Pushed to the brink, Kennedy and Khrushchev chose to back down. But Kennedy emerged from the crisis looking much tougher — his concession to the Soviets not only remained secret but was vehemently denied. LeMay, among others, suspected that some sort of deal had been struck. Asked at a Senate hearing whether the Jupiters in Turkey had been traded for the missiles in Cuba, McNamara replied, “Absolutely not… the Soviet Government did raise the issue… [but the] President absolutely refused even to discuss it.” Secretary of State Rusk repeated the lie. In order to deflect attention from the charge, members of the administration told friendly journalists, off the record, that Adlai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the United Nations, had urged Kennedy to trade NATO missiles in Turkey, Italy, and Great Britain for the missiles in Cuba, but the president had refused — another lie. A reference to the secret deal was later excised from Robert Kennedy’s diary after his death. And a virile myth was promoted by the administration: when the leaders of the two superpowers stood eye to eye, threatening to fight over Cuba, Khrushchev was the one who blinked.
Within the following year, President Kennedy gave a speech at American University that called for a relaxation of the Cold War and “genuine peace” with the Soviets. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting nuclear detonations in the atmosphere, the ocean, and outer space. And a hot line was finally created to link the Kremlin and the Pentagon, with additional terminals at the White House and the headquarters of the Communist Party in Moscow. The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle. “We at the embassy could only pray,” Ambassador Dobrynin recalled, “that he would take it to the Western Union office without delay and not stop to chat on the way with some girl!”
Unlike the hot line frequently depicted in Hollywood films, the new system didn’t provide a special telephone for the president to use in an emergency. It relied on Teletype machines that could send text quickly and securely. Written statements were considered easier to translate, more deliberate, and less subject to misinterpretation than verbal ones. Every day, a test message was sent once an hour, alternately from Moscow, in Russian, and from Washington, in English. The system would not survive nuclear attacks on either city. But it was installed with the hope of preventing them.
During the Cuban missile crisis, the Strategic Air Command conducted 2,088 airborne alert missions, involving almost fifty thousand hours of flying time, without a single accident. The standard operating procedures, the relentless training, and the checklists introduced by LeMay and Power helped to achieve a remarkable safety record when it was needed most. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the crisis, public anxieties about nuclear war soon focused on the dangers of SAC’s airborne alert. The great risk — as depicted in the 1964 films Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove — wasn’t that a hydrogen bomb might accidentally explode during the crash of a B-52. It was that an order to attack the Soviet Union could be sent without the president’s authorization, either through a mechanical glitch (Fail-Safe) or the scheming of a madman (Dr. Strangelove).
The plot of both films strongly resembled that of the novel Red Alert. Its author, Peter George, cowrote the screenplay of Dr. Strangelove and sued the producers of Fail-Safe for copyright infringement. The case was settled out of court. The threat of accidental nuclear war was the central theme of the films — and Strangelove, although a black comedy, was by far the more authentic of the two. It astutely parodied the strategic theories pushed by RAND analysts, members of the Kennedy administration, and the Joint Chiefs. It captured the absurdity of debating how many million civilian deaths would constitute a military victory. And it ended with an apocalyptic metaphor for the arms race, conjuring a Soviet doomsday machine that’s supposed to deter an American attack by threatening to launch a nuclear retaliation, automatically, through the guidance of a computer, without need of any human oversight. The failure of the Soviets to tell the United States about the contraption defeats its purpose, inadvertently bringing the end of the world. “The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost,” Dr. Strangelove, the president’s eccentric science adviser, explains to the Soviet ambassador, “IF YOU KEEP IT A SECRET!”
