The Cuban missile crisis occurred on October 16~29, 1962.
What do you remember about that fateful time? Well, if you are not at least 65
years old, you don’t have any memories of it. But it was a scary time for June
and me as we were in our mid-20s then.
In September 1962, I started my doctoral studies at Southern
Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and our family of four was living some 50 miles
away at Ekron, Ky., where I was pastor of the Baptist church in that small town.
At that time, we didn’t have CNN or other 24/7 television
news to keep us informed—in fact, we didn’t even have a television set in our
home. But we kept up by the daily newspaper and radio.
In the narrow daily spaces of her five-year diary, June
mentioned the crisis in Cuba on three days in a row. She wrote, “The U.S. has
put a quarantine on Cuba” (10/22); “The Cuba situation is very serious”
(10/23); “Our Cuban situation is so bad” (10/Oct. 24).
To cut down on driving time and to give me more time for
study, on Tuesday and Thursday nights I stayed in seminary campus housing. On
the morning of Thursday, Oct. 25, I went to Louisville as usual—and it was
probably that afternoon when I thought seriously about going back home.
If there was going to be a nuclear attack, which seemed to
be a distinct possibility, I certainly wanted to be with my family.
Fortunately, both President Kennedy and USSR Premier Khrushchev
made domestically unpopular decisions and averted nuclear war. What a tremendous
relief that was!*
“My Cuban Missile Crisis” is chapter 12 of Daniel
Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine (2017). He is seven years older
than I, so that notable book was published when he was 86. (His leaked Pentagon
Papers was published in 1971, when he was 40.)
Ellsberg finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1962, but he was
already working for the RAND
Corporation and was a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House.
As such, he was closely involved in discussions directly related to the Cuban missile
crisis.
In “Cuba, The Real Story,” his 13th chapter,
Ellsberg states, “The fact is that on Saturday, October 27, 1962, a chain of
events was in motion that might have come close to ending civilization” (p. 194).
The situation in Ukraine now is not nearly as dire as
it was in Cuba in 1962, mainly because Russian President Putin has threatened
only to use tactical nuclear weapons, not strategic ones such as the ones
central to the threat 60 years ago.
(Strategic nuclear weapons are roughly ten times more
powerful than tactical ones, and it is only the former that are designed to
produce “mutually assured destruction,” with the ironic acronym MAD.)
Yet, way leads on to way and there is no telling what damage
might result—in Ukraine, in Europe, and even in the whole world—from even minimal use of tactical nuclear warheads.
Last week during a televised address, Russian President Vladimir
Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons on Ukraine.
Then on Sunday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that
U.S. officials have communicated to the Russians that there will be
"catastrophic consequences for Russia if they use nuclear weapons in
Ukraine."
A big question now is whether Putin will be willing to lose
face the way Khrushchev did in 1963.**
Let’s hope and pray he will.
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* For
factual information about the nuclear threat in 1962, I highly recommend “The Cuban Missile Crisis
Explained in 20 Minutes,” an informative YouTube video.)
** In an interview with Norman Cousins in 1963, Khrushchev
said, “What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that
though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the
national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?” (cited by Ellsberg on p. 212).
The
words at the end are probably those of Danish poet Piet Hein (1905~96), although
there are sites on the internet that say they are from his distant ancestor, the
Dutch admiral Piet Pieterszoon Hein (1577~1629), which I think is highly unlikely.
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Well, I don’t have access to my computer at the moment, so I am going to have to respond as anonymous. I turned 15 on September 30, 1962, and frankly I cannot remember any of the details of the Cuban missile crisis except the tension in the air among adults. I was working quite a few hours every week as a car hop and going to school, of course, and interested in girls, etc. So I am not in a position to remember details very much. What I do remember is all of those air raid drills we did in school, curling up in the coat closet, curling up under our desks, and the monthly testing of air raid sirens. I think those exercises in school gave us children a false sense of security as if we could somehow be protected from the worst of nuclear war. I also remember talk of people building air raid shelters in their yards. I did not know anybody personally who did that, though. Anyway, thanks for your thoughtful blog today. My only disappointment is that here on my birthday you wrote about anything other than me. LOL! —Anton Jacobs
ReplyDeleteHappy birthday, Anton! (I didn't remember that today was your birthday, and evidently Facebook didn't know as you are not on the list of my friends with birthdays today.)
