On Oct. 19, Kennedy meets with the military brass to consider all his options.
08:00 - Gromyko sends a telegram to the Soviet government stating that he believes the American administration is shocked and "amazed" by the Soviet Union's courage and is "not preparing an intervention in Cuba."
09:00 - During reconnaissance flights, U.S. U-2 spy planes discover a second cluster of missile sites in central Cuba. These include facilities for IRBMs with ranges of 2,800 miles. The CIA has now identified three different medium range missile sites on the island with eight missile launchers each.
09:45 - President Kennedy meets with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Army, Air Force, and Navy chiefs favor an invasion of Cuba, although Army chief Maxwell Taylor only wants to prepare at this stage. However, Kennedy is hesitant to take firm military action, predicting that a U.S. attack on Cuba would cause the Soviet Union to retaliate with an attack on Berlin. This would leave the United States with the only alternative "to fire nuclear weapons," which Kennedy called a "hell of an alternative." Air Force Chief LeMay disagrees with the president, stating that a lack of firm action by the United States would "lead straight into war," and compares it with the appeasement of the Nazis in Munich. LeMay instead believes that U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union will put Khrushchev "in a trap," and that they should go ahead and "take off his testicles." Kennedy strongly disagrees with the concept of attempting to "win a nuclear war" and said that it was meaningless when "you're talking about the destruction of a country." After the president leaves the meeting, the Head of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Shoup, states that Kennedy's caution will leave them all "screwed" and that they should settle matters with "that little pipsqueak of a place" for good. Later, and in private, Kennedy tells his personal assistant that his generals have "one great advantage in their favor...if we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong."
11:30 - The CIA locates the Soviet ship Aleksandrovsk near Cuba. However, they record it as a "dry cargo" ship of little importance -- however, Soviet nuclear weapons were actually on board at the time.
14:00 - ExComm meets again, with the members increasingly supportive of the idea of a blockade on Cuba, as many feel that the destructive "price" of an airstrike is too high.
16:00 - Meeting again in the afternoon, the Joint Chiefs, who are still in favor of an airstrike, state that they are willing to accept a 24-hour delay in attacking Cuba in order to inform allies. A CIA report issued that afternoon expresses the belief that directly approaching either Khrushchev or Castro is unlikely to halt the deployment of missiles to Cuba and that a total blockade of Cuba would "almost certainly" lead to strong Soviet action and could "escalate to general war."
21:00 - The U.S. Defense Department publicly denies any knowledge of missiles in Cuba or of any emergency action by the U.S. government to the press.
21:45 - Miguel Orozco and Pedro Vera, two Cubans working for the CIA, enter Cuba on a guerrilla operation to attack the Matahambre copper mine. They have both been told by their CIA case officer that they must successfully disrupt copper extraction "or don't bother to come back alive."
National Security Archive
