60 Years Later, We Are Closer to Nuclear War Than the Cuban Missile Crisis
Original Content by David Krayden
When we are contemplating nuclear war, it really doesn’t matter if Putin lacks the convenient validation of international law or the proper moral right to annex portions of Ukraine – what matters is to seek a peaceful solution before a “tactical” or nuclear strike quickly becomes a “strategic” nuclear exchange and New York City suddenly becomes a target in a once distant war. Putin may act like Adolf Hitler but that doesn’t mean we can arrest his foreign policy like the West could have stopped Nazi Germany. Hitler did not possess nuclear weapons.
Sixty years ago, in October 1962, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. U-2 spy planes had discovered that Cuba was preparing to install Soviet-made nuclear missiles on the communist island. For President John Kennedy – or for any president of that Cold War era – it was a challenge that was both provocative in the extreme and completely unacceptable. This was not just a gross violation of the Monroe Doctrine that claimed the Caribbean as an American sphere of influence, it was as if the Soviet Union was pointing a gun at the president’s head and demanding he do nothing.
Picture: L to R, geopolitics today lining up similarly with history, but without leadership focused on de-escalation is a dangerous game in a dangerous time. TOP LINE: Today October 2022: Russia’s President Putin, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy, and United States’ President Biden. BOTTOM LINE: Historic October 1962: Soviet leader Khrushchev, Cuban Dictator Castro, United States’ President Kennedy.
That moment, and we shall return to it many times in this column, was a defining moment in the Cold War and it has become a truism to describe it as the nexus of that long struggle between the communism and the free world and closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.
In October 2022, we are in a much more dangerous position with the war between Russia and Ukraine because there seems to be no determination to seek a peaceful resolution to the conflict but to march ever closer to a nuclear holocaust.
The desire for peace is precisely why the Cuban Missile Crisis did not lead to the Third World War or even a tactical nuclear strike in the Western Hemisphere. Of course, the Soviet Union was an evil empire sowing Marxist revolution around the world and it was up to no good in Cuba. Kennedy’s military advisors urged him to carry out an air strike on the missile stations or invade Cuba. He could have done that, committed to stopping Russia in its tracks and the bombs would have started falling.
It is easy to start a war. Humankind has done so throughout history. But it is damn difficult to end these bloody ordeals and they are never terminated without a massive loss of life and treasure. Do you think the world powers in 1914 thought they were unleashing a war that would destroy three of the monarchies in Europe, give birth to Bolshevism and provide the beginning of the end of the British Empire? No, they thought this quarrel between royal cousins would be over by the coming Christmas and life would return to the Belle Epoque. But that wasn’t the case, sadly.
Instead, Kennedy who had fought in WWII, and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy decided to explore a myriad of options: after all, when nuclear war is at your doorstep, don’t you want to assess more than one response? So, they waged some backchannel diplomacy that the media and the public never heard about at the time. Kennedy acknowledged that the U.S. had deployed missiles in Turkey, which was in close proximity to the Soviet Union. In the end, the president decided on a strategy that might be called passive containment. Instead of waging war on Cuba and the Soviets, Kennedy decided on a quarantine that would keep the missiles from reaching Cuba.
It was a brilliant decision because it bought time for the two leaders to exchange correspondence and it allowed the Soviets room to disentangle themselves from the looming catastrophe. Clearly Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev did not want a nuclear war or he would have had won. He had gone through the Second World War and witnessed the Nazi occupation of his country, the atrocities – on both sides – and the absolute devastation. He knew that a nuclear war would make the last war look like a weekend in the country.
Yet as Russia formally annexed four areas of Ukraine that are heavily populated with Russian-speaking people, how did Ukraine and the West respond? Ukraine’s publicity seeking president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, released a theatrical video where he officially requested fast-tracked membership in NATO. He looked like a midget, standing in between two burly ministers of state who could double as his bodyguards.
The United States announced it could never accept the annexation and promised more billions in military support to the mad hatter Zelenskyy.
This might have been a profoundly opportune time to end this futile war. Please do not think Russia is going to walk away from it having gained absolutely nothing. It will not do so. But it might engage tactical nuclear weapons to retaliate against Ukranian offenses and it might well decide that America and NATO want a nuclear war.
Why else would President Joe Biden continue to fund this conflict with billions of dollars in armaments? This spending isn’t going to win the war but it will prolong it until push becomes shove for Russia
And do you believe for a minute that Russia sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline? Both Biden and State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland warned that the pipeline would be terminated if Russia continued the war.
“With regard to Nord Stream 2, we continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies and I want to be clear with you today. If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Why should we think they were making these threats in jest? As any fool can tell you, you don’t have to destroy your own pipeline to shut off the supply of natural gas to Europe. But we are expected to believe that Russian President Vladmir Putin sent in a demolition squad to blow up his own infrastructure just to look like a madman?
Of course, America would have quietly advised its NATO allies that the sabotage was coming. Why would Germany have come calling to Canada this summer looking for natural gas supplies? It all came to nothing as the green-energy obsessed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – who turned down one of the best trade deals in history – rebuffed their requests. They finally sealed a deal with Mexico for their natural gas needs.
Though will this be enough?
Both the Republican and Democratic leadership is in marching in lockstep towards global oblivion. RINO Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) suggested there was “no off ramp” for Putin after the annexation. What the hell does that mean? We’re going to war, no matter what?
Here are the facts: Ukraine cannot become a member of NATO and should not become a member of NATO. It cannot because that would automatically mean that Russia had invaded a NATO state and all other members would be obliged to defend it. It should not because it is too close to Russia and Russia demobilized the Warsaw Pact only because the West was supposed to dissolve NATO. As Human Events Jack Posobiec, Human Events senior editor, said on Human Events Daily (Six minute to 10:40 minutes), “We’re talking World War III. If Ukraine becomes a part of NATO that means there would be Russian forces inside a NATO country.” He rightly said it was time for “de-escalation” of the war not for Biden to throw more gas on the fire.
This is what everyone seems to have forgotten. The media is foursquare behind throttling Putin, nukes be damned. There are about two anchors on Fox – Tucker Carlson included – who are allowed to attack the war hawks. The network itself has spends the majority of its time covering the weather while a nuclear storm continues to grow in Europe.
I have always said that if the next global war begins, it will not start as the Second World War did, with a blitzkrieg attack on a militarily backwards nation, followed by a swift conquest and consolidation of the occupation. No, it will be like the First World War, when the great powers almost walked in their sleep towards Armageddon, never really believing that their rhetoric would result in the clash of arms that they spoke of. All the warring parties believed that God and morality was on their side in 1914.
That is precisely what is happening right now. We are not talking about bomb shelters, nuclear fallout, or how the large will be the fireball of even a 10 MG nuclear bomb. Yet in the 1980s, we used to obsess about nuclear war, and some believed it was imminent, so imminent that they even thought unilateral nuclear disarmament was preferable to the risk of war.
Is it irresponsible to talk of nuclear war as a real possibility in 2022? Not when the people fueling that potential inevitability refuse to acknowledge the sinister intent of their words, nor even think to warn the populace that putting Russia and Putin in their place could result in the nuclear war that we used to fear but somehow ignore today.