When a Russian leader threatens the use of tactical nuclear weapons, or, worse, a nuclear war, he immediately commands the attention of an American president.
So it was with Joe Biden in September 2022 during the early months of the Ukraine War, and so it was with John F. Kennedy during the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. History follows no exact libretto, but the similarities are stark.
Seven months into the Ukraine War, when a desperate Vladimir Putin, robbed of the quick victory he’d considered his, raised the threat of using tactical nuclear weapons to save the shaky Russian position in Ukraine, Joe Biden warned him of “catastrophic consequences” if he acted on his threat. There was, according to Bob Woodward’s book, “War,” a U.S. intelligence judgment of a 5-to-50 percent chance that Putin would use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.
This frightening possibility, changing the unwritten rules of modern warfare and likely sucking the United States into an unwanted war with Russia, hung like a dark cloud over the Biden White House. When John Kennedy lived in the White House, the Russian nuclear threat seemed to be even worse. In the early 1960’s, the Russian leader was not the cold, calculating ex-intelligence officer, for whom feints, dodges and bluffs were second nature; it was the emotional, fiery, unpredictable Nikita Khrushchev, a pudgy package of contradictions difficult to judge but more available for possible compromise. He yearned for U.S.-Russian summitry; Putin flees from the very concept of accommodation with the West.
For an American reporter living in Moscow at the time, the major, compelling issue was not Ukraine but the division of Germany, specifically Berlin, one lingering, dangerous result of World War II. It was, Khrushchev often said, “a bone in my throat.”
Ever since Kennedy’s election, Khrushchev maneuvered heaven and earth to arrange a summit meeting with him, and finally, in early June 1961, after much confusion and misunderstanding, he won his prize, a two-day summit with Kennedy in neutral Vienna. Anticipation was alpine in dreamy expectation of substantial progress; but when both leaders ran into a diplomatic deadlock on Berlin, each retreated into deep disappointment, falling back on hard, unyielding definitions of national interest.
Kennedy worried that in his disappointment, the flamboyant Khrushchev would “miscalculate,” that somehow he would misread him. At one point, Khrushchev lost his temper, exploding “Miscalculation! Miscalculation! All I ever hear…is that damned word. You ought to bury it in cold storage…I’m sick of it.” Glaring at Kennedy, the Russian leader shook his head and reportedly shouted, “If the U.S. wants war, then so be it!” Kennedy let a minute pass before coolly replying, “Then it’s going to be a cold winter.”
At home, a sobered American president quickly added to the U.S. military budget, promising a strong but undefined American response to any Soviet maneuver affecting Berlin’s status. Khrushchev, for his part, reacted harshly, reflected in three angry televised speeches on Berlin in one week in mid-June. What was especially alarming about the speeches was not their frequency but their tone. It seemed to many of us in Moscow that Khrushchev had lost control of himself. He was hysterical. He ranted and raved. He seemed to be anticipating a cataclysmic disaster. “If the Western powers unleash a war,” he screamed, banging the table, “there will be no open cities, no front, no rear, no groves, no Acropolis—nothing will be left.” He frightened the Russian people into believing war was around the corner. I sensed they worried about another World War II, only worse.
On August 13 at 5 p.m., my quiet Sunday was shattered, when Moscow Radio announced, like a bolt out of the blue, that East Germany had begun to seal the border between East and West Berlin, stopping all traffic, commercial and military, a Khrushchev decision that sent shock waves through Western capitals. Khrushchev was clearly in violation of World War II agreements. He knew it. Kennedy knew it. But how would Kennedy respond?
In Moscow, fears were widespread, the mood grim. A Russian official told me Khrushchev was “holding his breath.” Everyone anxiously wondered whether war in central Europe had now become a distinct possibility.
Within a few days, after urgent consultations with Great Britain and France, Kennedy responded with what American diplomats called a “a strong note of protest” but which a relieved Khrushchev seemed to understand as “words but no action.” A Soviet official, who’d been at the Vienna summit, believed that Khrushchev had taken the measure of the young American president and concluded that, if necessary, he could run rings around him. Kennedy was, in Khrushchev’s estimation, “weak” and “inexperienced.” Weeks later, at a Kremlin reception, a different Soviet diplomat confided that if Kennedy had decided to “tear down the fence” in Berlin, Khrushchev would have had to bow to that show of American power. Russia could not afford a war with the United States, he conceded. George Kennan, a noted Soviet expert who was then U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, sought compromise. He urged Kennedy to consider the new Berlin wall as “Khrushchev’s way of avoiding a confrontation.” Reluctantly, Kennedy agreed and swallowed his pride. Khrushchev had gambled and he’d emerged a winner. At least so he thought at the time.
