Cuban Missile Crisis: Encyclopedia II - Cuban Missile Crisis - Aftermath

Cuban Missile Crisis - Aftermath

The compromise satisfied no one, though it was a particularly sharp embarrassment for Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, who were seen as retreating from circumstances that they had started, whilst, if played well, it could have looked like just the opposite; the USSR gallantly saving the world from nuclear holocaust by not insisting on restoring the nuclear equilibrium. Khrushchev's fall from power two years later can be partially linked to Politburo embarrassment at both Khrushchev's eventual concessions to the US and his ineptitude in precipitating the crisis in the first place.

U.S. military commanders were not happy with the result either. General LeMay told the President that it was "the greatest defeat in our history" and that the US should invade immediately.

For Cuba, it was a betrayal by the Soviets whom they had trusted, given that the decisions on putting an end to the crisis had been made exclusively by Kennedy and Khrushchev.

In early 1992 it was confirmed that Soviet forces in Cuba had, by the time the crisis broke, received tactical nuclear warheads for their artillery rockets, and IL-28 bombers [4], though General Anatoly Gribkov, part of the Soviet staff responsible for the operation, stated that the local Soviet commander, General Issa Pliyev, had predelegated authority to use them if the U.S. had mounted a full-scale invasion of Cuba. Gribkov misspoke: the Kremlin's authorization remained unsigned and undelivered.

The short time span of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the extensive documentation of the decision-making processes on both sides makes it an excellent case study for analysis of state decision-making. In the Essence of Decision, Graham T. Allison and Philip D. Zelikow use the crisis to illustrate multiple approaches to analyzing the actions of the state. The intensity and magnitude of the crisis also provides excellent material for drama, as illustrated by the movie Thirteen Days (2000), directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp. It was also a substantial part of the 2003 documentary The Fog Of War, which won an Oscar.

In October 2002, McNamara and Schlesinger joined a group of other dignitaries in a "reunion" with Castro in Cuba to continue to release classified documents and further study the crisis. It was during the first meeting that Secretary McNamara first discovered that Cuba had many more missiles than initially expected, and what McNamara refered to as 'rational men' (Castro and Khruschev) were perfectly willing to start a nuclear war over the crisis. Furthermore, it was revealed at this conference that an officer aboard a Soviet submarine, named Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, may have single-handedly prevented the initiation of a nuclear catastrophe [5]. The reported details of this event are remarkably similar to the plot from the movie Crimson Tide (1995), except that the roles of the Americans and Soviets are reversed.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Aftermath", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki