Nuclear weapons still have the power to instantly destroy the world
http://www.capebretonpost.com/Opinion/Columns/2012-10-23/article-3105130/Nuclear-weapons-still-have-the-power-to-instantly-destroy-the-world/1
Nuclear weapons still have the power to instantly destroy the world
Published on October 23, 2012
Gwynne Dyer
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What almost nobody knew until very recently is that the crisis did not really end on Oct. 28. A new book by Sergo Mikoyan The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of November reveals that it continued all the way through November.
U.S. intelligence was unaware that along with the SS-4s, the Soviet Union had also sent more than 100 shorter-range tactical nuclear missiles to Cuba. They werent mentioned in the Soviet-U.S. agreement on withdrawing the SS-4s from Cuba, so technically Khrushchev had not promised to remove them.
Castro was in a rage about having been abandoned by his Soviet allies, so, to mollify him, Khrushchev decided to let him keep the tactical missiles. It was crazy. Giving Castro 100 nuclear weapons was a recipe for a new and even bigger crisis in a year or two. Khrushchevs deputy, Anastas Mikoyan, who was sent to Cuba to tell Castro the happy news, quickly realized that he must not have them.
The second half of the crisis, invisible to Americans, was Mikoyans month-long struggle to pry Castros fingers off the 100 tactical nuclear missiles. In the end, he only succeeded by telling Castro that an unpublished (and in fact non-existent) law forbade the transfer of Soviet nuclear weapons to a foreign country. In December, they were finally crated up and sent home.
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