r/JFK • u/Adventurous_Clerk584 • 19h ago
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine almost launched a nuclear torpedo. Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev knew it was happening.
On October 27, 1962, the most dangerous day of the thirteen, American naval vessels were dropping small signaling depth charges near a Soviet submarine called B-59 to tell it to surface. The Americans intended them as signals, not attacks. The problem was that the submarine had been underwater for days, had lost radio contact with Moscow, and its exhausted crew had no way of knowing whether the explosions meant a signal or the start of a war.
B-59 carried a nuclear-armed torpedo.
The submarine's captain, Valentin Savitsky, reportedly considered launching it. Vasily Arkhipov, a senior officer aboard B-59, opposed the idea and helped prevent a potentially catastrophic decision. The torpedo was never fired. Kennedy and Khrushchev had no idea the incident was happening.
That detail matters because the version of the Cuban Missile Crisis that became famous, two leaders staring each other down until one blinked, leaves out how little either of them actually controlled.
American intelligence hadn't detected that Soviet forces in Cuba possessed tactical nuclear weapons that could have been used against an invading force. A U-2 pilot, Rudolf Anderson, was shot down over Cuba on the same day as the B-59 incident. Despite pressure from military advisers to retaliate, Kennedy decided against an immediate military response.
Soviet IL-28 bombers were still in Cuba after the initial missile agreement. Castro was furious that Khrushchev had negotiated without him. During the crisis, he had even urged Khrushchev to consider a nuclear strike against the United States if Cuba was invaded.
The public version has Kennedy issuing a naval quarantine on October 22, Khrushchev backing down on October 28, and America winning.
The actual version is thirteen days of cascading near-disasters that both governments were only partially managing.
How it actually ended is also less clean than the textbooks suggest.
On October 26, Khrushchev sent Kennedy a long, unusually personal letter proposing that the Soviet Union remove its missiles if the US pledged not to invade Cuba.
The next day, he sent a second message publicly demanding that the US also remove its Jupiter nuclear missiles from Turkey. Kennedy couldn't openly accept that demand without appearing to compromise a NATO ally's security under Soviet pressure.
So Robert Kennedy met secretly with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and communicated that the US would remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within a few months, provided the arrangement remained confidential and was not publicly presented as a direct trade.
Khrushchev accepted.
The public agreement involved Soviet missiles leaving Cuba in exchange for an American pledge not to invade the island. The confidential understanding also included the withdrawal of the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, which the US completed in April 1963.
The arrangement remained secret at the time, allowing both governments to present the outcome differently to their own audiences.
Khrushchev's position afterward was that he had protected Cuba and obtained a real concession over Turkey. Many of his colleagues in the Soviet leadership saw a humiliating retreat.
He was removed from power in October 1964. The Cuban Missile Crisis was among the grievances against him, alongside economic problems, political disagreements, and dissatisfaction with his leadership.
Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.
Castro, who had been excluded from the negotiations that determined the fate of his country, never fully forgave Khrushchev for it.
The direct communications link between Washington and Moscow that now seems obvious didn't exist during the crisis. It was established afterward because both governments recognized how dangerous the delays in communication had been. The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty followed in 1963.
You can explore the full crisis on Virtual Wayback at virtualwayback.com/cuban-missile-crisis-experience and interact with AI recreations of Kennedy and Khrushchev. There's also a new quiz with a leaderboard if you want to test how much you know about what happened.
The thing historians still debate is whether Kennedy or Khrushchev deserves more credit for the outcome.
Kennedy rejected military escalation and kept negotiating. Khrushchev made the essential decision to withdraw rather than risk a war. But Khrushchev had also created the crisis by secretly deploying nuclear missiles to Cuba.
Does initiating a dangerous confrontation and then stepping back from it count as responsible leadership? Or does the fact that Khrushchev withdrew after Kennedy held firm mean Kennedy deserves more credit for preventing a nuclear war?
