The Soviets reacted strongly against the naval quarantine, with Premier Khrushchev, on October 24, calling it a violation of international law and declaring that the blockade was an “act of aggression” that would lead to war and that Russian warships would ignore the American “piracy”. The Soviet leader declared that the “armaments…in Cuba, regardless of classification…are solely for defensive purposes…to secure Cuba against the attack of an aggressor.” Escorted by submarines, Soviet freighters bound for Cuba appeared determined to ignore the quarantine. However, Premier Khrushchev soon ordered the cargo ships to change course or turn back. The next day, Adlai Stevenson, U.S Ambassador to the United Nations, presented the U-2 aerial photographic evidence of the nuclear missiles to the UN Security Council. Stevenson asked Valerian Zorin, the Soviet Ambassador to the UN, about the missiles, but the latter refused to confirm or deny their deployment.
(Taken from Cuban Missile Crisis – Wars of the 20th Century –Vol. 2)
Background After the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961 (previous article), the United States government under President John F. Kennedy focused on clandestine methods to oust or kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and/or overthrow Cuba’s communist government. In November 1961, a U.S. covert operation code-named Mongoose was prepared, which aimed at destabilizing Cuba’s political and economic infrastructures through various means, including espionage, sabotage, embargos, and psychological warfare. Starting in March 1962, anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Florida, supported by American operatives, penetrated Cuba undetected and carried out attacks against farmlands and agricultural facilities, oil depots and refineries, and public infrastructures, as well as Cuban ships and foreign vessels operating inside Cuban maritime waters. These actions, together with the United States Armed Forces’ carrying out military exercises in U.S.-friendly Caribbean countries, made Castro believe that the United States was preparing another invasion of Cuba.
From the time he seized power in Cuba in 1959, Castro had increased the size and strength of his armed forces with weapons provided by the Soviet Union. In Moscow, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev also believed that an American invasion was imminent, and increased Russian advisers, troops, and weapons to Cuba. Castro’s revolution had provided communism with a toehold in the Western Hemisphere and Premier Khrushchev was determined not to lose this invaluable asset. At the same time, the Soviet leader began to face a security crisis of his own when the United States under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) installed 300 Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy in 1961 and 150 missiles in Turkey (Map 33) in April 1962.
In the nuclear arms race between the two superpowers, the United States held a decisive edge over the Soviet Union, both in terms of the number of nuclear missiles (27,000 to 3,600) and in the reliability of the systems required to deliver these weapons. The American advantage was even more pronounced in long-range missiles, called ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles), where the Soviets possessed perhaps no more than a dozen missiles with a poor delivery system in contrast to the United States that had about 170, which when launched from the U.S. mainland could accurately hit specific targets in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet nuclear weapons technology had been focused on the more likely war in Europe and therefore consisted of shorter range missiles, the MRBMs (medium-range ballistic missiles) and IRBMs (intermediate-range ballistic missiles), both of which if installed in Cuba, which was located only 100 miles from southeastern United States, could target portions of the contiguous 48 U.S. States. In one stroke, such a deployment would serve Castro as a powerful deterrent against an American invasion; for the Soviets, they would have invoked their prerogative to install nuclear weapons in a friendly country, just as the Americans had done in Europe. More important, the presence of Soviet nuclear weapons in the Western Hemisphere would radically alter the global nuclear weapons paradigm by posing as a direct threat to the United States.
In April 1962, Premier Khrushchev conceived of such a plan, and felt that the United States would respond to it with no more than a diplomatic protest, and certainly would not take military action. Furthermore, Premier Khrushchev believed that President Kennedy was weak and indecisive, primarily because of the American president’s half-hearted decisions during the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, and President Kennedy’s weak response to the East German-Soviet building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961.
Map 33: NATO’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy was a major factor in the Soviet Union’s decision to install nuclear weapons in Cuba.
A Soviet delegation sent to Cuba met with Fidel Castro, who gave his consent to Khrushchev’s proposal. Subsequently in July 1962, Cuba and the Soviet Union signed an agreement pertinent to the nuclear arms deployment. The planning and implementation of the project was done in utmost secrecy, with only a few of the top Soviet and Cuban officials being informed. In Cuba, Soviet technical and military teams secretly identified the locations for the nuclear missile sites.
In August 1962, U.S. reconnaissance flights over Cuba detected the presence of powerful Soviet aircraft: 39 MiG-21 fighter aircraft and 22 nuclear weapons-capable Ilyushin Il-28 light bombers. More disturbing was the discovery of the S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missile batteries, which were known to be contingent to the deployment of nuclear missiles. By late August, the U.S. government and Congress had raised the possibility that the Soviets were introducing nuclear missiles in Cuba.