U.S., Russia Again Worry of Nuclear War 60 Years After Cuban Missile Crisis

Sixty years ago today, the discovery of planned Soviet missile sites in Cuba by a CIA U-2 spy plane sparked a series of events that would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.

On October 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the Communist-led island located just 90 miles south of Key West, Florida, an island which he had unsuccessfully attacked using allied rebels a year and a half earlier. Soviet Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev threatened to defy the so-called U.S. military "quarantine," and Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, fearing an imminent invasion, appealed for Moscow to make good on its vow to strike back.

At one particularly fateful point in the crisis, a lone Soviet submarine commanding officer refused to approve nuclear retaliation to the U.S. Navy's use of depth charges in international waters, narrowly averting what would have been only the second-ever use of such weapons in combat after the U.S. tandem atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, less than 17 years earlier.

While the harrowing, roughly 13-day affair that's come to be known in the United States as the Cuban Missile Crisis — or the Caribbean Crisis to those in Russia — was ultimately resolved peacefully with a mutual withdrawal of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) from the frontiers of the two superpowers, the specter of nuclear war has lingered, surviving the fall of the Soviet Union only to emerge once again six decades later.

"Think about it: We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis," President Joe Biden said at the Democratic Senatorial Reception Committee held last week in Washington, D.C.

While the U.S. and the Soviet Union never engaged in direct conflict throughout the Cold War, the two superpowers fought a number of proxy wars across the globe that drew blood on both sides, including in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And today, large-scale conflict has returned to Europe with Russia's attack on Ukraine, a post-Soviet republic that underwent a pro-West uprising in 2014 and has since intensified efforts to join the U.S.-led NATO Western military alliance.

Russia has viewed Ukraine's aspirational entry into the nuclear umbrella established to repel Moscow during the Cold War as a national security threat, prompting President Vladimir Putin to launch one of the largest military campaigns in Europe since World War II. Putin, who has easily outlasted Khrushchev among others to become the longest-serving leader in the Kremlin since Joseph Stalin, has repeatedly warned that he reserves the right to use nuclear weapons to protect his nation's territorial integrity, which is to soon include four regions of Ukraine annexed in an internationally unrecognized referendum held late last month.

At last week's event, Biden stated emphatically that for the "first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat of the use of the nuclear weapons if, in fact, things continue down the path they've been going."

And Biden said that Putin, whom the U.S. leader claims to "know fairly well" is "not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical and nuclear weapons."

Newsweek, which covered the Cuban Missile Crisis in real-time in 1962, asked the White House what lessons from that era of brinksmanship the Biden administration was applying in today's fraught geopolitical climate.

"The President's comments reinforce how seriously we take these threats about nuclear weapons — as we have done when the Russians have made these threats throughout the conflict," a White House spokesperson said.

"The kind of irresponsible rhetoric we have seen is no way for the leader of a nuclear armed state to speak," the spokesperson added. "But if the Cuban missile crisis has taught us anything, it is the value of reducing nuclear risk, not brandishing it."

The view is far different in Moscow, however, where Washington is seen as once again attempting to impose its worldview abroad, even as the U.S. and its allies accuse Russia of doing the same in Ukraine.

In comments shared simultaneously with Newsweek and Moscow's state-run Rossiya Segodnya Information Agency, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov compared current Washington-Moscow ties with the darkest days of the decades-long dispute that dominated the relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union along with much of the world.

"It is an open secret that Russian-U.S. relations are in a very poor state," Ryabkov said. "They are comparable to the peak moments of the Cold War. The main problem today is that the Americans have trampled underfoot international law and absolute taboos in diplomatic practice."

"Contrary to geopolitical realities, the United States is trying to subdue all others, like it did during the Caribbean crisis," he argued. "It wants to compel others to live according to its notorious 'rules' that are beneficial to it alone."

"The Russophobic American elites are thinking irrationally and pushing the U.S. leadership to open confrontation with Russia," he added, "and eventually to the irresponsible escalation of international tensions."

Neither the White House nor the Kremlin have expressed interest in any official contacts, and even working-level relations are presently tenuous. It remains to be seen if Biden and Putin would be able to communicate in the consequential, albeit frenetic manner that Kennedy and Khrushchev did to avert disaster in the most decisive moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Ryabkov held out hope that it is "possible to break this vicious circle of escalation."

To do so, however, he said that "Washington should seriously work on its mistakes and give up claims to global domination in the paradigm of a unipolar mentality," and "also make the correct conclusions from its abortive attempts to interfere in our domestic affairs and adjust its own conduct accordingly."

Ryabkov went on to criticize the U.S. for not "considering the current geopolitical realities," and dismissed the effect of sanctions adopted by much of the Western world against Moscow.

Notably, major economies in Asia such as China and India have not followed through with such restrictive measures. And the recent decision by the expanded group of the Saudi-led Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC+) to slash oil production rather than increase it as Biden had requested has underlined divisions among the international community, even if the overwhelming majority of nations have condemned Russia's actions in Ukraine.

Ryabkov said that, for Moscow's part, "we do not reject contacts" with Washington, and "we believe talking is better than not talking." But he added a caveat that "such communication should be based on mutual respect and consideration of each other's interests."

He also dismissed a notion gaining traction in Western media that "Russia is getting ready for strikes with WMD," and argued it was the U.S. and those aligned with it that "are actively using nuclear rhetoric against the backdrop of events in Ukraine."

"Obviously, a direct clash with the US and NATO is not in Russia's interests," Ryabkov said. "We are warning and hoping that Washington and other Western capitals realize the danger of uncontrolled escalation."

Central to Moscow's concerns is increased Western military aid to Ukraine, which has staged a massive series of counteroffensives to beat back Russian forces present in large swathes of the country's east and south that Moscow seeks to incorporate into the Russian Federation.

"We note with regret that the continuous large-scale assistance to Kiev, the training of Ukrainian military personnel on the territory of NATO countries, and the provision of intelligence information and real-time satellite photos up to defining targets for artillery strikes and planning Ukrainian army operations are increasingly involving Western countries in the conflict on the side of the Kiev regime," Ryabkov said.

"U.S. and European leaders of different levels are calling for the defeat of our country on the battlefield," he added. "In this situation, Russia will have to take appropriate countermeasures, including asymmetric ones."

While the nuclear stockpiles of both the U.S. and Russia have dropped dramatically from their Cold War heights, they still number in the thousands, and the modernization of such strategic assets has only ensured greater lethality. The historic bilateral arms control measures that once restricted certain types of weapons have also collapsed over the past two decades.

In 1987, Washington and Moscow came to an unprecedented agreement to ban the same kind of land-launched missiles that were at the center of the crisis in Cuba. In 2019, under then-President Donald Trump, the U.S. withdrew from this pact, known as the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, accusing Russia of developing a weapon that violated the terms of the deal. Moscow in turn accused Washington of having undermined the agreement through the deployment in Eastern Europe of defensive systems suspected of having offensive capabilities as well.

Even the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which has served as the cornerstone of U.S.-Russia non-proliferation measures, is at risk given the breakdown in relations and lack of trust between the two nuclear titans.

With both nations retaining their nuclear capabilities, exercises involving such assets remain a priority, and the White House issued assurances that such training is not event-driven.

On Thursday, the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis 60th anniversary, U.S. National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby announced to reporters that NATO would be proceeding with its nuclear-themed "Steadfast Noon" drill this fall. At the same time, he said Russia was likely to soon conduct its own nuclear-focused exercise known as "Grom."

Kirby said the U.S. assessment is that neither nation's drills has any connection to the ongoing conflict.

"In both cases, given what's going on in Ukraine," Kirby said, "I felt it was important to put some context around these annual long-planned routine strategic exercises."

Meanwhile in Cuba, which remains under a U.S. trade embargo to this day despite never having deployed nuclear weapons, the 60th anniversary of what's known there as the October Crisis passed with little fanfare and no official comment.

Experts in Cuba did mark the occasion by holding debates and discussions on the topic, including an event in Havana last week sponsored by the Union of Journalists of Cuba and the Cuban magazine Temas. The event was promoted by the Cuban Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Speaking there, Juan Sánchez, professor at the Higher Institute of International Relations in Havana, argued that Washington and Moscow ultimately mismanaged the crisis, as, although nuclear war was averted, their saber-rattling helped set the stage for future nuclear developments, both amongst themselves and other nations that would soon follow.

Sánchez also expressed an uneasiness about the U.S. and Russia's current capacity to handle their tensions amid heated rhetoric over the conflict in Ukraine. He said he could not understand the "tranquility" of humanity given the dangerous circumstances, nor the lack of diplomacy to try to de-escalate the situation.

"It's not even negotiated," Sánchez said, "although the war is currently underway."

This article has been updated to include further context featured by the Cuban Embassy in Washington, D.C.