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Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

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The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted for decades and resulted in anti-communist suspicions and international incidents that led the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear disaster.

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How propaganda psychologically affects us. 

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How propaganda psychologically affects us. 

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Propaganda traffics mostly in emotions, and not just negative ones. Propagandists appeal to our fears but also to our courage, our hatred, and our love. The fact that propaganda is at heart an emotional manipulation also does not mean that our emotions and "emotionality" are bad. It means that our emotional system can be manipulated to destructive ends.

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"If you can't find the sucker at the poker table," goes the saying, "you're it." Extrapolating that axiom to the present political moment, we may say: "If you don't hear much about propaganda, that's what you're hearing."

The term propaganda has its origins in the 17th-century efforts of the Catholic Church to propagate its views and stem the rise of Protestantism. It has gone through various permutations since. By the time Hitler was dead and the Cold War underway, the word had lost its godly associations and became a pejorative, connoting mostly the self-serving lies of nefarious tyrannical regimes. Yet propaganda properly understood is non-discriminating, inclusive with regard to its users, contents, and ends.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines propaganda as:

"The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person." Propaganda, in other words, is manipulative persuasion in the service of an agenda. The word itself doesn't imply truth or falsehood in the content or pass judgment on the agenda."

Understood as such, propaganda is not the sole providence of one side or another in the political (or any other) arena. It is a tool that may be used by both sides. (Indeed, assigning the propaganda label to the opposite camp in a conflict is itself a common propaganda move). Moreover, propaganda may be used to achieve "good" ends. This does not make it any less problematic, just as assassinating Hitler would not have made assassination as an approach to solving ideological disagreements any less problematic.

Propaganda traffics mostly in emotions, and not just negative ones. Propagandists appeal to our fears but also to our courage, our hatred, and our love. The fact that propaganda is at heart an emotional manipulation also does not mean that our emotions and "emotionality" are bad. It means that our emotional system can be manipulated to destructive ends.

The antidote to the process of propaganda is the process of finding factual truth. The best way we have for doing that is through scientific inquiry, which referees competing claims systematically based on evidence. The propagandist process subordinates the facts to an agenda, even at the price of distorting or ignoring the facts altogether. For science, factual truth is the agenda; it follows the evidence wherever it might lead. Anything counter-factual, anything that obscures or distorts the truth is anathema to the scientific project. Propaganda knows how to sell a product. Science knows how to shop smart.

This tension between propaganda and science speaks to a duality that undergirds our internal architecture: We feel and we think. The young child is emotional; she cries and recoils when she's scared, or when she sees fear in her mother's face. But she's also a scientist, doggedly trying to figure out how stuff works.

Both systems are useful for survival, yet the processes and results they yield are often in competition with each other. And the competition is rigged. Emotional reaction precedes reasoned analysis, like biting must have preceded the evolution of teeth. We are more likely to act on a feeling without much thought than to act on a thought without much feeling. To quote E.O. Wilson: "People would rather believe than know." The propagandist's appeal to emotion is therefore bound to find a more ready reception than the scientist's appeal to reason. Emotional reactions easily drown out and overtake intellectual analysis and fact-based reasoning. That's the psychological edge exploited by the propagandist.

While they may seem to be uniquely of this moment, concerns over propaganda undermining American society are not new. Perhaps the most famous case in point dates back to 1937 when-with the political unrest of the depression era still gripping the nation-growing concerns about the American public's vulnerability to extremist ideologies prompted the liberal philanthropist Edward Filene to fund a proposal by Clyde Miller of Columbia University to create the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA). The IPA defined propaganda as, "expression of opinion or action by individuals or groups deliberately designed to influence opinions or actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends." The institute then set out to "help the public gain a clear understanding of present-day conditions" by teaching Americans how to "recognize propaganda, to analyze it, and to appraise it."

Savvy propagandists, Miller and his colleagues realized, draw their power in large part from the fact that their targets are not aware that propaganda is being used on them. In this way, propaganda is not a magic show but a con. A mind that is not trained to detect and neutralize propaganda is a gullible mind, ripe for the swindle.

