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The Cuban Missile Crisis: the road to resolution
In the fourth and final episode of our series on the Cuban Missile Crisis, we chart the final tense days of the Cold War standoff, investigating how it was eventually resolved
In the concluding episode of our series on the Cuban Missile Crisis, we trace how a tentative compromise coincided with the most dangerous moments of the stand-off, in an exchange of letters that threatened disaster. Elinor Evans speaks to expert historians Alex von Tunzelmann, Mark White and William Taubman to find out how the crisis reached a resolution, and the diplomatic fall-out from the 13 days. Plus, we track revelations that have come to light in the 60 years since the world was brought to the edge of a nuclear war. Want to hear more? Browse more episodes in our podcast series on the Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis: dangerous days
In the third episode of our series on the Cuban Missile Crisis, we chart the first phase of the Cold War standoff – from panicked secret meetings to risky naval manoeuvres
In the third episode of our series on the Cuban Missile Crisis, we chart the first phase of the Cold War standoff. Elinor Evans speaks to expert historians Alex von Tunzelmann, Mark White and William Taubman to uncover how top-secret meetings descended into chaos, the American public was plunged into panic and a US naval ‘quarantine’ threatened to push the Soviets to the brink. Want to hear more? Browse more episodes in our podcast series on the Cuban Missile Crisis
Max Hastings on the Cuban Missile Crisis: "If the Americans had bombed Cuba in 1962, escalation would have been almost inevitable"
In his new book, Max Hastings turns to one of the most dangerous fortnights in history, when the United States and Soviet Union took the world to the brink of Armageddon
Cuban Missile Crisis: In context In July 1962 the USSR premier Nikita Khrushchev, in agreement with Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro, made the fateful decision to place nuclear warheads in Cuba, just 90 miles from the US mainland. The Americans’ discovery of the weapons in October 1962 sparked a 13-day standoff between the superpowers of east and west that became known as the Cuban missile crisis. It is widely regarded as the most dangerous period of the Cold War. On 16 October, US president John F Kennedy convened his closest advisors in a secret body later known as ExComm (Executive Committee of the National Security Council), to discuss a response to the Soviet act of aggression. “Go to general war,” was the advice of some of the president’s closest advisors, who pushed for air strikes or a full-scale invasion of the island. After nearly six days of top-secret meetings, Kennedy – who had come to regard a nuclear strike and descent into war as “a final failure” – favoured a naval blockade. He delivered the news to the world in a televised speech on 22 October 1962; Cuba was cut off from any military aid from its communist ally in the east, and America had avoided a declaration of war. A tense series of letters between the leaders followed, with Khrushchev and Kennedy eventually reaching a diplomatic compromise in which the Soviets agreed to remove missiles from Cuba, and in return Kennedy secretly agreed to remove American nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey. The crisis was diffused, and the world was brought back from the brink of nuclear war. Can you introduce readers to your narrative of the crisis and how it seeks to handle this episode, 60 years on? When I started to write this book, it seemed like simply a piece of history or archaeology. One thing that has been extremely spooky is that – as I researched and wrote this account of how the world, in the midst of the Cold War, came closer than at any time in its history to Armageddon, to a nuclear war – President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Suddenly the whole thing achieves an immediacy, because we are looking again at an incredibly reckless, dangerous and ruthless leader in the Kremlin who is prepared to take extraordinary risks to try and frighten the world into acquiescing in these acts of aggression. Of course, this caused me to significantly change parts of the beginning and the end of my narrative. I’ve said: “Here is this terrifying episode that happened 60 years ago. And what can we learn from it about the experiences we’re going through today?” Alas. Want to hear more about the Cuban Missile crisis? Browse more episodes in our four-part podcast series Putin is obviously an inescapable figure on the world stage now. And you write in Abyss that, contrary to ideas that personalities play only a minor part in determining history, the figures involved in the Cuban missile crisis dominated decisions and decided the outcome. What can you tell us about the key players? There have been many accounts of the so-called “13 days” in October 1962 that followed the Americans’ discovery that the Soviets had secretly placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. I think it’s a mistake just to look at that brief period. To understand what it all means, you’ve got to know quite a bit about what the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba were at that time. And, of course, these three extraordinary personalities. First is Fidel Castro, the guerrilla leader who took over Cuba from dictator Fulgencio Batista at the beginning of 1959. Then there’s President John F Kennedy who remains, I think, by far the most fascinating and extraordinary US president of the past century – even more so than Franklin Roosevelt. And finally, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, this frightening thug; curiously, an impressive thug in some ways – you didn’t get to the top of the Soviet Union in those days without climbing over a mountain of corpses. A lot of the first half of my book is about these people and these countries. The first thing to understand is how appallingly the US had treated Cuba for the previous century. The Americans always like to think that they don’t have an empire, but they treated Cuba as a colony. They decided everything, and most of the profits from Cuban sugar and tobacco went straight into American pockets. American gangsters were running all the casinos in Havana. With the ascent of Castro, the Americans suddenly found that they had been kicked out. One of the people interviewed for the book was the so-called head of protocol for the Castro government. He said: “People from the American embassy would turn up at our offices and say, ‘Here’s what you’re going to do, we’re from the embassy and you’ll do it.’” And of course, the Cubans said: “It’s not like that anymore, this is our own country. We’re a sovereign country.” How did the alliance between the Soviet Union and Cuba lead to such a dangerous crisis? When it became clear that the US was going to seek to isolate Cuba and topple its leader, Castro turned to the other superpower – to the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev was absolutely enchanted by Castro. He was reminded of the 1917 revolutionaries, the young idealists who had taken over Moscow and Petrograd. He decided to give total support to Castro. In the spring of 1962, after a year of supplying weapons to Castro, Khrushchev was staying at his dacha [second home] on the Black Sea, looking through his binoculars. He was infuriated, knowing that 200 miles or so across the water, there were American nuclear missiles [in Turkey] pointed at his dacha. One day in April 1962, he said to his defence minister, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, “How would it be if we throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants?” In other words: “How would it be if we install nuclear missiles in Cuba?” Khrushchev knew that the Soviet Union was far weaker than the United States. He was obliged to face the fact that, at the same time as he was saying that socialism was going to take over the world, most of the Soviet Union was living in what Americans would think was abject poverty. Bread