Defensive Weapon or Offensive Weapon? Maybe Both?

Fifty-ninth Chapter in a Series Chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

Kennedy’s Warnings about Offensive Weapons

Twice in September 1962 the Kennedy administration had warned that if the Soviets were deploying offensive weapons in Cuba, the U.S. would take any measures necessary to remove them.

Drawing a bright line between offensive and defensive weapons is difficult, however. More than a few weapons, from handguns up to nuclear missiles, can be considered either defensive or offensive, depending on whether you are aiming the weapon or it is aimed at you.

McCone Still in the Dark

On September 16, 1962, Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, honeymooning on the French Riviera since late August, sent a TOP SECRET message to his CIA deputy, Army General Marshall Carter, repeating his now-familiar warning that the Soviets were planning to put strategic missiles in Cuba. Then he warned that those missiles

…COULD NOT BE DETECTED BY US IF CUBAN DEFENSES DENY OVERFLIGHT.…DETECTION OF PREPARATORY STEPS POSSIBLY BEYOND OUR CAPABILITY ONCE CUBAN DEFENSIVE SYSTEM OPERATIVE.

The words “IF” in the first bolded clause and “ONCE” in the second tell us that McCone still does not know that U-2 reconnaissance missions over Cuba have been severely curtailed (see chapter 57 in this series: ).

Kennedy Fulfills Kremlin’s Wildest Dreams

To put it another way: As of September 16th, Carter still has not told McCone that the Dean Rusk-McGeorge Bundy-Bobby Kennedy coalition has done for the Kremlin what it could never have accomplished on its own. They have persuaded the President to suspend U-2 over-flights of Cuba’s interior at the very moment that Soviet strategic missiles arrived there.

McCone’s latest cable should have galvanized Carter into cabling his boss the bad news.

But it didn’t. So far as we can tell, Carter never told McCone about the curtailed U-2 missions. That discovery would have to wait until McCone returned to Washington in late September. There must have been high old times at CIA headquarters once the truth began to emerge.

The Offensive-Defensive Weapons Question

In his September 16th message, McCone also commented that the U.S. press reports he has been reading in France suggest that it is easy to differentiate between offensive and defensive weapons.

McCone questions, however, whether there is “a clear demarcation between defensive and offensive preparations,” and he is concerned about “possible developments and alternative situations which might evolve and unexpectedly confront us.”

McCone is quite right. While some weapons, like the deadly SA-2 antiaircraft missile are clearly defensive, the status of other weapons systems is much less clear. Some weapons are defensive under certain circumstances, but offensive under others. When enemy bombers approach a fighter-attack plane’s home base, for example, the plane rises to shoot down the attackers, clearly a defensive role. The same plane can be ordered to attack the enemy bombers’ base, however—clearly an offensive role.

Consider NATO’s missiles ringing the Russian Homeland. For NATO, they were defensive—designed to deter the Soviet Union from extending its borders westward. For the Kremlin, however, NATO’s missiles were offensive—evidence of the West’s determination to reduce the USSR to rubble.

New Soviet Tracking Radar Detected in Cuba

On September 19th, 1962, the National Security Agency announced that on September 15th it had intercepted “the first reported signal [in Cuba] identified as SPOON REST.…SPOON REST radars have been used by the Soviets as target acquisition radars serving SA-2 missile sites.” (See facsimile of this release at head of this chapter.)

The SPOON REST target acquisition radar would track all aircraft within range of its deadly antiaircraft missiles. A second radar, the FRUIT SET, would guide the SA-2 to its target.

This SPOON REST intercept was evidence that the SAM sites in Cuba were approaching operational status—but were not there yet. The U-2s were still safe from these defensive missiles.

It didn’t matter. The mere advent of these deadly defensive missiles had frightened high-level Washington policy-makers into blinding the U-2s’ powerful eyes—thereby blinding themselves.

Email your questions to phufstader@sbcglobal.net or post a comment.

Sources and Notes

McCone’s September 16th cable to General Carter is document 28 in Mary McAuliffe, ed., CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962. Washington, D.C.: October 1992.

McCone first warned that the Soviets were planning to use Cuba as a strategic missile base on August 10, 1962.

I acquired the NSA electronic release concerning the SPOON REST radar signals from the agency’s Cuban Missile Crisis Document Archive for 1962: http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/cuban_missile_crisis/1962.shtml. The “distribution list” for this release has been blacked out (see the facsimile at the head of this chapter). This means that we can’t determine who received it, and thus who knew about this important step-up in the readiness of Soviet air defenses in Cuba.