That same year, the Institute published a manifesto, How to Detect Propaganda, detailing "the seven common propaganda devices" of which Americans should become aware, the better to counter nefarious propagandists at home and abroad. Here they are:
Name-calling
"Labeling," in today's lingo; this basic technique amounts to Propaganda 101 and its origins reach all the way back to preschool. If you want to hurt someone, diminish their standing, intimidate them, or provoke them into ill-considered action, call them a bad name: Crooked. Tiny Hands. Bad names, according to IPA, "have ruined reputations, stirred men and women to outstanding accomplishments, sent others to prison cells, and made men mad enough to enter battle and slaughter their fellowmen."
Glittering generalities
This technique takes "big virtue" words to which many people are emotionally connected and attaches them to the ends favored by the propagandist. Make America Great. Hope and Change. However, these kinds of words mean different things to different people and can be used in different ways.

"When someone talks to us about democracy, we immediately think of our own definite ideas about democracy, the ideas we learned at home, at school, and in church. Our first and natural reaction is to assume that the speaker is using the word in our sense, that he believes as we do on this important subject. This lowers our 'sales resistance' and makes us far less suspicious than we ought to be when the speaker begins telling us the things 'the United States must do to preserve democracy.'"

Transfer
Transfer is a device by which the propagandist seeks to transfer onto him or his cause the esteem and respect we have for someone else (celebrity endorsements, anyone?). It's a way to Bask in someone's Reflected Glory (BIRGing, in social psychology parlance), to have another's legitimacy confer legitimacy onto the propagandist.

"For example, most of us respect and revere our church and our nation. If the propagandist succeeds in getting church or nation to approve a campaign in behalf of some program, he thereby transfers its authority, sanction, and prestige to that program. Thus, we may accept something which otherwise we might reject."

Testimonials
This technique is used frequently in marketing and advertising. Propagandists will use testimonials to legitimize an idea or position. This technique makes use of the fact that we more easily attach to specific personal narratives than to general facts and dry statistics. The personal narrative, after all, is the format by which we experience ourselves. "Anne Frank" is more accessible and comprehensible than "six million" and thus carries more emotional resonance.
Plain folks
This technique takes advantage of the human ability, and desire, to identify with like others.

"This is a device used by politicians, labor leaders, businessmen, and even by ministers and educators to win our confidence by appearing to be people like ourselves...Businessmen often are 'plain folks' with the factory hands."

Presidential candidates who eat at McDonald's, kiss babies, visit Iowa, or wear a baseball cap are not plain folks; they are merely using the 'plain folks' technique.
Card stacking
Card Stacking is what we may these days call "hyping." It's full-court PR press.

"The propagandist employs all the arts of deception to win our support for himself, his group, nation, race, policy, practice, belief, or ideal. He stacks the cards against the truth. He uses under-emphasis and over-emphasis to dodge issues and evade facts. He resorts to lies, censorship and distortion. He omits facts. He offers false testimony. He creates a smoke screen of clamor by raising a new issue when he wants an embarrassing matter forgotten. He draws a red herring across the trail to confuse and divert those in quest of facts he does not want revealed. He makes the unreal appear real and the real appear unreal. He lets half-truth masquerade as truth."

Bandwagon
This is in essence an appeal to our tribal impulse, which is our deepest. Human beings are herd animals. We survive and thrive best in stable, well-organized groups. We derive much of our identity and strength from our affiliations. We want to belong and are terrified of social rejection and isolation. Thus we are deeply conformist by design and are strongly susceptible to normative pressures. (Nonconformists by and large do not opt out of the group to go it alone; they merely switch affiliations from one group to another).

That's why you are more likely to like something on Facebook if it already has many likes; more likely to have sex if you think all your peers are doing it; more likely to vote if you believe all your neighbors have voted. Group affiliation at once enlarges our sense of self and overrides it. Inside a large group, we can turn off our individual moral compass, and shed the burdens of individual responsibility and identity, becoming in effect invisible and with that, free.

To mobilize large groups, propagandists often appeal to already existing groups and coherent identities.

"The propagandist...directs his appeal to groups held together already by common ties, ties of nationality, religion, race, sex, vocation.... With the aid of all the other propaganda devices, all of the artifices of flattery are used to harness the fears and hatreds, prejudices and biases, convictions and ideals common to a group. Thus is emotion made to push and pull us as members of a group onto a Band Wagon."

By 1941, the IPA had ceased its activities, yet its animating concerns, and the principles it outlined, are as urgent and relevant today as they were then. Once you know the techniques, you see that their use is pervasive and that it's not limited to one side or the other in the political arena.

Hence, the biggest underlying problem with propaganda is not who is using it, but the extent to which it's used to the diminishment or exclusion of reason, science, fact, and truth. That is to say, if our camp wins by using propaganda, it will be no victory at all because it means the people are gullible and vulnerable to the next skilled propagandist, who may well come from the other side. Only people educated about the process of propaganda and adamant about not letting it override the processes of science will be truly civilized, liberated, and safe.

