“The difference with the Cuban Missile Crisis is there were serious men in charge of the situation on both sides.”
The other REALLY BIG difference is that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba aimed at the U.S. and which would take just a few seconds from launch until landing on U.S. targets, thereby making them indefensible ... this was a direct, gigantic, and unacceptable threat to the security of the U.S. ...
That’s true, but once again that story usually misses the fact that Soviet action was reciprocal to the deployment of similar US PGM-19 missiles in Turkey aimed at USSR. And the crisis ended exactly the moment Kennedy agreed to remove it.
The situation is exactly the same now.
> The other REALLY BIG difference is that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba aimed at the U.S. <
And the U.S. had nuclear weapons in Turkey. That was right on the border with the USSR. Now, I’m not saying that JFK was wrong here. Quite the contrary. He played his hand perfectly.
But if you want to talk about Cuba in 1962, you should also consider how the Soviets viewed things: The U.S. has nuclear weapons in Turkey. Many a war has started because one side did not understand how the other side thought. World War I is a good example of that.