THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 4, 1995 TAG: 9508040595
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: THE ATOMIC AGE TURNS 50
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
For 13 days in October 1962, Hampton Roads held its breath as the world marched to the brink of nuclear war.
It was a level of tension unprecedented in the atomic age, yet not until years later was it fully apparent just how close the superpowers came to Armageddon.
After an aborted U.S.-aided invasion attempt at the Bay of Pigs the year before, Cuban President Fidel Castro had shifted his nation further into the Soviet orbit. Photos taken by U.S. spy planes revealed construction sites on the island for medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
Adm. Isaac Kidd recalls the atmosphere of grim urgency that gripped Washington as President John F. Kennedy gathered his advisers to consider the U.S. response.
Kidd, now retired and living in Northern Virginia, was later commander-in-chief of the Atlantic Fleet in Norfolk. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, he was executive assistant to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon.
As soon as the F-4 reconnaissance planes returned to Andrews Air Force Base with the latest photos from Cuba, Kidd said, their film was whisked straight to the Pentagon photo lab. The pilots would wait outside the CNO's office while it was developed, then would be taken to the White House for on-the-spot debriefing.
Scholars reported later that most of Kennedy's advisers favored lashing out at Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev by bombing the missile sites.
``There was no question in my mind that President Kennedy was absolutely serious and would have had the guts to do everything that would have been necessary to convince the son of a bitch to get those things out of there,'' Kidd said in a recent interview. ``I don't think for one second that we were threatening something we were not prepared to do.''
But Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president's brother, argued forcefully against airstrikes, which he characterized as a ``Pearl Harbor in reverse.''
``My brother,'' Robert Kennedy was quoted as saying, ``is not going to be the Tojo of the 1960s,'' referring to the Japanese general who was instrumental in leading his nation into World War II.
Eventually the president settled on a less belligerent alternative: a naval blockade.
The Navy rounded up every available ship and formed a 19-vessel picket line in the Atlantic, 500 miles from Cuba. Kidd remembers that two East Coast-based aircraft carriers were even pulled out of shipyards where they were laid up for repairs.
Wives wept on the piers as their husbands hurried aboard ships leaving the Norfolk Naval Base. Soon, except for a few tugboats, there wasn't a Navy ship left in the harbor.
A mile from the waterfront, inside a concrete bunker-like building, senior officers manned the Atlantic Command's nerve center around the clock for a week, sleeping on cots when they could.
Some 2,500 family members were evacuated from Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, the Navy's outpost on Cuba. Four ships brought the dependents to Norfolk. Sailors slept in the cargo hold while the families took over their berths, and the pantries were given over to preparation of baby formula.
On Oct. 24, two Soviet ships were spotted approaching Cuba with a submarine escort.
``I felt we were on the edge of a precipice with no way off,'' Robert Kennedy later wrote.
Then the Soviet ships stopped dead in the water. Khrushchev sent word that he would withdraw the missiles if the United States would pull 15 Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, where they were pointed at Soviet targets.
Kennedy refused a tit-for-tat deal, but the U.S. had already decided that the Jupiters were no longer needed for defending the nation's European allies. The president let the Soviet leader know that they would soon be removed.
That was good enough for Khrushchev, and he announced on Oct. 28 that the Cuba missile sites would be dismantled. The world let out its collective breath.
But there is an epilogue.
A few years ago, a group of senior American, Russian and Cuban officials who were involved in the 1962 crisis met in Cuba to share information about it.
There, the Americans got a chilling revelation: At the time of the crisis, there was a Soviet military unit in Cuba already equipped with tactical nuclear weapons under the control of the unit's commander.
That meant that if the ``hawks'' on Kennedy's team had gotten their way - air strikes against Cuba followed by a U.S. invasion - U.S. troops would have encountered an enemy with nuclear arms and the authority to use them.
The implications are ``earthshaking,'' Rene Perez-Lopez believes. A Cuban-American, Perez-Lopez teaches Latin-American politics at Virginia Wesleyan College, where he is vice president for information systems.
``If there had been an invasion, Castro would have certainly wanted the nuclear devices to be used, and it would have led to a response in kind,'' he said in an interview.
In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, Perez-Lopez said, ``there was a certain kind of triumphalism on both sides that they had been able to handle this thing right, that reason prevailed. But nowhere was this very important fact.
``In fact, the United States could have made a serious mistake. The world was really very close to the end.'' MEMO: Coming Saturday: Remembering the Enola Gay. by CNB