1. IR201 INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
COLD WAR: THE WAR IN VIETNAM AND CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

3. Summary
The Vietnam War is the commonly used name for the Second Indochina War, 1954–1973.
It also refers to the period when the United States and other members of the SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) joined the forces of the Republic of South Vietnam in contesting communist forces comprised of South Vietnamese guerrillas and regular-force units, generally known as Viet Cong (VC), and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).
The U.S. had the largest foreign military presence and basically directed the war from 1965 to 1968.
For this reason, in Vietnam today it is known as the American War. It was a direct result of the First Indochina War (1946–1954) between France, which claimed Vietnam as a colony, and the communist forces then known as Viet Minh.
In 1973, a "third" Vietnam war began—a continuation, actually—between North and South Vietnam but without significant U.S. involvement. It ended with communist victory in April 1975.

4. SEATO Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 1954
In September of 1954, the United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO.
The purpose of the organization was to prevent communism from gaining ground in the region.
Although called the “Southeast Asia Treaty Organization,” only two Southeast Asian countries became members. The Philippines joined in part because of its close ties with the United States and in part out of concern over the nascent communist insurgency threatening its own government.
Thailand, similarly, joined and expressed concern about the potential for Chinese communist subversion on its own soil.

5. SEATO
The rest of the region was far less concerned about the threat of communism to internal stability.
Burma and Indonesia both preferred to maintain their neutrality rather than join the organization.
Malaya (including Singapore) found it politically difficult to give formal support to the organization, though through its ties with Great Britain it learned of key developments.
Finally, the terms of the Geneva Agreements of 1954 signed after the fall of French Indochina prevented Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from joining any international military alliance, though these countries were ultimately included in the area protected under SEATO and granted “observers” status.
(The Geneva Conference (April 26 – July 20, 1954) was a conference which took place in Geneva, Switzerland, whose purpose was to attempt to find a way to settle outstanding issues in the Korean peninsula and discuss the possibility of restoring peace in Indochina)

6. SEATO
Most of the SEATO member states were countries located elsewhere but with an interest in the region or the organization.
Australia and New Zealand were interested in Asian affairs because of their geographic position in the Pacific. Great Britain and France had long maintained colonies in the region and were interested in developments in the greater Indochina region.
U.S. officials believed Southeast Asia to be a crucial frontier in the fight against communist expansion, so it viewed SEATO as essential to its global Cold War policy of containment.
Headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand, SEATO had only a few formal functions. It maintained no military forces of its own, but the organization hosted joint military exercises for member states each year.
SEATO worked to strengthen the economic foundations and living standards of the Southeast Asian States. It sponsored a variety of meetings and exhibitions on cultural, religious and historical topics, and the non-Asian member states sponsored fellowships for Southeast Asian scholars.

7. SEATO
Beyond its activities, the SEATO charter was also vitally important to the American rationale for the Vietnam War.
The United States used the organization as its justification for refusing to go forward with the 1956 elections intended to reunify Vietnam, instead maintaining the divide between communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel.
As the conflict in Vietnam unfolded, the inclusion of Vietnam as a territory under SEATO protection gave the United States the legal framework for its continued involvement there.

8. SEATO
The organization had a number of weaknesses as well. SEATO defense treaty called only for consultation, leaving each individual nation to react individually to internal threats.
Unlike the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), SEATO had no independent mechanism for obtaining intelligence or deploying military forces, so the potential for collective action was necessarily limited.
SEATO also faced charges of being a new form of Western colonialism. Linguistic and cultural difficulties between the member states also compounded its problems, making it difficult for SEATO to accomplish many of its goals.
By the early 1970s, members began to withdraw from the organization. Neither Pakistan nor France supported the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and both nations were pulling away from the organization in the early 1970s. When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the most prominent reason for SEATO’s existence disappeared. As a result, SEATO formally disbanded in 1977.

