The Cuban Missile Crisis – NATO nuclear weapons in Turkey, then and now

By Nigel Chamberlain, NATO Watch

 
Fifty years ago, in the autumn of 1962, the ideological rivalry for ‘Spheres of Influence’ between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics led the protagonists to the verge of an all-out nuclear war, widely referred to as ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis’. 
 
Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library, has just published a review of the documentary record of that period which was declassified in the 1990s.  Sheldon concludes: "Never before or since has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations," culminating in the Week the World Stood Still.
 
Kennedy's close associate, historian Arthur Schlesinger, described the events as "the most dangerous moment in human history".  The then US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wondered aloud whether he "would live to see another Saturday night", and later recognized that "we lucked out" – barely.
 
Noam Chomsky’s review of Sheldon’s work and these dangerous times makes graphic reading and is available on the Guardian website.  He points out that President Kennedy had declared the highest nuclear alert short of launch (Defcon 2), which authorized "Nato aircraft with Turkish pilots ... [or others] ... to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb" in response to a Soviet attack.  We might want to remind ourselves at this point that there are still nuclear weapons under NATO command in Turkey today with plans to modernise both the aircraft and the weapons.  And nuclear weapons remain a core part of NATO’s Strategic Concept today. 
 
A B-52 pilot on NATO patrol, Major Don Clawson, said: "We were damned lucky we didn't blow up the world – and no thanks to the political or military leadership of this country."  He added that the civilian National Command Authority was kept in the dark by Strategic Air Command.  General Burchinal's oral history reveals even greater contempt for the civilian command and that a decision to go to war would have been taken without consultation. 
 
In the event nuclear war was avoided when Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy that the USSR would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads from Turkey. 
 
Many decision-makers in the United States took this compromise as further justification to stand firm and confront the USSR whenever, and wherever.  And it started right away in media reporting.  On 28 October 1962, CBS reported that the world had come out "from under the most terrible threat of nuclear holocaust since the second world war", with a "humiliating defeat for Soviet policy". 
 
Chomsky concluded:
 
In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev's willingness to accept Kennedy's hegemonic demands.  But we can hardly count on such sanity forever.  It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.  There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, almost 60 years ago, that we must face a choice that is "stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”
 
 
For further information about NATO’s nuclear policy and weapons see: