Russian Life & People Digest
Question by : What were the goals of Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis?
What was it that Khrushchev wanted to accomplish in the crisis?
Answers and Views:
Answer by tuffy
To put thermonuclear warheads 90 miles from the U.S. and try to threaten them.
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Gerald Cline says
On the face of it he wanted to level the playing field against America’s overwhelming superiority in nuclear delivery capability during that era of the Cold War. In 1962 the primary means of delivering nuclear weapons was still the long range bomber. Short range missiles were available, but the USSR did not have any allies close enough to the US to base them. ICBMs were just starting to come on line, but were unreliable (liquid fueled) monsters difficult to set up and launch, and neither side had more than forty or fifty missiles in their inventories (probably half or more would have failed if launched).
When Castro came to power in Cuba Khrushchev thought he saw an opening. Kennedy had proven to be a weak and indecisive leader in several earlier encounters with Khrushchev, and the Russian leader thought he could bully Kennedy into accepting the deployment of the missiles if he could get them installed and active before he was caught deploying them.
It didn’t work, and he got caught. Kennedy was also trapped. The American people did not trust the Russians with a first strike capability, and were willing to go to war over the issue. They all got behind Kennedy…and pushed. Kennedy would have been driven from office if he had let the deployment stand no matter how popular he was with the media. This was something the American people were not willing to compromise on.
In the end more reliable and massive numbers of ICBMs posed a similar threat to the US starting in the mid to late 60s, but it was accompanied by a corresponding American buildup which offset a first strike capability by the USSR (called Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD).