Country:Romania
Committee:United Nations Security Council (UNSC)
Topic:Historical 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
Romania’s opposition toward Soviet hegemony, arguably begun sometime between 1962
and 1964, included an event which remains unclear. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought
into question Bucharest’s attitude regarding the fulfillment of its obligations as a
member of the Warsaw Pact in case of a war with NATO. The Crisis centered on
Khrushchev’s decision to install Intermediate Nuclear Missiles in Cuba, one of the most
controversial decisions of the Soviet leadership. The escalating tension in the region
brought mankind to the edge of a nuclear war.
In April 1964, the Romanian leadership issued a declaration in which it first expressed
public dissatisfaction with the Warsaw Pact. Gheorghiu Dej, and after 1965 his successor
Nicolae Ceausescu, increasingly distanced themselves from the Pact and Moscow's
leadership, although without challenging the Soviet Union. Romania has ceased active
participation in the military command of the Warsaw Pact since 1969. During the crisis,
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, general secretary of Romania's communist party, sent a letter to
President Kennedy dissociating Romania from Soviet actions. This convinced the American
administration of Bucharest's intentions of detaching itself from Moscow.
Romania played almost no role whatsoever in the Cuban missile crisis. Yet that crisis was
critical in reorienting Romanian foreign and security policies in a manner that caused
significant shifts in the nature of the Cold War regionally and globally – for example, as
attested by its subsequent campaign for nuclear disarmament and confidence-building
measures within the Warsaw Pact, and its central role in the Sino-American rapprochement
and in the mediation of Egyptian-Israeli relations. Indeed, the Cuban missile crisis
constituted one of the turning points that determined the character of Romanian independent
policy for the rest of the Cold War.
From 1962 until sometime in the second half of the 1960s Romanian advocacy of Warsaw
Pact reform was accompanied by efforts to assert an Eastern European voice over Soviet
nuclear policy in order to encumber Soviet capriciousness in the deployment (and
employment) of its missiles that might result in nuclear war. Explicitly referring to the
precedent set in the North Atlantic alliance, Bucharest advocated a “two-key arrangement” of
the sort that NATO employed, whereby US nuclear weapons deployed on the territory of
another NATO member could not be fired without their approval, as part of this reform. As
explained to The New York Times by a Romanian diplomat in May 1966, his country sought
“to avoid a situation like the Cuban crisis of 1962 in which foreign missiles could be fired
from our territory without our consent.”
Romanian-American relations at that time were minimal. Nonetheless, when Romanian
Foreign Minister Corneliu Manescu asked to meet with the Secretary of State Dean Rusk,
when both were in New York for the opening of the UN General Assembly in the fall of 1963, a
routine meeting was arranged for October 4. Manescu then arranged a private meeting with
Rusk, attended only by an interpreter. It was the first opportunity after the crisis nearly a year
earlier for the Romanian leadership to approach the United States government at this level.
Bibliography:
https://www.esiweb.org/pdf/romania_Deletant-Romania%201955-89.pdf
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB14/doc12.htm
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/romania-security-policy-and-the-cuban-missile-
crisis
