The arms control treaty, which has helped keep Europeans safe,
could soon end.
{an8}If Russia does not return to full and verifiable compliance with the treaty
{an8}within this six-month period
{an8}by verifiably destroying its INF-violating missiles,
their launchers and associated equipment,
the treaty will terminate.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announcing that the US is leaving
{an8}the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty with Russia.
{an8}We saw in the Trump Administration,
{an8}President Trump withdraw from one treaty,
{an8}the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
There's only one arms control treaty left
{an8}between the United States and Russia, the New START Treaty,
{an8}and even that is due to expire in a few years.
Because US-Russian relations
are at such a low point because of Ukraine,
they might not be able to restart those negotiations, which could be tragic.
{an8}Because if that treaty expires, this would be the first time in 50 years
{an8}where there's no limits on the total number of nuclear weapons
that the United States and Russia can deploy.
{an8}Tonight, the Kremlin now suspending all notifications involving nuclear weapons,
{an8}communications required under the New START Treaty.
{an8}I feel we're already in the first inning of a new nuclear arms race.
We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe.
It is not just the US, Russia.
It's also all the countries in the world that can make weapons
that can eliminate God's creation.
That's where we are on the human scale.
Catastrophe is running a lot faster than cooperation.
One of the characteristics of the Cold War
{an8}was that the Soviets were always insecure about American power.
{an8}They knew they were behind.
{an8}They also knew, because the US had a free press,
{an8}how afraid Americans got
{an8}whenever they showed a little bit of might.
And Khrushchev wanted to weaponize American fears.
He felt that nuclear weapons
were such a threat
that he could use them psychologically
to contain American power.
So he set about exaggerating.
The Soviets began to pretend that they had more missiles.
We don't want war, but we won't stop.
Nothing stops us from defending our sovereignty and our motherland.
The problem for the CIA is trying to figure out
what's going on inside the Kremlin.
What are the military capabilities of the Soviet Union?
How many missiles do they have?
How many bombs do they have? How big is their army?
{an8}So the CIA, through the brilliant Richard Bissell,
{an8}spearheads the effort to develop a spy plane.
The first spy plane is called the U-2.
The U-2 can fly at an altitude of more than 70,000 feet,
and it can take pictures from that altitude
that are good enough to let you know what is happening at a certain airfield.
When the U-2 came along, it really did change the whole game.
The Cold War cat-and-mouse game.
For the first time, the Americans could map
what was happening in the Soviet Union, could see this stuff in real detail.
But these flights were not every day.
And they couldn't photograph every part of the Soviet Union
that might have a missile farm.
In a time of nuclear weapons, you don't want to underestimate your enemy
because the costs of getting it wrong are potentially catastrophic.
And then the Soviets surprised the United States
by putting the first artificial satellite into space.
October 4, 1957.
Sputnik, the first Earth satellite, was launched.
{an8}The Soviet Union gets to space first
{an8}with this tiny beeping ball called Sputnik.
In the history of the Earth,
no other event had captured the imagination
of so many people as this first step into space.
You could watch it from your backyard with binoculars
as it passes over your house.
You could pick it up on your household radio.
{an8}And it becomes this sort of beeping harbinger of doom for the United States
{an8}that Russia got to space first,
and then sort of more broadly,
this fear that the US was falling behind
in science and technology.
Well, if they can put that capsule into space,
they can put a missile with a nuclear warhead into space,
and the game's over.
The U-2 is followed by an even more useful piece of spy technology,
which is called the CORONA satellite.
That's a small satellite placed in orbit,
which can take continuous, first, still pictures,
and then video of what's going on in the Soviet Union.
The first satellites actually used film,
and they would eject these pods of film from the satellite with electronics,
so you'd know where it was.
Air Force planes with big prongs at the front of the plane
would snatch this canister coming down to earth.
The canisters would then be sent to Kodak to be developed.
The first photographic satellites gave us a lot of information
about what was going on in the Soviet Union
in terms of both bombers and missiles.
As the CIA discovered,
the Soviet Union did not have thousands of missiles
capable of striking the United States.
It did not have hundreds of nukes capable of striking the United States.
It had four.
Not 4,000.
Turned out there was a missile gap,
but it was around a thousand to one in our favor.
This thing that we had feared through all of the 1950s
{an8}as this existential threat to the United States
was really a paper tiger.
The Russian army had been enormously overestimated.