9. The Vietnam war
The Vietnam War was the longest in U.S. history, until the war in Afghanistan that began in 2002 and continues at this writing (2013).
It was extremely divisive in the U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere. Because the U.S. failed to achieve a military victory and the Republic of South Vietnam was ultimately taken over by North Vietnam, the Vietnam experience became known as "the only war America ever lost."
It remains a very controversial topic that continues to affect political and military decisions today.

10. The Vietnam war
The war began in 1954 (though conflict in the region stretched back to the mid-1940s), after the rise to power of Ho Chi Minh and his communist Viet Minh party in North Vietnam, and continued against the backdrop of an intense Cold War between two global superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union.
More than 3 million people (including 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War; more than half were Vietnamese civilians.
By 1969, at the peak of U.S. involvement in the war, more than 500,000 U.S. military personnel were involved in the Vietnam conflict. Growing opposition to the war in the United States led to bitter divisions among Americans, both before and after President Richard Nixon ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973.
In 1975, communist forces seized control of Saigon, ending the Vietnam War, and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year.

11. Roots of the Vietnam war
During World War II, Japan invaded and occupied Vietnam, a nation on the eastern edge of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia that had been under French administration since the late 19th century.
Inspired by Chinese and Soviet communism, Ho Chi Minh formed the Viet Minh, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam, to fight both Japan and the French colonial administration.
Japan withdrew its forces in 1945, leaving the French-educated Emperor Bao Dai in control of an independent Vietnam.
Ho’s Viet Minh forces rose up immediately, seizing the northern city of Hanoi and declaring a Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) with Ho as president.

12. Roots of the Vietnam War
Seeking to regain control of the region, France backed Bao and set up the state of Vietnam (South Vietnam) in July 1949, with Saigon as its capital.
Armed conflict continued until a decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu in May ended in French defeat by Viet Minh forces.
The subsequent treaty negotiations at Geneva split Vietnam along the latitude known as the 17th parallel (with Ho in control in the North and Bao in the South) and called for nationwide elections for reunification to be held in
In 1955, however, the strongly anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem pushed Bao aside to become president of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (GVN).

13. U.S. Intervention
With the Cold War intensifying, the United States hardened its policies against any allies of the Soviet Union.
In 1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower had pledged his firm support to Diem and South Vietnam.
With training and equipment from American military and police, Diem’s security forces cracked down on Viet Minh sympathizers in the south, whom he derisively called Viet Cong (or Vietnamese Communist), arresting some 100,000 people, many of whom were tortured and executed.
By 1957, the Viet Cong and other opponents of Diem’s repressive regime began fighting back with attacks on government officials and other targets, and by 1959 they had begun engaging South Vietnamese Army forces in firefights.

14. U.S. Intervention
In December 1960, Diem’s opponents within South Vietnam–both communist and non-communist–formed the National Liberation Front (NLF) to organize resistance to the regime.
Though the NLF claimed to be autonomous and that most of its members were non-Communist, many in Washington assumed it was a puppet of Hanoi.
A team sent by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to report on conditions in South Vietnam advised a build-up of American military, economic and technical aid in order to help confront the Viet Cong threat.
Working under the “domino theory,” which held that if one Southeast Asian country fell to communism, many would follow, Kennedy increased U.S. aid, though he stopped short of committing to a large-scale military intervention.
By 1962, the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam had reached some 9,000 troops, compared with fewer than 800 during the 1950s.

15. Vietnam war escalates
A coup by some of his own generals succeeded in toppling and killing Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, in November 1963, three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
The ensuing political instability in South Vietnam persuaded Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to further increase U.S. military and economic support.
The following August, after DRV torpedo boats attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson ordered the retaliatory bombing of military targets in North Vietnam.
Congress soon passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave Johnson broad war-making powers, and U.S. planes began regular bombing raids, codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder, the following February.

16. Vietnam war escalates
In March 1965, Johnson made the decision–with solid support from the American public–to send U.S. combat forces into battle in Vietnam.
By June, 82,000 combat troops were stationed in Vietnam, and General William Westmoreland was calling for 175,000 more by the end of 1965 to shore up the struggling South Vietnamese army.
Despite the concerns of some of his advisers about this escalation, and about the entire war effort as well as a growing anti-war movement in the U.S., Johnson authorized the immediate dispatch of 100,000 troops at the end of July 1965 and another 100,000 in 1966.
In addition to the United States, South Korea, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand also committed troops to fight in South Vietnam (albeit on a much smaller scale).

