PROVIDENCE -- At 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 27, 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended to President Kennedy that the United States invade Cuba with 280,000 troops.
Days into the U.S. naval blockade around the Caribbean country, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev continued ignoring demands to remove Soviet missiles from the island nation.
The CIA pushed for a speedy invasion, advising Kennedy that Cuba's first nuclear warheads were expected to arrive within days.
Except the CIA was wrong.
The warheads were already in Cuba.
One hundred sixty-two of them, with the potential to kill millions of Americans upon provocation, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara said yesterday.
Kennedy did not have to decide. Khrushchev blinked and the world stepped back from the precipice of nuclear annihilation.
It would be 29 years before the United States learned that as Kennedy's advisers advocated an attack, Cuba already had a nuclear capability and a will to use it.
And it was only two weeks ago, during a conference in Havana, McNamara says, that a little-known story further underscored how frightening that time was 40 years ago:
On the same day Kennedy was weighing an invasion, three Soviet officers aboard a Soviet submarine off Cuba's coast were debating whether to fire a nuclear torpedo at the American ship dropping depth charges upon them. Two wanted to shoot. The third said no.
"We had no idea the Soviet sub was carrying a nuclear weapon," McNamara said, "and we certainly didn't have a plan for a response."
Had the submarine used its nuclear weapon, "there would have been tremendous pressure to respond with a nuclear weapon."
"So the danger that we thought was great at the time was far more than we understood," McNamara said, "and we're still learning."
McNamara, now 86, spoke at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, where he discussed his participation in the recent Havana conference, co-sponsored by the university. The conference was the sixth in the last 15 years that has brought the adversaries in the 13-day Cuban missile crisis drama together to swap impressions and learn what happened -- and what almost happened.
And what history has uncovered, McNamara said, is how much luck played in saving the world.
"It was by this much," McNamara repeated over and over again yesterday, pinching a thumb and finger together. "It was scary as hell and everything we've learned since then has shown us it was scarier than we thought it was."
All sides -- Americans, Soviets and Cubans -- made crucial mistakes in judgment and knowledge. And, McNamara said, as errant U.S. bombings in Afghanistan of a wedding party and Canadian troops prove, mistakes happen in every conventional war.
But there is no room for mistakes in nuclear war, McNamara said.
Which brought him to his main point: that unless the world's supply of nuclear weapons is severely reduced,"the combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons is going to destroy nations."
McNamara's words held a special resonance as the United States continued its tense standoff with Iraq.
An applicable lesson learned 40 years ago, said McNamara "is the absolute requirement that you develop an empathy -- not a sympathy -- for your adversaries . . . Put yourself in their shoes. Think about the consequences before you do it. They [the Soviets and Cubans] didn't. We didn't."
For instance, McNamara said, Kennedy and his advisers had no intention of launching a nuclear attack against Cuba. Yet Castro had nearly convinced Khrushchev that such an attack was certain and pressed the Soviet leader to launch nuclear weapons from Cuba when the attack came, "which scared the hell out of Khrushchev."
Castro was willing to retaliate with nuclear weapons, McNamara said, knowing full well his nation would be destroyed in return.
"He was prepared to pull the temple down on his head," McNamara said, as is Iraq's Saddam Hussein if Iraq is attacked.
McNamara said he was sure Saddam doesn't yet have nuclear weapons, but that the Iraqi leader wouldn't hesitate to use biological and chemical weapons.
McNamara wouldn't say whether he supported a war against Iraq, noting the "very, very delicate negotiations" that President Bush was holding with United Nations officials and allies.
But any war, he said, would be "bloody" and economically costly, and would likely spur the overthrow of several regional nations, including Jordan.
