So I'm reading Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," his memoir of growing up in 1950's Des Moines, Iowa, and he mentions the Cuban Missile Crisis, and how close we came to World War III:
In fact, we all came closer to dying than we realized. According to the memoirs of Robert McNamara, the then secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time suggested--indeed, eagerly urged--that we drop a couple of nuclear bombs on Cuba to show our earnest and to let the Soviets know that they had better not even think about putting nuclear weapons in our backyard. President Kennedy, according to McNamara, came very close to authorizing such a strike.
Twenty-nine years later, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, we learned that the CIA's evidence about Cuba was completely wrong (now there's a surprise) and that the Soviets in fact already had about 170 nuclear missiles positioned on Cuban soil, all trained on us of course, and all of which would have been launched in immediate retaliation for an American attack. Imagine an America with 170 of its largest cities--which, just for the record, would include Des Moines--wiped out. And of course it wouldn't have stopped there. That's how close we all came to dying.
I haven't trusted grown-ups for a single moment since.
So then...true? 170 missiles already in Cuba, and we nearly started nuclear annihilation over a few more?
Oh how 11 years difference in age makes us. Bill's writings are mainly from research. His memories are probably irrelevant since he was about 11 at the time. When I was eleven during the Korea era i was interested in baseball, the Yankees, and jet fighter kills in the skies over N Korea. In fact I just turned up some pretty good sketches of F 80s and F 86s I drew while being bored in the back of the classroom in '51. The point here is to demonstrate where one's memories lie at that age and to correct memories with reality.
I was on the front lines, so to speak, in '62 on a frigate west of Puerto Rico. Yes we talked about survival times in case of a nuclear exchange, 15 minutes for a carrier group, as we prepared to take down the Ruskies at sea. They sent cargo ships not warships. Their navy was largely US lend lease. Their nuclear capabilities were largely nearly unguided missiles and bear bombers, both of which we had very good counters against.
Another thing. Life in the midwest, the safest place in 'merica, was a bunker zone where fear raged unchecked by practicality. Those of who were near, say nuclear production sites where masters and phd degrees and mostly veterans were the norm, were of a much calmer sort. Yes it was a bit like the ebola thing last year at the time, but the threat of nuclear war? The soviet union clearly didn't have the capacity and the residue of Eisenhower's recent turn at president had set us in very good stead.
Still the main thing was the possibility of some Hiroshimas in the US if the Soviets were as rabid as US politicians made them out to be. The reality was these guys, the soviet politburo, were pragmatists first and ideologues way down the line. They weren't going to fight a war they could not possibly win to sustain a tenuous advantage near the US. Everything was political, exaggerated, never really about military might. Hell, they didn't even try to stop us from supplying Berlin in 1948 where they had all the advantages on the ground and with airbases all about. Those are the realities.
Finally an an after the fact analysis. The soviet union was already well into post war decline. Khrushchev's little ploy was a gambit to put off his coming removal in '65. The space race? largely a US eruption of technical money to satisfy a political pledge of a dead president. The USSR was never competing except with the occasional political show off based on captured German technology. For example if one has ever looked into a mig 15 or 17 one is taken aback by all the steam gauges reflecting pre WII technology. Power plants and weaponry was all the soviet AF was about. Technology and sophistication and pilot accommodation never entered soviet designers minds. The soviet plan was to hit the west with as many troops, tanks, and other military hammers they could while we actually improved war technology in the west as counters.
The woulda couldas were never real possibilities. Romantic literature with poetic licence in every paragraph was the reality of the military situation in that era.
