Monday, October 15, 2012

Boneryänker's Almanach

We Really Were That Close: The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962

President Nixon Urges Americans To Take Shelter, 1962

Just a thought:  If Richard M. Nixon had been President, rather than John F. Kennedy, on October 16, 1962, American response to a discovery of Russian IRBM's in Cuba would have been resolved in a very different way.

Nixon was an insecure human being, and a true-believing Cold Warrior.  It would have been a near-certainty that the same response plan pushed on JFK by the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- an air attack on the missile sites, followed by an invasion of Cuba -- which Kennedy successfully resisted, would have been Nixon's decision.

It's now known that the Russians also had short-range, tactical nukes in Cuba (referred to as "Frogs"), and local control of those devices had been released to Russian commanders of Soviet troops handling them in the field.  The hardline Soviet Politburo members had approved this and were just as fucked-up lizard brain crazy as Nixon expecting to use them on any American invasion, which was already beginning to stage in ports along the Gulf of Mexico.

If the Russians had used their tactical nukes, escalation to a full thermonuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union would have followed in a matter of days, if not hours.


Several hundred million people would have died outright, and over the next few months as food supplies dwindled and Winter set in. If you're American, or European, you would probably be dead now, or never born -- or, born into a horribly broken, radioactive world.

It might be argued that, had Nixon been elected, the 1961 Bay Of Pigs invasion by CIA-trained and supported right-wing Cubans would have been provided U.S. air support and may have succeeded in forcing Castro from power. And, had Nixon been elected, that likely would have happened.
(Nixon lost the 1960 election by the thinnest of margins -- some conservatives believed the election had been stolen by the Kennedys in Texas and Illinois; they were more than pissed. When Kennedy -- who reluctantly went along with the plan -- later refused to commit U.S. warplanes to support the Cuban expatriate invaders, some in the military and the CIA began to hate him; JFK dismissed several critics who went public.)

(But the major result of the Bay of Pigs was the Russian suggestion to move their IRBM missiles into Cuba, arguing that it would be a strategic fait d'accompli -- by the time America knew what was happening, it would be too late, and they would never again attempt to invade the island. Castro thought this logical and agreed.)
The Bay Of Pigs was planned by the CIA in 1959 and 60 to rid the hemisphere of a Communist threat: The "Big Red Dog", in our own backyard.  But if Nixon had pushed it all the way, it also might have forced the Soviets (whose hardliners wouldn't have passively accepted an invasion) to react -- possibly seizing West Berlin,  and creating another on-the-brink crisis.



The strategic nuclear forces of East and West were on a "Launch On Warning" status in the late 1950's and early 60's.  One lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis for both sides was that the unthinkable really was possible -- and fortunately for humanity, some on both sides refused to accept that annihilation was inevitable, and took steps to allow everyone to move back from the brink.

But in the alternate historical reality pushed by America's Right, JFK wasn't an American hero -- just some indecisive candyass liberal, an oversexed toad, an appeaser to global Communism, 'cause a real man woulda kicked their Red asses.

Oy.  Some people never learn anything.
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3 comments:

  1. earlier today i was reading about a guy i knew in college - this was long, long ago - he went crazy after taking lsd, dropped out of school, and eventually went into a catholic church to desecrate the religious images ("idols"), shot and killed a church janitor and then was himself shot and killed by the cops - a sad story

    but he had wanted to be a nuclear physicist - the retrospective about him in the college newspaper of that time wondered about an alternative future for him - what if he had gone on to a nuclear physics career and been employed in the weapons of truly massive destruction program of our country - if there HAD been a nuclear war maybe as a well-functioning technocrat he could have been responsible for many more deaths that way than he was as a violent psychotic (as part of a group endeavor, of course - but when you divide the number of victims by the number of perpetrators, you still get a number quite a bit larger than one)

    although humanity has stepped back from the brink, there are still many, many nuclear weapons around - and we live in a world of radical contingency

    on the other hand -

    smile at your neighbor
    smile at the sky
    life is a blessing
    why ask why



    with best wishes,
    mistah charley, ph.d.


    oh and in my nostalgic rummaging around today i also learned that my first real girlfriend died of pancreatic cancer earlier this year - i hadn't seen or heard from her for over forty years - she followed the road less traveled - who knows if it's good or bad?

    www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jul2012/ruth-j18.shtm

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  2. try this one

    http://wsws.org/articles/2012/jul2012/ruth-j18.shtml

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  3. re the guy i knew who wanted to be a nuclear physicist see

    tech.mit.edu/V91/PDF/N50.pdf

    ReplyDelete