Sleepwalking With the Bomb by John C. Wohlstetter Page A

In response, the Kennedy administration imposed a naval “quarantine” (blockading contraband supplies only) around the island.
    On October 15, Kennedy convened an executive committee of 13 “wise men” to suggest ways to resolve the crisis. Their firmly shared belief was that it was unacceptable to have Russian missiles armed with nuclear warheads sitting 90 miles south of Florida. One of them, Paul Nitze, wrote later that at the outset nearly all “ExComm” members—including the president and his brother Robert—believed that military action to remove the missiles was almost inevitable. In his Cuban Missile Crisis history,
Nine Minutes to Midnight,
Michael Dobbs superbly described what happened next.
    On October 27, which the White House dubbed “Black Saturday,” things nearly spun out of control. A U.S. U-2 spy plane was downed and its space-suited pilot killed, by a Soviet surface-to-air missile at Castro’s orders. Another U-2 pilot on an Arctic surveillance mission was tricked by an intense aurora borealis (“Northern Lights”) into taking a wrong turn, penetrating 300 miles into Soviet airspace. That spy plane eluded Russian interceptors and by a major miracle made it back to friendly territory. This was not a true fail-safe scenario (inability to recall in time a hostile plane carrying bombs), as the plane was unarmed, but a shoot down would hardly have helped resolve the crisis.
    Meanwhile, a U.S. destroyer was dropping depth charges to force a quarantine-breaking Russian diesel submarine to surface. Unbeknownst to the destroyer crew, the sub was armed with a 10-kiloton nuclear-tipped torpedo, some 70 percent as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Its commander was under strict orders not to fire a nuclear device without direct authorization from Moscow, but only by surfacing could the sub exchange messages with the authorities. But after being tracked by U.S. ships continuously—and being forced to stay below despite tropical conditions inside the sub—the Soviet commander was ready to fire his nuclear torpedo. His crew prevailed upon him to surface instead, noting the lack of authorization from Moscow. The sub surfaced to find itself in the midst of four U.S. destroyers. Moscow ordered the sub to depart the area, and the U.S. did not try to stop its departure. Had the submarine commander used his nuclear torpedo in 1962, it is inconceivable that Kennedy would have responded with an all-out attack over the loss of one of four small ships. It is hard to credit assertions that the USSR would have chosen mutual annihilation either.
    Unknown to Kennedy and his advisers then was how many nuclear warheads and types of nuclear-capable delivery systems were on the island, or what command and control arrangements were in place between the Soviet and Cuban strategic forces. Dobbs writes (surely accurately) that Cuba’s nuclear arsenal “far exceeded the worst nightmares of anyone in Washington.” Specifically, deployed or en route to Cuba by ship were no less than 158 warheads. Ninety were already on the island, including 36 one-megaton warheads that could be hurled almost 1,300 miles and 36 14-kiloton warheads (Hiroshima-size) mounted on small tactical nuclear missiles. An estimated 150,000 American troops were to be sent to take the island, and 1,397 separate targets had been marked for destruction as part of the invasion. The Russians were prepared to send tactical bombers carrying Hiroshima-size A-bombs to annihilate any major invasion force.
    Even without nuclear missile strikes on American soil, the instant carnage that would have been inflicted by the invasion force alone—by some 45,000 Soviets armed with atomic weapons, plus a much larger volunteer Cuban contingent—would have been the worst in American military history. The invasion force had the potential to suffer in a single day the death toll of Americans killed by enemy fire in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.
    En route on ships were 68