The Russians were not on a crash program to build missiles,
which the people around me all took for granted that they were,
and were not superior, were not trying to be superior,
which meant that they were not trying for a first-strike capability
against the US,
which in turn really meant they weren't trying to dominate the world militarily.
That discovery should have led to a rethinking
of our whole paradigm there of our whole world perspective,
as to who we were confronting, and what their aims were,
and how we dealt with them.
But it didn't at all.
The foreign policy of the Soviet Union is, in a word, conquest.
{an8}They envision the entire world Sovietized and united communist-style.
{an8}Why has such a totally fraudulent belief
been so persistent all this time?
Because there's jobs.
It's very profitable.
All manner of private-sector companies,
{an8}defense contractors,
{an8}communications contractors,
{an8}becomes reliant on the government and the defense spending.
This is becoming sort of a nuclear-headed hydra
unlike anything that the US has ever experienced before.
The defense orientation
also dramatically changed American universities,
particularly in science and technology.
By some estimates, 75% of funding for the natural sciences
was coming from defense institutes in the 1950s.
This was a society that had become increasingly oriented around defense,
and security, and nuclear weapons.
Under Eisenhower, the number of weapons
and the diversity of types of weapons starts to exponentially increase.
{an8}The American scientists within the nuclear infrastructure
{an8}get extremely creative.
So they end up with this wide variety of bombs
for all sorts of different types of circumstances.
The smallest bombs that the US ever made
could fit into a reasonably large duffel bag or backpack
and be carried by a single person.
The largest bombs that get made in this period
were the size of a sort of school bus, essentially.
It's a huge bomb.
It doesn't really fit inside the bomber. It has to sort of hang underneath it.
And then you have everything in between. Might be a bomb meant to be on a missile.
It might be a bomb that's meant to have ten of them on one missile.
It might be a torpedo. It might be a land mine,
a regular bomb you drop out of a plane,
a rocket meant to carry a nuclear bomb to shoot down a bomber.
Just a tremendous variety of weapons in this time.
They sort of have an unlimited budget for this, and unlimited ideas.
When Eisenhower came into office,
{an8}there was about a thousand atomic warheads.
{an8}When Eisenhower left office, there was about 23,000 nuclear warheads.
{an8}And most of them by now were thermonuclear,
which was a thousand times more powerful than the Nagasaki bomb.
This immense expansion of destructive power
took place with very little attention of the public.
By the time that he left office in 1961,
Eisenhower was concerned at how these spending levels
just seemed to keep going up and up and up,
even after he himself had endorsed many of the policies
that created that situation in the first place.
To Eisenhower, this was beginning to pose a threat to American democracy.
{an8}We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry
{an8}of vast proportions.
In the councils of government,
we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise
of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Eisenhower becomes deeply afraid by the end of his presidency.
The Cold War is spinning out of control.
So many congressmen are reliant on the jobs in their districts
that it's sort of in everyone's interest
to keep building towards this world-ending moment
because it's good business.
{an8}Both sides played it.
{an8}Democrat, Republican, they all played this game.
{an8}Although we are today
the strongest nation in the world militarily,
we must increase our strength.
The fundamental problem of our time
is the steady erosion of American power
relative to that of the communists in recent years.
John Kennedy, when he's running for president in 1960,
talks about the missile gap,
you know, and-and kind of suggesting that somehow the Eisenhower administration
had been soft.
Had been caught with their pants down against the Soviets.
They all played it.
I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, do solemnly swear...
That you will faithfully execute the office
of President of the United States.
...that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.
Kennedy comes in. Kennedy's a young president.
Only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt
can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.
Khrushchev thinks, "Who is that little boy?"
He's the age of his own son Leonid.
And, of course, Khrushchev had his own opposition already growing,
the hardliners who were saying,
"Well, the Americans are treating you so horribly."
So he had a lot of people in his ear
saying that he was just being a total fool,
and a punching bag for the West, and so on.
Then the famous visit of Khrushchev to the United Nations
when he was banging his fists and screaming that, you know,
America is an imperialist country and racist country.
All the sparrows on the rooftops are chirping about this
that the most imperialist power which supports colonial regimes
is the United States of America.
So the confrontation was increasing,
and Kennedy had his own hawks in the administration
pushing him to step up and be against this horrible Soviet despot.
And so a lot of it just was getting out of control.
And then they met in Vienna in 1961.
I went to Vienna to meet the leader of the Soviet Union, Mr. Khrushchev.
For two days, we met in sober, intensive conversation.
But our most somber talks were on the subject of Germany and Berlin.