was rationed in some regions, and people had tiny televisions which they had to watch through water-filled magnifiers to make the picture big enough. Whereas on the other side of the world, you had Americans all eating steaks, with a growing audience for colour television. This seemed so monstrously wicked and unfair to Khrushchev. It made him rage that – after all the Soviet Union had suffered in the Great Patriotic War, after losing 27 million people – the Americans should end up so rich and with this great nuclear arsenal, and that the Americans were trying to tell the world what to do. He was determined to even the score, to show the Americans that they didn’t rule the world. Your book includes some staggering testimony from the ExComm meetings following the US discovery of the missiles in Cuba that shows just how close the west came to responding with a nuclear strike. How near did the world come to nuclear war? The first thing Kennedy said, at the White House when he heard about this, was: “We’re probably going to have to bomb them.” At that stage, the Americans had no idea that there were also tactical nuclear weapons, they had no idea of the strength of the Soviet forces in Cuba. The US chiefs of staff wanted full bombing, an American invasion of Cuba. All through the crisis though, all the civilians around JFK, and the president himself, were always sure that they had to go very carefully, be very cautious. But America’s generals and admirals were saying “we’ve got to go in and zap these people. We’ve got to bomb them. We’ve got to invade them.” My view, which I’ve expressed in my book very strongly, is that there is no doubt that neither the Kremlin nor the White House wanted a third world war, they didn’t want all-out war. But the Soviets had put hundreds of nuclear weapons in Cuba with no technical safeguards to stop local commanders from firing them. Had the Americans done what many people around the president wanted – bombed and invaded – I think the chances of these weapons not being used, and the idea the Russians would sit there and take devastating casualties to their own forces and not respond, is for the fairies. Once they started that, escalation would have been almost inevitable. You had a terrifying situation. In those first days, as Kennedy presided over daily and sometimes hourly meetings of the so-called ExComm, they talked through every option: bombing, blockade, etc. The one thing they all agreed upon was that they could not do nothing. By around the Friday [19 October 1962], the chiefs of staff and McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, were urging towards bombing and probably invasion. But I think that – although JFK made many other mistakes in his time as president in his thousand days – when I listen to the recordings and read the transcripts of those meetings, he stands head-and-shoulders above all the others in his steadiness of purpose and his clear, unflinching understanding that if all this went wrong, we were going to have World War Three. You write in Abyss of a collective wisdom on both sides that transcended the misjudgements of both the Kremlin and the White House. What was it about Kennedy and Khrushchev and their administrations that made this such an extraordinary episode? I’m a passionate believer in diplomacy and diplomats. One of the scary things that’s happened in the last 20 years is that suddenly national leaders think the diplomats don’t matter anymore. I don’t think it’s just me as an old man being nostalgic. The quality of some of those top British diplomats and top American diplomats was so impressive. Today, I’m afraid, there are no successors, because both American governments and British governments treat their diplomats with contempt. They get the diplomats they deserve, who are not people of remotely similar stature. It’s one of the things I’ve come to believe passionately about studying the Cold War. I hope anybody who reads my books will have a sense not only about the missile crisis, but about the wider Cold War. It was so important all the way through to keep talking. And even if the talks didn’t seem to get anywhere, just the fact there was dialogue was terribly important. I was rather shocked a few years ago when a British general said to me, “You do realise, don’t you, that nowadays we talk less to the Russians than we did in the worst days of the Cold War?” How do you think the international situation today, particularly regarding the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, compares with that of the missile crisis? President Putin today represents a terrifying threat. I personally believe that he’s a more dangerous and less stable figure than was Khrushchev, who had to consult the Soviet Presidium; although Khrushchev dominated the Presidium, its opinion still mattered. Putin appears to act entirely alone. I’m not suggesting that if we’d had better diplomats then Putin might have acted differently. But I think in general, in international affairs, it is so vital that we understand the importance of dialogue, and the importance of understanding each other in a way that, I’m afraid, I don’t think governments do today. And it is very scary. Sure, you can say, what about Suez and Harold Macmillan, who only a few years earlier had been complicit in the British government being mad enough to invade Egypt in 1956? And of course later, the best and the brightest around Kennedy during Cuba, they got the United States into Vietnam. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/11/GettyImages-1243916680smlwebmain-d6ed679.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Images of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian president Vladimir Putin loom over a TV interview in October 2022" title="Images of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian president Vladimir Putin loom over a TV interview in October 2022" /> I’m not naive enough to suggest that those people all had the wisdom of Solomon all the time. But one effect of researching this book and reading all the transcripts of who said what during the crisis, is that one can see that people like Robert McNamara [US secretary of defense 1961–68], whom I met later and whose reputation was destroyed during Vietnam, was brilliant on the missile crisis. All the way through, he looked for ways of very graduated escalation, with the blockade as a first step. The chiefs of staff loathed him. After the missile crisis, one of them said – and I quote this in the book – that McNamara as defence secretary was the most dangerous man in America. They meant that he wouldn’t do the horrible things that they wanted to do, including risking nuclear war. Even if these were not guys who got everything right all their lives, by gosh, they were guys who got a lot right in those days. What did you make of the legacy of the Cuban missile crisis during your reporting in the US in the late 1960s, and in the years that followed? I’m not sure I would have had the nerve to write this book about what’s overwhelmingly an American subject, but for the fact that I lived in the United States in 1967–68, and I always remember at the beginning of ’68, sitting in the White House Cabinet Room listening to President Lyndon B Johnson, with a group of other foreign journalists, talking about another American crisis, in Vietnam. I was taking a look around the Cabinet Room in those days and thinking, “This was the room where ExComm met earlier in the decade.” When I was there as a young reporter, I met a lot of the people who were involved intimately in the missile crisis, including [secretary of state] Dean Rusk, [attorney general] Robert Kennedy, and McNamara, and [presidential speechwriter and historian] Arthur Schlesinger became a close friend. Of course, at that period, America was racked by the whole Vietnam agony. It did give one an insight into how, on the one hand, it was the most exciting country on Earth. No one doubted its towering stature in the sixties; it was the absolute powerhouse of the world, for its technology, its wealth, its power. But on the other hand, one witnessed the United States