The ‘13 days’ of the Cuban Missile Crisis stands as the most ominous period of the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The world appeared to be on the edge of a nuclear abyss that that threatened to engulf the two superpowers. It is clear to the modern reader of Cold War history how close the world came to thermonuclear devastation, but also, with the benefit of historical hindsight we can be reasonably certain that Khrushchev never meant to instigate a third world war. The Soviet leader had made it clear to Washington that Cuba would feature in Soviet foreign policy. After all, he had stated at the time of Castro’s revolution that the Soviet Union would support ‘wars of national liberation worldwide.’[1] Although sceptical of Khrushchev’s motives, Dean Rusk certainly thought that the Soviet Union would not place nuclear weapons in Cuba “unless they’re prepared to generate a nuclear war.”[2] So how is it that Nikita Khrushchev risked the fate of human civilisation for the sake of placing a relatively small number of nuclear missiles on a small Caribbean Island? For General Maxwell Taylor the answer was initially very simple; the Soviet’s had placed the weapons primarily as “a launching base for short-range missiles against the United States to supplement their ICBM system.”[3] President Kennedy was sure about Khrushchev’s role in the matter; it was the Soviet leader that “initiated the danger…he’s the one that’s playing God, not us.”[4] Khrushchev’s own personality and ideological beliefs appear to have had central role in the decision making process. Fidel Castro once remarked that “Nikita had a weakness for Cuba…emotionally, and so on-because he was a man of political conviction.”[5] This understandable ‘political conviction’ motivated the Soviet leader to respond to the situation, and so it was that Khrushchev launched ‘Operation Anadyr’. In doing so, he instigated a Cold War stand off profoundly watched by the eyes of the world. Mark White describes the search for Khrushchev’s motivation in this episode as “the greatest enigma in the historiography of the missile crisis.”[6] It appears difficult to narrow down Khrushchev’s decision to an indisputable single reason. However, it is possible to identify several factors that may have influenced the reasoning behind the Soviet leaders decision to place nuclear missiles into Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
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