In mid-May 1962, in his running confrontation with Kennedy, Khrushchev took his next fateful step, a decision that brought the world to the edge of a nuclear war. While in Sofia to celebrate the 7th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact, Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky quietly informed Khrushchev that the U.S. Jupiter missiles, recently based in nearby Turkey, had become “operational,” pointing at the Soviet Union. At that moment, into Khrushchev’s fertile imagination popped a not-so-playful thought, borne more of desperation than a need for adventure: if the U.S. could move missiles into Turkey, he asked, then why couldn’t the Soviet Union move missiles into Cuba? Turning to Malinovsky, Khrushchev grinned maliciously, “What if we throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants?”
Over the next few months, operating in total secrecy, Khrushchev launched the historic Cuban missile crisis, transporting roughly 40,000 troops and dozens of missiles equipped to carry nuclear warheads to Fidel Castro’s Cuba without even informing Castro of this reckless plan. In Moscow, nothing leaked. Normalcy reigned. Diplomacy crept along at its usually slow pace. American reporters focused on everything from a highly successful Benny Goodman tour to the latest Khrushchev warning about Berlin, but nothing about the secret Khrushchev gamble on Cuba. We were sitting on the biggest story of the year, innocently ignorant.
In Washington, occasional stories did appear about a Soviet military buildup on Cuba, but Kennedy and his senior aides deemed the sourcing to be suspect, coming as it was largely from Cuban exiles. Besides, even if there were a buildup, Kennedy considered it “defensive” in nature. He still did not know that Khrushchev had, months earlier, quietly shifted his East-West strategy from “defensive” to “offensive.”
On October 16, like a surprise punch in the jaw, Kennedy learned the shocking news that Russia was building medium-range missile sites southwest of Havana. The missiles could carry nuclear warheads. On October 22, after a week of non-stop, high-level consultations, Kennedy stunned Khrushchev with a broadcast announcement of a U.S. naval quarantine of Cuba. The intent was to block Soviet ships on the high seas, to many an act of war. If Khrushchev had ordered his ships to challenge the quarantine, American warships would have stopped them. For a frozen moment, the prospect of a Soviet-American shootout hung over the Caribbean.
Seeking to avoid a confrontation he himself had created, Khrushchev wisely backed off–he ordered his ships to stop. He was, I learned, “very surprised” by this show of strength from a president he had once considered “weak.” Khrushchev had again gambled, but this time he’d miscalculated. It was the kind of dangerous miscalculation in the nuclear age that Kennedy had feared could one day happen. But, for both leaders, what now?
The next week, day after day of suspenseful crisis, struck many of us in Moscow as an endless exercise in global torment. Both leaders engaged in diplomatic signaling and military preparations, both eager to avoid another miscalculation that could have led to a nuclear war. Another Khrushchev–Kennedy summit was a possibility, but, Kennedy made clear, not until Khrushchev agreed to withdraw his missiles from Cuba.
Finally, on October 29, a very nerve-wracking Sunday, when the American military went through a last-minute drill for an attack on Cuba, Khrushchev arranged for his favorite Moscow Radio broadcaster, Yuri Levitan, to read a letter he had written to Kennedy the night before, agreeing to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba. Khrushchev had caved to Kennedy’s key demand. The Cuban missile crisis ended.
For both Russian and American leaders, the lessons were clear. Khrushchev learned that careful, considered calculation of national interests was preferable to reckless miscalculation, what his Kremlin critics, then secretly plotting his ouster, termed “hare-brained scheming.” A wounded Khrushchev held on to power long enough to conclude a historic atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty with Kennedy a year later, shortly before Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy had demonstrated during the Cuban crisis that his refusal to rush to war and his willingness to give his adversary a little more time to reconsider his miscalculation saved the world from a nuclear catastrophe.
One can learn from history, but one can also be misled by history. Because Khrushchev pulled his missiles out of Cuba in 1962 does not mean that another Russian leader, someone like Putin, for example, would do the same thing.
#####
Marvin Kalb, a former network correspondent who covered Khrushchev, currently a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings, is author of the soon-to-be published “A DIFFERENT RUSSIA: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course,” his reporting on their testy relationship.