17. Strategy of attrition
In contrast to the air attacks on North Vietnam, the U.S.-South Vietnamese war effort in the south was fought on the ground, largely under the command of General Westmoreland, in coordination with the government of General Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon.
In general, U.S. military forces in the region pursued a policy of attrition, aiming to kill as many enemy troops as possible rather than trying to secure territory.
By 1966, large areas of South Vietnam had been designated as “free- fire zones,” from which all innocent civilians were supposed to have evacuated and only enemy remained. Heavy bombing by B-52 aircraft or shelling made these zones uninhabitable, as refugees poured into camps in designated safe areas near Saigon and other cities.
Meanwhile, supported by aid from China and the Soviet Union, North Vietnam strengthened its air defenses.

18. Strategy of attrition
By November 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching 500,000, and U.S. casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded.
As the war stretched on, some soldiers came to mistrust their government’s reasons for keeping them there, as well as Washington’s claims that the war was being won.
The later years of the war saw increased physical and psychological deterioration among American soldiers, including drug use, mutinies and attacks by soldiers against officers and noncommissioned officers.
Bombarded by horrific images of the war on their televisions, Americans on the home front turned against the war as well: In October 1967, some 35,000 demonstrators staged a mass antiwar protest outside the Pentagon.
Opponents of the war argued that civilians, not enemy combatants, were the primary victims and that the United States was supporting a corrupt dictatorship in Saigon.

19. IMPACT OF THE TET OFFENSIVE ON VIETNAM WAR
On January 31, 1968, some 70,000 DRV forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap launched the Tet offensive (named for the lunar new year), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam.
Though taken by surprise, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces managed to strike back quickly, and the communists were unable to hold any of the targets for more than a day or two.
Reports of the attacks stunned the U.S. public, however, especially after news broke that Westmoreland had requested an additional 200,000 troops.
With his approval ratings dropping in an election year, Johnson called a halt to bombing in much of North Vietnam in March (though bombings continued in the south) and promised to dedicate the rest of his term to seeking peace rather than reelection.

20. IMPACT OF THE TET OFFENSIVE ON VIETNAM WAR
Johnson’s new tack, laid out in a March 1968 speech, met with a positive response from Hanoi, and peace talks between the U.S. and North Vietnam opened in Paris that May.
Despite the later inclusion of the South Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (the political arm of the Viet Cong) the dialogue soon reached an impasse.

21. Life in the jungle
U.S. troops fought a jungle war, mostly against the well-supplied Viet Cong. The Viet Cong would attack in ambushes, set up booby traps, and escape through a complex network of underground tunnels.
For U.S. forces, even just finding their enemy proved difficult.
Since Viet Cong hid in the dense brush, U.S. forces would drop Agent Orange or napalm bombs which cleared an area by causing the leaves to drop off or to burn away.
In every village, U.S. troops had difficulty determining which, if any, villagers were the enemy since even women and children could build booby traps or help house and feed the Viet Cong.
U.S. soldiers commonly became frustrated with the fighting conditions in Vietnam. Many suffered from low morale, became angry, and some used drugs.

22. Napalm
Napalm is a gel, which in its original form contained naphthenic and palmitic acid plus petroleum as fuel. 
The modern version, Napalm B, contains plastic polystyrene, hydrocarbon benzene, and gasoline.
 It burns at temperatures of 800 to 1,200 °C (1, ,200 °F).
When napalm falls on people, the gel sticks to their skin, hair, and clothing, causing unimaginable pain, severe burns, unconsciousness, asphyxiation, and often death.
Even those who do not get hit directly with napalm can die from its effects, since it burns at such high temperatures that it can create firestorms that use up much of the oxygen in the air. 
Bystanders also can suffer heat stroke, smoke exposure, and carbon monoxide poisoning.

