree “(a) to remove promptly the quarantine measures now in effect and (b) to give assurances against an invasion of Cuba.” That was the version of the story as it was told for many decades. Kennedy, and even more so his advisers, would later hail the Trollope ploy for resolving the crisis on U.S. terms. But RFK had more than a letter to deliver that night to Dobrynin. He also had a private message for Khrushchev: the United States was prepared to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within six months if the Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba. While many of JFK’s advisers insisted that the invasion pledge alone would be sufficient, the president was convinced by the public nature of the Khrushchev’s demands that morning that the Soviet leader needed more before he could agree to a deal. RFK and Dobrynin met in the Attorney General’s office at 7:45 p.m. RFK then returned to the White House for the third and final ExCom meeting of the day. Upon McNamara’s advice, JFK activated twenty-four air reserve squadrons and agreed that if U.S. reconnaissance planes were fired upon again, the U.S. Air Force would have to return fire. RFK recorded his impression of JFK’s mood as Black Saturday came to a close: The President was not optimistic... He had not abandoned hope, but what hope there was now rested with Khrushchev’s revising his course within the next few hours. It was a hope, not an expectation. The expectation was a military confrontation by Tuesday and possibly tomorrow... There was nothing to do now but wait. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

Journalists live for scoops. Being the first to break major news is the ticket to journalistic fame and fortune. But what if you are a journalist covering the biggest story of your lifetime and suddenly you become a participant? Do you tell the world what you have learned, or do you sit on it? ABC News diplomatic correspondent John Scali found himself in just such a predicament on Friday, October 26, 1962, the eleventh day of the Cuban missile crisis. Scali got a call shortly after noontime from Alexander Fomin. Fomin was officially a diplomatic counselor at the Soviet embassy in Washington. His real job, though, was KGB station chief in Washington. His given name was Alexander Feklisov, and he had run Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenberg spy ring. Fomin wanted to have lunch. Scali was just finishing a baloney sandwich and was not inclined to eat more. But the urgency he detected in Fomin’s voice persuaded him that food wasn’t the point of the phone call. So he agreed to meet at the Occidental Restaurant, located just two blocks from the White House. Scali soon discovered that he was right. As he later told the story: After the waiter had taken our order, he [Fomin] came right to the point and said, "War seems about to break out; something must be done to save the situation." And I said, "Well, you should have thought of that before you introduced the missiles." He then said, "There might be a way out; what would you think of a proposition whereby we would promise to remove our missiles under United Nations inspection, where Mr. Khrushchev would promise never to introduce such offensive missiles into Cuba again? Would the President of the United States be willing to promise publicly not to invade Cuba?" I said I didn’t know, but I would be willing to try and find out. The rest of the meal was eaten in silence, and incidentally he got my crab cakes and I wound up with his pork chop, but he didn’t notice it. Scali immediately returned to his office in the State Department press room and jotted off a short memo summarizing what Fomin had told him. He gave his memo to Roger Hilsman, the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Hilsman immediately recognized its significance and passed it along to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The secretary in turn passed it on to President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Fomin’s offer to Scali came as JFK was becoming increasingly pessimistic about the direction the crisis was headed. The Soviet ships carrying missile parts had turned back, but there were still missiles in Cuba. More would become operational every day. At the morning meeting of the ExCom, he told his advisers that the missiles would come out only if the United States invaded Cuba or offered to trade removal of the missiles for something the Soviets wanted. Now, with Fomin’s overture, he had a possible way out of the crisis. After Scali finished his appearance on ABC News’s 6:00 p.m. network broadcast—he didn’t mention anything about his lunch with Fomin—he was summoned to the State Department and ushered into Rusk’s office. The secretary pulled a sheet of yellow, legal-sized paper out of his pocket and began reading. The gist of the message was that Scali should tell Fomin that he had been told by “the highest officials in the United States Government” that the administration saw possibilities in his offer. Scali immediately arranged to meet Fomin in the coffee shop of the Statler Hotel, a half-block away from the Soviet embassy. He passed along the message. After being convinced that Scali was leveling with him, Fomin picked up the thirty-cent tab for the two cups of coffee they had ordered. When the cashier continued talking to a friend rather than take the payment, the Soviet spy chief slapped a five dollar bill on the counter and disappeared into the night. As Scali was relaying his message to Fomin, the White House was receiving a long and emotional letter from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that looked to confirm the proposal Fomin had floated. The letter had been delivered to the U.S. embassy in Moscow at 9:43 a.m. that morning Washington time. It had taken more than eleven hours to translate the letter, transmit it to the State Department, and deliver it to the White House. The letter began with Khrushchev’s indignant defense of why the Soviet Union had sided with Cuba. Khrushchev then shifted gears and put an offer on the table: Let us therefore show statesmanlike wisdom. I propose: We, for our part, will declare that our ships, bound for Cuba, will not carry any kind of armaments. You would declare that the United States will not invade Cuba with its forces and will not support any sort of forces which might intend to carry out an invasion of Cuba. Then the necessity for the presence of our military specialists in Cuba would disappear. He went on to add: Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose. Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this. JFK and his advisers inferred from Khrushchev’s letter and Fomin’s overture that the Soviets were making a coordinated effort to extend an olive branch. (In fact, Fomin was floating a trial balloon on his own initiative and the two developments were serendipitous rather than coordinated.) The break they had been hoping for had finally arrived. As JFK and his advisers were becoming more hopeful that a peaceful resolution to the crisis was possible, Cuban leader Fidel Castro was becoming increasingly convinced that a U.S. invasion was imminent. El Comandante had no intention of going down to defeat at the hands of the “imperialists” without inflicting pain in return. Late that night he sent “Comrade Khrushchev” a telegram urging him to launch a preemptive nuclear first strike on the United States if it attacked Cuba—“However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.” Castro also ordered Cuban forces to fire on any U.S. aircraft that entered Cuba’s airspace. JFK knew nothing of Castro’s telegram. As far as he could tell that Friday night, he now had a way out of the crisis on terms that served U.S. interests. What he would discover when he awoke the next morning, however, was that the crisis had entered its most dangerous day: “Black Saturday.” The decisions he and Khrushchev made—and more importantly, the events neither man anticipated nor controlled—would determine whether the world would go over the nuclear brink. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

U.S. ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson had a reputation for preferring to concede than to confront. In the first days of the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy worried that his man in New York didn’t have what it took to present the U.S. position on Cuba forcefully to the world body. On Thursday, October 25, the tenth day of the crisis, Stevenson showed that he was in fact made of sterner stuff than JFK thought. The former two-time presidential candidate dressed down Valerian Zorin, the Soviet ambassador, in a UN Security Council meeting as Americans watched on television. Stevenson’s dramatic moment would come that afternoon. At 1:45 a.m. (8:45 a.m. in Moscow) that morning, the State Department handed the Soviet embassy in Washington a letter from JFK. It responded to the letter that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had written the day before. Whereas Khrushchev’s letter struck an indignant tone, Kennedy’s was cold and to the point: “I regret very much that you still do not appear to understand what it is that has moved us in this matter.” The final sentence in the 266-word letter made it clear that Kennedy wasn’t offering any concessions: “I hope that your Government will take the necessary action to permit a restoration of the earlier situation.” At that morning’s meeting of the ExCom, Kennedy directed that the Soviet tanker Bucharest be allowed to cross the quarantine line. (One of the ships enforcing the quarantine line was the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, which was named after JFK’s older brother, a Navy flier who had been killed during World War II.) U.S. intelligence had determined that it was carrying ordinary petroleum products; the ExCom agreed that the first Soviet bloc ship the U.S. Navy stopped should be one that was carrying missiles or missile parts. Kennedy also discussed how to respond to an offer that acting UN secretary general U Thant made the day before that the United States and the Soviet Union agree to halt both the quarantine and arms shipments pending negotiations. Khrushchev accepted the offer. Kennedy, however, saw it as equating the U.S. response with the Soviet provocation.  So he decided essentially to ignore U Thant’s offer, writing in his response to the acting secretary general that “the existing threat was created by the secret introduction of offensive weapons into Cuba, and the answer lies in the removal of such weapons.” That afternoon at an emergency meeting of the Security Council, Ambassador Zorin assured his fellow delegates that the Soviet Union had not placed missiles in Cuba: “Falsity is what the United States has in its hands, false evidence.” The United States, he argued, was manufacturing a threat that could have “catastrophic consequences for the whole world.” Stevenson listened impassively as the Soviet ambassador laced into the United States. When it was finally his turn to speak, he dispensed with the standard diplomatic niceties. He instead went immediately for the jugular: “I want to say to you, Mr. Zorin, that I do not have your talent for obfuscation, for distortion, for confusing language, and for doubletalk. And I must confess to you that I am glad that I do not!” Stevenson went on to denounce the Soviets for lying, treating Zorin in