Imagine how different the world would have been if Kennedy had allowed Khrushchev to place nuclear weapons in Cuba...Europe would not be free. The United States would have been too fearful to challenge Russia in Europe.
In Turner's telling of the tale, had Kennedy acquiesced in 1962, "Europe would not be free" today. This, at a minimum, betrays a great lack of understanding of how and why the Cold War ended.
Turner, by mentioning the October Crisis as a precedent to deal with the threat (if it in fact exists) of Russian nuclear weapons in space, is pointing an already overly hawkish administration in a dangerous direction.
As President John F. Kennedy and only a few members of the Executive Committee (ExComm), which was set up to act as an advisory council to Kennedy during the crisis, recognized right away, Khrushchev's plan to place nuclear warheads in Cuba was above all a political move.
Collection
[
|
...
]