doing terrible things, conspicuously including the appalling racial strife. There was always this contrast between the wonderful things about America – which remain true today – and also the terrible things; somehow America has a tragic talent for presiding over some of the worst things that have happened on the planet. I was there in the Vietnam period, and later reported in Vietnam. When I see all that’s going on in Ukraine – and I hasten to add that this does not make me an apologist for Putin – I can’t forget that “our side”, if you like, has its own share of shames, and some of them date from the 1960s. I do feel it was a big help to me in writing this book to have been around in the sixties and to have known some of those people, and to remember how it all felt. Because in the 21st century, to you who were not even born until ages after that, it seems an eternity away. To me it almost seems like yesterday. Max Hastings is a leading British journalist, author, broadcaster and former newspaper editor who is currently a columnist for The Times and Bloomberg Opinion. His latest book is Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 (William Collins, 2022) Hear what life was like for ordinary Cubans during the crisis in BBC World Service’s Witness History This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Professor Michael Goodman answers key questions about the decades-long rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union
What was the Cold War and why do we refer to it as such? To put it simply, the Cold War was a political, ideological and economic conflict that broke out in the years after the Second World War and lasted up until 1991. The two main protagonists were the United States and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies (the western and eastern blocs). Of course, it was much more complex than that. Read more | The CIA’s most unlikely Cold War weapon? A secret smuggling operation that terrified Soviet censors As to the name: a war will turn ‘hot’ when it involves open fighting, whereas a ‘cold war’ is a battle of ideology. The Cold War of the second half of the 20th century did, in various instances, become a physical conflict as there were lots of wars by proxy, such as in Korea and Vietnam. But fundamentally it remained peaceful and certainly was not what the two world wars had been. What were the ideologies of the two opposing sides? The United States, and its chief ally Britain, were capitalist and democratic countries, while the Soviet Union was a communist state – the first significant communist country to come out of the First World War. The Soviet ideal was an internal system for making life more equitable and level, but more broadly there was a belief that if communism was to succeed then the Russians would have to export that mentality to other countries around the world. So, in the interwar years – particularly after Joseph Stalin came to power – the idea of a global communist revolution took hold. This was strongly opposed by the west, but the two sides would become allies in the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war, Soviet expansion took on a renewed vigour and became more overt: not just in a political-ideological way, but increasingly in a military way, too. The east and west became embroiled in a battle for ideas, for people, for land and for territory. And later, this battle would become characterised by the threat of nuclear war. Read more | Did the Soviet Union win the war? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/08/GettyImages-1035607912-098f873.jpg" width="3806" height="5510" alt="An American propaganda poster, dated c1920, offers an alarming depiction of life under communist rule" title="An American propaganda poster, dated c1920, offers an alarming depiction of life under communist rule. Long before the Cold War, the US sought to halt the spread of the ideology. (Photo by Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Was the Cold War inevitable after the Second World War? The answer to this question is more complex than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. On one level, there were substantial differences in the aftermath of the Second World War that had not existed at any previous time in history. Take Germany: the four great powers who had won split the country into four zones, with the capitalist nations (the United States, Britain and France) combining their zones into what became West Germany. The Soviets took East Germany. So, in one country, there was a stark division in politics, ideology, economy and allegiances. The hope that these two sides of Germany could live perfectly harmoniously was, at best, naive. Why and how was the Berlin Wall built? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/08/GettyImages-542359919-8124f85.jpg" width="2035" height="2675" alt="The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 physically prevented East German citizens from entering the area of the city under western rule" title="The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 physically prevented East German citizens from entering the area of the city under western rule. (Photo by Hilde/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" /> But one issue that pervaded the Cold War was trying to understand what was going on: the perception versus reality. One of the main difficulties that the west faced after the war was knowing what the Russians were up to. Read more | Stanislav Petrov: the Soviet who saved the world Stalin and the Kremlin were fearful of a German invasion; a common fear for the Russians as they had been invaded numerous times in the preceding centuries. American, British and other western diplomats began focusing on the question ‘Is Stalin trying to expand the communist revolution outward, to make states to the west of the Soviet Union communist?’ Or was his intention, as others believed, to create a buffer zone between Germany in the centre of Europe and the Soviet Union? Events from 1947 onwards made the Russians show their hand, and that’s when the Cold War became a more crystallised conflict. Listen| Historian Sean McMeekin discusses his revisionist history of WW2, which places Josef Stalin at the centre of the conflict. He shows how the Soviet dictator outmanoeuvred both enemies and allies to secure his own ends How long after the start of the Cold War did the public know it was happening? Between the end of the war in 1945 and 1947, not much happened. Countries were preoccupied with their own economies and with other forms of rebuilding after years of destruction. The big change came in 1947. First, there was the Truman Doctrine, launched by US president Harry Truman in reaction to what he perceived as a communist threat to Greece and Turkey. This was essentially a promise that the US would come to the rescue of any country who was fighting political oppression. It didn’t name the Soviet Union directly, but it was a clear statement of intent: “We, the US, will support anyone standing up to the Russians.” The Truman Doctrine was followed a few months later by the Marshall Plan, named after the then-US secretary of state George Marshall, which promised enormous amounts of economic aid to these countries. What you had with both of these was a political commitment to defend Europe (and other countries more broadly) against the Soviets. This was followed two years later with the creation of Nato. So, by the late 1940s, the public was certainly aware that there was a growing antagonism between the US and the Soviet Union, if not a conflict. How and why was Nato established? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/08/GettyImages104416960-22e2215.jpg" width="2612" height="3508" alt="Greek dockers unload sacks of American flour provided as part of the Marshall Plan" title="Greek dockers unload sacks of American flour provided as part of the Marshall Plan. The US scheme was designed to help Europe recover from the economic damage of the Second World War –although there was a crucial ulterior motive. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)" /> How close did the Cold War get to becoming ‘hot’? Arguably, the prospect of a nuclear war was actually less close than people appreciated, and feared, at the time. But a fundamental concern during the Cold War was misperception: if one side got it wrong in their judgment of what the other was up to, it had the potential to lead to a severe miscalculation that would result in a direct war – a nuclear war, at that. The closest that they came was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. This was a reasonably short-lived episode where the Russians secretly transported a huge number of nuclear missiles to Cuba, an island around 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Cuba was a communist country led by Fidel Castro, a great friend of the Soviet Union. After American intelligence spotted the missile sites on the island, a tense 13-day standoff followed. There were calls for an invasion, and, famously, Curtis LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command (one of the US’s nuclear arms) – a characteristic, cigar-chomping Air Force man – just said, “Let’s bomb them!” Fortunately, saner heads prevailed. Under President John F Kennedy, there was instead a blockade, which stopped more Russian ships getting in, and clandestine negotiations. Eventually, an agreement was reached whereby the missiles would be dismantled and removed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/08/GettyImages-159788523-76a228a.jpg" width="4800" height="3632" alt="The US destroyer USS Barry (bottom) and a Navy plane escort the Soviet freighter Anosov (top) away after the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis" title="The US destroyer USS Barry (bottom) and a Navy plane escort the Soviet freighter Anosov (top) away after the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Photo by Underwood Archives/Getty Images)" /> The Cuban Missile Crisis was regarded at the time as the moment the world stepped back from the brink, and is still remembered as such to this day. How did the US resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis? It is with the benefit of hindsight that there is a greater understanding of the stand-off between Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. The latter was notorious for using bluff as a main method of dealing with people, so he was unlikely to back down publicly in October 1962, despite the scale of the American anger at having missiles so close to their mainland. There was a great sense that this could all-too easily lead to an escalation of the Cold War. Yet the tense situation was diffused with help from a Soviet spy: a colonel in military intelligence named Oleg Penkovsky, who passed information to the Americans and British about the missiles and the Soviet nuclear programme. Thanks to this, the Americans knew that Khrushchev’s policy was based on bluffing, and that the best way of dealing with a bully like that was to stand up to him. That’s what Kennedy did, and Khrushchev backed down. In return, the Americans secretly agreed to remove their missiles in Turkey, the presence of which had partly prompted the Russians to send missiles to Cuba in the first place, in a sort of quid pro quo. One intriguing detail, which didn’t come out until the 1990s, was that in addition to the missiles that the Americans had known about on Cuba – had tracked and watched being dismantled – the Russians had actually managed to get some tactical nuclear weapons onto Cuba. These were never spotted by the Americans. Alternate history: what if the Cuban Missile Crisis had escalated? How close to nuclear war did the Cuban Missile Crisis get? Listen | Michael Goodman tells you everything you need to know about the Cold War What was the significance of espionage in the Cold War? Policymakers in both the east and west continuously supported and financed their intelligence communities throughout the Cold War; clearly it was felt there was a great need for the information they provided and the misinformation they spread to the other side. There were a number of episodes that were a direct consequence of the information gained through espionage. For example, technical intelligence acquired by the Russians – such as blueprints during the Second World War from a variety of different scientists – influenced the way they built their atomic bomb. Then there was the intelligence passed on to the British by Russian double-agent Oleg Gordievsky. In particular, he was good at sharing information about the mentality of the Kremlin. In the early 1980s, Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982, was by then an old man and hugely paranoid. He heard US president Ronald Reagan’s speeches calling Russia “the evil empire” and became convinced that the west was going to launch a nuclear strike. Gordievsky’s intelligence prompted the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to tone down her rhetoric about the Russians and also to convince Reagan – with whom she had developed an extremely close relationship – to change his speeches. So, this is a key example of where you can almost draw a direct line between espionage information and a change in policy. Listen | Bestselling historical author Ben Macintyre talks to us about his book, The Spy and the Traitor, which tells the remarkable story of a KGB double agent who risked his life to help the west during the Cold War How did the way in which wars were fought change in the second half of the 20th century? One of the biggest innovations of the Second World War was the construction of the atomic bomb. Fundamentally, it arose out of a fear that the Germans would be the first to develop this technology. The atomic bomb was one of the biggest secrets of the war – the science behind it and the fact it was being constructed on such a massive scale – and the dropping of bombs on Japan was a real watershed moment. It changed warfare. Atomic bomb history Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? Hiroshima: the race to the atomic bomb How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world The mystery of the missing H-bomb paper In pictures: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki So, as the antagonism between the east and west grew during the postwar period, one of the key questions for the Americans and their allies was: when will the Russians get the atomic bomb and how will that change warfare? It was assumed from the outset that any future war would be a nuclear war. Who ‘won’ the Cold War? The easy answer is: the west won. The Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union; the Soviets’ political-ideological system imploded, as did all the countries that were allied with them – they became independent and shed their Soviet allegiances. Of course, there’s a much more complex answer to the question, but I think on a basic level, as an ideological political conflict, you can say the Soviet system lost. Did the Cold War ever really end? Michael Goodman is professor of intelligence and international affairs and head of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He has published widely in the field of intelligence history and scientific intelligence
How close to nuclear war did the Cuban Missile Crisis get?
Serhii Plokhy discusses the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and reveals just how close the world came to nuclear disaster
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 saw a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union escalate to the edge of nuclear war. Historian Serhii Plokhy, author of a new account of the crisis, explores the factors that led the two sides back from the brink. Serhii Plokhy is the author of Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Allen lane) Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones Buy now on Bookshop.org
Alternate history: what if the Cuban Missile Crisis had escalated?
What might have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated? Jonny Wilkes talks to Professor Mark White about how the world stood on the brink of World War III and nuclear Armageddon in October 1962 – all it needed was a single push...