In the college classes I teach, I often look to dramatize this point about the value of reason, evidence, and science. I ask students to imagine that one of their peers is found murdered in the dorms. Everyone is emotionally distraught about the murder, which is good because it motivates an investigative effort. A suspect is immediately located (let's call him suspect A). He's a widely loathed rival of the deceased. Everyone on campus believes he's the killer; they expect him to have been the killer; they even hope he's the one, so he'd be removed from campus. Alas, as the detectives begin to collect actual evidence, the preponderance of it points clearly to suspect B, a well-liked friend of the deceased. "Who should go to prison?" I ask my students. "Is it suspect A, the one we all believed, expected, and hoped would be the killer, or suspect B, who is the killer by all the evidence?"

At the end of the day, I think we want to live in a society where suspect B ends up in prison.

In our justice system, as in our political system, we can expect that advocates for differing sides will use-and be subjected to-emotional manipulation to predetermined ends. But if that's all there is, if the system either lacks or disavows a mechanism to obtain the evidence, analyze it rationally and disseminate it clearly, then before long we will have neither justice nor politics to speak of.
This post also appeared in Quillette.

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"If you can't find the sucker at the poker table," goes the saying, "you're it." Extrapolating that axiom to the present political moment, we may say: "If you don't hear much about propaganda, that's what you're hearing." The term propaganda has its origins in the 17th-century efforts of the Catholic Church to propagate its views and stem the rise of Protestantism.

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Cold War propaganda promoted the advantages and virtues of one political system and/or criticized or demonized the other. This reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when pro-American values were being widely promoted in film, television, music, literature and art.

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Propaganda was ever-present during the Cold War. Using different mediums, techniques and degrees of subtlety, Cold War propaganda promoted the advantages and virtues of one political system and/or criticised or demonised the other. This reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when pro-American values were being widely promoted in film, television, music, literature and art.

Early propaganda

One early piece of Cold War propaganda was the 1948 short film Make Mine Freedom. This animated feature, pitched at children and adults alike, extolled the advantages and freedoms available to those who live in a capitalist society. Released the following year, Meet King Joe told American workers they should be content with their lot, since they had it better than those elsewhere in the world.

As time progressed, the themes and methods in pro-Western propaganda became more subtle. Governments produced less of it themselves, instead relying on film and television studios to incorporate acceptable ideas and values into their product.

Many of the radio series, dramas and sit-coms made in America during the 1950s celebrated the distinct advantages of living in a prosperous, capitalist nation. The benefits of things like the nuclear family, school, community, obedience to parents and loyalty to the nation were openly promoted.

'Red Nightmare'

In contrast, communism was condemned both as a political ideology and a social and economic system. Every medium, from motion pictures down to children's comic books, was used to portray an America under the heel of a communist dictatorship.

One classic example is the 1962 film Red Nightmare, first made as an instructional device for the armed forces but later released on television. Red Nightmare makes the outlandish claim that entire US cities had been reconstructed in Soviet territory, in order to train communist spies and infiltrators in methods of bringing down American government and society.

In the comic book This Godless Communism, an American family finds the US has been taken over by communists, virtually overnight, and renamed the "United Soviet States of America". As they attempt to find help, they find all their rights and freedoms have been abolished. The father is relocated to a distant lumber mill, the mother to an urban factory and the children to state-run schools and nurseries.

In the 1950s, the CIA commissioned an animated film version of George Orwell's Animal Farm - an allegorical account of the Russian Revolution and Soviet government - to serve as propaganda.

Motion pictures brought the battle between democracy and communism to the big screen. Many pro-American films were made in the wake of the HUAC-inspired blacklists, as movie studios and producers strived to appear patriotic and loyal.

In Big Jim McLain, John Wayne stars as a House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigator who travels to Hawaii to stamp out communist activity there. Soviet and Western espionage was also a common theme, depicted in movies such as The Third Man.

Cold War hysteria seeped into the science-fiction genre, in movies such as Red Planet Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Blob. All contained aliens who took the form of shadowy forces hell-bent on taking control of the world by stealth, an obvious metaphor for communist infiltration.

Cold War themes were also revived in 1980s films such as (where the US is subject to a joint Soviet-Cuban invasion) and (where an American boxer does battle with a robotic Soviet fighter).

Television

Television was still in its infancy in the 1950s. Most television programs contained music, light entertainment and comedy, so anti-communist themes were represented with more subtlety.

