60 Years Since Cuban Missile Crisis, Nuclear War Once Again "Thinkable"

For 60 years, the Cuban missile crisis has loomed both as a frightening lesson on how close the world came to nuclear doomsday -- and how skillful leadership averted it.

For 60 years, the Cuban Missile Crisis has loomed as a frightening lesson about how close the world is to a nuclear doomsday—and how skillful leadership managed to avoid it.

With Russian President Vladimir Putin brandishing the nuclear option in Ukraine, the threat is back again, but this time, experts aren't sure of a way to end it.

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US President Joe Biden in early October warned explicitly that the world was risking nuclear destruction for the first time since 1962, saying that Putin was "not joking" about using ultra-destructive weapons because his military was "remarkably weak" in its conquest. Ukraine.

Biden said he is looking to provide "external corridors" for Putin.

But there is no indication that Putin is eager to accept one.

"I think this situation, more than any situation since 1962, could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons," said George Berkowitz, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"I've been working in this field for 40 years and this is the most challenging situation because you have a nuclear-armed country, Russia, whose leader has defined the situation as an existential one."

Unlike in 1962, the world now faces a number of nuclear flashpoints with indications that North Korea is preparing for another atomic test,

Tensions remain at a simmering low between India and nuclear-armed Pakistan and Iran ramping up its nuclear activities.

But Ukraine poses unique risks as the conflict pits the world's two largest nuclear powers against each other.

Any Russian strike is expected to include tactical nuclear weapons.

It was targeted on the battlefield and not launched between continents - but Biden himself warned that it was hard not to "end up with Armageddon" just by using a nuclear weapon.

Putin who questioned Ukraine's historical legitimacy,

He announced the annexation of four regions and suggested that an attack on the annexed "Russian" territories or direct Western intervention might prompt Russia to use a nuclear weapon.

Bigger bets?

The brutal eight-month war is fundamentally different from the Cuban crisis,

The question was how to prevent the Cold War confrontation over the discovery of Soviet nuclear weapons on the island from getting hot.

US President John F. Kennedy, in one of his recorded deliberations filled with historians, said that European allies thought Washington was "crazy" for focusing on Cuba,

90 miles (140 kilometers) from Florida with a long history of American involvement.

"Ukraine is far more important to America's allies than Cuba," said Mark Silverstone, a Cold War historian at the University of Virginia.

"It seems that Putin is ready to rearrange Europe's borders, which is terrifying for Europeans."

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's motives, while broad, were less stringent than those of Putin, as Moscow sought partly to bridge a missile gap with the United States and gain influence with the West over a divided Berlin.

The political stakes were great for Kennedy,

who was embarrassed by the CIA's failed Bay of Pigs invasion a year ago to oust communist revolutionary Fidel Castro and was days away from congressional elections.

But Kennedy rejected advice about air strikes and imposed a naval "quarantine" against more Soviet shipments—avoiding the term blockade, which would have been an act of war.

Moscow withdrew after Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba, and, quietly, to withdraw American nuclear missiles from Turkey.

"For Kennedy, the most important thing was to reduce the chance of a nuclear exchange," Silverstone said.

"I don't know if that's the most important thing on Vladimir Putin's mind at the moment. In fact, he seems to be upping the ante."

Raise their red lines

In 1962 and now, the nuclear powers faced an additional layer of uncertainty from allies on the ground.

On October 27, 1962, while Khrushchev and Kennedy were exchanging messages, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba, killing an American pilot.

Kennedy ignored calls for revenge, and predicted - correctly,

The historical record proved that the order to shoot did not come from the Soviets, but from Cuba.

Khrushchev announced a deal the next day, and his son later wrote that he feared the situation was spiraling out of control.

In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky pledged to build on the momentum and restore all the lands occupied by Russia.

The United States has shipped billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine but Biden stopped short of sending missiles that could hit Russia, saying he would not risk "World War III".

“Both Zelensky and Putin took extreme positions, raising their red lines, while in 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev were lowering them,

Silverstone said.

Berkowitz said Biden, who worked for him when he was a senator, was as calm and historically experienced as any US president in dealing with the crisis.

But he said 2022 is a different era, too. In 1962, Russia agreed to keep the Kennedy agreement to withdraw American missiles from Turkey a secret.

Aware of the political risks to which the President is exposed.

"Many crises in history are resolved through secret diplomacy," Berkowitz said.

BY
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