The left just never stops lying. Here is the true story about the Cuban Missile crisis. With the advent of ballistic missiles and effective radar, it was apparent that manned bombers would not be all that effective at delivering atomic weapons into Russia. Our missiles did not have a long enough range to hit all of Russia if fired from the U.S. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles negotiated a deal with Turkey. We put our missiles in Turkey. From that point they could hit any target in the greater Soviet Union.
This put the Russians at a severe disadvantage. From Soviet Union soil they could only hit the northern most portions of the United States. We were in the drivers seat. We could destroy all of the Soviet Union and they could destroy less than half of the U.S. We would sustain huge losses, but we would survive an all out nuclear war,and the Russians would not.
To remove our advantage Khrushchev decided to put his missiles into Cuba. From that point he could hit any target in the USA. His object was to achieve nuclear parity with the USA. We had nuclear superiority with our missiles in Turkey. Khrushchev wanted parity or superiority if he could get it.
There were, from Russia's standpoint, two possible outcomes of putting missiles in Cuba that were good. The first was for the United States to do nothing. Russia would keep the missiles in Cuba. Castro was and is a loose cannon. From Khrushchev's point of view, Castro could take over the missiles and do something that could destroy both the US and Russia. The second outcome was Khrushchev's first choice of outcomes. That was for him to remove the missiles from Cuba and the United States to remove its missiles from Turkey.
That was the deal JFK got. We removed our missiles and the Russians removed theirs. There is no way that can be called an American victory. But the JFK buffs try to sell it that way.
Some of you may remember all the stink during the Reagan years when we put missiles in Germany and Britain. There were demonstrations all over the Europe. The left was claiming that putting missiles in Europe only made Europe a target. But Reagan was just restoring the tactical superiority that JFK lost. The advantage of Missiles in Europe was delivery time. The Russians would have no time to react before our missiles hit. We also put smaller tactical nukes in Germany. They could take out the superior Russian Ground forces in case of a Russian invasion of western Europe. Had not JFK lost our Turkish bases, we would have had that tactical advantage for years before Reagan got them into west Germany.
We of course in time developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that could hit anywhere in Russia. And the Russians did the same. We developed submarine launched missiles that could attack from the sea.
But for some period of time after the Cuban Missile Crisis we went from a position of nuclear superiority over the Russians to nuclear parity with the Russians
JFK got into a foreign policy poker game with Nikita Khrushchev. JFK had been dealt a whip hand by Ike Eisenhower. When JFK was killed Nikita Khrushchev had played his losing hand to a draw with JFK. JFK had squandered the whip hand Ike had given him.
JFK was a foreign policy disaster. We know that in the war for hearts and minds the Communists were wining the game in the 1960s. In Africa, in the Arab world, in South American, and in Asia the Communists were taking over nation after nation. We were liberating none. The one area in which we held superiority was in delivery of nuclear weapons. JFK lost that advantage.
Perhaps one of the reasons that both JFK and LBJ went as far as they did in NAM was to try to turn the tide of the communists wining every "war of liberation" they started. NAM for JFK and LBJ was an attempt to turn that tide. It failed.
You'll recall that at that time the Soviet Union and China were communist allies. When Dick Nixon took office he decided to try to drive a wedge between Russia and China. If he could cause a split between the two communist giants, we could play the divide and conquer game. We could make them compete for third would influence rather than share it. The carrot for the Chinese was the US market. Nixon got the Chinese to take a big bite of his carrot. He drove a wedge that caused a Russians and Chinese to split. That split never healed. Nixon tried to negotiate the Russians using a carrot too. That failed.
It remained for Ronald Reagan to continue the carrots for China and escalate the arms race with Russia until the Russian economy collapsed.
There was a time when we could have lost the cold war. JFK lost a major battle in that war. His side likes to claim it was a victory. If it was a US victory, then with equal honesty, one could claim the attack on Pearl Harbor was a victory for the USA.
We also put smaller tactical nukes in Germany.
The Davey Crockett Tactical Nukes were removed from the US Army maneuver battalions at about the same time. Was that part of the agreement between the US and the USSR also?
Uhhhhh, I think that the Russians were simply better at building reliable heavy-lift boosters at that stage of the Cold War. Remember Sputnik? Remember the numerous failed US attempts to match it?
We didn't scrap the SAC bombers, either. We just shifted to low level tactics, electronic jamming & radar decoys.
Bombers could be airborne during times of high threat, and then recalled. That is the very definition of THREAT. What can you do with an ICBM short of firing it?
Finally, the ICBM didn't really become a first-strike, push-button weapon until solid fuel boosters came-in with the deployment of the Minuteman system. Liquid-fueled rockets had to be fueled before fired -- a dangerous and time-consuming process. The Russian's didn't match the Minuteman until fairly late in the Cold War.