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| | suggests that the Soviets, knowing they could not keep the secret long into actual deployment, believed that they could count on the U.S. Government to keep it a secret from the public and its political opponents, a not uncharacteristic Soviet expectation repeatedly disappointed, and that the Kennedy Administration was in fact signalling its willingness to let the missiles be deployed. In the weeks preceding the outbreak of the crisis, Kennedy was saying in effect that he knew what was going on in Cuba, that offensive missiles were not there, and "were it otherwise, the gravest issues would arise"-this when it was already "otherwise" and the Soviets thought we knew it. From this they may have concluded that the U.S. would acquiesce in the missile move as long as the Soviets kept it from public view, as would the U.S. | |
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| | The foregoing may seem farfetched but essentially no more so than Allison's assumption that the Soviet government, not particularly given to light-handed management, would allow the trickiest undertaking since Alamogordo to run on unexamined standard operating procedures. The Southard thesis has gained novel support from the junior Gromyko who, in an article for a Soviet book on international crises, argued that prior to the crisis, Kennedy did not directly challenge the Soviets as to what was going on, and that they were as surprised as the U.S. public when Kennedy threw down the gauntlet in his TV address. Admittedly there must be in this an element of post hoc rationalization on behalf of Gromyko senior; but it is not therefore a false view of Soviet perceptions. Which of the two theses fares best under Occam's razor may be left to the reader and future historians. The point is that Model 11 facts can be made to work just as nicely in a Model I explanation. | |
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| | In fact, although Allison sets out to challenge him on his own ground, the Rational Actor remains standing astride the history of the Cuban missile crisis like the jolly Green Giant. Allison has a clear polemical interest in deprecating the power of the Rational Actor Model. Among its offshoots, he accounts the various sub-models called deterrence theory, strategic calculus, or missile power. These he finds inadequate to explain Soviet behavior. But to this reviewer the strategic power approach offers about as good an explanation of Allison's key questions-why they started and stopped the missile gambit-as any available. | |
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| | Despite the cruciality of strategic issues in the crisis, the Soviet view of these issues preceding and during the crisis has never been fully sorted out in public discussions. From the position of Moscow, or Khrushchev, or the Soviet General Staff, the strategic situation in early 1962 must have appeared positively horrendous. After much ballyhoo, the missile gap had collapsed in one speech by Roswell Gilpatrick; the Soviets had only a few dozen soft and very slow-reacting ICBMs; a small, very vulnerable bomber force; and a rag-tag assortment of missile submarines that the U.S. Navy had under constant trail. Meanwhile, the U.S. had about 100 Atlas and Titan ICBMs by mid-year 1962, a formidable force of 1,500 heavy and medium bombers, and 96 operational Polaris SLBMs. Moreover, it had been toying since McNamara came into the Pentagon with a counterforce doctrine that looked fearfully like a theory of preventive war to the Soviets. This was enunciated in McNamara's Ann Arbor address which not only pronounced counterforce, but implied a U.S. expectation that Soviet retaliation with any small surviving strategic force could be deterred. And finally, Minuteman was coming into the force at what the Soviets must have found a | |
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Posted: May 08, 2007 08:41 AM
Last Updated: May 08, 2007 08:41 AM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:41 AM
