Alistair Horne

Recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis

Memory of that terrible day will long survive Castro

Like the assassination of JFK, everybody alive then can remember where they were that Doomsday Week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. That Saturday, 27 October, was, and remains, the closest the world has come to nuclear holocaust — the blackest day of a horrendous week.

It was an incredibly beautiful autumn day. There was an almost sinister tranquillity in London. I recall walking across Hyde Park, almost deserted, and thinking ‘this is my last walk, the last day I shall spend with my tiny children, the end of all hopes for their future …it’s the end’. And yet a still small voice within me, of belief in the fundamental humanistic values of Americans, and their good sense, told me that it wasn’t going to be the end. JFK would not allow it….

The following day, Sunday, it was all over — suddenly, as abruptly as it had begun, the week-long crisis was over. Khrushchev had ‘blinked’. A deal, highly beneficial to the West — and to Castro — but humiliating to the Soviets, was struck; the offending Soviet missiles would be removed from Cuba;  US medium-range missiles (they were obsolescent anyway) would be taken out of Turkey; Cuba would be guaranteed that the US would not invade (that guarantee has held good to this day); and the Soviets would not move on Berlin.

The first talks between the Soviets and the West on nuclear disarmament began. In 1963 a first (partial) test-ban was signed in Moscow. Harold Macmillan told me that he regarded it as the greatest success of his seven years as prime minister.

The unstable Khrushchev was sacked the following year, replaced by the much more cautious Brezhnev. The world breathed again. ‘So it was all over,’ Harold Macmillan wrote in his diaries.

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