Last Nuclear Weapons Left Cuba in December 1962
Soviet Military Documents Provide Detailed Account of Cuban Missile Crisis Deployment and Withdrawal
New Evidence on Tactical Nuclear Weapons – 59 Days in Cuba
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 449 Posted December 11, 2013
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton With Anna Melyakova
For more information contact:
202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, DC, December 11, 2013 — The last Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis did not leave the island until December 1, 1962, according to Soviet military documents published today for the first time in English by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).
At 9 o’clock in the morning on December 1, 1962, the large Soviet cargo ship Arkhangelsk quietly left the Cuban port of Mariel and headed east across the Atlantic to its home port of Severomorsk near Murmansk. This inconspicuous departure in fact signified the end of the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War. What was called “the Beloborodov cargo” in the Soviet top secret cables — the nuclear warheads that the Soviet armed forces had deployed in Cuba in October 1962 — was shipped back to the Soviet Union on Arkhangelsk.
According to the documents, Soviet nuclear warheads stayed on the Cuban territory for 59 days — from the arrival of the ship Indigirka on October 4 to the departure of Arkhangelsk on December 1. U.S. intelligence at the time had no idea about the nature of the Arkhangelsk cargo. Arkhangelsk carried 80 warheads for the land-based cruise missile FKR-1, 12 warheads for the dual-use Luna (Frog) launcher, and 6 nuclear bombs for IL-28 bombers — in total, 98 tactical nuclear warheads. Four other nuclear warheads, for torpedoes on the Foxtrot submarines, had already returned to the Soviet Union, as well as 24 warheads for the R-14 missiles, which arrived in Cuba on October 25 on the ship Aleksandrovsk, but were never unloaded. The available evidence suggests that the 36 warheads for the R-12 missiles that came to Cuba on the Indigirka also left on Aleksandrovsk, being loaded at Mariel between October 30 and November 3.
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