Cuban Missile Crisis

[WildBill]

There was a lot of tension.

Many people thought that we might get into a nuclear war with Russia.

After that time a lot of people talked about building bomb shelters in the back yard.

I didn't know anyone who did, but I was just a kid.

There are a couple of good movies about it, but I think the content has been revised to make president Kennedy look like he handled it better than he actually did.

I guess he handled it okay. We are all still here.

Thirteen Days [2000] and The Missiles of October [1974] are two that come to mind. Several books have been written on the subject.

[oohrah]

I agree with Wild Bill. I was a Dallas Moning News carrier as a lad in those days (you remember those, right?).

I will never forget the picture above the fold one morning of a map showing Cuba and the US and the radius of impact that those missiles could attain, and I remember Dallas being just in range of those missiles. And we practiced "duck and cover" in the halls of the school.

I think history has treated JFK fairly, this was the evetn that coined the word "brinkmanship", IIRC.

[jmra]

I agree with Wild Bill. I was a Dallas Moning News carrier as a lad in those days (you remember those, right?).

I will never forget the picture above the fold one morning of a map showing Cuba and the US and the radius of impact that those missiles could attain, and I remember Dallas being just in range of those missiles. And we practiced "duck and cover" in the halls of the school.

I think history has treated JFK fairly, this was the evetn that coined the word "brinkmanship", IIRC.

I remember the school drills but with ours everyone got under their desk.

[Pawpaw]

I remember the duck and cover drills in school.

Also, my parents bought a galvanized trash can and stocked it with a bunch of stuff from a list in the paper. There were canned goods, candles, flashlight batteries, a radio, and I don't know what all in there. I do know the can was very full and it lived in the hall closet.

[WildBill]

I agree with Wild Bill. I was a Dallas Moning News carrier as a lad in those days (you remember those, right?).

I will never forget the picture above the fold one morning of a map showing Cuba and the US and the radius of impact that those missiles could attain, and I remember Dallas being just in range of those missiles. And we practiced "duck and cover" in the halls of the school.

I think history has treated JFK fairly, this was the evetn that coined the word "brinkmanship", IIRC.

I remember the school drills but with ours everyone got under their desk.

It's a good thing that we had really sturdy metal desks back then. The stuff they have now, wouldn't do much good.

[Cedar Park Dad]

Dad's enlistement was delayed a year. He was sent down with his unit in Florida. Dad said he was sure they were all going to die.

[joe817]

I was in the 8th grade at Allen Military Academy in Bryan. When the crises first broke, it was nothing but talk in the dorms, and in the chow hall. But as the crises deepened, we cadets started talking about it in the classroom. I remember talking about it in math for one solid week. Our math teacher was very accommodating, and did his best to calm us down. We were scared to death that we(8th graders) would be called up to fill in the gaps stateside when the regular army shipped out. The imagination of an 8th grader is pretty vivid, lol.

The classroom chatter then spread to our MST classes(military science & tactics). Our instructors were Active Army, and still wore full uniform, IIRC. They tried reassure us that due to our age, what we had feared wouldn't happen...to us. But in our JR.College section, most of them were going to be commissioned as 2nd Lts. and THEY had something to be concerned about. But they were never called up. I'm not sure they would have been called up anyway., as we were ROTC, not OCS and the OCS schools were filling up(Viet Nam was on the horizon).

We didn't go to school on Mondays(we went to school on Saturday). And Monday mornings(9-12) we assembled, drew our weapons(M-1's for most everybody, 03's for the 7th graders) and marched around the drill field, the manual of arms, and spent an hour or so cleaning our rifles. During the crises, we paid particular attention to detail in cleaning them....just in case.

I was there when Kennedy was assassinated as well. That was a very somber times. But that is a different story.

Thanks for the memories.

[Charles L. Cotton]

I was 11 when this happened and Nikita Khrushchev blinked before Kennedy surrendered Cuba to the Soviet Union. The Military Channel ran a program on the Cuban Missile Crisis several years ago. The U.S. Navy shrunk it's blockade of Cuba at least twice (maybe more, I don't recall) as the Soviets got closer. The program noted that Kennedy's last orders to the fleet were not to engage the Soviets. Kennedy would have let Cuba become a major nuclear missile base for the Soviet Union and the cold war would have been lost overnight. Khruschev's prediction that they would defeat the U.S. without firing a shot would have come true.

We were not aware of the final orders to the fleet, but we were very much aware that the Soviets were challenging the U.S. blockade and our fleet was withdrawing each time. This fueled fear not only for the near term, but for the long term as well. Most Americans had little faith that Kennedy would stand up to the Soviets, due in large part to the deadly cowardice he exhibited in his botched Bay of Pigs invasion. Early shopping malls had companies displaying their backyard bomb/fallout shelters and, as others mentioned, atomic bomb drills were commonplace in schools. At just a few weeks shy of 12 years of age, I realized that none of us might see the next day and that political leaders had better be willing to fight. I suspect that event led me to be a political activist because I in was in full campaign mode by 1964 with the Goldwater/Johnson election.

I case there's someone who hasn't picked up on it yet, I despise everything related to the Kennedy family.
Chas.

[baldeagle]

I remember tremendous tension and constant drills diving under our desks (which seemed really stupid to me). I remember a palpable sense of relief when it was over.

[Maxwell]

All I remember from the early 60's cold war era are the kindergarten and elementary school drills that had us hide under our desks...

