The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 is often remembered as thirteen days in which the world stood on the edge of nuclear war. Yet those thirteen days did not come out of nowhere. They were the product of seventeen years of rivalry, mistrust and confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, two countries that had fought together against Hitler and then, almost immediately, turned against each other. This prologue goes back to the beginning of that story, to the collapse of the wartime alliance, to the division of Europe and to the long series of crises that taught each side to see the other as an enemy. Without that history, the decision to place missiles in Cuba cannot be understood at all.
Allies Who Became Rivals
During the Second World War, the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union were allies, bound together by the need to defeat Nazi Germany. The alliance was always uneasy. The Soviet Union had suffered enormously, losing tens of millions of people, and its leaders were determined that Germany should never again be able to invade from the west. The Western Allies, for their part, were determined that the Europe liberated from Nazism should not fall under Soviet control. At the conferences of Yalta in February 1945 and Potsdam that summer, the leaders tried to agree on the shape of the post-war world, but the agreements were vague, and the suspicions suppressed during the war reappeared as soon as the common enemy was gone.
The division was not only a matter of words. In the countries of Eastern Europe liberated by the Red Army, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and, after a coup in 1948, Czechoslovakia, communist governments loyal to Moscow were installed, often by force and fraud. In Greece, communist guerrillas fought a civil war against the government. In Germany, the four occupying powers could not agree on the future of the country, and the division of Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, became a symbol of the larger division. By 1946, Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, warned that an Iron Curtain had descended across Europe.
Containment, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan
The American response was given a name by the diplomat George Kennan, who argued in 1946 and 1947 that Soviet expansion should be met with a policy of containment: firm, patient resistance to Soviet pressure wherever it appeared. President Harry Truman adopted that approach in March 1947, when he asked Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey, which were under pressure from communist forces and from the Soviet Union. The Truman Doctrine, as it became known, committed the United States to supporting free peoples who were resisting subjugation, and it marked a decisive break with the isolationism that had shaped American foreign policy before the war.
The economic arm of containment was the Marshall Plan, announced in June 1947 by Secretary of State George Marshall and put into effect the following year. The plan offered large-scale American aid to help the war-damaged economies of Western Europe rebuild, on condition that the recipient countries cooperate with one another. Sixteen Western European countries took part, and the aid helped to produce a rapid recovery that strengthened democratic governments and reduced the appeal of communism. The Soviet Union refused to take part and forbade its Eastern European satellites from doing so, a decision that deepened the division of the continent.
Berlin, the Bomb and Korea
The first great crisis came over Berlin. In June 1948, the Soviet Union blocked all road and rail access to the western sectors of the city, in response to the introduction of a new currency in the Western zones of Germany. The Western Allies, rather than abandon the city, supplied it by air for almost a year, in one of the great logistical feats of the twentieth century. The airlift ended in May 1949, when the blockade was lifted, but the crisis had lasting consequences. It led to the creation, later in 1949, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, and to the formal division of Germany into two states, the Federal Republic in the west and the German Democratic Republic in the east.
The arms race added a new dimension. The United States had been the only nuclear power since 1945, but in August 1949 the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, ending the American monopoly far sooner than Western experts had expected. Both sides then developed more powerful weapons, including the hydrogen bomb, and built the bombers and, later, the missiles to deliver them. The Cold War was called cold because the two superpowers never fought each other directly, but it was not cold for everyone. In June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, and the United States intervened under the United Nations, in a war that lasted three years and ended in a stalemate that left the peninsula divided.
Cuba, the Video and the Legacy
It was in this context that Cuba became a focal point. In 1959, Fidel Castro led a revolution that overthrew the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and the new government moved closer to the Soviet Union, nationalising American-owned property and accepting Soviet aid. The United States responded with an economic embargo and, in April 1961, with a failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, carried out by Cuban exiles supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. The failure humiliated the new administration of President John F. Kennedy, and it convinced Castro, and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, that the United States would try again. In the summer of 1962, Khrushchev decided to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, in part to defend the island and in part to correct what he saw as an imbalance in nuclear power.
The prologue at the centre of this chapter traces those first years, from the end of the Second World War through the Iron Curtain, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Blockade, and it shows how each crisis added a layer of mistrust to the last. Its strength is in showing that the Cuban Missile Crisis was not an isolated incident but the culmination of a long history, and it captures how the Cold War felt to those who lived through it, as a contest between two ways of life that shaped the politics and daily anxieties of millions. The alliances formed in the late 1940s, the division of Germany and the arms race left a world in which a single misjudgement could have destroyed them both, and that is the history the following chapters walk through day by day.