23. Agent Orange
Agent Orange is a liquid mixture containing specific herbicides. 
The compound is toxic for only about a week before it breaks down, but unfortunately, one of its daughter products is the persistent toxin dioxin.  Dioxin lingers in soil, water, and human bodies.
During the Vietnam War, the US sprayed Agent Orange on the jungles and fields of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. 
The Americans sought to defoliate the trees and bushes, so that enemy soldiers would be exposed. 
They also wanted to kill off the agricultural crops that fed the Viet Cong (as well as local civilians).

24. Agent Orange
As a result, even decades later, the dioxin continues to cause health problems and birth defects for Vietnamese people in the sprayed area.
The Vietnamese governments estimates that about 400,000 people have died from Agent Orange poisoning, and about half a million children have been born with birth defects. 
US and allied veterans who were exposed during the period of heaviest usage and their children may have elevated rates of various cancers, including soft tissue sarcoma, Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hodgkin disease, and lymphocytic leukemia.
Victims' groups from Vietnam, Korea, and other places where napalm and Agent Orange were used have sued the primary manufacturers of these chemical weapons, Monsanto and Dow Chemical, on several occasions. 

25. VIETNAM WAR ENDS: FROM VIETNAMIZATION TO WITHDRAWAL
Nixon sought to deflate the antiwar movement by appealing to a “silent majority” of Americans who he believed supported the war effort.
In an attempt to limit the volume of American casualties, he announced a program of withdrawing troops, increasing aerial and artillery bombardment and giving South Vietnamese control over ground operations.
In addition to this policy, which he called “Vietnamization,” Nixon continued public peace talks in Paris, adding higher-level secret talks conducted by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger beginning in the spring of 1968.
The North Vietnamese continued to insist on complete U.S. withdrawal as a condition of peace, however, and the next few years would bring even more carnage, including the horrifying revelation that U.S. soldiers had massacred more than 400 unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai in March 1968.

26. FROM VIETNAMIZATION TO WITHDRAWAL
Anti-war protests continued to build as the conflict wore on. In and 1969, there were hundreds of anti-war marches and gatherings throughout the country.
On November 15, 1969, the largest anti-war protest in American history took place in Washington, D.C., as over 250,000 Americans gathered peacefully, calling for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.
The anti-war movement, which was particularly strong on college campuses, divided Americans bitterly. For some young people, the war symbolized a form of unchecked authority they had come to resent.
For other Americans, opposing the government was considered unpatriotic and treasonous.

27. FROM VIETNAMIZATION TO WITHDRAWAL
As the first U.S. troops were withdrawn, those who remained became increasingly angry and frustrated, exacerbating problems with morale and leadership.
In 1970, a joint U.S-South Vietnamese operation invaded Cambodia, hoping to wipe out DRV supply bases there. The South Vietnamese then led their own invasion of Laos, which was pushed back by North Vietnam.
The invasion of these countries, in violation of international law, sparked a new wave of protests on college campuses across America.
By the end of June 1972, however, after another failed offensive into South Vietnam, Hanoi was finally willing to compromise.
Kissinger and North Vietnamese representatives drafted a peace agreement by early fall, but leaders in Saigon rejected it, and in December Nixon authorized a number of bombing raids against targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Known as the Christmas Bombings, the raids drew international condemnation.

28. LEGACY OF THE VIETNAM WAR
In January 1973, the United States and North Korea concluded a final peace agreement, ending open hostilities between the two nations.
War between North and South Vietnam continued, however, until April 30, 1975, when DRV forces captured Saigon, renaming it Ho Chi Minh City (Ho himself died in 1969).
The long conflict had affected an immense majority of the country’s population; in eight years of warfare, an estimated 2 million Vietnamese died, while 3 million were wounded and another 12 million became refugees.
War had decimated the country’s infrastructure and economy, and reconstruction proceeded slowly.
In 1976, Vietnam was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, though sporadic violence continued over the next 15 years, including conflicts with neighboring China and Cambodia.
Under a broad free market policy put in place in 1986, the economy began to improve, boosted by oil export revenues and an influx of foreign capital.
Trade and diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S. were resumed in the 1990s.

