"Had JFK made one wrong move in the Cuban Missile Crisis, sixty years ago this week, ..."

[mahatmakanejeeves]

During Cuban Missile Crisis, sixty years ago, JFK on TV urges Americans to vote "in these difficult days in the life of our country" in order to "demonstrate our faith in democracy."
Good message for October 2022.

Link to tweet

Had JFK made one wrong move in the Cuban Missile Crisis, sixty years ago this week, tens of millions of people could have been killed and much of the Northern Hemisphere might have been incinerated.
Make sure we Americans elect leaders of sound judgment.

Link to tweet

[Turbineguy]

1. "...leaders of sound judgment...."

Nice prose, that.

[EYESORE 9001]

2. Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper would beg to differ

I invoke a fictional character, but remain convinced that some segment of the military industrial complex was turgid about engaging in thermonuclear warfare, toe-to-toe with the rooskies. They considered it winnable. Maybe it was winnable at that time; who TF knows? Glad it didn’t happen.

[Wednesdays]

4. Such as General Buck Turgidson?

[GreenWave]

3. Cuba had NO working nukes.

Russia did not trust Fidel and most Russian missiles were for show too.

[Hekate]

5. Did we know this at the time? I mean that as a serious question. I was 15 ...

I remember what it was like being a teenager in a school with many military dependents, and knowing their fathers were all on high alert.

Nobody on tv, certainly not JFK, sounded like they were just bluffing.

Fast forward to adulthood: I participated in an interview project that was video-recording the memories of military veterans. Bob, the interviewee I sat with that one day, was a Cold War veteran whose job had been to interpret imagery from what sounded like U-2 aircraft. When he talked about the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was deadly serious. He turned off his telephone and evacuated his family from the city.

[ProfessorGAC]

9. Almost Definitely Not

The US government overestimated the power, technology & reliability of Soviet military power for decades.
Reagan was promoting SDI over missiles that probably wouldn't get to North America.
Look at the space race. We didn't know until the 90s the number of catastrophic failures, accidents, injuries, deaths and the high tolerance for risk the Soviets had. That's why we were freaked out about getting to the moon first. We thought it was a real race, but despite all their risk taking they were a minimum of 10 years from a successful manned moon mission.
Although Russia's per capita GDP is pathetically low, they're an economic titan compared to the old USSR. They couldn't afford good stuff, and certainly not at the quantities they'd have us believe.
But, back in '62 we were at the peak of overestimating them.

[Hekate]

11. Thank you. I didn't know all that till you told me. And living thru it at the time was terrifying...

I hate revisionist history that mocks the people of 1962 for not having the vision of gods or the perspective of 2022.

My late friend Bob was no fool. He read the signs and knew he was going to be called in, and for an unknown period of time. That’s why he didn’t answer his phone, or place any calls. Just loaded the wife and kids into the family car and got them out of Dodge. He wasn’t AWOL — he just never got the call, sir.

[GreenWave]

12. Russia's plan was to make us crazy with the space race and arm's race

and bankrupt us. They forgot capitalism can thrive on waste!

[ProfessorGAC]

13. What A Dumb Plan

They had 1/15th the economic power, but they thought they'd bankrupt the US.
That is quite the concrete example of stupid.

[Jedi Guy]

6. If any three men could credibly say they saved the world, JFK would be one of them.

The other two were Soviets. One of them, Vasily Arkhipov, was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis as well. The other, Stanislav Petrov, kept calm and employed logic when his instruments indicated an American nuclear missile launch in the early 80s. Both of their stories are hair-raising at how close we came to losing it all but for cooler heads prevailing, as well as JFK's legendary calm under pressure that resulted in Khrushchev backing down.

Those close calls are instructive and, I think, offer a measure of hope. No rational person wants to be the first one to turn the key and become the biggest mass murderer in human history. Putin may no longer be a rational actor (if indeed he ever was) but we must hope that those under him will think twice before "following orders" into oblivion if the order is ever handed down. Cooler heads prevailed before, so we have to hope they will again when the time comes.

[roamer65]

7. JFK saved us from nuclear war.

God rest his soul.

Nixon would have started one.

[Xolodno]

8. Many of the Generals were pushing for a military solution.

They believed the Soviets would not respond and if they did, the a couple dozen million casualties was acceptable. Some pretty sick fucks if you ask me.

And today, we are inching closer to that and many have the cavalier attitude we can defeat Russia, their nukes cant hit us and if they do, its only a couple dozen million. Yeah, go fuck yourself. You don't want me to gamble with your life so why are trying to do so with mine.

Escalating pain points in the world does not benefit anyone.

[FakeNoose]

10. We had the nukes to wipe out Moscow, but the Russian nukes were inadequate to fight back

The problem all along was ... we didn't know it at the time. We thought their stuff was as good as ours, or better. It would have been ideal to have better intelligence - yes, better spies - to keep us informed of the Soviets' ability.

The whole messy and scary Cuban Missile Crisis could have been avoided if we'd had the tactical intelligence.