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was just one rash judgement, one communication breakdown, or one incident getting out of control from turning the Cold War hot – and risking a nuclear war that would change the fate of the entire world in the 20th century. The Soviets had clandestinely deployed nuclear missiles to Communist-friendly Cuba to level the playing field against the US, which had placed Jupiter missiles on the Soviet Union’s doorstep in Turkey. When the US discovered the presence of a medium-and intermediate-range ballistic missile launch sites under construction just 90 miles from Florida, tensions immediately began to rise. President John F Kennedy convened a special group of senior advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) to decide on a course of action – from doing nothing to an invasion. On 22 October, JFK declared a naval quarantine of Cuba. What if JFK had lived? While the Soviet leadership, under Nikita Khrushchev, could order their ships bound for Cuba to sail through the quarantine, they knew they would be at a severe disadvantage if war broke out and escalated into a nuclear shootout. Mark White, professor of history at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Cuban Missile Crisis, says: “The US had a huge lead in terms of nuclear weapons in the early 1960s. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the Soviets roughly achieved parity in the Cold War.” In context On 14 October 1962, a US spy plane obtained photographic evidence that nuclear missiles had been secretly shipped to Cuba, and that the Soviets were building medium-and intermediate-range launch sites. The US, even with an overwhelming nuclear superiority, could not tolerate anything this close – with Cuba just 90 miles from Florida – so President John F Kennedy and his advisory body, ExComm, considered a number of responses. In a television address on 22 October, JFK announced a naval blockade, or quarantine, and his commitment to retaliation if attacked. It was after days of an agonisingly tense standoff that negotiations eventually prevailed. The 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis resolved with the Soviet ships sailing away and the missiles withdrawn. In return, the US secretly agreed to remove their own missiles from Turkey. It was the most dangerous episode of the Cold War, but the world eventually stepped back from the brink of nuclear Armageddon. But so many things could have led to the escalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The U-2 spy plane that took the photographs of the missile launch sites on 14 October could have been delayed, meaning the information came later and JFK’s decisions had to be more rushed. Or, despite Khrushchev’s concerns, Soviet ships could have ignored the cordon and forced a response. The most perilous incident on the blockade line came on 27 October, when two US destroyers, USS Beale and USS Cony, intercepted a Soviet sub and dropped ‘signalling’ depth charges. If the captain, who had launch capability, had not listened to his level-headed officer, Vasily Arkhipov, then there just may have been a nuke in the air. A breakdown in communications; a failure in diplomatic efforts; or JFK giving in to the hawks in ExComm had the potential to escalate the situation. The moment the President could have snapped was the shooting down of a U-2 spy plane over Cuba, killing the pilot Major Rudolf Anderson. White asserts, though, that JFK was “very good at crisis management, as seen in Berlin in 1961 and periodic civil rights crises. He tended to keep cool and calm.” Did you know? In the aftermath of the Crisis, it was clear that changes had to be made so such a near-disaster wouldn’t happen again. The hotline between Washington, DC and Moscow was set up to allow direct communication and a partial test ban on nuclear weapons was agreed. Both superpower leaders demonstrated caution and willingness to negotiate. On 26 October, JFK received an offer to withdraw the missiles if the US promised not to invade Cuba, followed by another deal demanding the removal of US missiles from Turkey, which was agreed to in secret. “A big question is what JFK would have done had Khrushchev got back to him on the 28th adjusting the deal so that the removal of US missiles was a public part of the settlement,” says White. “Would JFK have accepted that, if it meant the world would have known about the concession?” Things get heated If not, or if another of the myriad possible catalysts had led to an outbreak of hostilities, then JFK would have likely ordered air strikes on strategic targets in Cuba, followed by an invasion. “The US had developed plans to attack Cuba all the way back to Eisenhower after Fidel Castro’s advent to power,” says White. “JFK regularly instructed his military to update those plans.” Following air strikes, an amphibious landing in the north – comprising a planned 261,000 troops in 10-15 days – aimed to oust Castro and take control of the country. Pentagon reports released in 2012 show a projection of 18,500 American casualties in the opening days based on the number of troops that the US military believed they faced. “Any invasion would have meant engagement with Soviet troops on the island,” says White. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/03/GettyImages_53379593-2594351.jpg" width="6456" height="4859" alt="JFK addresses the nation on 22 October 1962. (Photo by Ralph Crane/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)" title="JFK addresses the nation on 22 October 1962. (Photo by Ralph Crane/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)" /> But that projection was flawed. There were more Soviets on Cuba than the US knew about, as well as tactical nukes. Extraordinarily, launch command had been given to field officers, so smaller tactical missiles could have been utilised to halt the invasion. That may have been enough to start an exchange of nuclear weapons. The US would destroy any remaining weapons on Cuba, while risking a retaliatory attack on some of their cities since the Soviets’ best hope, due to their nuclear inferiority, was an immediate strike. Bay of Pigs invasion: Kennedy’s Cuban catastrophe The Soviets simultaneously had their eyes on other targets. “Khrushchev could have responded elsewhere, for instance Berlin,” says White. An attack there, with conventional forces, would have dragged Europe into a conflict that intensified by the moment. The result: nothing short of World War III and a global nuclear exchange. Of course, calmer heads could still have prevented such a disaster, but at a time of the highest emotions it would be all too plausible that it was already too late. In the case of nuclear war, the Soviet Union was likely to be obliterated by the sheer number of missiles raining down. The US may have fared better, but major cities would certainly have been destroyed and tens of millions perished. The world we know today would never have been. And while clearly the most extreme alternative history, it all could have come from one man, JFK or Khrushchev, blinking during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This article was first published in the March 2021 edition of BBC History Revealed
The Cold War: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
Michael Goodman responds to your questions on the decades of geopolitical tension that shaped relations between east and west in the second half of the 20th century
From espionage across the Iron Curtain, to the global struggles between communists and capitalists, Michael Goodman responds to your questions on the decades of geopolitical tension that shaped relations between east and west in the second half of the 20th century, in the latest in our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics. The Cold War: 9 key questions
Castro and the trip that shaped the 1960s
Simon Hall explores why Fidel Castro’s visit to New York City in 1960 shaped the rest of the decade
In September 1960, Fidel Castro visited New York City to give the opening address at the United Nations General Assembly. Historian Simon Hall, author of Ten Days in Harlem, explores the impact of this trip, and how it was to shape an entire decade.
The Cuban Missile Crisis: everything you wanted to know
Mark White responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the Cold War nuclear confrontation between the US and the USSR
In the latest of our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics, historian Mark White responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the Cold War nuclear confrontation between the US and the USSR. Listen to more episodes in our 'Everything you wanted to know' podcast series
Coronavirus: what might we learn from pandemics in the past?
