Quote:
Originally Posted by theaustinescorts
When the US agreed to pull atomic missiles out of Turkey the Russians were happy to remove theirs from Cuba in 1962.
When the US takes its missiles out of Romania and other places they just put in, right on the Russian's border, then the Russians will take there's out of Cuba.
|
If I were in your shoes, I would not bet on that.
On a beautiful day in summer of 2002, as I recall, I went to the Wednesday lunch buffet at The Mens Club of Dallas, as was my standard practice at that time. I found myself talking with a very interesting older gentleman.
He was the only B-52 aircraft commander in the US Air Force who did not fly his airplane out to his Fail-Safe point on That Day during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was because he and his crew were landing, after a long training flight, when the orders went out.
He described meeting his brother officers on the flight line, as he and his crew were walking in and they were going to their airplanes. He said that every single one of them was "white as a sheet". They all believed, to a man, that This Was It.
It wasn't the US pulling missiles out of Turkey that got the Russians to back down. It was the radar reports coming into the Kremlin, showing a whole bunch of B-52s arriving on station, and the realization that the US was fully prepared to end Russian history over this threat.
Khrushchev blinked. The Soviet Union backed down.