The impact of the Cuban Missile crisis on Soviet Middle Eastern policy. How it led to the Six-Day War, 1967

The widespread perception of the “Caribbean” crisis as a setback for the Soviet Union overlooks the major achievement that Moscow did score. This was Khrushchev’s success – which, unfortunately for his future in the Soviet leadership, he agreed to the Kennedys’ demand not to publicize – to gain the withdrawal of American Jupiter missiles from Turkey. But within three years, the joint French-Israeli development of nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems threatened to plug the gap that had thus been created in the ring of nuclear-armed western pacts that were the subject of perennial Soviet fears. Documents and memoirs that surfaced in the early years after the USSR’s collapse, cross-checked against US and Israeli sources, reveal this motivation for, and the hitherto unknown features of, the Soviets’ response when in late 1965 an authoritative informant confirmed that despite domestic political change and US pressure, Israel was about to cross the nuclear threshold. This added urgency to Moscow’s regional considerations in favor of supporting an Arab attack on Israel, and produced what was in several respects a mirror-image of the Cuban affair. A joint plan was developed with Egypt, to provoke an Israeli first strike that would legitimize Soviet military intervention to “aid the victims of aggression” and ensure Israel’s defeat. The provocations included overflights of Israel’s nuclear facility by advanced Soviet aircraft; the intervention was to include targeting of the facility by Soviet strategic bombers. This plan’s fiasco in the Six-Day War of June 1967 shaped the Middle East as well as Soviet policy there for decades to come, as an indirect but distinct consequence of the Cuban crisis.

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