I think everyone knows the story of the Cuban missile crisis. In October of 1962, JFK learned that the Soviets had put nuclear missiles in Cuba. This especially frightened him, because he spent so much time at his Mother’s house in West Palm Beach that in 1960, the US government installed a Presidential Emergency Facility on Peanut Island, Dubbed Detachment Hotel. It was a 1500 square foot bomb shelter, designed to house the President and his family in the event of a nuclear war.
We came so close to nuclear war that the decision of one man is all that stood between the world and a full nuclear exchange. Captain Savitsky, the commander of the Soviet B-59 submarine had loaded and armed a nuclear torpedo on October 27, 1962. That night, he had surfaced the boat to charge his batteries, and was surrounded by US forces demanding that he surrender. Believing that he was under attack, he ordered a crash dive and the firing of the nuclear weapon. The only reason it didn’t happen was that he couldn’t dive fast enough. That’s how close we came.
But why did the Soviets put nuclear weapons in Cuba? That’s the part of the story that the Americans have never really liked talking about. The Jupiter missile was a nuclear armed, medium range ballistic missile. With a range of 1700 hundred miles, this missile could deliver a 3.75 megaton nuclear warhead within 1000 feet of its aiming point. Almost, as they say, only counts in atom bombs, hand grenades, and horseshoes.
In 1961 and 1962, the US put 15 of these missiles in Turkey, near the town of Izmir, just 1300 miles from Moscow and 45 missiles were located in Italy. This put 60 nuclear missiles just 15 minutes’ flight time from Moscow. Launch detection satellites were still 6 years into the future, so these missiles would be detonating all over the Soviets’ command and control systems before anyone knew the attack was coming.
The Soviets did the only reasonable thing from their point of view- in May of 1962, they reciprocated by putting their own missiles within the same distance of Washington, DC in Cuba. That is what led us to the brink of nuclear war in the fall of 1962.
The resolution of the entire thing included an agreement for the US to remove the missiles from Italy and Turkey. Part of the deal included the Soviets agreeing to keep the existence and removal of the Jupiter missiles a secret from the US public. The operation to remove them was called Operation Pot Pie. The missiles were pulled out of Turkey, but the US still maintains a stockpile of as many as 50 nuclear weapons in Turkey to this day.
The US government has a long history of bumbling through the world, screwing up, but then making the other nation’s reaction to the screw up look like aggression. Name nearly any warlike event of the past century, and it is likely that actions taken by the US government precipitated them. Sometimes it was just inept bungling, sometimes it was deliberate provocation, but our government’s own poor actions resulted in Americans getting killed. A sampling:
- Bin Laden was a CIA asset
- Gulf of Tonkin
- Panay Incident
11 Comments
@HomeInSC · March 8, 2025 at 5:51 am
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
— Kurt Vonnegut
Michael · March 8, 2025 at 6:36 am
Divemedic when has simple truth and logic ever convinced a Russophobia person to decide the Russian’s aren’t always to blame?
That Russia *Might* even have reasonable reasons (not paranoia if they are really out to get you) to act in self-defense of their own citizens in Ukraine and so on?
You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.
Robert A. Heinlein
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
Winston Churchill
But I can admire your stubbornness in aptly applying logic and simple historical truths to this subject.
Divemedic · March 8, 2025 at 7:48 am
This postwasnt intended for that. It was the result of me asking “Why do we still have nuclear weapons in Turkey?”
Michael · March 8, 2025 at 8:38 am
Turkey isn’t the trustworthy “ally” to have even possible access to nukes. Erogen has been playing both sides of the street for HIS SIDE for decades.
Yeah, someone will pipe up that they don’t have the “triggers”.
Modern science and planning they WOULD have the Triggers IF they wanted to grab them.
I agree that our Nukes shouldn’t be in Turkey and given the behavior of “Warlike Europe” I’d suggest they are removed FROM the EU and our nuke capacity be in our carriers IF we need that capacity in that area.
Divemedic · March 8, 2025 at 8:51 am
Until 1992, nearly half of the US total stockpile was at sea. That all changed in 1992, when GHW Bush ordered all tactical weapons be removed. All that remains are the warheads on SSBNs.
Our carriers no longer carry the nukes, and the personnel needed to maintain them are no longer in the US Navy.
The personnel who maintained the nuclear weapons on a carrier were W division, and those personnel no longer exist. It would take a couple of years in order to reinstate those weapons on surface ships.
In September 1991, then-President George H. W. Bush announced the withdrawal of all tactical nuclear weapons from submarines, surface ships, and land-based aircraft. These weapons were kept in reserve and eventually destroyed, and today the only nuclear weapons remaining in the fleet are those arming Trident II D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. (TLAM-N was removed from the fleet in 1991, and the W80-0 warheads were retired in 2011.) The warheads in many cases no longer exist. That would take years, perhaps decades, to replace given the military’s current clumsy procurement system.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2016.1124664
Michael · March 8, 2025 at 10:03 am
A real mess indeed.
Is there anything our graft ridden military procurement system (aka CONgress spelling intentional) hasn’t crippled or destroyed of our once fine military?
Yet we pound our chests and a lot of us say we can do Pax Americana and “Humble Broke*ick Russia”.
I knew from various Army and Navy contacts how poor our real world resupply and repair systems were but wow, just wow about the Nukes.
NP · March 8, 2025 at 10:21 am
Bush was a profoundly destructive president.
it's just Boris · March 8, 2025 at 11:46 am
Our ability to make new warheads is also a factor, especially given some of the materials used in the manufacturing processes are apparently no longer available (thanks, EPA!) so the same “recipe” couldn’t be used.
And then, since we don’t do full-scale testing any more, the first time you know “for sure” whether the new warheads work, is with a bona fide warshot.
Mike_C · March 8, 2025 at 8:23 am
“long history of bumbling through the world, screwing up, but then making the other nation’s reaction to the screw up look like aggression”
I know persons who go through life like that. I’m sure you (y’all) do to. And it’s surprising how successful many of them are, despite, or maybe because of, this crappy behavior. As to how this applies to US foreign policy, it’s hardly surprising when you consider the kind of people who work at, and very frequently head, State.
NP · March 8, 2025 at 10:24 am
A senate investigation later determined that the USSR removed decoys from Cuba and left the real nukes in place.
Henry · March 8, 2025 at 11:21 am
It’s disgraceful that we failed to use the fall of the Berlin Wall as an opportunity to truly reform our relationship with Russia and begin to build trust between our countries. We squandered the chance, and you’ve outlined numerous instances where our foreign policy did everything possible to make foreign countries distrust us.
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