The Atomic Brink

The 1950s were a time of emotional terror for people at the center of the cold war. Radio bombarded the public with messages about the threat of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the villainous superpower enemy (meaning the United States or the USSR, depending). During the late 1940s and 1950s, the Voice of America, with its main studio in Washington, D.C., broadcast in thirty-eight languages from one hundred transmitters and provided an alternative source of news as well as menacing messages for people in eastern Europe. Its Soviet counterpart broadcast in Russian around the clock but initially spent much of its wattage jamming U.S. programming. The public also heard reports of nuclear buildups and tests of emergency power facilities that sent them scurrying for cover. Children rehearsed at school for nuclear war, while at home families built bomb shelters in their backyards. Fear gripped people’s emotions in these decades.

In this upsetting climate of cold war, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963) became U.S. president in 1960. Kennedy represented American affluence and youth; he also confirmed the power of television. A war hero and an early fan of the fictional cold war spy James Bond, Kennedy participated in the escalating cold war over the nearby island of Cuba, where in 1959 Fidel Castro (1926–) had come to power. After being rebuffed by the United States, Castro aligned his new government with the Soviet Union. In the spring of 1961, Kennedy, assured by the CIA of success, launched an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs to overthrow Castro. The invasion failed miserably and humiliated the United States.

Cold war tensions increased. In the summer of 1961, the East German government directed workers to stack bales of barbed wire across miles of the city’s east–west border. This was the beginning of the Berlin Wall, built to block the escape route by which some three million people had fled to the West. In October 1962, tensions came to a head in the Cuban missile crisis, when the CIA reported the installation of silos to house Soviet medium-range missiles in Cuba. Kennedy acted forcefully, ordering a naval blockade of ships headed for Cuba and demanding removal of the installations. For several days, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Then, between October 25 and 27, Khrushchev and Kennedy negotiated an end to the crisis. Kennedy spent the remainder of his short life working to improve nuclear diplomacy; Khrushchev did the same. In the summer of 1963, less than a year after the shock of the Cuban missile crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a test-ban treaty outlawing the explosion of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and in the seas. The treaty held out hope that the cold war and its culture would give way to something better.