As Covid-19 dominates the news, read our interview with Laura Spinney (author of Pale Rider, an account of the 1918 influenza pandemic known as Spanish flu) from the HistoryExtra podcast. In the interview, Spinney draws historical parallels with other pandemics in history and asks what we might learn from disease outbreaks in the past
Note: this is an unedited transcript of our recent podcast Coronavirus – a historical perspective Matt Elton, editor of BBC World Histories Magazine: Obviously, Coronavirus is something that’s hitting a lot of headlines at the moment. Why does it strike such a chord, why are we so afraid of pandemics? Laura Spinney: Well, I think it’s something very primitive in us really. I mean, we’ve had to deal with epidemics of infectious disease, plagues if you like, to use a more kind of ancient and Biblical term, since we settled down in kind of semi-permanent settlements, since we started farming, that is, about 10, 12,000 years ago. And, you know, these diseases that kind of adapted to big groups of densely-living people, we call them the crowd diseases, and they kind of evolved in parallel with us as we adopted those new, more sedentary lifestyles. So it’s been a kind of arms race for a very long time, they know us very well and unfortunately because they’re small and they reproduce much faster, they tend to be a step ahead. They can just mutate and adapt and, you know, they’re just wherever we don’t want them to be before we can do anything about it and we’re seeing that again now. In some ways, there are many aspects, I think, of a pandemic which don’t change over time. There are many that do but there are many that don’t and those are the ones that speak to our, obviously speak to our most ancient fears. ME: And, of course, it’s natural for humans to look back at past examples of a similar thing to see if there’s any parallels or any lessons that could be drawn. Do you think there are particular pandemics from history that are most useful to look at in terms of parallels or is it just not a useful exercise generally? LS: No, I do think it’s a useful exercise, I just don’t know why we immediately rush to pick the worst possible example. Given that the Spanish Flu, or the not Spanish Flu, we should really call it the 1918 Flu, was pretty much forgotten for most of the last century, even though it killed a staggering 50 to 100 million people, the fact that we’re now, everybody’s talking about it, that’s the only parallel we can draw is somewhat ironic. I mean, if you just think about flu pandemics because obviously we’ve had pandemics of other diseases, although flu does tend to be considered the disease that lends itself most easily to pandemics, we have had three flu pandemics since 1918 and none of them killed more than about four million people. The last one we had was sometimes considered rather anti-climactic, if that’s not a politically-incorrect thing to say, given that lots of people died nevertheless. But 600,000 people died in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic which is considerably less than in any other pandemic. So there are other kinds, other leagues of pandemics that we could be comparing it with and that we’re not. Why was the 1918-19 pandemic known as Spanish Flu? Portraits of a plague: the 19th-century pandemic that killed 12 million people ME: So is there a more useful historical parallel to draw? LS: Well, that’s the killer question, isn’t it? The thing is, there’s so much we don’t know about this bug yet. We don’t know, for example, exactly how lethal it is. And the other problem is that we don’t really know how lethal, for example, the Spanish Flu was, for different reasons. We don’t know how lethal this current one is because we don’t have very much data yet. So you might have seen a figure floating around of a case fatality rate of 3.4%, which refers to the proportion of people who catch the Covid-19 infection who go on to die of it. The number that’s often quoted for the Spanish Flu, for example, case fatality rate is 2.5% but it’s a very, very, very controversial figure because the numbers are so vague. I mean, we think that probably 50 million people died but there was no form of reliable test at the time so we can’t be sure about that and that just throws all the numbers out. So it’s really difficult to make the historical comparisons, even if you have accurate data now, which we don’t. So on both sides of the equation, if you like, it’s a moving target. ME: The other side of this, of course, is although we may not be able to draw historical parallels with a specific pandemic, there is something perhaps to be gained from how people dealt with them or how they reacted to them at the time. Are there useful parallels in terms of that? LS: Yes, there are. So we would obviously love to have a vaccine against Covid-19 now but we don’t and we may have to wait a year to 18 months for that. They had no vaccine at all in 1918. Or rather, they did make vaccines but they were useless, pretty much, because they were essentially vaccines against bacteria in the respiratory tract whereas, as we know, flu is a viral disease. So in terms of that, we are much advanced compared to 1918. But we don’t have that vaccine yet. We so have anti-viral drugs for treating the sick and we do have antibiotics which will be useful for treating the bacterial complications that may cause pneumonia in some cases, as they did also in 1918, interestingly. But the only thing that actually stops people falling sick is the vaccine and we won’t have that for a while. So what do we have? We have strategies of containment, strategies that are collectively known as social distancing. And those are surprisingly unchanged since 1918, or even since much, much before that. I mean, they’re basically things like quarantine, isolation, wearing masks, although masks have always been debateable. It depends on the pathogen but once again, it’s looking like they may not be as effective as we hoped they would be. And hand washing is another thing. Basically, any kind of barrier technique that keeps the sick and the healthy apart and therefore reduces disease transmission. Because it’s looking pretty much now, at this stage, with the WHO having declared the pandemic, that it was a pandemic yesterday, as if containment is not going to work very well, if at all. And so what the governments are moving to now is more a sort of delay tactic, which will push off the peak of the epidemic, hopefully, until later in the year, towards the summer. And what everyone’s pinning their hopes on is that this bug will be a sort of seasonal bug, a bit like flu, and will kind of recede when the warm weather comes. At the very least, they want to push off that peak while the health systems are already coping with many other winter respiratory conditions and so try and lessen the burden on them. But basically, whether you delay or whether you contain, as long as you’re before the sort of mitigate stage, which is where Italy and South Korea and Iran are, you know, they’ve got widespread community transmission and they’re just trying to treat everybody and, you know, reduce morbidity and mortality as much as they can. We’re the step before. But essentially the techniques for delaying that peak of the pandemic are pretty much the same as containment and they all involve social distancing. So that’s where we are, and that’s a long-winded way of saying that historical parallels are useful there because the techniques for containment were the same in, for example, 1918 or 1957 when we had another flu pandemic, or 1968 or 2009 and today, they’re all the same. ME: To what extent does today’s transmission of the panic or of the media coverage of this epidemic compare to that of 1918, say? LS: Well, I think it is different. I mean, fake news is not a new phenomenon, fake news is as old the hills. But, you know, with the advent of the internet, the speed and the volume of both information and fake information that we can transmit have just, you know, been amplified to an extraordinary level. So we’re dealing with the disadvantages and the advantages of that. In 1918, you know, most people read the newspapers, that’s how they got their news, so it was a slower medium. And then, on top of that, there was a war on, at least for the first part of the pandemic and so you had things like wartime censorship interfering with things. And many countries, at least at the beginning of the pandemic tried to suppress the information that they had this illness spreading in their populations because they didn’t want