American television in the 1950s promoted conservative family values and the virtues of American society, particularly in its situation comedies. Situation comedies like Leave it to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet emphasised the importance of education, work, obedience, respect for your parents and the stability and prosperity enjoyed by American families.

Cold War espionage was explored in James Bond films and drama series like I Spy and The Man from UNCLE. It was also parodied in the Mel Brooks-created series . Even the villains in children's cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle (Boris and Natasha) and Roger Ramjet (Noodles Romanoff) were stereotypical European communist agents.

Television journalists occasionally influenced public attitudes, such as Edward R. Murrow's 1954 criticism of Joseph McCarthy, or Walter Cronkite's 1968 editorial suggesting that the US should look to withdraw from Vietnam.

Literature

Allusions to the Cold War were found in popular literature, George Orwell's novel 1984, for example, drew comparisons with the Cold War by depicting a dystopian world kept divided and obedient with propaganda and fears of 'perpetual war'.

The 'spy novel' genre was by far the most prevalent in Cold War literature. Ian Fleming's novels about a British spy, James Bond, were written in the 1950s and were motivated by tensions with the Soviet bloc. In The Spy who Loved Me, Bond does battle with SMERSH, a Soviet counter-espionage agency. John le Carre (a pen-name for David Cornwell, a former employee of British spy agency MI5) penned a number of novels such as The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, set in East Germany.

The 1950s and 1960s also saw the production of hundreds of cheap pulp-fiction novels, often with lewd themes or excessive violence. Purgatory of the Conquered showed an America taken over by communist forces; Red Rape told of a Soviet-run operation to capture Western women for the purposes of sexual slavery.

Cold War tensions fuelled competition and shaped the content of art forms as diverse as music and ballet. American and Soviet dance companies performed regularly around the world, attempting to demonstrate cultural superiority. This competition led to a dramatic rise in US government funding for the arts.

A critical moment came in 1961 when Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West to perform with Britain's Royal Ballet; Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev later signed a death warrant for Nureyev, should he ever return to Russia.

The US provided funds to allow several orchestras, jazz bands and solo musicians to tour the USSR, in an attempt to demonstrate the artistic advantages of capitalism. The superpowers also engaged in chess competitions to prove whose strategies were more effective.

Cold War rivalry also carried over into sporting events (see Sport in the Cold War).

The 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia were held just days after Soviet forces had crushed a pro-democratic uprising in Hungary, prompting the withdrawal of Holland, Spain and Switzerland from the games. These tensions spilt over into a water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union, where players exchanged punches and one left the pool bleeding. The game was called off after the pro-Hungarian crowd threatened to riot.

The 1972 Olympic gold medal basketball match between the US and USSR also ended in controversy, with the defeated Americans refusing to accept the silver medal. The 1980 Olympics were held in Moscow and were boycotted by the US, West Germany, Japan and several other nations. The Soviets reciprocated by refusing to attend the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

In both hemispheres, education was harnessed for Cold War purposes and used to instil into children the social and political values of each system.

Education systems in both the US and USSR received dramatic boosts in funding, particularly in the maths and sciences. Humanities subjects like History and English became steeped in patriotism and political values. In 1952, for example, the American Pledge of Allegiance, widely chanted by schoolchildren, was altered to include the words "under God".

Many American students were also subject to 'social hygiene' or 'mental health' films in high school. These 10-20 minute single-reel movies focused on what might now be called 'personal development': hygiene, manners, respect for others, appropriate behaviour and sexual conduct. Many examples contained an obvious political message or subtext, such as one titled How to Spot a Communist.

Children in American schools were also taught the famous 'duck and cover' drills - training in what they should do in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack.

A historian's view:
"The United States and its allies tried to convince their citizens that they lived in the best possible society. It may not have been as free, democratic or egalitarian as the propaganda asserted, but it did boast free markets, limited government, the rule of law, individualism and human rights. A system of selling these beliefs domestically was successfully in place, despite the debunking efforts of its enemies at home and abroad. According to Frederick C. Barghoorn, the Soviet Union attempted to "sap the faith of Americans in their leaders and their institutions", but failed."
Daniel Leab

1. Cold War propaganda promoted the virtues and advantages of one system, while criticising or demonising the other. This propaganda was particularly intense during the 1950s and 1960s.

2. Early forms of propaganda, such as animations like Make Mine Freedom and short films like Red Nightmare, contained explicit political messages and warnings.

