From the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898 until Castro’s revolution toppled the dictator Hugo Baptista, Cuba was the playground of the American elite and a quasi-colonial possession. I gave some background on the strategic situation in Cuba in this post, but for this story it’s laying out the timeline of events in a little more detail.
The influence of these most senior members of the military bureaucracy has been pervasive throughout the history of nuclear weapons, and their role in nuclear risk will be something I’ll return to in a later post. The joint chiefs of staff were the most senior officers in the US army and provided its strategic direction. Throughout the crisis, the US government kept an invasion of Cuba or airstrikes on the missile sites as options on the table, and the former was pushed very aggressively by the joint chiefs of staff. But, there was also the risk of nuclear not by accident but by intention. There were moments of tension between the US and Soviet militaries, all of which tell us something interesting about how different patterns of civil-military relations influence the outcomes of moments of crisis. There were two types of close call in Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis was probably the closest we came to nuclear war. Cross posted to LessWrong and The Good blog
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