October 30, 1962
MINUTES OF CONVERSATION BETWEEN THE DELEGATIONS OF THE CPCZ AND THE CPSU, THE KREMLIN (EXCERPT)

Present: CPCz: Novotný, Hendrych, Šimůnek, Dvořák

CPSU: Khrushchev, Kozlov, Brezhnev, Kosygin, Kolesnikov, Zimyanin

...We received a letter from [Fidel] Castro in which he told us that the USA would attack Cuba within twenty-four hours. That would mean nuclear war. We could not be certain that they would not do so. The presence of our missiles provoked them too much; the Americans thus sensed the winds of war from up close. It was necessary to act quickly. That is why we issued the statement [on 28 October] that we would dismantle the missiles if the USA declared it swore not to attack Cuba.

In a letter, Fidel Castro proposed that we ourselves should be the first to start an atomic war. [3] Do you know what that would mean? That probably cannot even be expressed at all. We were completely aghast. Castro clearly has no idea about what thermonuclear war is. After all, if a war started, it would primarily be Cuba that would vanish from the face of the Earth. At the same time, it is clear that with a first strike one cannot today knock the opponent out of the fight. There can always be a counter-strike, which can be devastating. There are, after all, missiles in the earth,which intelligence does not know about; there are missiles on submarines, which cannot be knocked out of the fight right away, and so on. What would we gain if we ourselves started a war? After all, millions of people would die, in our country too. Can we even contemplate a thing like that? Could we allow ourselves to threaten the world of socialism which was hard won by the working class? Only a person who has no idea what nuclear war means, or who has been so blinded, for instance, like Castro, by revolutionary passion, can talk like that. We did not, of course, take up that proposal, especially because we had a chance to avert war. What the Americans feared most, by the way, was that the missiles were in the hands of the Cubans and that the Cubans would start a war. That is why in our letter to the president we stressed also that the missiles were in the hands of our officers, who would not fire before receiving orders from the Soviet government. From our intelligence reports we knew that the Americans were afraid of war. Through certain persons, who they knew were in contact with us, they made it clear they would be grateful if we helped them get out of this conflict.

We agreed to dismantle the missiles also because their presence in Cuba is essentially of little military importance to us. The missiles were meant to protect Cuba from attack; they helped us to wrench out of the imperialists the statement that they would not attack Cuba, and they thus served their main purpose. Otherwise we can hit the USA from elsewhere, and we do not need missiles in Cuba for that. On the contrary, their deployment on our territory is safer for us and our technical personnel who look after them....

In your October 27th wire, you proposed that we should be the first to carry out a nuclear attack on enemy territory. Naturally, you can understand where that would have led. It wouldn’t have been a simple strike but the start of a termonuclear world war.

Dear Comrade Fidel Castro; I find your proposal to be mistaken even though I understand your reasons.

..... (long part about how we all die in fire and that US publicly promising no to invade Cuba is a WIN).

Comrade Fidel Castro; we decided to send you this answer as quickly as possible. We shall make a more detailed analysis of what has occurred in a letter that we shall send you soon. In that letter we shall make a deeper analysis of the situation and give our opinion on the results of how the crisis was settled.

At this moment, negotiations for a settlement are starting and we ask you to communicate your position to us. As for us, we shall be keeping you informed on the progress of the negotiations and we shall be making all the necessary consultations.

DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two
contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and
accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which
direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows
that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of
DOUBLETHINK he also satisfies himself that reality is not
violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not
be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be
unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and
hence of guilt. DOUBLETHINK lies at the very heart of Ingsoc,
since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious
deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes
with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely
believing in them, to forget any fact that has become
inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again,
to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed,
to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while
to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is
indispensably necessary. Even in using the word DOUBLETHINK
it is necessary to exercise DOUBLETHINK. For
by using the word one admits that one is tampering with
reality; by a fresh act of DOUBLETHINK one erases this
knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one
leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of
DOUBLETHINK that the Party has been able—and may, for all
we know, continue to be able for thousands of years—to
arrest the course of history.

Up to 2,000 Swiss volunteers fought in the Waffen SS during World War II. They killed not only citizens of the Soviet Union, but also citizens of many European countries