3. In time, these propaganda messages became more subtle and were integrated into popular culture. American television shows, for example, promoted family values, patriotism and obedience.

4. Cold War culture also focused on the continued activities of spies and secret agents like James Bond, who were well represented in film, television and literature.

5. Cold War propaganda also targeted school children. They were shown lecturing "social hygiene" films and subjected to duck-and-cover civil defence drills, adding to nuclear paranoia.

Citation information
Title: "Cold War propaganda"
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/cold-war-propaganda/
Date published: September 24, 2020
Date accessed: March 16, 2023
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

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Propaganda was ever-present during the Cold War. Using different mediums, techniques and degrees of subtlety, Cold War propaganda promoted the advantages and virtues of one political system and/or criticised or demonised the other. This reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when pro-American values were being widely promoted in film, television, music, literature and art.

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Examples of propaganda and its effects. 

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Examples of propaganda and its effects. 

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Movies
- Red Nightmare: Red Nightmare makes the outlandish claim that entire US cities had been reconstructed in Soviet territory, in order to train communist spies and infiltrators in methods of bringing down American government and society.

-Films like Red Planet Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Blob contained aliens who took the form of shadowy forces hell-bent on taking control of the world by stealth, an obvious metaphor for communist infiltration.

Arts
-American and Soviet dance companies performed regularly around the world, attempting to demonstrate cultural superiority. This competition led to a dramatic rise in US government funding for the arts.

Sports
-The 1972 Olympic gold medal basketball match between the US and USSR also ended in controversy, with the defeated Americans refusing to accept the silver medal. The 1980 Olympics were held in Moscow and were boycotted by the US, West Germany, Japan and several other nations. The Soviets reciprocated by refusing to attend the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

Source: https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/cold-war-propaganda/

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Policies and programs as effects of propaganda. 

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Policies and programs as effects of propaganda. 

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- Marshall Plan: Fearing that poverty, unemployment, and dislocation were reinforcing the appeal of communist parties to voters in post-World War II western Europe, the United States implemented the European Recovery Program.

-Domino Theory: First proposed by Pres. Harry S. Truman to justify sending military aid to Greece and Turkey in the 1940s, the Domino Theory, a staple of Western Cold War thinking, held that the “fall” of a noncommunist state to communism would precipitate the fall of noncommunist governments in neighboring countries. It was later used to explain American involvement in the Vietnam War.

-Perestroika: Perestroika (“restructuring”) program was instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s to restructure Soviet economic and political policy. Seeking to bring the Soviet Union up to economic par with capitalist countries such as Germany and the U.S.

-Brezhnev Doctrine: The Brezhnev Doctrine called on the Soviet Union to intervene—including militarily—in countries where socialist rule was threatened. It was also used to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.​

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Cold War Policies, Propaganda, & Speeches - Student Center | Britannica.com

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The Cold War was a strategic and tactical contest to influence the nature of the governments and societies of the world's countries.

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Overall, propaganda in times of war can have a great impact in all aspects of life. One example of propaganda's power was a the Cold War which nearly brought the world to a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. This was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict.

Sources

“Cold War Policies, Propaganda, and Speeches.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/study/cold-war-policies-propaganda-and-speeches.

“The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962.” U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of State, history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/cuban-missile-crisis.

Llewellyn , Jennifer, and Steve Thompson. “Cold War Propaganda.” The Cold War, 30 Sept. 2020, alphahistory.com/coldwar/cold-war-propaganda/.

Shpancer, Noam. “The Con of Propaganda.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/201702/the-con-propaganda.

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The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict. The crisis was unique in a number of ways, featuring calculations and miscalculations as well as direct and secret communications and miscommunications between the two sides. The dramatic crisis was also characterized by the fact that it was primarily played out at the White House and the Kremlin level with relatively little input from the respective bureaucracies typically involved in the foreign policy process.

After the failed U.S. attempt to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion, and while the Kennedy administration planned Operation Mongoose, in July 1962 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev reached a secret agreement with Cuban premier Fidel Castro to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter any future invasion attempt. Construction of several missile sites began in the late summer, but U.S. intelligence discovered evidence of a general Soviet arms build-up on Cuba, including Soviet IL-28 bombers, during routine surveillance flights, and on September 4, 1962, President Kennedy issued a public warning against the introduction of offensive weapons into Cuba. Despite the warning, on October 14 a U.S. U-2 aircraft took several pictures clearly showing sites for medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) under construction in Cuba. These images were processed and presented to the White House the next day, thus precipitating the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kennedy summoned his closest advisers to consider options and direct a course of action for the United States that would resolve the crisis. Some advisers-including all the Joint Chiefs of Staff-argued for an air strike to destroy the missiles, followed by a U.S. invasion of Cuba; others favored stern warnings to Cuba and the Soviet Union. The President decided upon a middle course. On October 22, he ordered a naval "quarantine" of Cuba. The use of "quarantine" legally distinguished this action from a blockade, which assumed a state of war existed; the use of "quarantine" instead of "blockade" also enabled the United States to receive the support of the Organization of American States.