a way that the Soviet ambassador likened to an American prosecutor browbeating a defendant. Stevenson pressed on: All right, sir, let me ask you one simple question: Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the U.S.S.R. has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no—don’t wait for the translation—yes or no? When Zorin refused to answer, Stevenson snapped: You can answer yes or no. You have denied they exist. I want to know if I understood you correctly. I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that’s your decision. And I am also prepared to present the evidence in this room With Zorin still continuing to refuse to answer, Stevenson’s aides proceeded to produce large photos of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. The delegates in the room, and everyone watching on television, saw the Soviets unmasked as liars. Zorin could only simmer. The mild-mannered Stevenson had scored an enormous political and diplomatic victory for the United States. As dramatic as Stevenson’s tongue-lashing of Zorin was, it did not solve JFK’s fundamental problem—Soviet missile were in Cuba. Indeed, at a second ExCom meeting that evening, the president learned from CIA director John McCone that his greatest fear was true: some of the missiles in Cuba were operational. The stakes were now even greater.   For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

President John F. Kennedy was beginning to feel the pressure on Wednesday, October 24, 1962, the ninth day of the Cuban missile crisis. The naval quarantine of Cuba had formally gone into effect early that morning. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the Soviets to respond. Kennedy didn’t know whether at the day’s end he would be breathing a sigh of relief or on the road to a nuclear war. The U.S. Navy initially proposed to intercept Soviet ships when they came within eight hundred miles of Cuba. That distance had been chosen in good part to keep U.S. warships beyond the reach of Soviet fighter planes. But at the suggestion of the British ambassador, JFK had ordered the quarantine line to be reduced to five hundred miles. That would give the Soviets more time to ponder their options, and hopefully, reverse course. But moving the quarantine line only delayed the inevitable. The U.S. Navy expected that the first Soviet ships would cross the quarantine line late in the morning of October 24. As JFK prepared to attend the 10:00 a.m. ExCom meeting, he lamented to his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, that he had been forced to impose the quarantine. “I just don’t think there was any choice,” RFK assured him, “and not only that, if you hadn’t acted, you would have been impeached.” JFK’s response was succinct: “That’s what I think—I would have been impeached.” The morning’s ExCom meeting began with an intelligence briefing, followed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sharing photos showing that the Air Force had responded to the president’s directive that U.S. planes in the southeastern United States be dispersed. At 10:25 a.m. a staffer delivered a note to CIA director John McCone. The note contained the message that Kennedy and his advisers had been hoping for: Soviet ships had stopped dead in the water. Unbeknownst to the group at the time, shortly after Kennedy’s nationwide television address Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had ordered Soviet ships outside the quarantine line to turn around. “We’re eyeball to eyeball,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk whispered to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, “and I think the other fellow just blinked.” Rusk’s comment became the iconic line of the Cuban missile crisis. But it was misleading in a critical way. It implied that U.S. and Soviet ships were in close proximity if not actually steaming straight for each other. The men gathered around JFK on the morning of October 24 certainly thought that was the case; McCone even recorded a note later in the day that a U.S. Navy vessel had confronted a Soviet ship at virtually the same time he received the intelligence bulletin in the White House. The incident didn’t take place. In fact, the two closest Soviet ships were more than five hundred nautical miles from the quarantine line and headed back to the Soviet Union. Rusk’s dramatic interjection also suggested that the crisis had peaked. It hadn’t. That night, Kennedy received a letter from Khrushchev. Even though the Soviet leader had privately ordered Soviet ships to return home, he told Kennedy the exact opposite. He rejected the American “ultimatum” and insisted that the Soviet Union would not respect the quarantine: Mr. President, if you coolly weigh the situation which has developed, not giving way to passions, you will understand that the Soviet Union cannot fail to reject the arbitrary demands of the United States. When you confront us with such conditions, try to put yourself in our place and consider how the United States would react to these conditions. I do not doubt that if someone attempted to dictate similar conditions to you—the United States—you would reject such an attempt. And we also say—no. The Soviet Government considers that the violation of the freedom to use international waters and international air space is an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war. Therefore, the Soviet Government cannot instruct the captains of Soviet vessels bound for Cuba to observe the orders of American naval forces blockading that Island. Our instructions to Soviet mariners are to observe strictly the universally accepted norms of navigation in international waters and not to retreat one step from them. And if the American side violates these rules, it must realize what responsibility will rest upon it in that case. Khrushchev looked to have thrown down the gauntlet. Kennedy would have to decide how to respond. The elation of the morning’s news had given way to new fears. The Cuban missile crisis was not only far from over, its most dangerous days still lay ahead. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