29. LEGACY OF THE VIETNAM WAR
U.S. spent more than $120 billion on the conflict in Vietnam from ; this massive spending led to widespread inflation, exacerbated by a worldwide oil crisis in 1973 and skyrocketing fuel prices.
Psychologically, the effects ran even deeper. The war had pierced the myth of American invincibility, and had bitterly divided the nation.
Many returning veterans faced negative reactions from both opponents of the war (who viewed them as having killed innocent civilians) and its supporters (who saw them as having lost the war), along with physical damage including the effects of exposure to the harmful chemical herbicide Agent Orange, millions of gallons of which had been dumped by U.S. planes on the dense forests of Vietnam.
In 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, D.C. On it were inscribed the names of 57,939 American armed forces killed or missing during the war; later additions brought that total to 58,200.

30. Why America lost the Vietnam war?
Americans
Vietcong
The American hi-tech tactics continually killed the wrong people and demoralized their own troops.
The Vietcong's guerrilla tactics were appropriate to the nature of the conflict.
The US was trying to supply a war 8,000 miles from America.
The Vietcong were supplied with weapons by China and Russia.
The South Vietnamese regime was weak, brutal and corrupt.
The South Vietnamese peasants supported and sheltered the Vietcong.
Their short (one-year) tour of service meant that American troops were always inexperienced.
The Vietcong had been continuously at war since they resisted the Japanese during the Second World War.
The morale of Americans soldiers was rock bottom - they took drugs, shot their officers and deserted.
The Vietcong were fanatically determined to drive out the Americans, whatever the cost.
The war became very unpopular in the US, and lost public support.
The North Vietnamese were motivated, fighting at home to unite their country.

31. CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
For 14 days in October 1962 the world stood on the brink of nuclear war.
The Soviet Union had secretly stationed nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba, and when the government of the United States discovered them, and demanded their withdrawal, the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War followed.
A single miscalculation made either in the White House or the Kremlin could have precipitated catastrophe.

32. The Cuban Revolution
In January 1959, Fulgencio Batista, the brutal, American-backed Cuban dictator, was overthrown by the guerrilla army of Fidel Castro.
Initially president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration welcomed the Cuban revolution.
Batista had long been an embarrassing ally, and a friendly, democratic government in Cuba, addressing urgent social reform, would be far more stable and reliable.

34. The Cuban Revolution
For America, Cuba provided a naval base at Guantanamo; it was an exotic, but conveniently close, tourist resort; and low paid Cuban labour made it an attractive investment area, much of the island’s agriculture and industry being American- owned.
Hence governments in Washington had never hesitated to intervene to protect American interests.
Indeed to Castro, and to a large proportion of the Cuban people, American domination was a root cause of Cuba’s problems, and it must be ended.
As American property was expropriated by the new government, Castro’s defeated enemies were treated mercilessly and elections were postponed while Castro secured his grip on power.
Yet as ever more vicious anti-American diatribes came from the new leader, his popularity in Cuba grew.
In the United States, however, he became increasingly unacceptable.

35. The Cuban Revolution
Eisenhower ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow him, and the CIA orchestrated sabotage raids on Cuba to destabilize the regime.
Attempts were made to assassinate Castro,
Economic sanctions were imposed, especially against Cuba’s sugar crop, which was its main export. Yet rather than undermine Castro, this hostility made him more secure, and an increasingly bitter and vocal enemy of the United States.
In the logic of the Cold War, this made him a potential partner of the Soviet Union.
Steadily growing ties with the USSR made him appear a growing threat to US hegemony in the western hemisphere which could not be tolerated.

