To The Precipice | Part 8

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And four decades later, the fall of the wall that had not yet been built would be the augury of its imminent inevitable demise. 18 months after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, this gray and dismal former capital of Nazi Germany would be shackled together with that tropical island, each thorn pushing in extrably upon the other. [Music] Nikita Khrushchev was hardly a well-educated man, at least not in the traditional sense. His son of Russian peasants spent his boyhood hurting sheep. He apprenticed as a skilled metal fitter in Dinesque, heart of Tsar Nicholas II's burgeoning industrial base. It would be called upon to enter the surreal hell of a Russian coal mine descending into the city darkness to repair broken-down machinery. Late in life, he recalled that he had seriously considered emigrating to the United States in search of better conditions and higher wages. He had completed a total of four years of elementary education. On April 17, 1912, workers at the Lena Gold Mining Partnership in Northeast Siberia went on strike to protest subhuman working conditions. Tsarist troops arrested the leaders of the strike committee which fan the flames and resulted in a march by the entire workforce. Soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army then fired into the crowd, killing 270 and wounding at least that many more. This became yet another of the brutal atrocities that turned the Russian people against the Romanov dynasty and spread revolutionary sentiment across that vast nation. That outrage soon reached the factory in Dinesque where young Khrushchev became so incensed that he started a collection for the survivors. This cost him his job at the factory, but it also gave him credibility when the Bolsheviks came to power five years later. While Khrushchev lacked in formal education he more than made up for in the four qualities absolutely essential if he were to rise to the very top level of Soviet politics. First, he was utterly ruthless, imposing his iron-disciplined stalling grad and then throughout the entire Soviet Union, an icy hardness forged in the coal mines of Dinesque. Second, he had a very finely tuned antenna. Time and time again reverting to his role as court-gester and palace fool when he sensed Stalin's suspicious eyes upon the back of his neck. Third, he had an innate sense of timing, instinctively knowing when it was time to throw off the fool's costume and act swiftly and mercilessly. And fourth, he had the physical and moral courage to act when the moment arrived, neither a day to early or an hour to late. He was therefore the polar opposite of the American president in every way. Khrushchev was short, fat and ugly where Kennedy was tall, handsome and charismatic. Khrushchev had started life as a barely literate nobody, a son of peasants who had the callous hands of a metal worker, the only calluses on the hands of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, son of a wealthy politician and destined for fame and influence, had come from rowing regardless at Harvard University. Khrushchev had clawed his way to power while Kennedy had it delivered to him on a silver plate, which gave Kennedy that unmistakable era of aristocracy, at ease at declaring his wishes and fully expectant that they would be carried out. Khrushchev brought to the table the potent blend of utter contempt for Kennedy's soft and comfortable privilege coupled with a massive inferiority complex that almost too perfectly reflected that of his Soviet Union when confronted with the wealth and power of the United States. Utterly charmed by Eisenhower at Camp David in 1959 and then burning with anger and resentment after the U2 scandal. Khrushchev saw his chance to move while this new American president was floundering with his own scandal down in Cuba, embarrassed and off balance. Now was the time to move in regard to pulling the West Berlin thorn from his side, and he would do it in the way he'd done everything else in his long climb to power. He would find where his opponent was most sensitive, grab him there, and begin to squeeze. A mere six weeks after the Cuban debacle, Kennedy and Khrushchev met face to face for the first time in Vienna. The Soviet premiere had gone into the summit with a low opinion of the new American president and after his initial discussion with Kennedy, that opinion dropped to borderline contempt. Khrushchev restated his demand that Western military forces would have to depart Berlin by midnight on December 31st. It was the same demand he'd made earlier with Eisenhower, which he had quietly abandoned during the Camp David mini-thaw. It was to be the Berlin airlift scenario all over again only this time. Khrushchev made clear his intent to enforce the eviction by whatever means necessary. Kennedy seemed to equivocate. He certainly did not issue a counter-ultimate him declaring that the United States and its NATO allies would be willing to go to war over the matter. Kennedy countered with a protest over Soviet meddling in Laos in far off Southeast Asia, where the KGB and CIA were wrestling in what Kennedy feared might turn into another proxy war on the far side of the globe. And Khrushchev repeatedly flagged the young president over the back-to-back humiliations of the U-2 violation and the American-backed invasion at Plyahiron. He beat the hell out of me. Kennedy told New York Times reporters Scottie Reston shortly after the Venice Summit. Kennedy openly admitted that his