The first week of the Cuban missile crisis played out in secret. President John F. Kennedy and his advisers quietly evaluated the results of the U-2 overflights and formulated a response. But on Tuesday, October 23 the crisis began playing out in public. U.S. diplomats scrambled to secure international support for the impending quarantine of Cuba while the White House waited to see what Moscow’s next steps would be. The Organization of American States (OAS) met at 9:00 a.m. in emergency session at its headquarters in Washington, DC at the request of the United States. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Edwin Martin introduced a resolution authorizing OAS members to use force, individually or collectively, to impose a quarantine on Cuba. The initial discussion proceeded slowly, however, because many of the ambassadors were awaiting instructions from their home capitals on how to vote. When the vote was finally held in late afternoon, every country but Uruguay voted yes. (Cuba had been expelled from the OAS earlier in the year, and the Uruguayan ambassador abstained because he still had not received instructions from Montevideo; the next day he would revise Uruguay’s vote to yes.) The United States now had what it claimed was a firm legal basis for imposing the quarantine. News of the OAS vote reached New York while Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, was addressing the Security Council. Kennedy and several of his advisers had worried that Stevenson would not present the U.S. case forcefully. The two-time Democratic presidential candidate had after all counseled Kennedy to offer Moscow concessions rather than champion a muscular response. (He would be accused by unnamed administration officials in a story that ran in the Saturday Evening Post after the crisis concluded of having advocated a Caribbean Munich.) But Stevenson used his remarks to lambaste Soviet perfidy and call Cuba "an accomplice in the communist enterprise of world domination.” Kennedy was sufficiently pleased that he immediately dispatched a telegram to the ambassador: “I watched your speech this afternoon with great satisfaction. It has given our cause a great start.” While U.S. diplomats were busy building international support for the U.S. position, Kennedy and his advisers continued to meet and review the situation. Pursuant to a directive that Kennedy had signed the day before formally establishing the ExCom, the group now met each day at 10:00 a.m. In the morning meeting CIA Director John McCone reported that intelligence suggested that the Cubans were bystanders on the missile installation rather than active participants. At the request of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Kennedy approved six low-level reconnaissance flights over Cuba to provide additional information about the Soviet missile sites. After seeing a photograph of Cuban aircraft lined up wingtip to wingtip, and thus highly vulnerable to a U.S. attack, Kennedy directed the U.S. Air Force to conduct a similar reconnaissance flight over U.S. air bases. Those photos confirmed what the president suspected: the U.S. Air Force had also failed to take prudent steps to disperse its military aircraft during the crisis. In the late afternoon the White House received what it had been waiting for: a response from the Soviets. The Soviet Foreign Ministry gave the U.S. embassy in Moscow a letter from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. U.S. ambassador Foy Kohler cabled the message to the State Department, which in turn delivered it to the White House. Khrushchev neither admitted to the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba nor offered any concessions. Instead, he pushed back, saying that the U.S. position “cannot be evaluated in any other way than as naked interference in domestic affairs of Cuban Republic, Soviet Union, and other states. Charter of United Nations and international norms do not give right to any state whatsoever to establish in international waters control of vessels bound for shores of Cuban Republic.” The ExCom reconvened at 6:00 p.m. Kennedy signed Proclamation 3504, which formally ordered the quarantine of Cuba to begin at 2:00 p.m. Greenwich time on October 24. Kennedy also agreed to answer Khrushchev’s letter with a letter of his own. It was blunt, telling the Soviet leader: “I hope that you will issue immediately the necessary instructions to your ships to observe the terms of the quarantine, the basis of which was established by the vote of the Organization of American States this afternoon.” Later that night, Attorney General Robert Kennedy met secretly with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the Soviet embassy in Washington. Acting at the president’s request, RFK hoped that Dobrynin might be able to provide insight into what Soviet leaders were thinking. Dobrynin insisted, however, there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba. (Unlike Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, Dobrynin was in the dark about Soviet plans for Cuba.) The attorney general left the Soviet embassy at 10:15 p.m. and headed back to the White House. He had little new to tell the president. The wait for a definitive Soviet response would continue. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.

