The Cuban Missile Crisis

[Anomalocaris]

So what was the truth here? On the one hand the Soviets climbed down and Kennedy claimed a victory, which is the way the West saw it. On the other hand the Russians got rid of a perceived threat, if not an actual one. I wonder if it was actually a fair deal in the end. Maybe the Soviets came out on top because of the removal of the threat from Turkey. They also found out about how good US surveillance was from the presentation they made in public.

It amuses me when I hear of media that presents the Soviets as anything less than sophisticated. Their intelligence was as good as the west, we know that now from records released after the collapse of the USSR. We forget, while the USA got a man to the moon the Soviets got the first satellite in orbit and the first man in space, they were no slouches. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that the Cuban Missile Crisis achieve exactly what the Soviets set out to achieve.

MM

Cuban missile crisis may have achieved what some others in the Soviet Union would have sought to achieve, but it served to defeat the chief goal of the administration of Nikita khrushchev, who was actually the main instigator of the crisis.

A main goal of Nikita Khrushchev was to break out of the cycle of ruinously expensive full spectrum army, navy, air force arms competition with the US that he inherited from Stalin by emphasizing innovative and asymmetrical technological solutions, usually involving missiles, to deal with soviet union's strategic problems.

The fact that soviet missiles in Cuba was forced out by a US naval blockade, and the Soviet Union could neither break the American blockade, nor had the ability to mount a blockage of her own should the situations be reversed, convinced many in soviet leadership that khrushchev's attamept to gain strategic parity with the US on the cheap using mainly missiles won't work, and Soviet Union needed to go back to Stalinist policy of trying to match every aspect of American military capability, including conventional navy and Air Force.

Keep in mind in the Soviet Union, the strategic missile forces were not part of army, navy, or air force, but a completely separate branch of armed services. There is no doubt the soviet navy and air force was not displeased with the outcome of the Cuban missile crisis, because it showed missiles can't do everything, and the budgets of the navy and Air Force would soon be vastly expanded.

Khrushchev was discredited in the politburo as a result of the Cuban missile crisis, and was soon forced out. The influence of strategic missile forces and the part of the military industrial complex behind the missiles declined, while the influence of the army, navy and air force grew, and the part of the military industrial complex that built warships, tanks, and airplanes became dominant.

This set the stage for the Brezhnev era, when Soviet Union drove itself into the ground by its attempt to match all aspects of American military power, precisely the thing Khrushchev sought to avoid.

So in a wide sense, Soviet Union was a huge loser in the Cuban missile crisis because it caused her to question her grand strategy, and encouraged her to change course and adopt a new direction which would ultimately ruin her.