Further On Richard Nixon And The Cuban Missile Crisis

Even 40 years after Watergate Richard M. Nixon is still a part of the American and world psyche. Woodward and ernstein are talking bad about him again. My tak on the man is that he was a brilliant and misunderstood person. He had the potential to have incredible accomplishment and made a good start with the opening to China. Sadly his bad character destroyed his career, caused us to lose the Vietnam War, hurt his family and personally cost each one of us in one way or another.

For me one important question remains. Let us assume that Nixon had won the 1960 presidential election. In October of 1962 he is handed the proof of Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Would he have followed the advice of his military people and launched massive air strikes and an invasion of Cuba or would he have played it cautious as John F. Kennedy had done.

The Soviets not only had the MRBM's with nuclear war heads. They also had quite a number of battlefield nuclear weapons. US authorities bragged that they knew about these weapons and could have taken them out. I am skeptical. I suspect that the invasion force would have suffered horrific casualties and tha tthe US Navy ships supporting them would have also been sunk in large numbers. A nuclear response on Cuba would have been ordered.

This could have escalated into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR. The US with its better nuclear weapons and delivery systems, would have lost 20 million and the Soviet Union would have been flattened with up to 70 million casualties. We would have had global warming and nuclear winter for years. Where would we all be now?

All of us need to have a god idea of what Nixon would have done almost 50 years ago.

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