own performance at Vienna had been "the worst thing in my life." He savaged me, unquote. Vienna had been so one-sided that even the merciless Khrushchev seemed to feel sorry for him, remarking on Kennedy's obvious disappointment and sadness at the conclusion of the summit, Khrushchev later remarked that "look not only anxious but deeply upset, hadn't meant to upset him. I would have liked very much for us to part in a different mood, but there was nothing I could do to help him. Politics is a merciless business." Then the Soviet leader immediately said to work showing his opponent just how merciless politics could be. Khrushchev's Russian gambit was simple. If the NATO allies did not agree to depart West Berlin by year's end, then the Soviet Union would sign a unilateral peace treaty with East Germany in direct violation of the Potsdam agreement signed by the United States, France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, stating unequivocally that any settlement on the status of Germany would require the unanimous consent of all four parties. While this seemed to signal the Soviet release of East Germany and its launch as an independent nation, it was, in fact, a fig leaf as flimsy as the American assertion that it had no hand in the aborted Cuban invasion. The communist East German government headed by Walter Ubrich would of course remain subservient to his masters in the Kremlin. The entire ploy was just another of the endless pirouette of public relations and legal hair splitting that defined the entire Cold War from start to finish. By signing an independent peace treaty with East Germany, the Russians would then be able to claim that the decision to isolate Berlin was made by the East Germans themselves, with their elder brother in world socialism standing ready to back them if the capitalist decided to put up a fight. Now that put Kennedy into the same corner that Harry Truman had faced in 1948. Namely, with the West go to war in order to preserve the independence of West Berlin, half a city, deep inside enemy territory. Having watched the new American leader vacillate and then back down when it came to supplying U.S. air power for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Khruschev was confident that the Soviet Union was no longer facing a hard-headed Harry Truman or a steely-eyed Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now was the time to plug the hole in the dam that threatened to derail the entire communist empire. That leak that loophole really was West Berlin. Between the end of the war in May of 1945 and the Vienna Summit in 1961, the communist Eastern European nations of the Warsaw Pact were bleeding citizens at a staggering rate. In the early days of the Cold War, people could travel between East and West Berlin with relatives ease. And so in ocean of poles, Czechoslovakians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians, and others caught on the communist side of the Iron Curtain, managed to arrange travel to the fellow socialist nation known officially as the German Democratic Republic, commonly referred to as East Germany. And once in the GDR, it was a relatively simple matter to enter East Berlin and then magically step across an invisible line in order to apply for political asylum in the free federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, whose capital was safely back in bond, but whose ownership of the Western half of the former capital was a source of constant concern. 197,000 Eastern Europeans defected in 1950. 165,000 requested asylum in 1951, 182,000 in 1952, and 331,000 in 1953. By the end of the Vienna Summit in June of 1961, 4.5 million East Germans that's 20% of the country had escaped through this Berlin loophole, and that had to stop. Well before the Vienna Summit, East Germany's first Secretary Ulbrick had been stockpiling the materials needed to enclose the 100-mile circumference of West Berlin, which would surround the entire Western enclave and not just the 30-mile actual border between the two halves of the ancient German capital. Now this barrier started out as a cleared area covered in coils of barbed wire, but this was something that a determined refugee could simply jump over. As an East German border guard named Conrad Schumann famously did on film on August 15th as the actual wall was being constructed. This image of a prison guard escaping from his own prison became one of the iconic photos of the Cold War, and he had very nearly missed his chance. Just two days earlier, August 13th, 1961, the East German government had officially closed the border between East and West Berlin. East German soldiers had immediately torn up roads and strung bales of barbed wire identical to the one that Conrad Schumann left over. August 13th would be remembered annually as barbed wire Sunday. The construction of what the East Germans would call the anti-fascist protection rampart was completed in record time. Averging 10 feet in height and four feet thick, the eastern side of the actual wall was bordered by what soon became called the death strip. A cleared area made up of rake sand or gravel, easily revealing footprints, and more importantly, offering a clean field of fire for the guards manning the 186 observation towers ringing West Berlin. In fact, they had in secret intentionally weakened small sections of the barrier at key locations, should East German or Russian tanks need to break into the West Berlin enclave. From its construction in 1961 until its ultimate demolition at the hands of Berliners on both sides in