On the 70th anniversary of the missile crisis, celebrated in these days of October, Russia is again threatening a possible nuclear attack on the West in what appears to be another Putin bluff.
Soviet military commander and defense minister between 1957 and 1967 Rodion Malinovsky was born in Odessa in 1898. He fought in Stalingrad and was given command of the armies that drove the Germans out of Ukraine. Stalin appointed him Marshal that same year. His political commissar in Stalingrad had been Nikita Khrushchev.
Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in May 1961. Wikimedia Commons / John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library
In 1962, Khrushchev was in charge of the Soviet Union and Malinovsky was its defense minister. On a sunny morning in May of that year, the Soviet leader confided his plan to the minister: why don’t we put a hedgehog in Uncle Sam’s underpants?” Nikita Khrushchev asked.
Despite the opposition he encountered in the Politburo, Khrushchev carried out his plan: the USSR sent missiles with nuclear warheads to Cuba, installed ramps for their launches, and brought some 50,000 soldiers of his army to the island. The Cuban government, led by Fidel Castro, who had initiated Moscow in 1960 through Raúl Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara, was delighted. Any threat of invasion from the United States should now be met with formidable response.
On October 14, 1962, a United States Air Force plane obtained photographic evidence showing part of the “hedgehog” to the Kennedy administration. Two days later, the president convened his executive committee and discussed how to respond.
The military answer was chosen: a bombardment during which it was doubted whether it should be surgical or massive. Part of the presidential cabinet was frightened and pressured to lower the tone of the response. A blockade of the island, which was called “quarantine” was chosen with the intention that it would not be seen as an act of war.
On the 22nd, the Soviets received the news. The intricate elaboration of an answer began. Meanwhile, US forces in Florida began maneuvers that could be preparation for an invasion and were pushed to maximum immediate alert level, which would mean unleashing nuclear war.
It seems that Khrushchev was not aware of the risk of his sharp bet until he was faced with the risk of US missiles starting to fly toward Moscow. Until then, he had skillfully handled the nuclear challenge as a “bluff” against the Americans. He realized late that he had gone too far and that he could actually provoke a nuclear war with disastrous consequences.
The two sides looked to the abyss of a war that would have much self-inflicted damage, but neither the fear nor the giddiness of the moment could guarantee it wouldn’t happen. Rather, it gave the impression that it was almost inevitably bound to happen.
Then a complicated remote negotiation began that culminated in an agreement on the 28th: the USSR would withdraw its missiles from Cuba in exchange for the US commitment not to invade the island and, without disclosing it, the dismantling of US missiles in Turkey .
Two years later, in October 1964, the Politburo removed Khrushchev from office. Among the harsh accusations leveled against him, most of them on domestic politics, some were related to the Cuban Missile Crisis: his irresponsible and adventurous attitude had caused a very dangerous crisis with unforeseen consequences and had managed to worsen Soviet influence in America. .
The parallels with the current situation in Ukraine are many and interesting, with the opposite predominating. The invader is now Russia, the external containment force, NATO.
Ukraine’s rapprochement with the West has been a growing trend in fact since the country’s independence in 1991. Russian influence, on the other hand, has never been negligible, but it is declining. The Kremlin’s initially tolerant attitude grew increasingly suspicious, turning into hostility towards the West by the end of the first decade of the century. Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 accentuated that animosity. Official Russian nationalism became fiercer and anti-Western, or, as Putin would put it, anti-Anglo-Saxon.
In 2014, Russia decided to cross the red line: In a sneaky way, by those “green men” with no insignia who identified everyone as Russian troops, it violated the borders it had promised to respect in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. responded with tougher sanctions, very shy. The action of violence, camouflaged as ‘no war’, started a deaf confrontation that lasted eight years.
On February 22, 2022, a new “special military action”, a real invasion of Ukraine after impending military exercises, presented the world with the dilemma of how to respond to the challenge.
The response has been intense Western-backed Ukrainian military resistance which has shown that Russia’s military effectiveness is in part “bluff”. Russia could lose the war. Faced with such a scenario, their dilemma is once again to resort to nuclear weapons, this time to perpetuate the aggression.
It has gone much further than in Cuba. No one has installed nuclear missiles in Ukraine, on the contrary, they were withdrawn in exchange for a commitment to respect its borders, which Russia has violated. The country has been invaded, forcibly deprived of its sovereignty over part of its territory with the threat of razing it to the ground if it does not agree.
This is no longer a threat. It is more reminiscent of Castro’s insane insistence in 1962 to deploy nuclear weapons against the US military as soon as possible. Khrushchev did not allow it, he concentrated on reaching an agreement, avoided the war and, deposed, died in his bed. Malinovsky died while defense minister. Kennedy was assassinated a year after the missile crisis.
This article was published in ‘Het Gesprek’.
Source: La Verdad
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