President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney meet tonight in Boca Raton, Florida to debate foreign policy. Both men hope that what they say will move voters in their direction. But that’s not always how debates go. Here are five memorable moments from past debates when presidents took on foreign policy. 1976: Gerald Ford entered his second debate with Jimmy Carter hoping to regain momentum. He ended up doing the opposite. Ford ended an answer about his policy toward the Soviet Union by saying: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” The perplexed moderator gave Ford an opportunity to revise his remark, but he only dug a deeper hole, insisting that Yugoslavians, Romanians, and Poles didn’t consider themselves dominated by the Soviets. Ford said after the debate that he was arguing that the Soviets couldn’t crush Eastern Europe’s indomitable spirit. But the political damage had been done. http://youtu.be/PfyL4uQVJLw 1980: The lone 1980 presidential debate is best remembered for Ronald Reagan derailing Jimmy Carter’s criticisms by saying, “There you go again.” But Carter also hurt himself when he said, “I had a discussion with my daughter Amy the other day before I came here to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry.” The vision of the leader of the free world discussing matters of state with his thirteen year-old daughter unwittingly handed Republicans an applause line. They ran with it. At one campaign stop the crowd roared when Reagan joked, “I remember when Patti and Ron were little tiny kids, we used to talk about nuclear power.” http://youtu.be/UQhlabzQm8E 1984: Reagan looked tired and slow during his first debate against Walter Mondale. Pundits began to write his political obituary. At the second debate, however, Reagan was asked whether he still had the stamina to handle a major national security crisis. The seventy-three year-old replied: “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The quip brought down the house. The “Gipper” was back and Mondale’s momentum was gone. http://youtu.be/LoPu1UIBkBc 1992: Ross Perot made news this week by endorsing Romney. Twenty years ago he made news by becoming the only third-party candidate to stand on the presidential debate stage. He made it memorable. He warned that if Congress approved NAFTA that Americans could expect to hear a "job-sucking sound going south" as companies moved to Mexico to cut costs. Perot was wrong on the merits—NAFTA ended up benefiting both the U.S. and Mexican economies. But his vivid phrase, which morphed in the retelling into “a giant sucking sound,” entered the American political lexicon as a pithy way to describe policies that cause great harm. http://youtu.be/VRr60nmDyu4 2008. Barack Obama looked vulnerable on foreign policy when he ran against John McCain. The Arizona senator was a Naval Academy graduate who spent six years as a POW in North Vietnam. In the first debate, McCain accused Obama of having spoken recklessly about striking al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan. Obama coolly responded: “You’re absolutely right that presidents have to be prudent in what they say. But, you know, coming from you, who, you know, in the past has threatened extinction for North Korea and, you know, sung songs about bombing Iran, I don’t know, you know, how credible that is.” In a single sentence Obama shifted the debate from his judgment to McCain’s temperament. http://youtu.be/EWW1Q73eY8M Obama and Romney both aspire to land a knockout punch tonight like Reagan did in 1984. But they could end up stumbling like Ford or Carter. Either way, it may not matter. Polls show that voters care far more about jobs and the economy than they do about who has the better plan for Iran or Syria. That caveat, of course, won’t stop pundits from arguing for the next two weeks over what the candidates had to say. Only November 6 will do that. This article is also posted at CNN’s Global Public Square.