November of 1989, over 100,000 people made attempts to abandon the socialist paradise of East Berlin and 5,000 of them succeeded. Most of those that failed faced arrest and long prison sentences, but at least 200, were killed by guards, mines, and machine guns. Westerners continued to be allowed into East Berlin for another two months after the completion of the wall. But on October 22nd, 1961, US diplomat Alan Laitner was stopped on his way to an East Berlin theater as he attempted to cross checkpoint Charlie. Former General Lucius Clay, who had orchestrated the Berlin airlift 13 years earlier, had returned to Berlin as President Kennedy's special advisor and he immediately realized that to accept this outrage would mean the end of West Berlin. So he immediately asked another American diplomat, Albert Hemsing, to make another attempt in a clearly marked car representing the US mission in Berlin. Hemsing II was stopped by East German border guards who demanded in direct violation of the Pots' to agreement to see Hemsing's passport. Once it was clear that the East Germans knew that they were dealing with an authorized vehicle, US military police immediately arrived in Jeeps and escorted the diplomatic vehicle to its East German destination. Now this of course resulted in a series of protests between the American and Soviet representatives which quickly escalated into near-alternatoms. US tanks took up positions 50 yards to the West of checkpoint Charlie. Soviet Commodant Colonel Andre Soloflev asserted that the sudden imposition of an identity check was not unreasonable. US Commodant Albert Watson disagreed. I am authorized to state that it is necessary to avoid actions of this kind stated solid up. Such actions can provoke corresponding actions from our side. We have tanks too. We hate the idea of carrying out such actions and assure that you will reexamine your course. But Lucius Clay and President Kennedy would not be intimidated. A few days later, Hemsing, who apparently had a warrior's heart inside his diplomat chest, agreed to make another attempt. On October 27th, he drove his US mission car into East Germany escorted by US Jeeps as before. To everyone's relief, no one stopped him. The dispute apparently settled, Hemsing and the MPs returned to West Germany, followed by the US tanks. However, a few moments later, 33 Soviet made tanks appeared and took up station on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate. Again, the legal niceties had to be observed. Unsure, if the tanks were manned by East Germans or Russians, Colonel Jim Atwood, commander of the US mission in West Berlin, sent Lieutenant Vern Pike and Sergeant Sam McCart across the border to have a little look around. Presumably whistling a happy tune, the two men took advantage of a temporary absence of personnel to climb into one of the tanks, returning with a red army newspaper and other airtight evidence that the tanks were indeed crewed by Russians. The American tanks then reversed course and headed for the Friedrichsstraße, where 10 Soviet T-55s had stopped 50 yards east of the border. The American tanks advanced to a point 50 yards to the West. And there, from 5 PM on October 27 until 11 AM on the 28th, Soviet and American tanks faced each other at 100 yards, live ammo loaded, and ready to fire. With the full support of US commanders on the scene, Lucius Clay proposed attaching bulldozer blades to the front of the few tanks and simply knocked down the wall then and there. They were utterly convinced that the Soviets would have no choice but to withdraw. However, Washington's response was not what Clay had in mind. US Secretary of State Dean Russ cabled Clay that, quote, "We had long since decided that Berlin is not a vital interest which would warrant determined recourse to force to protect and sustain." Now that certainly came as news to Lucius Clay, Albert Watson, Jim Atwood and Albert Helmsing not to mention. The MPs in their jeeps and the American tank crews staring down the barrels of Soviet T-55s and the citizens of West Berlin who had unloaded supplies during the Berlin airlift. Kennedy had made his decision and the Berlin Wall was going to stand. All Kennedy got in return was an agreement that the Soviet tanks would withdraw first. And here, in the heart of Berlin was the perfect Cold War Tableau, hostile tanks so close to each other that might as well have been fitted with bayonets, restrained not by the fear of enemy tank fire, but rather the complete annihilation of New York and Moscow in thermonuclear fireballs. It's not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war, say Kennedy. So one Soviet tank backed up about five yards. One US tank did the same. And then in tedious robotic fashion, each of the armored units backed their way out of a shooting war, five yards at a time. Passage between East and West Berlin was sealed for the next 28 years. Despite that, West Berliners had been impressed by the refusal of the United States to abandon West Berlin. And 20 months later, President Kennedy would come in person and speak to half a million West Berliners and those listening in at the Kremlin. There are many people in the world who really don't understand or say they don't. What is the great issue between the free world and the communist world? Let them come to Berlin. [APPLAUSE] There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the communist. [APPLAUSE] And there are even a few who say that it's true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lotsy, not Berlin in common. All free men