Khrushchev's Response To The Cuban Missile Crisis

The crisis was not over. Nuclear missiles remained on Cuba and Kennedy was determined to remove them. A resolution had to be found, and quickly, before Kennedy was pushed by the national panic he had generated to launch an attack on Cuba. Both leaders, it is clear, had become horrified at the prospects in front of them. Kennedy, desperate to avoid pushing Khrushchev too far, to the disgust of Excomm ‘hawks’, ordered the navy to allow Soviet and Soviet-chartered merchant ships not carrying arms to pass unsearched. Khrushchev, for his part, sent a long, rambling letter to Kennedy, appealing to reason and trust to prevent a catastrophe, and insisting that if US threats to Cuba were ended, the issue of weapons would disappear. We now know, from recently released archives, that Castro was urging Khrushchev to use the missiles if Cuba was invaded. Khrushchev’s response was to order his military commander in Cuba to do nothing of the sort without direct orders from Moscow. Thus both sides were under immense pressure to resolve the crisis.
Khrushchev’s message seemed to contain the basis of a settlement. But matters took a turn for the worse. A new message was received from Moscow offering a specific deal by which the missiles in both Turkey and Cuba would be removed and the USA and USSR would jointly guarantee the security of both nations. …show more content…
Had the Russian used tactical nuclear weapons, whose presence was not suspected by the Americans, a full-scale thermonuclear war would probably have followed. But Khrushchev, himself desperate to find a settlement and aware that a non-invasion pledge would meet his most important need, did agree. Tedious and frustrating negotiations followed over the means of verifying the departure of the missiles, largely caused by the obstruction of Castro, who was enraged that Khrushchev had not consulted him over the