The following month, McNamara repeated many of these themes during a commencement speech at the University of Michigan, in his hometown of Ann Arbor. The speech was poorly received. McNamara’s plan to save civilian lives — without the classified information that supported its central argument — sounded like a boast that the United States could fight and win a nuclear war. Great Britain and France publicly repudiated the strategy. In their view the threat of total annihilation was a better deterrent than a more limited and more expensive form of warfare, fought with conventional weapons. And America’s NATO allies suspected that a “no cities” approach would primarily spare the cities of the United States. Nikita Khrushchev didn’t like the speech, either. “Not targeting cities — how aggressive!” Khrushchev told the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He suggested that McNamara’s remarks had a sinister aim: “To get the population used to the idea that nuclear war will take place.”
Although the United States and the Soviet Union publicly supported peace, diplomacy, and a settlement of their differences through negotiation, both countries behaved less nobly in secret. During the summer of 1962, the Kennedy administration was trying to overthrow the government of Cuba and assassinate its leader, Fidel Castro. Robert Kennedy guided the CIA’s covert program Operation Mongoose enlisting help from Cuban exiles and the Cosa Nostra. Robert McNamara supervised the planning for a full-scale invasion of the island, should Operation Mongoose succeed. Meanwhile, Khrushchev approved a KGB plan to destabilize and overthrow the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. More important, he decided to turn Cuba into a military outpost of the Soviet Union, armed with nuclear weapons.
If Khrushchev’s scheme worked, by the end of 1962, the Soviets would have twenty-four medium-range ballistic missiles, sixteen intermediate-range ballistic missiles, forty-two bombers, a fighter wing, a couple of tank battalions, antiaircraft missiles, and about 50,000 personnel in Cuba. The medium-range missiles would be able to strike targets as far north as Washington, D.C.; the intermediate-range, to destroy SAC bases in the West and the Midwest. The Cuban deployment would triple the number of Soviet land-based missiles that could hit the United States. Throughout the summer, Soviet merchant ships secretly transported the weapons to Cuba, hidden belowdecks, along with troops dressed in civilian clothes. Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them — if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or he would keep them in Cuba, just a hundred miles from Florida, and build a naval base on the island for ballistic-missile submarines.
“We have no bases in Cuba, and we do not intend to establish any,” Khrushchev had assured Kennedy in a personal note. That promise was later repeated by the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, during a meeting with Robert Kennedy. On September 11, TASS issued a flat-out denial: “Our nuclear weapons are so powerful in their explosive force and the Soviet Union has such powerful rockets to carry these nuclear warheads, there is no need to search for sites for them beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union.” A month later photographs taken by an American U-2 spy plane revealed Soviet missile sites under construction in the countryside near San Cristobal, about fifty miles west of Havana. Kennedy had warned the Soviets that the United States would not tolerate the deployment of ballistic missiles in Cuba. Now he had to figure out what to do about them.
For the next thirteen days, the Kennedy administration debated how to respond, worried that a wrong move could start a nuclear war. Many of the crucial discussions were secretly recorded; the president and his brother were the only ones at the meetings who knew that a tape recorder was running. At first, President Kennedy thought that the Soviet missiles had to be destroyed before they became operational. Most of his advisers felt the same way. They disagreed mainly on the issue of how large the air strike should be — confined solely to the missiles or expanded to include Cuban air bases and support facilities. As the days passed, doubts began to intrude. A surprise attack had the best chance of success; but it might anger America’s allies in Europe, especially if Khrushchev used it as a pretext to seize West Berlin. A small-scale attack might not destroy every missile and nuclear weapon on the island; but getting them all might require a full-scale invasion. And a blockade of the island would prevent the Soviets from delivering more weapons to Cuba; but it might have little effect on the weapons already there.