wherever they may live are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, it's been I, dear Lena. Many years later, there would be said that Kennedy had botched the translation. It's alleged that he should have said, "Ixbien Berliner. I'm a Berliner." And not "Ixbien Einberlinner," meaning that he was a jelly donut, a popular pastry called a Berliner. It also said that his audience erupted into laughter. And none of that is true. It's all urban legend. Either pronunciation is correct and the people in attendance did not laugh when the President of the United States said that all free people everywhere are citizens of Berlin. They cheered Kennedy to the rafters and tears of pride ran down the faces of many. That pride would lessen but never remove. The pain of missing relatives locked inside their own city just over the wall. You know, you can make a compelling case that the only reason you're able to listen to this broadcast is because two men, both Russians, happened to be on duty, one in 1962 and another in 1983. In 1962, the eyes of the world were once again on Cuba, where for 13 days, the United States and the Soviet Union came as close to all-out thermonuclear war as they would during the entire period of the Cold War. Bessily Archipof, one of those men that actually saved the world, was hiding in plain sight, square in the middle of the quarantine zone in the bright blue Caribbean, but several hundred feet beneath its surface. The appeasing weakness of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had led a ruthless adult Hitler to launch the world's greatest catastrophe. A similar miscalculation on the part of Nikita Khrushchev very nearly began a third world war that would have made the second war look like a spitball fight at recess. By October of 1962, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the most powerful man in the world, had eaten a lot of crow and so had his nation. The euphoria and pride of victory in World War II had slowly ebbed away, frozen in the mountain passes of Korea, and the long thin wings of the U-2 falling from the Russian sky lost in the roar of the pounding surf of the Bay of Pigs, and in the seemingly perpetual shadow of the Berlin Wall. And when the appearance of weakness is taken as weakness, bad things happen. The PGM-19 is really quite absurd looking, it's short, fat, and ugly. America's first nuclear-armed medium-range ballistic missile looks like a part of a much bigger rocket that got thrown away somehow. Called the Jupiter, its 1,500-mile range meant that it was already obsolete by the time it was first deployed in 1956. Just one year later, the SM-65 Atlas, as beautiful and elegant as the Jupiter was squat and ugly, would have a range of 9,000 miles, allowing it to hit any target anywhere on Earth. The Atlas was America's first ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile. The Jupiter had been built under contract to the US Air Force by an automobile manufacturer. For a brief window in the late 50s, America's primary nuclear deterrent was a Chrysler. Now it's been a constant theme of this series that the attitudes of the United States and the Soviet Union were negative images of one another. One nation constantly being invaded and ravaged, the other safe and pristine behind the world's two greatest oceans. A Soviet medium-range missile, with a range of perhaps 1,500 miles, would have to be launched from Russia and could never reach the United States. However, that same medium-range missile posed a lethal threat to the Kremlin since the Jupiter would not have to be launched from the American homeland. Deployed to US allies Italy and Turkey, the Jupiter had the range, barely, to hit Moscow. One of the reasons John F. Kennedy had won the 1960 election was his hawkish insistence that something be done to plug the infamous missile gap, charging that Republican President White Eisenhower and Kennedy's election opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, had allowed the Soviets to take the lead in ICBM numbers, ranges, and warhead sizes. Now a lot of this was due to bluster on the part of Nikita Khrushchev, who had promised to bury the West and whose Soviet Union was cranking out ICBMs like sausages, according to the Russian leader. The actual truth, known only to the Russians, was that Russia was woefully almost comically behind the United States when it came to nuclear missiles. By 1961, the United States Air Force had 170 ICBMs, the Soviet Union had four. The US was also deploying George Washington and Ethan Allen class submarines, the first boomers, each capable of launching 16 Polaris nuclear missiles. And so here's another of the cruel coincidences and random matchups that kept this conflict going for two generations. Nikita Khrushchev had not only survived but thrived through bluster, but now he was not playing against a similar cadre of poorly educated Stalin's sycophants, each one of them more than willing to commit millions of innocence to fate's worse than that of the Lena Gold mine-strikers that had cost Khrushchev his factory job and launched him into politics. Khrushchev was now eye to eye with serious people, men whose duty it was to assume and thus prepare for the worst. The metal worker from Denesk had overplayed his hand. In an attempt to cover his own country's weaknesses through saber-addling and bravado, all he did was to ensure that his richer, more technologically advanced adversary produced more and more weapons that left Khrushchev and his Soviet Union further and further behind. By 1962, the