DeleteI am too old to remember the "duck and cover" exercises in school--meaning not that I have forgotten but that when I was a schoolboy schools were not doing that--at least my school wasn't. Although I didn't know the man personally, the following (apparently true) story was told about a man who lived in my home county in northwest Missouri (just a couple of miles from where my Uncle Curt lived) who built an air raid shelter next his home. One of his neighbors reportedly asked in case of an actual air raid whether he could join him in the shelter. The man said he was sorry, but there wouldn't be enough room but for him and his family. Then the neighbor said, "What if I get there first?"
That was a frightening kind of scenario, well depicted in the movie "The Day After," people resorting to murder for their own family and friends. I remember when I was studying C.H. Henry, somewhere in one of his articles, maybe in Christianity Today, he said that a Christian would not be obligated to share one's air-raid shelter with others, but if he did, you can be sure there would be a Bible in the shelter. This was one of the most bizarre things I've ever read by a Christian.
DeleteP.S.: Thanks for the birthday wish. I took my birthday off Facebook.
Oops! I should have said Carl F.H. Henry.
DeleteI know that the Cuban missile crisis was in a perilous time. But, somehow, this time feels a lot more perilous to me. Perhaps it is because I know more than I did in 1962. And it is astounding what one human being holding the reins of power of a country can do to derail the whole world! Much less largely destroy civilization through something like nuclear war. —Anton
ReplyDeleteWell, the present crisis may be more serious than the one in 1962, but it certainly doesn't seem like it to me. The mass media and people in general now don't show anything like the terror that was felt so widely in 1962, at least in this country. One of the main differences (as I pointed out in my post) is the threat now is primarily the use of tactical nuclear weapons whereas it was strategic which were threatened to be used in 1962. Of course, it could be argued that probably Khrushchev was more emotionally balanced than Putin is.
DeleteThe first comments received this morning (before 6:30!) were from local Thinking Friend Joseph Ndifor, who was born in Cameroon but who has lived and worked in the U.S. for many years now. He wrote,
ReplyDelete"I believe that America's foreign policy for a unipolar world (in which it is the only dominant power) isn't resolving the world's problems as much it did during the Cold War. I wasn't born in 1962, when the Cuban Missiles crisis occurred, but I've read about it. JFK's ambitious foreign policy, which was more to demonstrate to Republican hawks back home that he was tough, had a lot to do to what led to that 1962 crisis, something that I see similar to what Putin is doing in Ukraine. But while both JFK and Russian leader chose compromise over Cuba (the U.S. agreed to pull away its Jupiter missiles which were in Turkey and pointed towards the USSR at the time), I don't see that in the current crisis.
Thanks, Joseph, for your comments, and I take them seriously as I know how well-read you are. I think you are right that JFK's strong stance against Khrushchev was due in large part to the hawkishness of many of the political leaders around him--and that was the reason his compromise (agreeing to remove the missiles in Turkey) was criticized by many of those leaders (as I indicated in my post). And, yes, my main concern about the current situation is the apparent unlikeliness of either Putin or Zelenskyy (or Biden) to make any compromise.
DeleteDavid Nelson, another local Thinking Friend, send the following comments by email just after 7 a.m.:
ReplyDelete"I was in Excelsior High School in Norwalk, California, at the time of the Cuban Crisis. The most influential teacher at the time was my speech and debate coach and he was ready to respond in a nuclear way. I realize looking back in later years that he was a military hawk. He invited his students to get involved in politics and I responded. My first activity was with a very conservative local candidate. Little did they know that I would become a pacifist and liberal socialist.
"I remain baffled about our obsession with military power and nuclear war. I often argue that humanity is advancing, but our inability to find alternatives to violence in solving problems is the strongest argument to prove me wrong. I appreciate your reflection, Leroy, and agree that today is not as serious. The threat of nuclear war remains."
Thanks, David, for your comments as one who remembers well the Cuban missile crisis. In my response to Joseph (above) I mentioned the hawkishness of political leaders, but you point out that many people across the country, including high school speech and debate coaches, were also hawks and did not like JFK's initial compromise.