to supposedly lower morale of their populations while everybody was concentrated on the war effort. And of course, that slowed down, you know, even if they had had techniques for dealing with this disease, it would have slowed down any response beyond any hopeful stage. Because one of the key things you need to do with an epidemic is to stop it or to contain it as early as you can. Because you get this kind of exponential growth in cases at the beginning because everybody is susceptible to this bug. ME: I’m really interested in the other social forces that might have changed since earlier pandemics. Organised religion, for instance, seemed to have played a big role in the past but doesn’t so much today, is that right? LS: Yeah, I think so. And I think that also has a positive negative aspect to it. So for example, to start with the positive, in 1918, doctors were pretty useless in the sense that they had nothing in their medicine cabinets really to offer, apart from aspirin. In fact, the people on the sort of conventional medicine side who were the most useful were nurses. They’re the only ones who can make any difference between life and death by keeping patients warm and hydrated and so on. But because doctors really had nothing to offer and because they were nevertheless, in many cases, very brave and, you know, in the front line and falling sick in droves themselves and often dying, others had to step into the breach and perform that kind of, if not doctor, then nursing role. And very often you saw it was priests and nurses and, you know, other people from the main faiths, or even the lesser faiths. So on the positive side there was that. "Far too little, too late": what happened when Spanish Flu hit Britain a century ago? Could flu really kill thousands again? On the negative side, because I think organised religion was much more powerful, they could have a nefarious effect on the messaging occasionally. I mean, you would always hope that the powerful leaders and the powerful influencers will, you know, coincide with the message that reinforces the public health message. But that didn’t always happen. So I can give you the example of Zamora, which is a town in north-western Spain, which was and in fact still is, very pious Catholic city. And there was a very charismatic, very influential bishop there at the time who basically just defied the provincial authorities. And at the height of the pandemic, in the autumn of 1918, ordered his flock into the churches to pray for forgiveness for their sins, which he insisted was the cause of this terrible punishment, divine punishment. And so everybody crowded into the churches and made their prayers to St Roch, who is the patron saint of pestilence and plagues. And that meant lining up to kiss his relics, everybody kissing the same relic. And Zamora went on to record one of the highest death rates from that flu in the whole of Spain, if not in the whole of Europe. So, you know, very kind of clear effect there. And I think today, you know, you do see the effect of religion but it’s very kind of marginal. So there are reports of people in the Iranian shrine city of Qom licking the shrine defiantly. And we hear that some of the early clusters in South Korea came from churches. But, generally speaking, there has been much less of an effect of organised religion, I think. ME: Is that the mechanism by which people in the past would have found out about pandemics or would they have learnt about it from another source? LS: I mean, I think that if your community leader was also your religious leader, that was quite often the way you found out about it, was probably also the source you looked to for guidance and how to live through this terrible thing and how to mitigate it, if possible. Of course, there were much higher levels of illiteracy in the world at that time, even in the supposedly advanced countries. And so that was much more of a feature, literate people obviously read newspapers but that wasn’t necessarily the most common means of information moving around, no. ME: Another way in which the world is different today is that it’s much more globalised and much more interconnected. Do you think that makes it much harder or even impossible to contain or stop such pandemics as this? LS: Well, it looks like it, doesn’t it? I mean, as soon as the WHO declared, because the WHO declared a pandemic yesterday but it had already declared a global health emergency on the 30th of January. And, you know, that was the step that unlocked its maximum resources and powers for dealing with this disaster. The word pandemic, it depends who you ask, did it matter that declaration yesterday? I think the WHO made it because it was worried that people were being too complacent and not acting in time, and previously they were trying to avoid panic, which is also counterproductive. But they declared a global health emergency on 30 January and, at the same time as they did that, they basically put out the advice not to close borders because we know it doesn’t work, we’ve learnt it over and over again through previous pandemics. And many countries promptly did exactly that. And now what they’re finding is that the virus is inside their countries and they are less than prepared for it. So not only did it not help, I think, it also meant that they were more on the back foot when it came to actually beginning testing and detecting and all the rest of it that goes into good containment which, you know, maybe it’s too late for that anyway. So are we globalised, of course we are. There was no commercial, there were no commercial air flights in 1918 and so the fastest people got around was by steam ship or train. And now, you know, a person and the germ they’re carrying, can travel round the world in days, if not hours. And, you know, we’ve seen the lightning speed with which this germ has got around the world. And so I think, I don't know, you know, perhaps we could have slowed it down but we also know that screening at entry and exit points is less than completely effective. Not only because there’s a question over whether people may be infected and asymptomatic but mainly because there’s an incubation period, which is on average three to five days, can be up to 14. So that means people can be infected but they’re not yet showing the symptoms and if they’re travelling across a border in those three to five days, then fever screening, temperature screening won’t pick them up. Spanish Flu: the virus that changed the world 10 facts about the Black Death ME: You mentioned national borders there, and alluded earlier to the idea that Spanish Flu got that name, and perhaps we shouldn’t call it that. What does that name tell us about this part of the story? LS: So it’s called the Spanish Flu because when it first manifested itself in the Northern Hemisphere spring of 1918, the world was still at war and the belligerent nations, which already had flu within their boundaries and they included the US, Britain and France, kept that information out of their newspapers, they were censoring them. Again, as I mentioned earlier, the stated goal, or the later stated goal being to protect the morale of their populations. And so even their populations weren’t necessarily aware that there was flu in their midst. Spain, on the other hand, was neutral in the war and so didn’t censor its press and so when they had the first cases there, in the spring of 1918, they reported them. And so it seemed to the whole world, including the Spanish, including people in the other countries that were already infected, that this disease was rolling out from Madrid. And the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, was among those early cases, he went onto recover, but his case sort of lent it a great deal of visibility. Of course, it’s unhelpful. One of the few certainties we have about that pandemic is that it didn’t start in Spain, we actually don’t know where it did start but we know it didn’t start in Spain. And the Spanish felt, and to a very great degree were, stigmatised by it. In 2015, the WHO put out guidelines for how to name a disease and I think the motivation for that was mainly to avoid this kind of stigmatisation, this kind of kneejerk naming of a disease after the place it appears to first manifest itself, or the sector of the population or the animal it first appears in. because remember, 2009, H1N1 flu was initially called swine flu. You could think about AIDS which was initially called gay-related immune deficiency and stigmatised the homosexual community, unhelpfully for