37. The Bay of Pigs
Among the steps taken by the CIA to remove Castro, a brigade of about 1,400 anti-Castro Cuban exiles was raised.
The CIA decided to use this force in a large-scale invasion of the Bay of Pigs island, with the backing of its own air force.
This, it was assumed, would trigger mass risings and overthrow Castro’s government.
Yet Eisenhower, who had after all been Supreme Allied Commander at D-Day, recognized the risks of failure and hesitated.
His successor in January 1961, John F. Kennedy, would be left to decide whether or not to launch the invasion.

38. The Bay of Pigs
Perhaps Castro hoped that a new president would be less hostile to his revolution. If so, he hoped in vain.
Kennedy had used Cuba repeatedly in the election campaign, accusing his Republican opponents of being soft on communism, insisting that Cuba was America’s ‘most glaring failure’, one that endangered the ‘whole Western Hemisphere’.
This rhetoric would be difficult to forget once Kennedy was in office. Business interests, alarmed that if Castro was left unpunished he might start a trend in Latin America opposing U.S. business investments.

39. Bay of Pigs
Furthermore, Kennedy seems to have been personally offended by Castro, who had defied the might of the United States and refused to be intimidated.
Kennedy became obsessed with the fear that Castro might prove able to export his revolution to other Latin American nations.
Defence Secretary Robert McNamara later admitted the administration was ‘hysterical’ over Castro.
Kennedy was even more hostile to Castro than Eisenhower had been, and a great deal less cautious.

40. Bay of Pigs
Kennedy was probably unaware that there were risks attached to the CIA’s plan. He approved the project (the invasion of the Bay of Pigs), which was put together in a remarkably slipshod manner.
Most bizarrely, Kennedy was convinced it would be possible to launch this invasion without the world being aware of American involvement.
At the time there was already speculation in the press that the CIA was planning an invasion.

41. Bay of Pigs
Air attacks failed to destroy Castro’s air force completely.
Most of the ammunition and communications equipment was destroyed before it could be landed.
Castro’s forces fought well, and enjoyed massive popular support.
There were no risings, and US forces did nothing to support the exiles. Within two days over 100 exiles had been killed and nearly 1,200 had surrendered.

42. Operation Mongoose
The Bay of Pigs was a shattering blow to Kennedy, who had to face international ridicule for the fiasco.
But Castro did not escape unscathed. Any possibility of mending fences with Washington was lost. He now faced the undying hostility of the United States.
A US invasion on Cuba was not an option in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, since Kennedy could hardly claim to be liberating people who had rallied to Castro.
But the President did authorize the CIA to undertake Operation Mongoose.
This amounted to renewed attempts to destabilize the Cuban regime.
Sabotage raids multiplied, Castro supporters were assassinated, foreign suppliers were bribed to send faulty goods to Cuba.

43. Operation Mongoose
Kennedy also warned the Soviet Union against challenging the USA in the western hemisphere.
Perhaps more threateningly, in 1962 a large-scale military exercise was undertaken by US forces in the Caribbean, in which 40,000 military personnel practiced invading an unnamed island to overthrow a dictator threateningly codenamed Ortsac.
Kennedy wanted to alarm Castro, and he succeeded. But he also alarmed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

44. Operation Mongoose
The Soviet government had welcomed the Cuban revolution; and as American hostility to it grew, so did Soviet support.
Cuba was never really an unquestioning servant of Moscow, but the state was growing increasingly dependent upon Moscow for military and economic aid.
In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, Castro had declared his commitment to Communism for the first time.
And in Moscow, as in Havana, there was a growing conviction that Kennedy was preparing to invade Cuba. As it was the only communist state in the western hemisphere, Khrushchev could not allow this.

45. Soviet Initiatives
Khrushchev also had other concerns. Since the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 in October 1957, Khrushchev had proclaimed an entirely fictitious superiority in Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs).
Kennedy had campaigned for the presidency proclaiming he would match the supposed Soviet advantage, closing the ‘missile gap’ as it was known.
Even when he found that the strategic balance was, in reality, heavily in America’s favour, Kennedy still ordered a major expansion of US ICBM forces.
Khrushchev, who was desperate to divert resources from the military to domestic reform, was now caught by his own bluff and faced ruinous expense to fill a very real ‘missile gap’ that was in America’s favour.

46. Soviet Initiatives
But American actions perhaps suggested a way out for Khrushchev.
In 1962 American Jupiter missiles were stationed in Turkey, well within range of Soviet targets.
Soviet followed example and stationed Intermediate Range and Medium Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs and MRBMs) in Cuba, where they could threaten most of the continental USA
This would be a cheap way to offset the American missile advantage, it would deter an American invasion of the island, it would be a proportional response to the missiles in Turkey.

47. Soviet Initiatives
The entire project was meant to be kept secret until the missiles were operational, and then a fait accompli would be presented to the USA, which would have to learn to live with them.
But the project was too big to be kept secret for long. The Soviet technicians were told that speed was their first priority and they made few attempts to camouflage their work, which would probably have been impossible completely to disguise anyway.

48. Soviet Initiatives
By August 1962 the first rumours of Soviet missiles in Cuba, from CIA leaks, appeared in the US press.
Soviet diplomats, unaware of the project, issued flat denials. This made the sense of shock when they were discovered by a U-2 spy plane, on 14 October 1962, even more profound.
Kennedy was stunned. He felt Khrushchev’s conduct was inexplicably provocative. Khrushchev, in fact, had never considered that the presence of missiles in Cuba would be deemed a monstrous threat in the United States.
Nor had he realised that Kennedy and the United States would not tolerate the massive blow to their prestige that would result if the weapons were allowed to remain.
In fact the weapons would make very little difference to a strategic balance that was massively in America’s favour. But their presence would give the appearance of a weakened America, and in the Cold War appearances were vital. For his part, Kennedy gave no thought to Khrushchev’s motives: the missiles had to be removed, and initially he favoured air strikes and an invasion of Cuba to achieve this.

49. U.S response
Yet the Bay of Pigs had taught Kennedy the dangers of acting impetuously. Within two days, he formed a special advisory group to weigh various options; this was named the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.
Excomm – made up of ‘hawks’ who favoured the immediate use of force and ‘doves’ who preferred to avoid a conflict – met almost continuously for 13 days and subjected proposals to resolve the crisis to intense scrutiny.
The dangers of using force soon became clear. An unprovoked attack, involving air strikes probably followed by an invasion, would be hard to justify; and Castro’s forces would resist and could be expected to fight a prolonged and bitter guerrilla war, the same sort of war they had fought so successfully against Batista.
The projected casualties were alarming. Also, large numbers of Soviet technicians would be killed, and this might lead to war between the Superpowers – or Khrushchev might launch the surviving missiles, and at least ten per cent of the missiles might survive an air strike.
Nevertheless, even the ‘doves’ in Excomm were largely agreed that the missiles must go, and without American concessions in return.

50. U.S response
Yet there was an alternative to invasion – a naval blockade of Cuba.
But it was a limited and measured response, which would avoid forcing Khrushchev into a corner where he have to fight to avoid utter humiliation. If it failed, the military option was still open.
Only on the 22 October, when the blockade was prepared, was news of the missiles and America’s response made public.
It caused immense shock in the USA and internationally –
Soviet responded by saying that they were acting legally and responding in kind to US actions in Turkey.
Khrushchev’s reply was to bluster that the USSR would assert its rights on the high seas and to accuse Kennedy of bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

51. Soviet Initiatives
Throughout the world forces went on high alert. World War III seemed imminent and, across the globe, terrified people prepared for Armageddon.
On 23 October, as 27 Soviet ships headed towards the blockade, many carrying military equipment, presumably including missile parts, Kennedy, who had assumed that Khrushchev would back down, had to consider what to do if his blockade was defied.
As the world stood on the brink of nuclear war, news reached Kennedy that the first Soviet ships had stopped and turned back.