[Abraham]

At the time my Dad told me there was a very good chance of a nuclear exchange between us and them.

I figured our deaths would be quick if it did happen.

I also thought if it didn't happen then, it would eventually.

Now, I think it's not Russia that'll launch, but Iran will if nothing is done to stop them.

They'll launch on Israel, who'll launch back, and then every nuclear equipped country will join the fun...and hello nuclear winter and good-bye human race.

[Oldgringo]

As the Russian ships steamed toward Cuba, I was a married 21 year old Field Engineer on a construction project in Nashville, TN, the city of my birth. We did not know if there would be a tomorrow. It was indeed a scary time.

[The Annoyed Man]

I'm like most of the others. The most dangerous part of the crisis lasted from October 14–28, 1962, with the naval blockade of Cuba ending on November 20 of the same year. I had turned 10 years old on October 5th of that year, so this was just a little over a week after my birthday. I do remember the intensity of the news coverage and I remember that adults talked about it a lot, but I don't think I realized at the time just how dangerous the situation truly was. I remember reading years later, when I was in my 30s or so, that JFK's own estimate at the time that the crisis would lead to a nuclear exchange as being 50%, and I remember my parents being particularly worried about it, but I suspect that they tried to protect my brothers and me from all of the implications of it.

I remember the "duck and cover" drills in school, but we were doing those anyway, for years before the cuban crisis.......nevermind that they were largely intended as a palliative for civilian anxiety. Hiding under your classroom desk was not going to be any kind of cover in the event of an atomic strike. The rooskies had had the hydrogen bomb since 1953, and by 1961 (the year before the missile crisis) they had built and tested the Tsar Bomba - a 100 megaton thermonuclear bomb, and the largest ever built by anybody before or since - as well as the means of delivery for it. It was only tested once at a throttled-down yield of "only" 50 megatons, because even the rooskies were afraid of seeing what the full 100 megatons looked like. The explosion was hot enough to induce third degree burns at 100 km (62 miles) distance. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, my school was located less than half that distance from downtown Los Angeles, so......

This is an aerial picture of the Tsar Bomba mushroom cloud taken from 100 miles away, and it was the "half-strength" 50 megaton version:


The top of the mushroom cloud is 35 miles high at the time of the picture. The Wiki page for the Tsar Bomba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) has this to say about the actual test:

The Tsar Bomba detonated at 11:32 (Moscow time) on October 30, 1961, over the Mityushikha Bay nuclear testing range (Sukhoy Nos Zone C), north of the Arctic Circle over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Sea. The bomb was dropped from an altitude of 10.5 kilometres (6.5 mi); it was designed to detonate at a height of 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) over the land surface (4.2 kilometres (2.6 mi) over sea level) by barometric sensors.[3][8][9]

The original, November 1961 AEC estimate of the yield was 55–60 Mt, but since 1992 all Russian sources have stated its yield as 50 Mt. Khrushchev warned in a filmed speech to the Supreme Soviet of the existence of a 100 Mt bomb. (Technically the design was capable of this yield.) Although simplistic fireball calculations predicted the fireball would hit the ground, the bomb's own shock wave reflected back and prevented this. The fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) away from where it ascended. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 64 kilometres (40 mi) high (over seven times the height of Mount Everest), which meant that the cloud was above the stratosphere and well inside the mesosphere when it peaked. The cap of the mushroom cloud had a peak width of 95 kilometres (59 mi). The base of the cloud was 40 kilometres (25 mi) wide. All buildings in the village of Severny (both wooden and brick), located 55 kilometres (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows and doors; and radio communications were interrupted for almost one hour. One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 kilometres (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero. A shock wave was observed in the air at Dikson settlement 700 kilometres (430 mi) away; windowpanes were partially broken to distances of 900 kilometres (560 mi). Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland. The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth. Its seismic body wave magnitude was about 5 to 5.25. The energy yield was around 8.1 on the Richter scale but, since the bomb was detonated in the air rather than underground, most of the energy was not converted to seismic waves. The TNT equivalent of the 50 Mt test could be represented by a cube of TNT 312 metres (1023 feet) on a side, approximately the height of the Eiffel Tower.

Here is an image superimposing the zone of total destruction over the aerial view of Paris, France:


And that was at half-strength......

Back in those days, there was actual talk of a "Doomsday Device" - one which would be the ultimate payback in a nuclear exchange, intended to render the planet uninhabitable to man - the ultimate expression of mutually assured destruction. The concept was featured in sci-fi and spy movies at the time. Given the immense power of the 50% powered Tsar Bomba, it is not hard to imagine that the full-strength version was as close to a doomsday device ever built by man.

In retrospect, it is easy to understand why people were genuinely worried. Thank God that I was a kid and so I don't remember the potential horrors as vividly as did my parents. Consider also that my parents and their generation had also fought WW2 and Korea not that long before (think 9/11 to now, and that's how long), and they knew the horros of war full well. Add the monstrosity of a nuclear exchange to those fears, and one can well understand just how either terrified or fatalistic people must have been at the time. But as a child, I knew none of that. I only remember the photos in Life Magazine of the Soviet ships being blockaded from entering Cuban waters.

[RPBrown]

I remember the duck and cover drills, both under our desks and in the lower level of the school. I also remember the adults talking about if it started, the world would end and most all living things would be dead. Dad had looked into a bomb shelter for us and probably would have done it had the crisis not ended when it did. Even then he still considered it for years.