Today's events vs the Cuban missile crisis

[jdc]

gadje wrote:
I was not around during the Cuban missile crisis. I am curious how the current tension between US and Russia compares to the tension back then.

Me neither, but based on how we are all living our day to days lives -- no comparison.

For most of the USA, Our biggest inconvenience is life right now is the cost of gas... which is fleeting. Morning radio hosts are too young to remember the 70s gas crisis, with looooooooong ass lines, and odd/even days and the ilk.

If I use one tank a week, 17 gallons, and its $1 more per gallon = extra $17 per week, or $68/mo.

Not insignificant, but those same morning DJs are acting like its we need to start eating ramen vs prime rib.

[hal]

I remember asking my mom how it was for her (she was in her late 20s, living in the NYC metro area) and she said that she thought she was surely gonna die.

[Lux Interior]

Wags wrote:
I remember being much more freaked about about the Cuban crisis. Likely from all the air raid drills, as if getting under a school desk was going to protect against an atomic bomb.

I was driving to the gym just before 6 AM, when the emergency broadcast system electronic screeches started.

I was listening to a the news on the radio and the RDS was frozen on "RUSSIA."

Although I knew it had nothing to do with the EBS screech, my first thought was "incoming nukes!"

Anyway, the screeches stopped and the radio continued on with the news.

No idea why the EBS came on. There was no message. Just the screeches.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

S. Pupp wrote:
Don't forget, though - all you had to do to protect yourself from 1950's radiation was to cover yourself with newspaper. There's no escaping 2022 radiation.

It's common knowledge that radiation today is, like, 20x stronger than radiation during the '50s era. miley-laughing001:

[N-OS X-tasy!]

Lux Interior wrote:
[quote=Wags]
I remember being much more freaked about about the Cuban crisis. Likely from all the air raid drills, as if getting under a school desk was going to protect against an atomic bomb.

I was driving to the gym just before 6 AM, when the emergency broadcast system electronic screeches started.

I was listening to a the news on the radio and the RDS was frozen on "RUSSIA."

Although I knew it had nothing to do with the EBS screech, my first thought was "incoming nukes!"

Anyway, the screeches stopped and the radio continued on with the news.

No idea why the EBS came on. There was no message. Just the screeches.

[Don C]

I remember in elementary school being taken to the basement for air raid drill. LOTS of asbestos down there.

As noted, the Cuba thing was right next door so was a very real and present threat.

My fear today is that whatshisname will decide that if he cannot have Ukraine, he will make sure that nobody else can have it either and "damage" one or more of the nuclear power plants so that radiation makes the area uninhabitable for anyone. There is already one area of the country that is uninhabitable, a little escaping radiation from other plants could destroy a lot of the country. Probably take out some of HIS country too, but that's just a price somebody else would have to pay.

[bfd]

jdc wrote:

…those same morning DJs are acting like its we need to start eating ramen vs prime rib.

They may have a point considering the amount of grain that Ukraine won't be exporting. All it takes is a bump like that to rattle the beef market a little more than it's already rattling … $50/lb for prime rib could soon be reality …

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/...costs-soar

[Ca Bob]

I was about 12 when the Cuban missile crisis happened. I remember we watched JFK's speech and continued to listen to comments on the radio for hours after. Then there were days of crisis news and finally -- finally, the news that the Russian ships turned back from the American blockade. There was a lot of drama although out here on the west coast I think we felt a little less of the tension because the issue was intermediate range missiles and they would not hit California. This was of course naive because a nuclear exchange would of course have escalated into World War III, but we also kind of felt that JFK would get us out of the problem somehow.

Of course we now know a lot more about how the negotiations occurred (I seem to remember that an American and a Russian got together unofficially at a D.C. restaurant and figured out that there might be a way out, and eventually the U.S. very unofficially removed its own IRBMs from Turkey, or something like that.)

I would suggest that the current situation is a lot less tense for a couple of reasons. The first is that JFK in his speech made it clear that this was the United States vs. the USSR and they were trying to put nuclear tipped missiles just a few miles from our coastline. It may have been the first and only time when Americans in general were looking nuclear Armageddon in the face.

The second reason is that our territory and our lives are not in the balance here, and few people expect the situation to expand to a nuclear exchange -- not because Putin is sane or under control, but because the Americans and Russians in charge of the nuclear weapons have learned a lot over the past 70 years. Instead, we feel sad for the Ukrainians and truly angry at the Russians for pulling us back to the emotion of the 1960s where people in Europe feared a Soviet ground invasion.

[Numo]

N-OS X-tasy! wrote:
[quote=S. Pupp]
Don't forget, though - all you had to do to protect yourself from 1950's radiation was to cover yourself with newspaper. There's no escaping 2022 radiation.

It's common knowledge that radiation today is, like, 20x stronger than radiation during the '50s era. miley-laughing001:
Actually, warheads today are 3,000 times more powerful (and also probably much more radioactive) than the warheads detonated in WWII, and much more numerous. Because of the worldwide devastation they would inflict, I believe a full nuclear exchange today would end civilization as we know it. Think of how much social and economic disruption just the COVID epidemic has caused - a nuclear war would be immeasurably worse.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

Ammo wrote:
[quote=N-OS X-tasy!]
[quote=S. Pupp]
Don't forget, though - all you had to do to protect yourself from 1950's radiation was to cover yourself with newspaper. There's no escaping 2022 radiation.

It's common knowledge that radiation today is, like, 20x stronger than radiation during the '50s era. miley-laughing001:
Actually, warheads today are 3,000 times more powerful (and also probably much more radioactive) than the warheads detonated in WWII, and much more numerous. Because of the worldwide devastation they would inflict, I believe a full nuclear exchange today would end civilization as we know it. Think of how much social and economic disruption just the COVID epidemic has caused - a nuclear war would be immeasurably worse.
I can't tell if you got the joke...