52. Resolving the Crisis
The crisis was not over. Nuclear missiles remained on Cuba and Kennedy was determined to remove them.
A resolution had to be found, and quickly, before Kennedy was pushed by the national panic he had generated to launch an attack on Cuba. Both leaders, it is clear, had become horrified at the prospects in front of them. Kennedy, desperate to avoid pushing Khrushchev too far.
Khrushchev, for his part, sent a long, rambling letter to Kennedy, appealing to reason and trust to prevent a catastrophe.
From recently released archives, that Castro was urging Khrushchev to use the missiles if Cuba was invaded.
Khrushchev’s response was to order his military commander in Cuba to do nothing of the sort without direct orders from Moscow. Thus both sides were under immense pressure to resolve the crisis.

53. Resolving the Crisis
Khrushchev’s message seemed to contain the basis of a settlement. But matters took a turn for the worse.
A new message was received from Moscow offering a specific deal by which the missiles in both Turkey and Cuba would be removed and the USA and USSR would jointly guarantee the security of both nations.
This was deemed unacceptable by Excomm, as it would mean backing down in the face of Soviet pressure.

54. Resolving the Crisis
Yet Kennedy was interested. It was not an unreasonable deal: the Turkish missiles were obsolete and were soon to be withdrawn anyway, and the crisis was escalating.
Kennedy outraged the ‘hawks’ by ordering the Turkish missiles to be disabled to prevent any accident.
In the message to Khrushchev agreed by Excomm, Kennedy insisted that the missiles in Cuba must be removed and offered to end the blockade and pledged not to invade Cuba if that happened.
But when he delivered it to the Soviet ambassador, Kennedy’s brother, Robert, added a private message that once this was done, after a few months had passed, the Turkish missiles would be withdrawn (which in fact happened in April 1963).

55. Resolving the Crisis
Had Khrushchev rejected the deal, it is likely that an American invasion of Cuba would have been launched within days.
Had the Russian used tactical nuclear weapons, whose presence was not suspected by the Americans, a full-scale thermonuclear war would probably have followed.
But Khrushchev, himself desperate to find a settlement and aware that a non- invasion pledge would meet his most important need, did agree.
Tedious and frustrating negotiations followed over the means of verifying the departure of the missiles, largely caused by the obstruction of Castro, who was enraged that Khrushchev had not consulted him over the settlement.
In the end the Russian ships departed with their hatches uncovered, allowing the Americans to see the missiles leaving.

56. Credit and Blame
Kennedy certainly came out of the crisis with a reputation greatly enhanced in the west.
Khrushchev, for his part, was deemed by his colleagues to have suffered a humiliation, and the crisis was one of the issues that led to his being deposed in October 1964.
Certainly once the enormity of the situation became clear to both men, they showed responsible leadership and a determination to find a peaceful resolution.
Both rejected hard-line advice and were careful not to escalate the crisis.
Khrushchev might even be said to have shown greater courage in making what was publicly seen as the larger concessions.

57. Credit and Blame
In the aftermath of the crisis they both worked to improve relations and prevent a recurrence of such a confrontation.
The ‘hotline’, allowing direct communication between both leaders, was installed and the Partial Test Ban Treaty of September signified a first step towards arms controls.
Kennedy’s hope to build on these steps, brutally ended by his assassination in November 1963, further heightened his statesman-like image.

58. Credit and Blame
However, both men had acted recklessly in bringing the crisis about.
Khrushchev (and Castro) should have realised the dangers of surreptitiously introducing nuclear weapons into Cuba.
They could not realistically be kept secret, and the US reaction should have been predictable.
Conventional forces, perhaps a couple of Soviet armoured brigades, should have been enough to deter a US invasion of Cuba, without risking a major confrontation.
Kennedy, for his part, allowed his vendetta against Castro to overcome good sense. Operation Mongoose was hardly the act of a statesman. He also rejected the use of discreet diplomacy.
A secret message to Moscow, requiring the quiet removal of the missiles, might have avoided a confrontation, though admittedly giving Khrushchev the chance to prevaricate until the missiles were operational.

59. Credit and Blame
In the final analysis, the world was fortunate that the greatest crisis of the Cold War arose when it did.
In 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev had days to consider their position and think through their options.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, both sides were careful to avoid such circumstances.