Russians would have a mere 20 ICBMs capable of reaching out and touching the American homeland. However, they did have 700 medium-range ballistic missiles, the R-12 with a range of about 1200 miles somewhat less than the Jupiter, and the intermediate range R-14 with a range of 2,800 miles, just marginally better than the American Polaris. Now of course, all of this was moot since the Soviet Union didn't have anywhere to base these medium-range missiles that would put them in range of the continental United States. And then, Fidel Castro came down from the mountains. Jupiter missiles based in Turkey could be deployed right up against the Russian border, but it was a long flight to Moscow. Medium-range missiles based in Cuba would be 90 miles to the south of US territory, but from there they could hit Washington and everywhere in between, a communist Cuba suddenly meant that the huge majority of Soviet nuclear missiles, 700 of them, were suddenly in play. Now of course, this would depend on getting to Cuba, but this problem did not overly concern Nikita Khrushchev who'd survived 20 years of Joseph Stalin's paranoia through sheer animal cunning. Kennedy had balked at the Bay of Pigs and achieved at best a tie in Berlin. One of Khrushchev's top advisors described JFK as "too young, intellectual, not prepared for decision-making in crisis situations, too intelligent and too weak." As the dust from the construction of the wall was settling in Berlin, Khrushchev himself told Soviet officials that, "I know for certain that Kennedy doesn't have a strong background, nor generally speaking does he have the courage to stand up to a serious challenge." In a conversation with his son Sergei shortly after, he predicted that when push came to shove regarding Cuba, Kennedy would "make a fuss, make more of a fuss, and then agree." And so, armed with all of the overconfidence that Hitler displayed after the Munich agreement, Khrushchev launched his own gambit, one that would bring the world to the absolute precipice beyond which lay the thermonuclear abyss. Khrushchev's first step was securing the cooperation of Fidel Castro. And having recently weathered the near-certain invasion of his island by the behemoth to the north, it did not take a lot of armed twisting on Khrushchev's part to convince El Commandante of the desirability of his own nuclear deterrent. Both agreed that in order for this plan to succeed, it would have to be a fate-accomplay meaning that the presence of medium-range nuclear missiles could not be revealed until the missiles themselves were operational. That both of them thought such a thing was possible even likely, gives a good indication to the degree with which both communist leaders underestimated not only John Kennedy, but the entire U.S. military and intelligence services. Meskirovka, denial and deception would be the key, and coming off of the striking failures to maintain deniability in both the U-2 and the Bay of Pigs debacles, this was curious reasoning indeed. The Kennedy administration began to pay attention when intelligence reported the installation of several surface-to-air missile batteries, arrayed in familiar patterns at remote and seemingly unimportant locations in Cuba. Now these SAM installations did not pose the slightest direct threat to the U.S. however. The Soviets had always deployed these assets and deployed them in exactly this way whenever they had something important to protect. As early as August 1962, brand-new CIA director John McCone, Kennedy's picture plays Eisenhower's intelligence chief Alan Delas, was earning his pay. Wailing all possible scenarios, McCone could only come to one conclusion namely that the anti-aircraft missile installations "made sense only if Moscow intended to use them as a shield for ballistic missiles aimed at the United States." On August 10th, he wrote a memo to the president advising him of this case. conclusion. The first of the shorter range S-12 missiles arrived by sea on the night of September 8th and another shipment came in a week later. Yet another twist of fate entered the equation, the United States had maintained regular U-2 reconnaissance flights over Cuba ever since the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion but on August 20th on the other side of the world. An Air Force U-2 mistakenly wandered into Soviet airspace above Sakhalin Island just north of Japan. The Soviets were particularly tender when it came to Sakhalin as the world would discover to its horror 21 years later. The Soviet Union filed a formal protest and the United States apologized for the transgression nine days later. Another U-2, this one operated by Chinese nationalists in Taiwan, was shot down over Western mainland China. Concerned that losing a U-2 over Cuba would be yet another diplomatic catastrophe. Secretary of State Dean Rusk pressed for and got a severe restriction in U-2 flights over Cuba at precisely the time that they were most needed. This critical five-week period of self-imposed blindness would later be known as the "photo gap." At the end of September a Navy reconnaissance flight detected suspicious-looking crates on the deck of the Soviet ship Kazemov bound for Cuba. It was clear that something big was happening and what that something might be became clearer every day. U-2 over flights of Cuba were approved on October 9th but five consecutive days of solid cloud cover over the targets meant that the first U-2 flight occurred on October 14th when Air Force Major Richard Heiser flew the Dragon Lady over a string of potential targets