military advice was for getting on with the job
and striking at Cuba; the military were chafing at
the bit. Perhaps in the end there was one good
thing that came out of the previous year’s Bay of
Pigs disaster: Kennedy was not going to be
pushed again and his innate conservatism and
caution prevailed. After the crisis was past, he
showed commendable restraint in not trying to
exult.
The drama of the days of crisis and con-
frontation can now be briefly told. On 14 October
1962, a U-2 spy plane took photographs of pos-
sible missile construction sites. Interpretation of
these photographs was not easy, but assistance
was received from an unlikely source, from Oleg
Penkovsky, a Soviet spy then in Moscow, who
was passing information to Western intelligence
services. (He was later caught and executed by
the Russians.) The president was first shown the
photographs, now interpreted on the morning of
16 October. They provided incontrovertible evi-
dence, he was told, that the Russians were con-
structing offensive missile bases. That was the start
of the emergency; the White House, where sus-
picions had been aroused, was nevertheless sur-
prised by the incontrovertible facts. The US
experts on the USSR, on whose advice Kennedy
had relied, were taken unawares. Indeed, before
September, Washington’s worries had been
focused on Soviet threats against West Berlin
rather than Cuba; in the previous year Washington
had even feared it might be faced with having to
abandon Berlin to the Russians or go to war.
The thirteen days of crisis that followed the
discovery of the sites were punctuated by intense
debates among the inner circle of advisers. They
were constituted as the Executive Committee of
the National Security Council, or Ex. Comm. for
short. From the first meeting on 16 October until
the end of the crisis the assumption was that the
US would get the missiles out of Cuba by diplo-
macy or force, whatever the risk. Throughout
those tense days there were continuing rounds of
freewheeling discussion: all possible options were
examined. These ranged from what was referred
to as a ‘surgical air strike’ against the missile sites,
to proposals for a naval blockade, an air strike on
the missile bases and an all-out invasion of Cuba.
The military favoured an air strike on the missile
bases. Robert Kennedy, who also at first had sug-
gested creating a pretext for attacking Cuba, later
opposed this option; he then likened such a sur-
prise raid to the sneak Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941.
Yet Kennedy and his advisers felt themselves to
be under inexorable pressure of time. A decision
would have to be reached. If allowed to continue
undisturbed, US intelligence calculated, the
Russians would complete the installation of the
missiles and be able to arm them with nuclear
warheads in fourteen days. In the end a majority
of Ex. Comm. favoured the naval blockade as a
first step. The final decision could be made only
by the president. By 21 October Kennedy came
down in favour of the blockade option. Up to this
point the proof of the installation of missiles had
been kept a secret in Washington, as had the dis-
cussions in the White House about how best to
deal with it. The missiles would soon be ready for
firing: decisions had to be reached. No one in
Washington knew whether they were equipped
with nuclear warheads, but it was thought safer
to presume that some warheads had already
reached Cuba. In fact, Soviet archives later
revealed that some forty-two nuclear warheads
were on the island but under exclusive Soviet
control. Khrushchev did not allow Castro to have
his finger on the trigger. An argument against an
air strike was that possibly not all the missile sites
had been located.
On the next day, 22 October, the president
delivered a sombre television broadcast to the
American people at 7 p.m. He announced his
decision to impose a blockade around Cuba as an
initialstep and coupled it with the demand that
the missiles had to be removed. He also explicitly
warned the Russians not to attempt a counter-
move against West Berlin. The broadcast was very
dramatic. He warned that Soviet nuclear missiles
and bombers based on Cuba were ‘an explicit
threat to the peace and security of all the
Americas’, and added that the Soviet Union had
no need of missile sites outside the Soviet Union.
Finally, he accused the Soviet leaders of deliber-
ate lying when they had assured him that no
offensive weapons would be based on Cuba. That