In 1961, the confrontation between East and West
becomes more and more intense in Berlin.
YOU ARE ENTERING THE FRENCH SECTOR
East Germany is in some ways
the jewel in the crown of the Soviet Empire.
It's in the heart of Europe,
and it's one of the most developed parts of the entire Soviet Bloc.
{an8}But East Germany is bleeding to death because its people are just leaving.
Doctors, engineers, teachers, technicians.
People with skills badly needed in the communists' faltering economy.
More than four million people have fled from Soviet domination
since the post-war occupation zones were established.
The part of Berlin where I grew up,
was... would become, uh, East Berlin, unfortunately.
As a little child, the border between East and West Berlin was open.
So we could go to West Berlin so often as we liked.
In West Berlin, we were able to see all movies which we want to see.
We could read all books. We could listen to every kind of music.
And in East Berlin, the GDR, a lot of such things was not allowed.
And then our life changed.
{an8}On the 13th of August, 1961,
{an8}the East German communist authorities throw up what we call the wall,
which is initially just breeze-blocks and barbwire.
And they say it's the anti-fascist protective wall,
to protect us against the fascists in West Berlin.
Everybody knows it's to keep their own people in, not us out.
The wall goes up. It's a terrible shock.
You have to imagine New York or London being divided down the middle.
So, literally one side of West 42nd Street is in East New York,
and the other side of West 42nd Street is in West New York.
And there's a wall between them,
and you get shot if you try to escape from one side to the other.
We came not very close to the border,
maybe 200 or 300 away,
and the police catch us and sent us back.
Told us it was not allowed to go too close to the border.
It was no longer allowed to move through the city as we are used to.
The political pressure was higher and higher.
You have a famous picture of a frontier guard,
an actual East German frontier guard, looking around.
And then taking a leap and jumping over the barbwire.
It gets more difficult,
so you have people tunneling underneath and trying to get out of the tunnels,
trying to get down from the windows of apartment blocks.
While an East German guard attempts to yank her back to prison,
West Berliners pull her to a fire net and freedom.
The regime would just destroy buildings
that were near to the wall
in order to create this larger security zone.
There's a famous case when a particularly beautiful church was just detonated
in order to make room for, you know,
another area for guards and guard towers and so forth.
There would be additional walls built.
Then there would be death strips put in.
Self-triggering machine guns. Barbed wire.
Something called Stalin's Lawn,
which was like a bed of iron spikes sitting up.
We were prisoners in our own country.
At the border between East and West Berlin,
Soviet tanks and American tanks were confronting one another.
They could watch on the other side, the tank of the opponent.
Therefore, just by accident, something could happen
almost all the time possible.
Everything about the greatest geopolitical conflict of the time
is concentrated in one place and in one symbol, that wall.
{an8}And there were so many Red Army troops in East Germany.
{an8}So it was an absolutely overwhelming military presence.
The Soviets could have walked into West Berlin at any time.
What kept them from doing that was an explicit threat
that that would lead to a nuclear response.
{an8}We had thousands of intermediate-range missiles and bombers
{an8}within range of Russia.
In 1961, the Americans led this new generation
of very advanced missiles in Turkey.
The Jupiter, an intermediate missile
with a range of 1,500 miles,
is being deployed by the Air Force to bases in Italy and Turkey.
The American missiles are right there in Turkey, aiming at the Kremlin,
and Khrushchev said, "Oh, this is so close. How horrible."
"We're surrounded by NATO bases. We have to do something about it."
The Soviets said, "Look, we don't have any land allies
close to the United States."
"We can't quite do the same thing, but we do have Cuba."
{an8}From his small hole in the wild Sierra Maestra mountains,
{an8}Cuba's Fidel Castro emerged triumphant after two years of guerrilla warfare
{an8}ended with the flight of dictator Fulgencio Batista
{an8}and the entry into Havana of rebel forces to be acclaimed by the city.
FIDEL: GREETS YOU
Fidel Castro, a lawyer, a very prominent political figure in Cuba,
pulled off an improbable, uh, revolution.
For over a hundred years,
the United States treated Latin America as our backyard.
And Cuba was the closest part of that backyard.
It's only 90 miles off the shore of Florida.
{an8}This region was presumed to be ours to control,
{an8}and it became clear that, uh,
{an8}Castro could not be told what to do by the United States.
What imperialists cannot forgive is that we are here
and that we have made a socialist revolution
under the very nose of the United States.
Fidel Castro promoted agricultural reform.