everybody, including heterosexuals, who nobody thought about how it might be being transmitted in that community. Meanwhile homosexuals were getting stigmatised for being the ones who transmitted it, so it was unhelpful to everybody. The swine flu name was unhelpful in many ways, for example, the Egyptian government ordered the slaughter of the country’s swine herd, which was mainly the property of the minority of Coptic Christians in that country, so their local economy was wiped out in one stroke. And in fact, by the time it was in humans, it was a disease that was being transmitted from human to human so it made no difference either. And in fact, to go back a little bit further in history, that swine flu was given to pigs by humans in 1918. So it came back from pigs to humans in 2009, you know, ironic historical reprisal. So naming doesn’t help. And this time, I think, it’s really interesting and one of the small things we can applaud ourselves for is that we have not given this outbreak a stigmatising name. It’s not the Chinese Flu, it’s not the Pangolin Flu, it’s Covid-19, which may sound mundane but it’ll do the job. ME: Do you think the responses to this particular pandemic in various parts of the world tell us about historical situations in those countries or historical pandemics in those countries? LS: So one of the things that public health experts are absolutely clear about is that the best way to impose a public health, a set of public health measures is not to impose them in the authoritarian way that the Chinese did. But if you can possibly manage it, to have people complying with you voluntarily, because you’re much more likely to be able to contain that disease that way. People don’t like to be told what to do. But if you want people to comply with you voluntarily two things are needed. The first is they have to be properly informed about the threat they face, so that they understand why you’re asking them to do these things and to restrict their normal lives in certain ways. And the second thing is they have to trust the authorities, they have to trust that those authorities are acting in their collective interest. And the thing is, that if that trust isn’t there when the pandemic breaks out, then it’s too late to build it. So I think you could look, for example, at the case of South Africa in 1918, where as in many other countries, when the epidemic arrived, doctors and scientists scrambled to produce a vaccine. Again, as I mentioned earlier, the candidates, the vaccines they developed were fairly, uniformly, useless because they were against bacteria and not the virus. But they launched a national, a nation-wide vaccination campaign and white South Africans dutifully lined up to get the vaccine and black South Africans basically boycotted it. Because white, the predominantly white doctors had never shown much interest in their health before and they couldn’t understand why they were doing so now. And there were rumours that circulated in the black population that the doctors were trying to kill them with their long needles. So, you know, that’s a very clear and graphic illustration, I think, of how if the trust is not there, if you don’t believe that the authorities and the doctors coming towards you in their white coats are acting in your interest, then you will not do what they want you to do, certainly not voluntarily. ME: The Spanish Flu destabilised social and political orders for decades, do you think that that is possible in this case? LS: Well, yeah, it’s certainly possible. You can already see the economic damage it’s doing and people have a tendency to look at their governments after some terrible disaster and to hold them responsible for what happened. So, you know political consequences are also possible. And then when you’ve got the two things together in concert, if the economy suffers then the politicians are likely to be blamed for that as well. Of course, the politicians are doing their best to shift the blame. I mean, you saw Mr Trump’s announcement yesterday that he was restricting travel to the United States from Europe with the heavy suggestion that Europe had somehow mismanaged the disaster in the same way, or just as badly as the Chinese had, to, you know, reproduce his narrative. Whereas the plain fact of the matter is that the disease is already in the United States, there have been reports that they haven’t been testing for it properly. So the problem is very much theirs as much as it is Europe’s. But Mr Trump has decided to play a political game with it and I’m sure that’s not unconnected to the fact that there is a presidential election coming up this year. Listen | Catharine Arnold explores the story of the Spanish Flu outbreak that caused devastation across the globe a century ago ME: Finally, what lessons do you wish that we would learn from the past, but don’t, and why do you think we don’t learn from them? LS: Well, I think the lessons we should learn in a very general sense are to try and, because we go through this cycle of panic and complacency. So we panic when it happens, when we should think calmly and rationally and just do, you know, what the experts tell us to do. And then when it’s passed, we immediately forget about it and become complacent again and don’t do any of the long-term things that the experts ask us to do. So for example, when the WHO declared its global health emergency on 30 January, it even took that opportunity to repeat a message that it’s been saying for a long time, which is we need to invest in the long-term in better health infrastructure in the poorer parts of the world, because when a pandemic strikes, we are only as safe as our least-safe place. So, you know, we should be doing things like that, when the pandemic passes, which of course it will, eventually. Will we remember to do that? I very much hope so. I think this pandemic is throwing up other things which are really interesting which we should take on board and discuss when it’s passed, how to fix to so they’re not weaknesses again. I can mention two. I mean, I think the first is how we get our news out. The fake news problem. A lot of young people have said to me the problem is that good information is behind paywalls where as fake news is free. The assumption there is that they shouldn’t have to pay for the information and I think older generations were used to paying for their news but that’s not the expectation with the internet anymore. So we desperately need a new business model, we’ve been talking about that for a while in news circles but I think this pandemic has really thrown it into relief how important it is that we have ways to get quality information out there and that people know which is which. So that’s one thing. And my list is not exhaustive, by the way. Another thing that I think is really interesting is that it’s showing up the weaknesses in our various health systems, national health systems. So the problem in the United States has been that lots of people have been excluded from testing and from care, and not just for this pandemic but this pandemic is really highlighting that. A lot of people were not getting access to Covid-19 testing when they needed it. And of course, you can’t control an outbreak of disease if you don't know who’s got it and who they’ve been in contact with. On our side, in Europe, where we have more socialised medical healthcare systems, which by the way, were the kind of fruit of the 1918 pandemic, when they realised how important this was. Our systems tend to be paid for indirectly by taxes or insurance, national insurance schemes and we get our healthcare free at the point of delivery. So that means that, in theory, anyone can get tested for Covid-19, assuming the tests are available. There have been some reports that they haven’t been but that’s another problem. But the problem is that our health systems are completely overloaded. They are arguably no longer fit for purpose. They were built for much smaller and much younger populations and they’re struggling to support older and bigger populations and not doing very well. So we may have to have a rethink on our side about how we fund our health systems and how we adapt them, going forward, for a different kind of population. So those are just two things that I think that we could be thinking about in the long term, once this pandemic passes. Listen to the full podcast interview with Laura Spinney here Matt Elton is the editor of BBC World Histories Magazine Laura Spinney is a British science journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer