>....Only a couple months after the blockade
>we'd pulled all our nuclear-armed Jupiter IRBMs out of Turkey; that was
>the deal Kennedy made with Khrushchev at the height of the Crisis.
>
>Good for Khrushchev too, because with a surprise attack by ICBMs the
>time from first detection by the forward radar bases until warheads hit
>airbases and cities was 30 to 40 minutes, in which period a U.S.
>president or a Soviet premier had to find out whether that image on the
>radar screen was a bunch of ICBMs, a flock of loons, or the moon rising,
>and to decide whether or not to launch a world-wrecking retaliatory
>attack. But with IRBMs, that period from detection to detonation was a
>mere six to ten minutes. As a result of forcing the issue by stationing
>Soviet IRBMs in Cuba, Khrushchev succeeded in greatly lessening the
>danger of accidental nuclear war.
This is true. But Khrushchev also got something else of enormous importance--the purpose the missiles were put in Cuba in the first place was to deter the US from an actual invasion, which by the summer of 1962, as I remember, seemed awfully imminent. The main quid pro quo for removal of the missiles was Kennedy's pledge that the US would respect the Cuban status quo, a pledge that the US has kept to this day. Another question though--did the K-K deal include Russian commitment to respect the US sphere of dominance in Latin America in return for American commitment to respect the Russian sphere of dominance in Eastern Europe? Or did that deal only become explicit with Brezhnev's and Johnson's tolerance of each other's invasions of Czechoslovakia and the Dominican Republic in 1968?
Shane Mage
"immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living their deaths, dying their lives"
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 62