and returned a few hours later with 928 razor-sharp images. Working throughout the night the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center prepared a briefing which was presented to the President early the next morning. It was now October 15th. At 6.30 pm Eastern time the President convened an emergency meeting of nine members of the National Security Council plus five additional advisers. The existence of medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba caught the entire administration by surprise. No one had dreamed that cruise jet could be so reckless. Six possible responses were soon on the table. They were in order of increasing seriousness and increasing risk of all-out war. One, do nothing. Defense Secretary McNamara had estimated the Soviet arsenal at around 300 warheads from a statistical point of view. An additional 40 warheads in Cuba would not significantly alter the balance. Two, rely on diplomacy. The Soviets might be persuaded to remove the missiles through diplomatic channels. Three, split the communist nations by making Castro an offer he could not refuse in an attempt to bribe him away from this Soviet gambit. Four, launch full-scale air strikes against all detected missile installations. This was the first option that would certainly result in the deaths of both Cuban and Soviet technicians. Five, blockade the island in order to prevent any new missiles from reaching Cuba and continue to tighten the blockade until Castro and Khrushchev collapsed under the economic pressure. The initiation of a blockade has long been recognized as an act of war. And finally option six, a massive US invasion of the island complete with regime change. Certainly thousands of Cubans and Americans would be killed in such an invasion. Kennedy weighed his options as the crisis moved inexorably forward. Pr either the air strike or the invasion option to be effective, they would have to take place before the missile sites won active because once operational they might be launched at any moment and air strikes might not get all of the missiles at any of the nine locations. Furthermore, there was the possibility of additional missile sites that had remained hidden. Back to over twenty second, Kennedy had come to a decision and scheduled network time for an address to the nation on the deepening crisis for early that evening. It also gave Kennedy time to place a phone call to one of the only two people on Earth who could fully understand the weight on Kennedy's shoulders. A few hours before his speech, President Kennedy called Ike. Both agreed that once installed nothing could persuade Chris Jeff to recall the missiles short of trading the Cuban missiles for West Berlin. At seven pm on October 22nd, Kennedy addressed the nation and it did not go far to steady millions of rapidly-fraining nerves. 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 four-retariatory response upon the Soviet Union. Well, there it was. In unmistakable plain English, there would be no fig leaf for the Soviets to hide behind. Should any of those missiles be launched? Now, I personally believe that this was the single most important move that Kennedy made. He made it clear to the Kremlin that if the others who dropped and missiles started flying in the Western Hemisphere, the Russian people would burn along with millions of Cubans and Americans. He then revealed which of his six options he decided upon. To hold this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound to Cuba from whatever nation or port where they found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons be turned back. This quarantine will be extended if needed to other types of cargo and carriers. We are not at this time, however, denying the necessities of life as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948. Now, this was artfully phrased because while the Soviets had blockaded Berlin in 1948, Kennedy's proposed action was not a blockade but merely a quarantine. Once again, with the entire world staring into the abyss, the court of public opinion not to mention culpability according to international law had to be addressed. As Kennedy was giving his speech, the armed forces of the United States went to DEF CON3 and with every passing hour, Soviet freighters came closer and closer to the exclusion zone. On October 24th, the Soviet news agency TAS went public with the telegram sent from Khrushchev to Kennedy which condemned "outright piracy" on the part of the United States and went on to state that the quarantine was an act of aggression and that "the Soviet Union cannot afford not to decline the despotic demands of the USA." Khrushchev concluded by telling the Americans that he had ordered all Soviet vessels bound for Cuba to "ignore" any effort at interdiction on the part of the United States Navy. On the night of October 25th, the United States escalated to DEF CON2. Defense condition 1 was open nuclear warfare for the only confirmed time in our history. Nuclear armed B-52s were constantly airborne. 1/8 of the strategic air commands 1400 bombers were in the air at any given time with the rest of them on a 15-minute alert. 