Details emerge of Cuba's nuclear threat

Posted on Wednesday, 09.23.09
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
Details emerge of Cuba's nuclear threat
Cold War documents recently made public reveal Castro called for a
tougher Soviet line on the U.S., up to and including nuclear strikes.
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
New York Times Service

In the early 1980s, according to newly released documents, Fidel Castro
was suggesting a Soviet nuclear strike against the United States, until
Moscow dissuaded him by patiently explaining how the radioactive cloud
resulting from such a strike would also devastate Cuba.

The cold war was then in one of its chilliest phases. President Ronald
Reagan had begun a trillion-dollar arms buildup, called the Soviet Union
``an evil empire'' and ordered scores of atomic detonations under the
Nevada desert as a means of developing new arms. Some Reagan aides
talked of fighting and winning a nuclear war.

Dozens of books warned that Reagan's policies threatened to end life on
earth. In June 1982, a million protesters gathered in Central Park.
Barack Obama, then an undergraduate at Columbia University, worried
about the nuclear threat and later wrote as a student and a journalist
about ways to avoid global annihilation. The future president didn't
know half the danger.

UNCOVERED THREAT

The National Security Archive, a private research group at George
Washington University, recently made public documents that reveal the
nuclear threat in new detail.

The two-volume study, Soviet Intentions 1965-1985, was prepared in 1995
by a Pentagon contractor and based on extensive interviewing of former
top Soviet military officials.

It took the security archive two years to get the Pentagon to release
the study. Censors excised a few sections on nuclear tests and weapon
effects, and the archive recently posted the redacted study on its website.

The Pentagon study attributes the Cuba revelation to Andrian A.
Danilevich, a Soviet general staff officer from 1964 to 1990 and
director of the staff officers who wrote the Soviet Union's final
reference guide on strategic and nuclear planning.

PRESSED HARD

In the early 1980s, the study quotes him as saying that Castro ``pressed
hard for a tougher Soviet line against the U.S. up to and including
possible nuclear strikes.'' The general staff, General Danilevich
continued, ``had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out
the ecological consequences for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S.''

That information, the general concluded, ``changed Castro's positions
considerably.'' Moscow's effort to enlighten Castro to the innate
messiness of nuclear warfare is among a number of disclosures in the
Pentagon study. Other findings include how the Soviets strove for
nuclear superiority but ``understood the devastating consequences of
nuclear war'' and believed that the use of nuclear weapons had to be
avoided ``at all costs.''

Details emerge of Cuba's nuclear threat - Cuba - MiamiHerald.com (22
September 2009)
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/cuba/story/1246784.html