That same day, Kennedy sent a letter to Khrushchev declaring that the United States would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba, and demanded that the Soviets dismantle the missile bases already under construction or completed, and return all offensive weapons to the U.S.S.R. The letter was the first in a series of direct and indirect communications between the White House and the Kremlin throughout the remainder of the crisis.

The President also went on national television that evening to inform the public of the developments in Cuba, his decision to initiate and enforce a "quarantine," and the potential global consequences if the crisis continued to escalate. The tone of the President's remarks was stern, and the message unmistakable and evocative of the Monroe Doctrine: "It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." The Joint Chiefs of Staff announced a military readiness status of DEFCON 3 as U.S. naval forces began implementation of the quarantine and plans accelerated for a military strike on Cuba.

On October 24, Khrushchev responded to Kennedy's message with a statement that the U.S. "blockade" was an "act of aggression" and that Soviet ships bound for Cuba would be ordered to proceed. Nevertheless, during October 24 and 25, some ships turned back from the quarantine line; others were stopped by U.S. naval forces, but they contained no offensive weapons and so were allowed to proceed. Meanwhile, U.S. reconnaissance flights over Cuba indicated the Soviet missile sites were nearing operational readiness. With no apparent end to the crisis in sight, U.S. forces were placed at DEFCON 2-meaning war involving the Strategic Air Command was imminent. On October 26, Kennedy told his advisors it appeared that only a U.S. attack on Cuba would remove the missiles, but he insisted on giving the diplomatic channel a little more time. The crisis had reached a virtual stalemate.

That afternoon, however, the crisis took a dramatic turn. ABC News correspondent John Scali reported to the White House that he had been approached by a Soviet agent suggesting that an agreement could be reached in which the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba if the United States promised not to invade the island. While White House staff scrambled to assess the validity of this "back channel" offer, Khrushchev sent Kennedy a message the evening of October 26, which meant it was sent in the middle of the night Moscow time. It was a long, emotional message that raised the specter of nuclear holocaust, and presented a proposed resolution that remarkably resembled what Scali reported earlier that day. "If there is no intention," he said, "to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this."

Although U.S. experts were convinced the message from Khrushchev was authentic, hope for a resolution was short-lived. The next day, October 27, Khrushchev sent another message indicating that any proposed deal must include the removal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. That same day a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance jet was shot down over Cuba. Kennedy and his advisors prepared for an attack on Cuba within days as they searched for any remaining diplomatic resolution. It was determined that Kennedy would ignore the second Khrushchev message and respond to the first one. That night, Kennedy set forth in his message to the Soviet leader proposed steps for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba under supervision of the United Nations, and a guarantee that the United States would not attack Cuba.

It was a risky move to ignore the second Khrushchev message. Attorney General Robert Kennedy then met secretly with Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, and indicated that the United States was planning to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey anyway, and that it would do so soon, but this could not be part of any public resolution of the missile crisis. The next morning, October 28, Khrushchev issued a public statement that Soviet missiles would be dismantled and removed from Cuba.

The crisis was over but the naval quarantine continued until the Soviets agreed to remove their IL-28 bombers from Cuba and, on November 20, 1962, the United States ended its quarantine. U.S. Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey in April 1963.

The Cuban missile crisis stands as a singular event during the Cold War and strengthened Kennedy's image domestically and internationally. It also may have helped mitigate negative world opinion regarding the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Two other important results of the crisis came in unique forms. First, despite the flurry of direct and indirect communications between the White House and the Kremlin-perhaps because of it-Kennedy and Khrushchev, and their advisers, struggled throughout the crisis to clearly understand each others' true intentions, while the world hung on the brink of possible nuclear war. In an effort to prevent this from happening again, a direct telephone link between the White House and the Kremlin was established; it became known as the "Hotline." Second, having approached the brink of nuclear conflict, both superpowers began to reconsider the nuclear arms race and took the first steps in agreeing to a nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

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Milestones: 1961-1968 - Office of the Historian