News & Events
The Challenges of Nuclear “Miscalculation”
Marvin Kalb, Founding Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy
When a Russian leader threatens the use of tactical nuclear weapons, or, worse, a nuclear war, he immediately commands the attention of an American president.
So it was with Joe Biden in September 2022 during the early months of the Ukraine War, and so it was with John F. Kennedy during the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. History follows no exact libretto, but the similarities are stark.
Seven months into the Ukraine War, when a desperate Vladimir Putin, robbed of the quick victory he’d considered his, raised the threat of using tactical nuclear weapons to save the shaky Russian position in Ukraine, Joe Biden warned him of “catastrophic consequences” if he acted on his threat. There was, according to Bob Woodward’s book, “War,” a U.S. intelligence judgment of a 5-to-50 percent chance that Putin would use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.
This frightening possibility, changing the unwritten rules of modern warfare and likely sucking the United States into an unwanted war with Russia, hung like a dark cloud over the Biden White House. When John Kennedy lived in the White House, the Russian nuclear threat seemed to be even worse. In the early 1960’s, the Russian leader was not the cold, calculating ex-intelligence officer, for whom feints, dodges and bluffs were second nature; it was the emotional, fiery, unpredictable Nikita Khrushchev, a pudgy package of contradictions difficult to judge but more available for possible compromise. He yearned for U.S.-Russian summitry; Putin flees from the very concept of accommodation with the West.
For an American reporter living in Moscow at the time, the major, compelling issue was not Ukraine but the division of Germany, specifically Berlin, one lingering, dangerous result of World War II. It was, Khrushchev often said, “a bone in my throat.”
Ever since Kennedy’s election, Khrushchev maneuvered heaven and earth to arrange a summit meeting with him, and finally, in early June 1961, after much confusion and misunderstanding, he won his prize, a two-day summit with Kennedy in neutral Vienna. Anticipation was alpine in dreamy expectation of substantial progress; but when both leaders ran into a diplomatic deadlock on Berlin, each retreated into deep disappointment, falling back on hard, unyielding definitions of national interest.
Kennedy worried that in his disappointment, the flamboyant Khrushchev would “miscalculate,” that somehow he would misread him. At one point, Khrushchev lost his temper, exploding “Miscalculation! Miscalculation! All I ever hear…is that damned word. You ought to bury it in cold storage…I’m sick of it.” Glaring at Kennedy, the Russian leader shook his head and reportedly shouted, “If the U.S. wants war, then so be it!” Kennedy let a minute pass before coolly replying, “Then it’s going to be a cold winter.”
At home, a sobered American president quickly added to the U.S. military budget, promising a strong but undefined American response to any Soviet maneuver affecting Berlin’s status. Khrushchev, for his part, reacted harshly, reflected in three angry televised speeches on Berlin in one week in mid-June. What was especially alarming about the speeches was not their frequency but their tone. It seemed to many of us in Moscow that Khrushchev had lost control of himself. He was hysterical. He ranted and raved. He seemed to be anticipating a cataclysmic disaster. “If the Western powers unleash a war,” he screamed, banging the table, “there will be no open cities, no front, no rear, no groves, no Acropolis—nothing will be left.” He frightened the Russian people into believing war was around the corner. I sensed they worried about another World War II, only worse.
On August 13 at 5 p.m., my quiet Sunday was shattered, when Moscow Radio announced, like a bolt out of the blue, that East Germany had begun to seal the border between East and West Berlin, stopping all traffic, commercial and military, a Khrushchev decision that sent shock waves through Western capitals. Khrushchev was clearly in violation of World War II agreements. He knew it. Kennedy knew it. But how would Kennedy respond?
In Moscow, fears were widespread, the mood grim. A Russian official told me Khrushchev was “holding his breath.” Everyone anxiously wondered whether war in central Europe had now become a distinct possibility.
Within a few days, after urgent consultations with Great Britain and France, Kennedy responded with what American diplomats called a “a strong note of protest” but which a relieved Khrushchev seemed to understand as “words but no action.” A Soviet official, who’d been at the Vienna summit, believed that Khrushchev had taken the measure of the young American president and concluded that, if necessary, he could run rings around him. Kennedy was, in Khrushchev’s estimation, “weak” and “inexperienced.” Weeks later, at a Kremlin reception, a different Soviet diplomat confided that if Kennedy had decided to “tear down the fence” in Berlin, Khrushchev would have had to bow to that show of American power. Russia could not afford a war with the United States, he conceded. George Kennan, a noted Soviet expert who was then U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, sought compromise. He urged Kennedy to consider the new Berlin wall as “Khrushchev’s way of avoiding a confrontation.” Reluctantly, Kennedy agreed and swallowed his pride. Khrushchev had gambled and he’d emerged a winner. At least so he thought at the time.
