Rodion Malinovsky was Soviet Defense Minister from 1957 to 1967 and oversaw military assistance to Cuba. He was consulted by Khrushchev about the deployment of missiles to Cuba and was responsible for supervising their secret transportation and installation. He had drafted and initialed a Soviet-Cuban defense treaty which would have been signed once the missiles were to become operational. On October 22, as the Soviets awaited President Kennedy’s address, suspecting he would announce an invasion of Cuba, Malinovsky advised against authorizing General Pliyev to use nuclear weapons in response to potential U.S. military action, fearing that if such message was intercepted, the U.S. might use nuclear weapons first.
Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center has created this site as a resource for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Designed to help policymakers, students, and interested citizens draw lessons from these critical events half a century ago, this site not only provides background on the crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster in October 1962 but also offers tools to understand how it can inform contemporary policy.