Thirteen Days of Atomigeddon 2: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

[james_davis_nicoll]

“The deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because they are possible to find.” The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

As ever, corrections accepted but I won't be able to act on them until tonight.

Comments

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

Yeah, the way to Reagan's heart was through movies evidently. Too bad someone didn't show him a film like El Norte when making policy for Central America.

As for pushing Khrushchev, well, the U2 incident didn't help relations for Eisenhower and it wasn't Kennedy who tried to sneak nuclear missiles into Cuba, even if he did authorize the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Demonstrate the essential moral difference between IRBMs in Turkey, aimed at Russia, and IRBMs in Cuba, aimed at the USA.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

There isn't, which is why the U.S. quietly removed them from Turkey after the crisis had passed. However what Khrushchev did was reckless and he knew what a dangerous game he was playing. Thankfully, he stopped playing it.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

No, Khrushchev didn't know how reckless he was being. He figured, based upon Kennedy's bungling of the Bay of Pigs and Vienna Summit, and weak response to the Berlin Crisis, that JFK would roll over once again, especially since any strong objection to the Cuban missiles would by hypocritical in light of the Turkish IRBMs. Unfortunately Kennedy was a hypocrite (or at least his military advisers were) and pushed the world to the brink of war because the Soviets had done to the US what the US had already done to the Soviets.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

Oh sure, Khrushchev hoped that Kennedy would back down, but the fact that he sent the missiles secretly was actually a tell that the Soviets did not want a confrontation. Kennedy initially thought of appealing to the Soviets secretly when U.S. intelligence revealed the missile sites in Cuba, but rejected it because it would make the U.S. look weak, hence the crisis.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

You're overlooking the issue of rhetoric. Kennedy took a hardline stance during the campaign and in the early part of his administration, which forced Khrushchev to reciprocate to keep his own hardliners off his back. Americans have built up such a mythology around JFK that it's easy to forget how frightening his "missile gap" talk must have sounded to the Soviets, who knew full well that the Americans were already outproducing them.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

No, Khrushchev was pushing for a nuclear missile buildup in hopes of being able to then reduce the size of the Soviet Union's conventional forces and then be able do more to improve the overall Soviet economy. Sputnik wasn't just a propaganda stunt, it was entirely part of the Soviet Union's nuclear ICBM program. The U.S. of course was stunned by Sputnik and started playing catch-up in a big way, and Eisenhower certainly fumed as Kennedy made his "missile gap" rhetoric work against Nixon, because Eisenhower didn't want it to be known how much ground the U.S. had made up during the last two years of his second term. Kennedy was doing what politicians do best, making hay about a fear of the Soviets that U.S. voters had. That rhetoric wasn't as worrisome to Khrushchev as you seem to believe it was, nor was Khrushchev worried by hardliners in his own party.