DeleteThen I received an email from Thinking friend Glenn Hinson in Kentucky with these forthright comments:
ReplyDelete"In 1962 I joined the faculty at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The Cuban Missile Crisis unnerved me. At that time I was taking students to the Abbey of Gethsemani. Thomas Merton was obsessed with the threat of nuclear destruction and was writing his book about it entitled 'Peace in a Post-Christian Era.' The Cuban Missile Crisis was foremost in our discussions in his hermitage, which began in 1961. When the standoff occurred, it scared me and it heightened my sense of doom. I prayed that Kennedy and Khrushchev would act rationally. I thought Kennedy would, but I didn’t have confidence that Khrushchev would. The affair scared the shit out of me, as it did Merton. He finished his book in 1963, but the church authorities wouldn’t let him publish it."
Thanks, Dr. Hinson, for sharing your memories and feelings from October 1962. This year I am reading (a page a day) "A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals" (2004). In October, there is only entry chosen from his October 1962 journal after the beginning of the Cuban missile crisis. On Oct. 20 he wrote, "The United States is now spending more each year on armaments than was spent in any year before 1942 for the entire national budget."
DeletePatricia and I and our two daughters lived in Seminary Village in Louisville during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Seminary Village was adjacent to the RR tracks, and we heard Florida bound trains carrying implements of war all night long. We considered just getting in our car and making the 1,000 mi. trip home to Tulia, TX. But what if nuclear war broke out while we were enroute? Would there be anything left to go home to? Tulia is only 50 miles or so from the Pantex plant near Amarillo which is a prime nuclear target. Scary days indeed! What about today? Both Kennedy and Kruschev ate a little crow to avoid MAD. Would Biden and Putin do something comparable? The current situation is not as immediate as in 1962, but situations can change rapidly. Potentially just as dangerous as 1962. But not the same degree of scary.
ReplyDeletePS: I was in the first semester of the first year of six in studies at SBTS.
DeleteThanks for sharing this, Charles. My wife and I and our two children lived in Seminary Village for the first time during the 1963-64 academic year, and I remember the RR tracks well. But I didn't know about the Florida bound trains carrying implements of war all night long during the Cuban missile crisis. (In 1964-65 I was pastor of the Clay City Baptist Church in eastern Kentucky, and a few times I rode the train from Winchester to Louisville, and just a little way west of Seminary Village they would stop and let me get off near Crescent Hill Baptist Church, from where as you know it was just a short walk to the seminary campus.)
DeleteA few minutes ago, Thinking Friend Eric Dollard in Chicago sent the following comments:
ReplyDelete"Thanks, Leroy, for bringing up memories of the missile crisis. I remember the Cuban missile crisis and it was scary. I was in the 9th grade at the time. We got our news from the Kansas City Star and television. Fortunately, the situation was resolved reasonably. The USSR removed the missiles from Cuba and we removed our missiles from Turkey, so in a sense it was a victory for the Soviets and for civilization.
"Aside from the insanity of possessing and using nuclear weapons, our Cuba policy at the time was a disaster--and it is still a disaster, although Obama made some improvements.
"What we see now, as you point out, is not so much the threat of worldwide nuclear war, but the real threat that the Russians may use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. For Russia, this would be an astounding blunder as the reaction from the rest of the world, and even many Russians themselves, would be complete outrage. Putin is currently cornered as he cannot win the war in Ukraine with conventional weapons, and the use of tactical nuclear weapons would reap a tremendous blowback, including those 'catastrophic consequences' threatened by NATO. But Putin is not making rational decisions, so anything is possible.
"Putin's best bet, in light of his ambitions, is to try to stabilize his frontlines. The Russians still have enough conventional weaponry to do this, but they have a severe shortage of trained personnel. His call up of 300,000 men will probably not help very much. The Ukrainian army has also suffered considerable losses, so a stalemate may still be the outcome without any nuclear weapons being used."
Thanks for your pertinent comments, Eric. Yes, from the beginning of the Cuban revolution under Castro, which overthrew a corrupt regime, the U.S. policy toward Cuba until now, in varying degrees, has been highly problematic.