145 intercontinental ballistic missiles were spun up to full readiness and 23 B-52s each armed with multiple megaton yield H bombs were dispatched to holding patterns just outside of Soviet airspace. Now the question was simple. What would the Russians do when confronted with US naval vessels with orders to board and inspect their cargo holds? Earlier that morning, USS Essex and USS Gearing had attempted to intercept the tanker bookarest but were unable to do so. Confident that it was not carrying any Soviet weapons, they allowed the ship to pass. At 5.43 pm, a US destroyer proceeded to board and inspect the Lebanese freighter Maroussha. Now the destroying question was the USS Joseph P. Kennedy named after the president's older brother. By the morning of the 26th, Kennedy had come to the conclusion that only a full-scale invasion of Cuba would be able to pry the missiles off of the island. Far from keeping this a secret, Kennedy knew that only the certainty of a US response would cause Khrushchev to order his supply ships to reverse course. Now this needless to say was not at all, but Khrushchev expected from the young American brawman. The pressure on Khrushchev became almost unimaginable not only from the threat of nuclear war with the United States but also from within his own polypural which had not been previously informed of this recklessness. At 1 pm on the 26th, Khrushchev sent another of his long and increasingly erratic telegrams, offering to discuss removing the missiles from Cuba in exchange for the US removing their Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy. Khrushchev apparently did not realize that US military planners had long considered the Jupiter obsolete its role being increasingly taken over by the Polaris missile sub-nates. So here, finally, was a crack-up daylight. On the morning of the 27th, US Air Force major Rudolph Anderson took off from a Koy Air Force base and turned south. Right around noon, a surface-to-air missile was launched from the Cuban mainland. The explosion destroyed the U-2 and killed major Anderson. Now this sent the pressure even higher if such a thing was possible. A low-level reconnaissance flight of two F-8 Crusaders was also fired upon. Estonishingly, it was later discovered that the Kremlin had not authorized either response. In fact, the Soviets had specifically instructed the defense batteries not to open fire on America. aircraft. It had been Fidel's brother, Raoul Castro, who'd ordered anti-aircraft defenses to fire on the two F-8s, and incredibly, the U-2 had been shut down by a low-level Soviet commander of one of the Sam installations he had acted on his own initiative. You've drawn first blood, Attorney General Robert Kennedy told the Soviet Ambassador and Toli de Brennan. The President has decided against advice, not to respond militarily to that attack, but he, meaning de Brennan, should know that if another plane was shut at, we would take out all the Sam's anti-aircraft, and that would almost surely be followed by an invasion, unquote. It's likely that the shock and horror of hearing that contrary to his strict disorders, three American aircraft had been fired upon, and a major in the United States Air Force had been killed, well that was the straw that finally broke Khrushchev's nerve. Given the stakes, it seems awfully trite to simply say that Khrushchev blinked first, but in the end, that's what it really boiled down to. John F. Kennedy had convinced the Soviet leader that he was ready to go all the way, and that was enough to get Khrushchev to accept what was in fact a pretty good deal for the Soviets. In her even negotiations with the White House, he agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange for the United States, removing the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy as well as an official assurance that if he did so, the US would not invade the island. It was on paper a pretty good deal for Kennedy as well. The Jupiter missiles were scheduled to be removed in the not-too-distant future anyway. The thing of it is, of course, that this didn't just happen on paper. In Khrushchev ordered the Soviet freighters heading to Cuba to reverse course. He did so in front of the entire planet. Even though the deal ending the crisis was a missile swap, the Jupiter's would be quietly removed in the months ahead while Khrushchev was retreating now. In front of the world, it was a worse Soviet humiliation than the Berlin airlift and the entire power structure of the Soviet Union, both internally and internationally, was predicated upon Soviet infallibility. The Russian bear would retreat to its cave for much of the remaining decade, licking his wounds where he was most tender, namely his pride. And Nikita Khrushchev was finished. He was not removed from office right away, of course, that would have compounded the humiliation, but two years later, October of 1964, a power play by the up-and-coming Leonid Brezhnev, removed Khrushchev from power in precisely the same manner that he himself had grabbed it in the coup that had deposed Malenkov and saw Beria executed. But times had changed. As Brezhnev made his move, security forces arrested Khrushchev and advised him not to resist. He was far from resisting by then. That same evening, Khrushchev called fellow Stalin survivor Anastas Mikoyin. The two had been old friends or at least as close to being friends of Soviet politics would allow. I'm old and tired, lamented Khrushchev. Let them cope by themselves. I've done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn't suit us anymore and suggesting he would retire, not even a wet spot would have remained where we'd been standing? Now, everything is different. The fear is gone and we can talk as equals. That's my contribution, and I won't put up a fight. Nor did he. The Central Committee voted to accept Khrushchev's voluntary retirement. The man who had signed as many death warrants as any of them was allowed