John F Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Page 3 of 8

• 1. The 'gravest issues'
• 2. The ExComm and the secret tapes
• 3. Quarantine
• 4. A Berlin crisis, not a Cuba crisis
• 5. Dreadful days
• 6. Finessing the Turkish missiles issue
• 7. Resolution
• 8. Find out more
• Print entire article

Quarantine

In the first day's debates, everyone favoured bombing Cuba. The only differences concerned the scale of attack. Kennedy, Bundy, and some others spoke of a 'surgical strike' solely against the missile sites. 'It corresponds to "the punishment fits the crime" in political terms', said Bundy. Others joined the chiefs of staff in insisting that an attack should also take out air defence sites and bombers, so as to limit losses of US aircraft and prevent an immediate air reprisal against US bases in Florida.

'The under secretary of state, George Ball, had commented that a US surprise attack on Cuba would be '... like Pearl Harbor ...''

By the third day, 18 October, another option had come to the fore. The under secretary of state, George Ball, had commented that a US surprise attack on Cuba would be '... like Pearl Harbor. It's the kind of conduct that one might expect of the Soviet Union. It is not conduct that one expects of the United States.' Robert Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk concurred, Rusk observing that the decision-makers could carry 'the mark of Cain' on their brows for the rest of their lives. To meet this concern and to obtain time for gaining support from other nations, there developed the idea of the President's publicly announcing the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, ordering a blockade to prevent the introduction of further missiles, and demanding that the Soviets withdraw the missiles already there. (Both for legal reasons and for resonance with Franklin Roosevelt's 'Quarantine Address' of 1937, the term 'quarantine' was substituted for 'blockade'.)

To those of Kennedy's advisers who still favoured quick use of military force (the 'hawks' in later classification), this quarantine constituted an ultimatum. If Khrushchev did not capitulate within a day or two, a US air attack on Cuba would follow, followed before long by an invasion. For those in the ExComm who would later be classed as 'doves,' the quarantine bought time for possibly developing some diplomatic solution.

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Published: 2001-03-01