Son of Khrushchev (Missiles and Crisis)

Author: (Russian) Shekhrushchev, translated by Guo Jiashen and Yu Tao
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: On the evening of Sunday, October 28, 1962, it was an ordinary autumn day. The scorching heat of summer had reluctantly passed, and winter was just around the corner. The sidewalks of Moscow were crowded with people in a hurry. Cars were scarce on the streets, and the noise was not loud. The city had recently banned car 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 growing increasingly impatient. The low growl of the government emergency siren sounded almost like a desperate cry. There was good reason for the urgency. The official in the Seagull car was of small, sturdy build 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 official in the Seagull car was no ordinary figure—newspapers, magazines, radio, and television across the country all followed his lead. 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 occur at any moment. Therefore, this time, the letter was not sent through the normal communication channels between world leaders but was immediately broadcast on the Moscow radio. This measure was extraordinary in international life but highly effective—the reply could be placed on the recipient's desk within minutes. As everyone knew, the U.S. radio monitoring department was renowned for its capabilities. The matter concerned the deployment of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba. Soviet leaders believed that only by taking this high-stakes gamble could they prevent the United States from repeating the risky amphibious landing in 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 respond 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 Soviet-Cuban agreement 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 high alert. The world was on the verge of war, with the threat of nuclear conflict hanging in the balance. Both the Soviet Chairman of the Council of Ministers and the U.S. President understood the fatal consequences of a nuclear conflict. They both believed that armed conflict was unthinkable. However, simply not wanting to go to war was not enough; they had to find the single correct measure to prevent it. Both leaders realized that if the situation spiraled out of control, conflict was inevitable. Correspondence between the two leaders had just begun...