Reliving the Cuban missile crisis: ‘We were going to be incinerated’

Space war

2 years ago

Oscar Larralde vividly remembers hearing the explosions that downed an American spy plane over Cuba in 1962; his island nation was in the eye of a nuclear standoff between the United States and Soviet Union.

The then-17-year-old bank employee-turned-enlisted soldier was convinced the moment spelled his country’s doom.

“We were going to be incinerated,” he recalled thinking at the time.

As nuclear threats swirl again around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the retired colonel hails the diplomacy that staved off full-blown war 60 years ago, and hopes reason will prevail once again.

In 1962, Larralde was deployed to the eastern port city of Banes in communist Cuba’s Holguin province.

On October 27, he was walking on a remote beach when he heard a roar unlike anything he had ever heard before, and felt two explosions high over his head, “very loud, very strong.”

“I didn’t know what it was,” the former soldier recalled.

He later learned it was two Soviet surface-to-air missiles, one of which downed a US U-2 spy plane, killing pilot Major Rudolf Anderson — at age 35, the only casualty of the so-called Cuban missile crisis.

“An officer told us that a Soviet-operated anti-aircraft group had shot down a Yankee plane,” Larralde told AFP.

“The reaction of the fighters in that first line of defense — because we were the first ones who would clash with the Yankees — was of enthusiasm, of joy,” he recalled.

“We had made our sovereignty prevail. They were intruding planes violating” Cuban airspace, added Larralde.

But celebration soon turned to fear of the fallout “when the Yankees found out.”

– ‘A difficult time’ –

Two weeks before Anderson’s death, US reconnaissance aircraft had taken photographs of Soviet work on missile launch sites on Cuba — within range of American shores.

Then-president John F. Kennedy warned Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev the United States would attack unless the missiles were withdrawn.

Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and mobilized 140,000 troops, while Fidel Castro put 400,000 of his own people on alert, anticipating a military invasion.

Then Anderson was shot down.

Even as some in the Pentagon urged Kennedy to strike, diplomacy won the day, and on October 28 — the day after the downing of the plane — Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for a US pledge not to invade Cuba.

“At a very difficult time, the USSR and United States managed to negotiate and find a solution to the conflict,” Larralde told AFP at a rusty launch platform bearing a spent Soviet missile converted into a monument at La Anita, near Banes.

Six decades later, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats against the West in his war on ex-Soviet neighbor Ukraine has brought back fearful memories of the last time the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war.

“I don’t think it will come to that, but I do think we are in more danger than at any time, in many ways even more than in 1962,” said Hal Klepak, a strategy expert at the Royal Military College of Canada.

For Cuban ex-diplomat Carlos Alzugaray, the big fear today, like 60 years ago, is that things can “escalate by mistake. That someone makes the mistake of hitting a nuclear site… and then it escalates from there.”

But Larralde is hopeful that this time, like the last, peace will prevail.

“It is important to negotiate to ensure world peace, or humanity will continue to be caught up in the possibility of a new nuclear conflict,” he reflected.

Nuclear belligerence: a history of close calls
Paris (AFP) Oct 20, 2022 –
Sixty years ago, the United States and Soviet Union brought the world to the brink of an atomic war over Soviet missiles deployed on the island of Cuba.

AFP looks back at other nuclear near misses:

– 1962: Submarine incident

The 13-day showdown between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev has been documented in great detail.

But one incident only came to light many years later.

On October 27, 1962, just as the crisis was nearing resolution, one of four Russian submarines sent to the area with nuclear torpedoes aboard found itself targeted by the US Navy after getting stuck in the Sargasso Sea.

When US forces began dropping non-lethal charges to pressure submarine B59 to surface, the frazzled crew, which had Moscow’s green light to use the vessel’s “special weapon” in event of attack, thought war was breaking out.

Believing that “the point of no return” had been reached the submarine commander decided to launch the torpedo but he needed the agreement of two other officers, including the second-in-command Vasily Arkhipov, according to the Russian defence ministry’s “Army Legends” documentary series.

Arkhipov kept his composure and opposed the launch, guessing correctly that the Americans did not know the submarine was carrying a nuclear weapon. The man “who prevented World War III” died in 1998.

– 1983: Soviet false alarm –

Another level-headed Soviet officer helped prevent a potential nuclear conflagration 20 years later.

On September 26, 1983, Air Force Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a secret base near Moscow responsible for monitoring missile attack early warning systems when the alarms started ringing.

Petrov had just minutes to react to a warning that five American intercontinental ballistic missiles were headed towards the Soviet Union.

With Soviet nuclear doctrine calling for retaliation, reporting it to his higher-ups would have had enormous consequences.

But Petrov’s gut instinct told him that an American attack would have involved around 100 missiles and he correctly deduced it was a false alarm.

Soviet experts later concluded that the warning system mistook the sun’s reflection off clouds for a missile.

Petrov was decorated several months later but the incident was covered up for a decade.

– 2001-2002: India-Pakistan –

In May 2002, India and Pakistan, at odds over the disputed Himalayan state of Kashmir since their partition in 1947, went to the brink.

India blamed Islamists from Pakistan for a suicide attack against the parliament in New Delhi on December 13, 2001, that left 14 dead.

The two countries, which became nuclear powers in 1998, mobilised a million soldiers along their shared border.

In April 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared he would use nuclear weapons if threatened with destruction by an attack from India.

India’s defence minister George Fernandes was scathing, saying: “India can survive a nuclear attack, but Pakistan cannot.”

New Delhi and Islamabad carried out months tit-for-tat missile tests before agreeing to US-sponsored de-escalation measures that lead to a ceasefire in November 2003 and leaders’ talks in January 2004.

– Other incidents –

In 1988, a KGB defector, Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, revealed that Soviet leaders had nearly pressed the button five years earlier in November 1983, when they believed the West was preparing a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

The panic attack was sparked by NATO manoeuvres.

On January 25, 1995, aides brought Russian President Boris Yeltsin his nuclear briefcase when Russian radars mistook the launch of a Norwegian meteorological sounding rocket from the Arctic Circle for a US strike.

Yeltsin concludes that it is not actually a US missile and does not retaliate. A week later Moscow admits there was a “misunderstanding”.

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Brussels (AFP) Oct 17, 2022

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