Fifty years ago this week, the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of war.
At issue was a bold move by Moscow to place nuclear weapons in Cuba in the form of missiles that could easily reach Washington and New York.
While America’s military leadership pushed hard for air strikes on the warheads followed by an amphibious assault of Cuba, President Kennedy opted for a more cautious strategy – a naval blockade of the island.
While the plan didn’t remove the missiles that were already in place at the two dozen launch sites, it prevented further weapons from reaching Cuba and demonstrated American resolve.
Senior Pentagon officials balked at Kennedy’s approach, considering it too weak. And according to an article published this week by the American news source The Christian Science Monitor, a group of generals led by Strategic Air Command’s Gen. Curtis Le May was ready to ignore the president’s orders and proceed with strikes on the missiles on their own.
“Robert Kennedy warned that ‘there were indeed people in the Pentagon that would take action if Kennedy did not – that there could be a military coup,’” writes the author of the article, Anna Mulrine.
This is just one of several revelations offered in the piece entitled: “Cuban Missile Crisis: The Three Most Surprising Things You Didn’t Know”. I won’t spoil the article for you, but rst assured, the other revelations are just as surprising.
It’s well worth the read. Click here for the full story.
Good stuff!
Thanks!
Thanks for this. I grabbed the link for my blog. I was nine-years-old when this happened. My whole class was terrified.
I wasn’t alive at that point, but I can imagine how terrifying it would have been. Thanks.
Reblogged this on kjmhoffman.
“If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is worth millions of atomic victims.”
— Che Guevara to the London Daily Worker, November 1962
This is a wildly inaccurate and awful article. While the military might have been dismayed about Kennedy its hard to believe that the Air Force could have caused a coup, nor that anyone else is mentioned who supported the alleged coup. Furhter documents reveal Castro urging the Soviets to use nuclear weapons if America invaded something the Soviets refused to do.
One wonders where the Soviet readiness to use nuclear weapons came from. This was a complete Soviet bluff and they sized up Kennedy and had his number. What the article doesn’t state is that the Soviets won this confrontation hands down. Americans pledged not to invade Cuba and withdrew all their weapons from Italy and Turkey.
What the article doesn’t say is the very real danger of accidental nuclear war. US aircraft were shot down and a US destroyer dropped DC on a nuclear armed Soviet sub inside the isolation zone.
Kennedy’s lack of will and lack of resolve pushed the US near war when a strong show of force would have destroyed Castro. It was a pathetic repeat of his failed Bay of Pigs debacle.