to retire to his dacha. We fell into a deep and long-lasting depression. When one of Khrushchev's grandsons was asked what Nikita was doing now that he'd retired, the boy answered "Grandfather cries." He remained a non-person until his death from a heart attack on September 11, 1971. Probdom, the state newspaper of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics, announced his death with a single paragraph. Quote, "The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and the Council of Ministers of the USSR announced with sorrow that on September 11, 1971, after severe and long illness, the former First Secretary of the Central Committee and Chairman of the Council of Ministers, special pensioner of Nikita Sergei of the Khrushchev, died in his 78th year. Of course, John F. Kennedy did not witness any of this, but as wife Jackie did, after she'd removed the blood-stained pink jacket and pillbox hat she'd worn on her motor key through Dallas with her husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the president of the United States of America, on November 22, 1963." A One Brief Final Post script. On the final day of the crisis, October 27, 1963, a Soviet diesel-electric-fox-truck class submarine named B-59 approached the quarantine line while submerged. Having run too deep to monitor radiotrophic, B-59's captain, Valentin Savitsky, was considering the possibility, if not the likelihood, that Armageddon had begun and his family had been turned into radioactive ash. Now, in order to warn B-59 that it was entering the exclusion zone, a U.S. Navy destroyer dropped several signaling charges, their practice depth charges with only the explosive power of a single hand grenade. What the Navy did not know was that B-59 had never experienced signaling charges before, that B-59 had standing orders to return fire if fired upon in the form of depth charges, and that return fire would be delivered by a single torpedo. The only one on board with a nuclear warhead. Soviet Navy standard procedure for the release of nuclear weapons called for the ship's political officer to confirm the captain's decision to launch. Now, with air running out, Captain Savitsky ordered the firing of the special weapon and Communist Party Apparachik Ivan Maslenikov enthusiastically agreed, but on this particular submarine, on this particular day, a third officer was on board. Although technically second in command of B-59, exceptional bravery during the nuclear disaster aboard the first Soviet ballistic missile submarine, K-19 had caused the executive officer to be in command of the entire four boat flattila, B-59, B-4, B-36, and B-130. So for this one time only, on this one sub only, a third officer would need to endorse the launch of the nuclear torpedo. Vessely Archipov ordered the order of the Red Banner for 20 years of patriotic service and the order of the Red Star, given for outstanding heroism while under fire, refused to endorse the order to launch the nuclear torpedo at the U.S. Navy vessel dropping practice depth charges from above. A violent argument ensued between Archipov who refused to fire the weapon and Captain Savitsky and political officer Maslenikov, who demanded that it was his duty given the standing orders issued to a Soviet submarine. Whatever it was that had won him such great respect aboard K-19, B-19y Archipov managed to retain enough of it to slowly convince Captain Savitsky not to fire the weapon and to surface the boat before they died of his fixation. This they did, B-59 bobbing and rolling in disgrace surrounded by American helicopters and warships exactly as K-19 had done years before. Upon their return to Russia, a Soviet admiral told them that it would have been better if you'd gone down with your ship. They submitted their report to Defense Minister Andre Grechko, when Grechko came to realize that they had been detected by the U.S. Navy and forced a surface rather than responding with the special weapon that would have undoubtedly died at World War III. He flew into such a rage that he tore off his glasses and smashed them repeatedly on the table before storming out of the room. Nevertheless, Archipov was eventually promoted to rear admiral and went on to become head of the Kirov Naval Academy. The died of kidney cancer in 1998, very likely caused by the radiation dose he'd suffered as he fought to save K-19 so many years before. K-19's captain, Nikolai Zatyev, died of lung cancer just nine days later. It sounds too amazing to be true, but this really did happen during the Cold War. And what was even more incredible was that this exact same scenario would happen again decades later. Now however, the attention of the world would move from both tropical Cuba and dismal West Berlin. Immediately after the catastrophe of the Vienna Summit, John Kennedy was determined to draw a line in the sand and prevent a communist victory. He told James Reston of the New York Times, quote, "Now we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place." The Cold War, what we saw, is written and presented by Bill Whittle, produced by Robert Sterling, directed by Jonathan Hay. Executive producer is Jeremy Boring. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our associate producer is Katie Swinerton. Post-production producer Alex Singaro, story producer Jared Sashel, edited by Matthew Scheller, audio recorded by Mike Koromina, original music and mixed by Kyle Perrin, designed by Cynthia Angulo. The Cold War, what we saw, is an esoteric radio theater production copyright, esoteric radio theater 2020.