In mid-May 1962, in his running confrontation with Kennedy, Khrushchev took his next fateful step, a decision that brought the world to the edge of a nuclear war. While in Sofia to celebrate the 7th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact, Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky quietly informed Khrushchev that the U.S. Jupiter missiles, recently based in nearby Turkey, had become “operational,” pointing at the Soviet Union. At that moment, into Khrushchev’s fertile imagination popped a not-so-playful thought, borne more of desperation than a need for adventure: if the U.S. could move missiles into Turkey, he asked, then why couldn’t the Soviet Union move missiles into Cuba? Turning to Malinovsky, Khrushchev grinned maliciously, “What if we throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants?”
Over the next few months, operating in total secrecy, Khrushchev launched the historic Cuban missile crisis, transporting roughly 40,000 troops and dozens of missiles equipped to carry nuclear warheads to Fidel Castro’s Cuba without even informing Castro of this reckless plan. In Moscow, nothing leaked. Normalcy reigned. Diplomacy crept along at its usually slow pace. American reporters focused on everything from a highly successful Benny Goodman tour to the latest Khrushchev warning about Berlin, but nothing about the secret Khrushchev gamble on Cuba. We were sitting on the biggest story of the year, innocently ignorant.
In Washington, occasional stories did appear about a Soviet military buildup on Cuba, but Kennedy and his senior aides deemed the sourcing to be suspect, coming as it was largely from Cuban exiles. Besides, even if there were a buildup, Kennedy considered it “defensive” in nature. He still did not know that Khrushchev had, months earlier, quietly shifted his East-West strategy from “defensive” to “offensive.”
On October 16, like a surprise punch in the jaw, Kennedy learned the shocking news that Russia was building medium-range missile sites southwest of Havana. The missiles could carry nuclear warheads. On October 22, after a week of non-stop, high-level consultations, Kennedy stunned Khrushchev with a broadcast announcement of a U.S. naval quarantine of Cuba. The intent was to block Soviet ships on the high seas, to many an act of war. If Khrushchev had ordered his ships to challenge the quarantine, American warships would have stopped them. For a frozen moment, the prospect of a Soviet-American shootout hung over the Caribbean.
Seeking to avoid a confrontation he himself had created, Khrushchev wisely backed off–he ordered his ships to stop. He was, I learned, “very surprised” by this show of strength from a president he had once considered “weak.” Khrushchev had again gambled, but this time he’d miscalculated. It was the kind of dangerous miscalculation in the nuclear age that Kennedy had feared could one day happen. But, for both leaders, what now?
The next week, day after day of suspenseful crisis, struck many of us in Moscow as an endless exercise in global torment. Both leaders engaged in diplomatic signaling and military preparations, both eager to avoid another miscalculation that could have led to a nuclear war. Another Khrushchev–Kennedy summit was a possibility, but, Kennedy made clear, not until Khrushchev agreed to withdraw his missiles from Cuba.
Finally, on October 29, a very nerve-wracking Sunday, when the American military went through a last-minute drill for an attack on Cuba, Khrushchev arranged for his favorite Moscow Radio broadcaster, Yuri Levitan, to read a letter he had written to Kennedy the night before, agreeing to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba. Khrushchev had caved to Kennedy’s key demand. The Cuban missile crisis ended.
For both Russian and American leaders, the lessons were clear. Khrushchev learned that careful, considered calculation of national interests was preferable to reckless miscalculation, what his Kremlin critics, then secretly plotting his ouster, termed “hare-brained scheming.” A wounded Khrushchev held on to power long enough to conclude a historic atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty with Kennedy a year later, shortly before Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy had demonstrated during the Cuban crisis that his refusal to rush to war and his willingness to give his adversary a little more time to reconsider his miscalculation saved the world from a nuclear catastrophe.
One can learn from history, but one can also be misled by history. Because Khrushchev pulled his missiles out of Cuba in 1962 does not mean that another Russian leader, someone like Putin, for example, would do the same thing.
#####
Marvin Kalb, a former network correspondent who covered Khrushchev, currently a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings, is author of the soon-to-be published “A DIFFERENT RUSSIA: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course,” his reporting on their testy relationship.