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That crisis lasted two weeks… between October 14, when a U-2 flight over Cuba took photos of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed; and October 28, when Khrushchev announced that he had ordered the removal of Soviet missile from Cuba, thus ending the stand-off. What wasn't said publicly at that time, and kept secret in the brokered agreement, where UN Secretary-General U Thant had a little known but very important interceding role was the quid-pro-quo which included the removal of all US nuclear missiles from Turkey. That erroneously vested Kennedy with hero-status and made Khrushchev a goat… something which would mar his remaining two years in power.
Two decades later a similar fate to that of Khrushchev would befall on the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. A reformer for a better life for the Soviet people under the banner of Perestroika-Glasnost, like his predecessor Khrushchev, he would come to be considered by many as a loser to his American counterpart, then Ronald Reagan; many of his countrymen even tagging him as traitor and hangman of Soviet communism.
Well, Putin is not about to be the third casualty against the unilateral I-do-as-I-please attitude of America's leader; and what he got from Bush at Heiligendamm (Germany) last June at the G8 meeting, or a month later at the Bush compound at Kennebunkport (Maine) was a plate of poorly flavored tofu passed on to him as lobster. But Putin, his palate intact, diplomatically told Bush to retrieve the plate and take it to the chefs at the Pentagon; that anti-missile defense the US intends to activate in Eastern Europe, a Cuba-Florida distance away from the Russian Federation, is in many ways a very poor reenactment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This upcoming Polish Missile-Interceptor Crisis sounds like an appropriate name, for the subterfuge of using the "Iranian danger" has as much credibility as Bush becoming recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Bush has misspent the entire allowance Putin gave him right after 9/11, which appeared to be both sizeable and tendered in good faith. Subsequent events involving the conflict in Iraq, America's bellicose attitude with Iran and a uniquely-narrow definition by Bush of the "global war on terror" have made the Russian leadership take a 180 degree turn. And with an emerging, prosperous economy and the necessary in-house human talent and natural resources to be self-reliant, it is little wonder that Putin would put the man in the White House on notice that, unlike the European vassals, his nation would not take a subservient role to the United States.
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http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17347&Itemid=1MOSCOW. (Nikita Petrov for RIA Novosti) - In some respects, the current crisis in Russian-U.S. relations is reminiscent of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear-tipped missiles in the immediate proximity of the U.S. borders.
However, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev managed to reach a compromise at the last moment, preventing an all-out nuclear war.
This time, Washington has decided to deploy 10 Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) missiles near Warsaw, the capital of Poland, and a 360-degree X-band radar not far from Prague in the Czech Republic, that is in direct proximity to Russia.
Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited Moscow and negotiated with President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov in the two-by-two format. But, just as analysts had predicted, the talks did not produce any substantial results. It is obvious that the Bush Administration will not renounce the missile defense program aimed at shielding the United States and Europe from so-called "rogue states."
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http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20071017/84293852.html
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