Jupiter IRBM Missiles Installed in Turkey
The United States put Jupiter missiles in Turkey in 1961 and traded them away a year later without saying so. The deployment had been agreed in 1959: fifteen intermediate-range missiles with 1.4-megaton warheads, liquid-fuelled, above ground, and requiring some fifteen minutes to prepare for launch, which made them useful only as a first-strike weapon and useless as a deterrent. They were obsolete before they were installed, since Polaris submarines were entering service and could do the same job invulnerably. Kennedy had asked twice in 1961 whether they could be removed and had been told that withdrawal would be read in Ankara as abandonment. Khrushchev's own account of why he put missiles in Cuba names them explicitly, along with the defence of Castro: the Americans had surrounded the Soviet Union with bases and it was time to let them feel what it was like. The crisis of October 1962 turned on them at the end. The public settlement was that the Soviet missiles would be withdrawn in exchange for an American undertaking not to invade Cuba. The private one, conveyed by Robert Kennedy to Ambassador Dobrynin on 27 October, was that the Jupiters would be gone within a few months provided it was never presented as part of the bargain. They were dismantled in April 1963. The concealment mattered politically and distorted the history: for thirty years the crisis was taught as a case of firmness alone, and the participants who knew otherwise kept quiet. The missiles are the reason the crisis is now taught differently. What looked for a generation like a victory won by nerve turns out to have included a concession, and the concession is what made the settlement possible.
- Year: 1961 CE
- Category: Military
