Cuban Missile Crisis: McNamara Revealed World Was '3 Minutes' From Nuclear War - Activist

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th October, 2022) Then-US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, when the Cuban Missile Crisis reached its peak sixty years ago, estimated that the world was only three minutes away from nuclear war, an eerie fact relayed in a conversation to his friend, peace activist Dr. Helen Caldicott, years later.

The 13-day crisis began on October 16, 1962, when President John Kennedy was shown surveillance photos of Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba, 90 miles off the Florida coast.

In the ensuing days Kennedy would resist pressure from military leaders who wanted to launch an invasion, and chose to impose a quarantine on Cuba instead. In a nationally televised address he urged Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles and enter into talks.

At 10:00 p.m. EDT on October 26, the US raised the readiness level of Strategic Air Command forces to DEFCON 2, the highest in US history, and a level away from the outbreak of nuclear war. The US sent 23 nuclear-armed B-52s to orbit points in striking distance of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, in a private letter, Cuban leader Fidel Castro urged Khrushchev to initiate a nuclear first strike against the United States in the event of an invasion. The missiles were in Cuba in the first place because Castro had asked Moscow for deterrence assistance in the wake of the United States' failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

On the following day, October 27, often referred to as "Black Saturday," a Soviet B-59 submarine almost launched a nuclear-armed torpedo while under harassment by US naval forces. In addition, the Soviets shot down a US spy plane over Cuba, killing pilot Rudolph Anderson, the only American casualty of the crisis.

"He (McNamara) recounted his time in the Oval Office during the Missile Crisis and he said, 'We came so close - to within three minutes of nuclear war,'" Caldicott, founder of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility, told Sputnik.

However, today, the world is in even greater danger of global nuclear war because of the Ukraine crisis and irresponsible US policy, Caldicott warned.

"Now the two nuclear superpowers are confronting each other again. The controls on the nuclear arsenals of both countries are tenuous at best, let alone the fact that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin has been pushed to the wall," Caldicott added.

Caldicott said she and McNamara became close friends many years after the missile crisis and used to lunch together, when she criticized his policies during the Vietnam War.

The peace activist also said she was a resident medical officer at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Australia at the time of the 1962 crisis and only later realized how close the world was to catastrophe at the time.

Despite reaching the height of tensions on those two days, the US and Soviet Union also opened back channel talks which led to a deal in which Moscow agreed to dismantle the missiles in exchange for Washington vowing not to invade Cuba. In addition, the US agreed to remove missiles from Turkey, a concession Khrushchev would not reveal when he announced the dismantlement of weapons on October 28.

Historians have said the solution allowed both sides to "save face," in an exhibition of sophisticated diplomatic acumen on the part of the US and Soviet leadership.