DeleteIn reflecting on Khrushchev's desire to put missiles in Cuba, I remember hearing that at one point, maybe going back that far, that every nuclear warhead that was not in the USSR was pointed toward the USSR. No wonder K. and so many who lived in the Soviet Union felt paranoid.
In 1962, my second or third-grade year, we lived within ten miles of Vandenberg Air Force Base, a SAC base with Minuteman installations, in Lompoc, California. Yes, we had the bomb drills, "ducked and covered" under our school desks, and otherwise couldn't know the exercises wouldn't help if we were so close to the base. Dad worked at the missile sites as a maintenance mechanic in the gantries, and I don't recall any mention of the crisis from Mom or Dad.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jerry, for sharing your memories about the Cuban missile crisis. My guess is that your parents were greatly concerned about that crisis but didn't want to worry you so didn't talk about it in your presence.
DeleteI remember how the “fallout” of the Cuban missile crisis continued for years afterward. My best friend’s father built his family a bomb shelter—and later they moved to the Virgin Islands. My fourth-grade teacher told the class we probably wouldn’t live to experience adulthood.
ReplyDeleteIn an interview for the 2003 documentary “Fog of War,” Robert McNamara credited Tommy Thompson, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, for avoiding nuclear holocaust by persuading President Kennedy to take a soft approach with Khrushchev. Thompson and his wife had practically lived with Khrushchev and his wife on several occasions — he knew Khrushchev needed to save face and needed to be able to tell his people that he had prevented Kennedy from invading Cuba and taking out Castro.
Kennedy had been saying they’d never get the missiles out by negotiation. The majority of his advisors were calling for an invasion of Cuba. Thompson convinced Kennedy to negotiate. If Thompson hadn’t been there on Oct. 27 and found the right words to change Kennedy’s mind … As McNamara put it: “It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came [so] close.”
Thinking Friend David Johnson in Alabama wrote,
ReplyDelete"I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis well. I would have been 13 years old. However, I remember, well before that in elementary school, we would push all our desks together to form one big table and crawl underneath them during periodic air raid drills. The threat of nuclear war was around all my growing-up years and was very frightful for a child. There was a Boeing plant that made military planes in our city. Our house was on a hillside overlooking the plant. I had constantly recurring nightmares of looking up and seeing a mushroom cloud down in the valley below. The strange (good) thing was, however, that I had that dream so often than I got the point that if I saw a mushroom cloud, I would tell myself, “This is a dream,” and wake up. Incidentally, the house we live in now was built in the 60s and has an authentic bomb shelter in the back yard. When I went down in it, I found a box labeled 'Radiation Detection Kit,' but alas, the kit was no longer in the box."
Thanks for sharing this, Dave. That was terrible that you had recurring nightmares about atomic explosions--but good that you could tell yourself even as you were asleep that it was only a dream. -- That's interesting that your house now has a bomb shelter in the back yard. That is quite different from the house in Fukuoka where we moved in 1968: it had an authentic baptistry in the back yard, constructed (below surface) when the Culpeppers lived there.
DeleteA couple of days ago I received the following comments from local Thinking Friend Marilyn Peot, who is a bit older than I:
ReplyDelete"I am not responding [to most of your blog posts], but I want you to know I'm learning so much.
"And being my age you are reminding me of 'those days' that threatened
and gave us all times of fear...and hoping against hope.
"Are we not there again?
"So often I hear "where is God in all this"?
"My own experience tells me we have evidence in so many ways that more folks than ever are now listening to the small still voice that has the answers...There are now more mystics and those that choose Silence and Meditation than ever before.
"I recall Kierkegaard's words: 'Create Silence' and Arthur Moore's words: "There are those who make a difference when they listen to the small still voice within."
"So I still have hope and join those who deeply listen."
Thanks, Marilyn, for your comments. I am always encouraged by your forward-looking, hopeful words. Indeed, there are doubtlessly a multitude of people who are listening to "the small still voice within" and are harbingers of a better future--but they mostly are not the ones who make the news and so are largely unknown. But their presence in the world is certainly of great importance--as is yours!
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