Son's View of Khrushchev - Missiles and Crisis

Author: She. Khrushchev
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: On the evening of Sunday, October 28, 1962, it was an ordinary autumn day. The heat of summer had reluctantly passed, and winter was just around the corner. The sidewalks of Moscow were crowded with people, all in a hurry. Cars were scarce on the streets, and the noise was minimal. Recently, the city had banned the use of horns. Therefore, the Seagull car, impatiently honking at the red light, stood out even more. This was no ordinary intersection. The Seagull car had been speeding through the streets of Moscow for half an hour, seemingly aimlessly weaving through narrow alleyways. The alley it was trying to reach was impossible to find, and the driver was becoming increasingly frantic. The low growl of the government emergency siren sounded almost like a desperate cry. There was good reason for the urgency. In the car sat a responsible comrade, short and sturdy, with a large head. A few sparse brown hairs barely covered his shiny bald head. His thick, short fingers clenched a red document bag sealed with five wax seals. The bag prominently featured large black letters: Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The rest of the bag was blank, with no address. The responsible comrade in the Seagull car was no ordinary figure. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television across the country were all at his command. Inside the bag was the typed draft of a reply from Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy of the United States. The world was on the brink of disaster, and irreversible events could happen at any moment. Therefore, this time, the letter was not sent through the normal communication channels between world leaders but was broadcast immediately on the Moscow radio. This move was extraordinary in international life but highly effective. Within minutes, our reply could be placed on the recipient's desk. As everyone knew, the U.S. radio monitoring department was not without reason. The matter was about the deployment of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba. Soviet leaders believed that only by taking this gamble could they prevent the United States from repeating the risky amphibious landing at the Bay of Pigs last April. However, neither Khrushchev nor his colleagues in the Presidium of the Central Committee could predict how the United States would react to this move. The deployment of missiles was an agreement between Cuba and the Soviet Union, seemingly posing no threat to anyone. It was hard to imagine that a small country like Cuba, even with dozens of missiles parked among the palm trees, would make its powerful neighbor tremble with fear. But the Americans operated on different principles. The agreement between the Soviet Union and the Republic of Cuba was seen as an unacceptable invasion of the Western Hemisphere. The United States could not tolerate this, and a storm broke out. Quarantine at sea, threats of air raids, reconnaissance planes circling constantly over the island—finally, the announcement that the military had been placed on first alert. The world was on the brink of war, just one spark away. Both sides of the ocean understood the fatal consequences of a nuclear conflict. The Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and the U.S. President both believed that armed conflict was unthinkable. However, simply not wanting to go to war was not enough; they had to find the only correct measure to prevent war from breaking out. Both leaders realized that if the situation got out of control, conflict was inevitable. Correspondence between them had just begun...