He nationalized US oil refineries
so that they wouldn't be dependent on the United States for oil.
{an8}Castro began nationalizing the properties of the wealthiest class of Cubans,
{an8}Cubans who owned ranches, and big farms,
and businesses, and factories, and sugar plantations.
{an8}My father was a pediatrician.
{an8}So I grew up in what was probably a very nice society.
We begin then to see the interference of communists.
There was a tremendous resentment in the street for anybody
that had any kind of wealth.
So eventually I came to Miami.
Many families have been forced out of everything they owned,
and they've all gone into exile.
Most of them are in Miami.
But much of the middle class is still supportive of Castro.
Castro revealed his true colors as a communist.
So the Americans were determined to overthrow him
like they had overthrown Árbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran.
Over and over again,
the United States was subverting governments
in the name of American democracy.
{an8}The CIA had this elaborate plan it had developed
{an8}to recruit and train an army of Cuban exiles
to overthrow and kill Fidel Castro.
Like so many of the CIA's operations in the Cold War,
it was ill-conceived and ill-run.
They would launch a paramilitary invasion of Cuba
with about a thousand exiles led by the CIA.
And their assumption was that the Cuban people would rise up
when the invaders arrived,
you know, and join them,
{an8}and that Castro's government would fall within a week or days.
But these assumptions proved to be false.
They were not tested either politically by Kennedy and his political team,
or by the intelligence officers in the operations directorate of the CIA.
The CIA had come to think of itself
as omnipotent in these covert operations, and boy, were they wrong.
Castro had very good intelligence.
He had at least one source in Guatemala in the training camp,
and he had sources all around the streets of Miami.
I signed up December 3 or 4th of 1960,
and I was called upon to go to the training camps in January.
{an8}I had no military background.
I thought we were gonna land in there
and we were gonna fight Castro's government head-on,
and that we were going to bring in freedom to all the Cubans
and get rid of communism.
The CIA, in its inimical wisdom,
picked a location in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs,
where Castro's reforms had actually changed the lives
of everybody in that area for the better.
Castro had brought in electricity,
water systems, education, a literacy campaign.
So there was nobody that wasn't a supporter of Castro there.
The Bay of Pigs, it's a...
You land in the middle of a swamp.
The beach in Girón, the mainland, this spot had a coral reef on the outside
that prevented landing ships from getting to shore.
We were landing at night, four o'clock in the morning.
We had to jump from the reef to the water with all our weapons,
with a piece of a mortar with two boxes of, uh, ammunition,
and the water up to your neck.
And as soon as we reached shore, the shooting began.
Castro was ready for us.
They sent first a battalion of a thousand men with tanks.
Then they sent another battalion in the afternoon.
And then at night, they attacked us with artillery for four hours.
We couldn't advance very far from the beach.
We ran out of heavy ammunition completely.
No food, no air cover.
That's when we really came to terms with reality
that we were abandoned and betrayed.
They captured us.
We were in prison 21 months.
It was a disaster.
There's an old saying that victory has 100 fathers
and defeat is an orphan.
{an8}Through the statement's detailed, uh, discussions,
I'm not to, uh, conceal responsibility
because I'm the responsible officer of the government,
but merely because I... And that is quite obvious.
But merely because I do not believe that such a discussion
would benefit us during the present difficult...
uh, situation.
The Bay of Pigs turned out to be the perfect failure.
All the planning, all the execution of this grandiose,
blatant, flagrant, active intervention from the United States
became the biggest fiasco for the CIA
and for the young new president John F. Kennedy.
The world, frankly, was aghast.
And that led to the most extraordinary consequence,
the decision by Nikita Khrushchev to put
intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba
as a way of making sure that the United States would be deterred
from invading Cuba again,
and to help the Soviet Union kind of psychologically balance
the mismatch and the size of the US nuclear arsenal
and the Russian nuclear arsenal.
Soviets were having a hard time with intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Americans could project power in a way the Soviets couldn't.
Soviets didn't have any aircraft carriers, for example.
So, Khrushchev came up with this idea. Well, the only way to scare them
{an8}is to put missiles 90 miles from the United States.
The first missile installation was under construction
near a town called San Cristóbal
in Western Cuba in October of '62.
It was a medium-range ballistic missile installation.
The missiles arrived on these large ships.
The Soviets didn't want American reconnaissance planes
to recognize what was happening,
so the people on the ships were kept below deck.
All of a sudden, there were big trucks coming in
under the cover of night.
They're so huge that the streets in the little town tremble,
and the trucks can't make it around corners.
The Cuban police would tell them to stay inside,
but they'd peek out their windows, and through the slats,
people could make out the large trucks with large, long beds.
And on the beds of the truck were tarps.
People said that the things under the tarps looked like large palm trees.
The United States had a few spies and a few defectors from Cuba
who provided very precise information
about areas west of Havana, the capital city,
where some very strange things were going on.
The intelligence community said, "Mr. President,
please consider approving the U-2 spy plane flight over Cuba."
So they carefully plotted out one crossing of the island
around where spies had indicated very suspicious activity.
{an8}It was that flight that found the missiles on October 14th.
The days that followed
come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In Cuba, they call it the Crisis de Octubre,
the Crisis of October.
Kennedy is furious.
{an8}The launch site at one of the encampments contains a total
{an8}of at least 14 canvas-covered missile trailers.
How far advanced is this?
{an8}Sir, we've never seen this kind of an installation before.
{an8}- Not even in the Soviet Union? - No, sir.
It's a goddamn mystery to me.
I don't know enough about the Soviet Union,
but if anybody can tell me any other time since the Berlin blockade
where the Russians have given us so clear a provocation,
I don't know what it's been.
For six days, there were secret deliberations in Washington
about how to respond to the presence of the missiles.
What would be the best way to get them out?
And, of course, almost everybody in the administration
were focused on an act of aggression.
Attack the missile sites by air,
and then launch an invasion for us to unseat the Cuban regime.
The military started to amass a massive invasion force.
{an8}I joined the Marines because I thought it would be
{an8}the most challenging of the services, which it turned out to be.
{an8}I was told that we had to pack RC bags because we were going, uh, to Cuba.
We, as Marines, would be planning an invasion of Cuba itself,
and that's where we practiced on, the island of Vieques,
and landing on the beaches.
I was aboard a troop transport.
And they put these cargo nets over the side,
and we had to climb down these nets with our backpacks and rifles,
and all our gear into these wooden boats from World War II vintage.
I just happened to have my camera with me,
and I took photographs of the chaos at the time.
When we looked down the beach as far as you could see,
there was personnel and equipment.
It was clear that it might be only hours
before the United States launched air strikes on Cuba.
The dangers were extraordinary.
The CIA estimated there were 8,000 Soviet personnel on the island.
In reality, there were 42,000.
Kennedy started to actually think through,
"If I end up being responsible for the death of that many Soviet soldiers,
what is the pressure going to be on Nikita Khrushchev to retaliate?"
"Will he retaliate by attacking us? Will he retaliate by attacking Berlin?"
"If he attacks Berlin, we will definitely have World War III on our hands."
"How will we keep nuclear weapons from being used?"
The question really is,
are we willing to pay some kind of a rather substantial price
to eliminate these missiles? I think the price is going to be high.
You mean nuclear exchange?
To give you a sense of the danger zone
that was developing on and around Cuba,
you had missiles that could reach the United States.
You had nuclear-tipped torpedoes on submarines headed toward the Caribbean.
And you had additional missiles on ships also going to Cuba.
What are Kennedy's options?
One is an air strike to knock out the missiles that have been found.
Two, an air strike, plus an invasion to occupy Cuba
and achieve regime change.
Three, some kind of diplomacy with the Soviets.
That third option was known as the blockade, or quarantine option.
Basically, making sure the Soviets could not... bring more missiles to Cuba.
{an8}Just the whole question of assuming you do survive all this.
{an8}We don't have... The fact that we're not... What kind of a country we are.
Robert F. Kennedy is the most important factor
in shifting majority support from the hawks
to those who want to seek some way short of war to deal with the missiles.
We've talked for 15 years that the Russians
doing a first strike against us, and we'd never do that.
Now, in the interest of time, we do that to a small country.
I think that's a hell of a burden to carry.
Kennedy asks the big question of the US Air Force.
"If we go ahead with an air strike, can you get all of the missiles?"
And the Air Force says, "Mr. President, we can get about 90% of them."
"Well, what happens to the other 10%?"
And the military says, "Well, they could be launched."
"And the consequence could be millions of people dying
in the United States."
And he couldn't take that risk.
And so Kennedy, reluctantly, embraced the blockade option.
Because it was the only sane, ethical response in the nuclear age.
And that is the response that he shares with the world on October 22nd.
Good evening, my fellow citizens.
This government has maintained the closest surveillance
of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba.
Within the past week,
unmistakable evidence has established the fact
that a series of offensive missile sites
is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.
The purpose of these bases
can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability
against the western hemisphere.
We were part of, uh, the quarantine fleet.
We were to keep the Russians from sending any more missiles into Cuba.
- This was at DEFCON 2? - Yes.
What is DEFCON 2?
This has to do with a state of readiness.
When they get to DEFCON 2,
that's the last step before all-out nuclear war,
which is DEFCON 1.
All these safety devices that they have on these nuclear weapons are off.
They're ready to launch, in other words.
Hundreds and hundreds of our planes are airborne,
headed towards the Soviet Union with one thing in mind,
that this could be a nuclear war and we may not be returning.
It's the closest you could possibly come to all-out nuclear war.
Castro dictates a letter to send to Khrushchev.
Castro writes,
"We are at what I believe to be the end stage of this crisis,
and there are two possibilities now."
"One is that the Americans will invade Cuba
and they will seek to occupy Cuba."
"The other is that they're going to try to destroy your missiles
that are armed with nuclear warheads."
"You must strike preemptively
with all of your nuclear forces against American targets."
"You must not wait for the Americans to fire."
"You must act first."
Even though it was Khrushchev's idea to put the missiles in Cuba,
I think Khrushchev comes to worry quite a bit about Fidel Castro.
The 12th day,
some of the most precarious things occurred
that put the Cold War onto a much higher plateau of danger.
An unprecedented plateau of danger.
On Saturday, October 27th,
a US U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Soviet anti-aircraft battery.
A U-2 was shot down.
They fired against our low-altitude surveillance.
{an8}A U-2 was shot down? This is much of an escalation by them.
{an8}Yes, exactly. I think we can defer an air attack on Cuba
until Wednesday or Thursday, but only if we continue our surveillance
and... and, uh, fire against anything that fires against a surveillance aircraft.
Moscow did not authorize this,
and Khrushchev was appalled when he heard that the U-2 had been shot down.
He did not order that.
{an8}Write to Khrushchev. Here's an action they've taken against us.
A new order in defiance of a public statement.
{an8}- I think we ought to. - They've fired the first shot.
The Air Force, at that point,
were within minutes of sending back retaliatory forces.
But Kennedy held back and said, "We'll give them another day,"
{an8}because he was trying to negotiate an end to the crisis.
Khrushchev had decided that he needed to find an off-ramp.
He tells the leadership, "We got to find a way out of this."
He wants to do it and save face.
What Khrushchev wants to get from Kennedy is a promise not to invade Cuba.
As it becomes clear that the Americans are afraid,
Khrushchev decides, "I want more than that."
"I want Kennedy to pull those missiles out of Turkey
and pull the missiles that NATO has in Italy."
Kennedy sent his brother, Robert Kennedy,
{an8}to secretly meet with the Soviet ambassador to Washington,
{an8}Anatoly Dobrynin, the night of Saturday, October 27th.
Robert Kennedy said,
"We would swap the missiles that we have in Turkey
for the withdrawal of the missiles in Cuba."
"We will never publicly acknowledge that there was a quid pro quo
to ending the Missile Crisis this way, but we will do that."
"I'm representing my brother, and you have his word
that that will happen down the road from now."
Khrushchev decided to announce publicly on the radio,
so that Kennedy would hear it quickly,
that the Soviet Union was agreeing to withdraw the missiles
on the basis of the pledge that the United States was making
that it would not invade Cuba.
The Soviet government
has ordered the dismantling of weapons in Cuba,
as well as their crating and return to the Soviet Union.
Radio Moscow at 9:00 this morning.
Mr. Khrushchev crating up his missiles and shipping them home.
Khrushchev never said anything publicly
about the connection between the removal of the missiles from Turkey
and his removal of the missiles from Cuba.
Never. He never crowed about it.
And that secret basically kept being a secret
for years and years and years,
much distorting everybody's understanding of how the Missile Crisis ended.
Castro is livid.
He wasn't consulted on the withdrawal happening.
He heard about it, you know, basically on the radio,
when the rest of the world learned about it,
and he essentially believed that by withdrawing the missiles,
the Soviets were giving the US a green light to invade.
We know what we are doing.
And we know how to defend ourselves,
our integrity, and our sovereignty.
It's clear to me neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev
had any desire to go to armed conflict with the other.
Each of them was threatening it openly and to their subordinates.
"Get ready for it. We're gonna do it."
Et cetera.
Both of them were bluffing, but they weren't in control.
The Cuban Missile Crisis brings home to the American people
just how real the possibility of nuclear war actually is.
Total war makes no sense
{an8}in an age where great powers can maintain large
{an8}and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces
and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces.
Kennedy, some months later, spoke of his sincere, genuine commitment
to strive with the Soviets
for peaceful solutions to our conflicts.
Today, the expenditure of billions of dollars every year
on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need them,
is essential to the keeping of peace.
But surely, the acquisition of such idle stockpiles,
which can only destroy and never create,
is not the only, much less the most efficient,
means of assuring peace.
The Soviets and Americans also agreed after the Missile Crisis,
because of the Missile Crisis,
{an8}to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,
{an8}which put American and Soviet nuclear testing underground,
{an8}not in the atmosphere.
In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev believe
that Moscow and Washington shared an interest in reducing nuclear tension.
But within two years, they would be gone from the center of power.
Kennedy would be assassinated in November of 1963...
and Khrushchev will be toppled in October of the next year.
Khrushchev would lose his job in part because of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The effort to put missiles in Cuba was Khrushchev's baby.
It was his brainchild.
When it failed, it was his fault.
He went quietly.
He said, "My greatest achievement is that today I'm ousted by mere voting."
Because only ten years before that,
he would have gone to gulag and everybody else,
the whole family, would go with him.
Khrushchev had just put the entire Soviet leadership through hell
because of his original thinking.
What the leadership wanted was a completely banal,
predictable,
incredibly uninteresting leader.
{an8}And they got that with Leonid Brezhnev.
{an8}Our foreign policy aims to consolidate
{an8}and develop the world socialist system,
{an8}mobilize all anti-imperialist forces
to defend the cause of freedom, of independence,
and the security of people in the cause of peace
and progress throughout the world.
Brezhnev importantly shares one thing with Khrushchev.
He does not want nuclear war.
But Brezhnev and his colleagues
do not ever want to be in the position of inferiority
that Khrushchev put them in in 1962,
when they were looking down the barrel of a gun.
When the Americans were threatened by the placement of missiles in Cuba,
the Americans made clear to the Soviets how much further ahead they were.
And the Soviets knew it.
So Brezhnev and his allies decide,
"We're never again going to be as far behind because we're gonna be ahead."
{an8}And the Soviets launch a missile-building program
{an8}after the Cuban Missile Crisis, not only to catch up, but to get ahead.
{an8}Nuclear weapons, and the drive for ever more powerful,
{an8}or more functional, or more versatile weapons,
{an8}really drove much of science and technology policy,
but also national policy, during the Cold War.
At the same time, the United States and the Soviet Union
largely considered them to be unusable weapons...
because the use of an atomic weapon
would basically trigger a mutual suicide pact.
By the late '60s,
when we've taken all these weapons, thousands of them,
we've put them on missiles that arrive in 27, 28, 30 minutes
from launch to impact,
we now have entered a situation where you're simply not going to get away
with a strike and survive somehow.
{an8}There's going to be another strike.
{an8}Your opponent is gonna fire those rockets out of the ground.
You're going to fire yours.
And at some point, the assured destruction reached such high levels on both sides
that it became mutually assured destruction.
These weapons are so horrible
that if one country used them and the other responded,
that the response would just basically kill off the entire Earth.
If you had dozens, hundreds, thousands of nuclear explosions
happening in very short order,
it would coat the Earth in a film
that would both prevent sunlight from getting in,
but also would prevent things from growing,
coating the entire globe in alarming levels of fallout.
So the United States and the Soviet Union
could not engage in direct conflict.
You have, instead, different kinds of conflicts around the world
as the United States and the Soviet Union
conducted their battles on proxy battlefields.
{an8}Intervening in other countries' civil wars.
{an8}Taking part in interregional conflicts.
Arming one side over the other.
The Cold War was a global war.
{an8}It was not simply a struggle for dominion between Washington and Moscow.
{an8}Every nation in the world was a battleground in the Cold War
{an8}between American-backed forces and Soviet-backed forces.
{an8}Every African nation was a battlefield in the struggle for control.
The proxy wars in Angola, in Mozambique, and in Congo
{an8}were particularly brutish,
{an8}particularly nasty, and particularly long.
Vietnam was not simply a war between the United States and North Vietnam.
{an8}The United States mobilized all its allies throughout Asia.
The North Vietnamese were supplied and aided
by the Soviet Union and China.
In Latin America, Cuba, El Salvador,
and Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua,
became cause célèbres for US foreign policymakers
{an8}who wanted to use the Cold War as a rationale to intervene once again
{an8}in countries that had already suffered decades, if not centuries,
{an8}of US intervention previously.
In Chile, we helped orchestrate the assassination
of the commander in chief of the Chilean Armed Forces,
in order to overthrow a democratically elected president
of another country.
{an8}And a military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet took over.
Pinochet murdered his political opponents,
and ruled by force and fear for the next 17 years
until the end of the Cold War.
{an8}It's remarkable the extent to which
{an8}we abandoned those countries after we overthrew their governments.
{an8}Guatemala is now a corrupt and highly violent country.
It's wracked by gang violence,
and the state has effectively ceased to function.
It's a country that was violently thrown off the path to democracy,
which it had been on for ten years and which seemed to be taking hold.
{an8}And you can say that about Iran and many other countries
{an8}where the United States has intervened.
I think America post-World War II
had this just massive crisis of confidence.
Rather than standing on our ideals
that we are going to be this exporter of democracy,
you know, as naive as that might sound, what happened was this mentality set in,
that everything was a zero-sum game,
and we're going to get into bed with whoever calls themselves anti-communist.
I think there was a huge moral cost.
We should have stood on our ideals.
{an8}I, Richard Milhous Nixon, do solemnly swear...
{an8}That you will faithfully execute the office...
{an8}That I will faithfully execute the office...
...of President of the United States.
When Richard Nixon's elected, takes office in 1969,
he has a reputation for being a really hard-line anti-communist,
anti-Soviet kind of guy.
Made his bones as an anti-communist crusader in the '50s.
{an8}The communists have been ruthless
{an8}toward the people of the nations they have engulfed.
They have no memory of former favors,
no kindness toward those who tried to be friendly.
They are cold and calculating masters.
But as the president, he approaches the Soviets and says,
"Look, you don't like us, we don't like you,
but we can't blow up the world."
"Mutual assured destruction is a real thing."
"We have to find some other way to deal with each other."
It's more than about just nuclear weapons.
Nixon goes to the Soviets and he says,
"We will recognize you as a legitimate superpower."
And this policy comes to be known by the term "détente."
Now we have well begun the long journey,
which will lead us to a new age
in the relations between our two countries.
In 1972, two major agreements were reached.
One is the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement,
which is called SALT I.
It was the first effort to limit strategic, offensive,
big intercontinental ballistic missiles,
sea-launched ballistic missiles, bomber forces,
and the warheads that go with them.
There was also the so-called Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
{an8}that put limitations on national missile defense systems.
Quickly, it became evident in the 1970s
that the Soviets were building capabilities
to get out from under the constraints of the first SALT agreement.
They were putting multiple warheads on each of their missiles.
And so while the number of missiles remained constrained,
the number of warheads started to go up.
On my command mark, I'll be running at T-minus 1-0 minutes.
If you look at the buildup
of US and Russian nuclear weapons over time,
it was the United States that built up first and fastest.
{an8}It was in the 1960s the United States peaked
{an8}with somewhere around 30,000 nuclear weapons.
{an8}That buildup then inspired what was a follow-on Russian buildup.
{an8}And so their peak was in the 1980s,
{an8}where they had about 40,000 nuclear weapons.
{an8}So all told, it was a combined arsenal of about 70,000 nuclear weapons.
{an8}In promoting détente with the Soviets,
{an8}American leaders were telling the American people,
{an8}"We don't really trust the Soviets, but we know they don't want war."
{an8}"And the best way for us to avoid war
is to control the number of nuclear missiles."
There are many Americans who say, "You can't trust the Soviets at all."
"How do you know they're not hiding missiles?"
"How do you know where all of them are?"
There was a growing group of Americans
who began to worry that this effort to regulate the nuclear conflict
was only giving the Soviets an opportunity to deceive us
and ultimately to win in a nuclear war.
{an8}Those Americans would later rally in support of Ronald Reagan.
{an8}This administration has eroded our margin of safety
{an8}and allowed our defensive capability
{an8}to decline in this country to the point that we are in danger
and no longer can say we are second to none.
We are second to one, the Soviet Union.
Reagan was a complicated man.
Yes, he exaggerated Soviet power.
Yes, he had a passionate dislike for communists.
But he also hated war,
and he especially hated nuclear weapons.
That is what I think brought Gorbachev and Reagan together.
{an8}The revulsion of nuclear weapons.