03-08-2022, 03:00 AM
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.
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.