| | | quote | Originally posted by Boondawg:
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Yeah... I dunno, that guy seems to go on and on about how they were just protecting their allies. A small island doesn't need 50 missiles pointed at Florida. The purpose of it was to show the United States that Russia had power. That's all it was for them back then. They weren't "defending" against the United States. Relations really became agitated when Kruschev said:
"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will dig you in"
That's when things really started to get hairy.
The book that I recommended yesterday, "Body of Secrets" by James Bamford, actually has an excellent historical documentation of the entire Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Cuba was pretty poor back then, as they had just gone through a revolution, and there wasn't a whole lot of order there. They were relatively uneducated back then as well, and the Cubans really had very little to do with those missiles. Matter of fact, all the missiles, and their controls, were being manned by Russians. In his book, the captured signals showed that the vast majority of chatter that the spy ship picked up was Russian dialog, and not Spanish.
I'm sure this guy believes what he says, and I'm sure he's proud of his country... but what he says is an emotional / biased view. While he was some-what right about the ICBM count, the Russians lied profusely about the number of weapons they had. This of course, caused us only to build more to make sure we had enough.
EDIT: That book also throws in some crazy stuff too, but it's always prefaced with "secret documents acquired by Body of Secrets... blah blah..." but everything else he wrote about the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis is all stuff that was released through the declassification of documents, and through the Freedom of Information Act. He really does a great job of outlining Cuba / US history throughout that time. Even down to the detail of JFK making a speech in the Orange bowl. I'm not a huge fan of James Bamford, but he did a GREAT job through most of the book with his historical breakdown.
| | | quote | Originally posted by blackrams:
Interesting, but I must point out, that's one man's perspective (if I'm to believe him) and I don't know that he's not just being a blowheart. It was no big deal. Maybe, maybe not.
I don't know that anyone today really knows how close we came to war then but, I know there were a lot of scared people. Somehow, I'm just not too sure the Soviets weren't just as scared.
Edited: Or maybe, they just weren't as well informed. Maybe, we all bought into something that was never a real threat but, I kind of doubt it.
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Oh, no... it was bad... it was real bad. There were several.... SEVERAL TIMES, where the US and Russia really were on the brink of total all-out world destruction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_PetrovStanislav Petrov was one guy who averted total disaster. Ever watch the movie "War Games?" Russia had a computer that they built which supposedly was supposed to give early warning to when the US had launched an ICBM. It just so happened that their computer had a glitch (sunspots I think?) that showed the US had launched 4 missiles. It was only because of Petrov's distrust of modern technology that he didn't retaliate, even DESPITE direct orders from his superiors to go ahead and launch retaliatory ICBMs... it would have been bad.
Also, K19 Widomaker was a movie that was loosely based on yet another situation that would have caused the start of WW3.
It was serious **** ... real serious **** . We should all be happy that we're still alive right now.
Once the USSR collapsed, all of their secret documents from the KGB were released... which in turn also released our own stuff, and it's shocking. The world almost came to an end like almost 5 times.
[This message has been edited by 82-T/A [At Work] (edited 08-15-2011).]