John F. Kennedy was a superb public speaker. His inaugural address is one of the best known and most frequently quoted speeches in American history. His press conference performance immediately after the Bay of Pigs, when he famously said that “victory has one-hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” helped blunt the political fallout from one of the biggest foreign policy fiascoes in U.S. history. But nothing matched the importance of the address Kennedy gave to the nation on the evening of October 22, 1962, when he told Americans (and the world) that the United States had discovered that the Soviet Union was secretly installing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. Administration officials spent the bulk of that Monday, the seventh day of the crisis, briefing cabinet officials, members of Congress, and foreign leaders about the situation. Twenty leaders from both parties were told that the president wanted to speak with them that day. Those congressional leaders who weren’t in Washington were told to catch commercial flights or special flights arranged by the U.S. Air Force. The lawmakers who made it to the White House got a personal briefing on the crisis from Kennedy late that afternoon. He also spoke by phone with British prime minister Harold Macmillan, while former secretary of state Dean Acheson met with French president Charles de Gaulle in Paris to convey the administration’s message. Kennedy received a scare just before noon when Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko delayed his return flight to Moscow and the Soviet mission to the United Nations announced that he would make an important announcement. Kennedy’s strategy had hinged on being the first to announce the presence of the missiles to the world. Had the Soviets learned that the administration had uncovered their secret and were now seeking to preempt the president’s speech? That would create political problems at home and diplomatic problems abroad for the White House. To Kennedy’s relief, however, it turned out that the “important statement” was a goodbye from Gromyko. The 3:00 p.m. meeting of the National Security Council did not have to do a last-minute rewrite of Kennedy’s speech. Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, an urgent summons for a meeting. Dobrynin arrived at the State Department at 6:00 p.m. Virtually simultaneously, the U.S. embassy in Moscow handed the Soviet Foreign Ministry a copy of the speech that Kennedy planned to give one hour later along with a letter from the president to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The letter stated Kennedy’s position bluntly:  “the United States is determined that this threat to the security of this hemisphere be removed.” Dobrynin departed Rusk’s office after just twenty-five minutes looking unnerved and clutching copies of the speech and the letter. Reporters hanging out at the State Department noticed the Soviet ambassador’s agitation and pressed him on why. He responded sharply: “Ask the Secretary… you can judge for yourself.” At 7:00 p.m., Kennedy addressed the nation from the Oval Office. The speech had gone through five drafts and took eighteen minutes to deliver. The president told the American public that the United States had discovered “unmistakable evidence” that the Soviet Union had begun installing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba in “flagrant and deliberate defiance” of both treaty obligations and Soviet assurances to the contrary. He added that Gromyko had sat in the Oval Office four days earlier and lied to his face that Moscow had not sent offensive weapons to Cuba. Kennedy described the Soviet action as “a clear and present danger” not just to the United States but to the entire Western Hemisphere. He had no intention of looking the other way because “the 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” To that end, he announced the “initial steps” that the United States was taking. First, it was imposing: a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba… All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back… Second: I have directed the continued and increased close surveillance of Cuba and its military buildup... Should these offensive military preparations continue, thus increasing the threat to the hemisphere, further action will be justified. I have directed the Armed Forces to prepare for any eventualities; and I trust that in the interest of both the Cuban people and the Soviet technicians at the sites, the hazards to all concerned in continuing this threat will be recognized. Third: It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. Kennedy went on to announce that he had ordered Guantánamo reinforced and he was calling for immediate meetings of the Organization of American States and the UN Security Council. He ended by insisting that the U.S. goal was “not the victory of might, but the vindication of right—not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.” The White House announced after the speech that Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson had canceled all public appearances for the duration of the crisis. Reflecting the severity of the situation, Kennedy ordered most U.S. military commands to move from Defense Condition (DEFCON) 4, the normal peacetime readiness condition, to DEFCON 3. The U.S. Strategic Air Command would subsequently go to DEFCON 2 for the first time ever. Kennedy also ordered the largest defense mobilization of the postwar era. B-47 bombers were deployed to thirty U.S. civilian airfields and nuclear weapons placed on board B-47s in Spain, Morocco, and Britain. The planes would remain on alert for a month, “flying 2,088 sorties in 48,532 continuous hours of flying time, in which over 20,022,000 miles were flown without a fatality.” The Cuban missile crisis was now public. Kennedy had made his move. U.S. Navy ships were getting in position to impose the quarantine. The question now was what the Soviets would do in response. For other posts in this series or more information on the Cuban missile crisis, click here.