Cuban missile crisis: The other, secret one | Hacker News Reader

Cuban missile crisis: The other, secret one

bbc.co.uk

142 pointsdrucken17 comments

Anastas Mikoyan is an interesting character. In another application of tricky diplomacy, he was one of the few Old Bolsheviks who managed to avoid being purged by Stalin, but also got ahead of the game on denouncing Stalin soon after his death, so avoided getting purged during de-Stalinization as well.

Less importantly, he's also the star of one of my favorite full-page magazine photos of all time, which I discovered while thumbing through an old issue of Life magazine: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/mikoyan_taco.html

It says "Even for the ruling elite of the USSR, the taco is approached in a brief encounter, surfacing as trauma.", but I don't really understand. Why is it brief and why is it surfacing as trauma? It's trying to say something but I can't decipher it.

The final comment is an allusion to the article it links, which is only tangentially related (in that it's also about tacos): http://www.kmjn.org/notes/specters_of_tacology.html

My goal in that article was to connect some comments I'd been hearing from philosophers, about taking things seriously in themselves (as opposed to only reducing things to their cultural roles) with an offhand comment a professor I know (Ian Bogost) had made about his hypothetical future career studying "tacology", the science of tacos and burritos, which he argued were woefully understudied.

So, I wrote a half-satirical "literature review" of the current academic study of tacos and burritos, surveying tacological references I could find in the literature. It really is a literature review, but many of the references I turned up are strangely ominous, discussing "mass psychogenic illness", violence in the parking lot of Taco Bell, and other such things. Thus, I weave them into a Lovecraftian hypothesis, which proposes that there is a hidden evil at the heart of tacology, which leads academics to study tacos and burritos only superficially, shrinking back at the instant they realize they have delved too deeply.

Thanks for the explanation!

I missed the link the first time.

Haha that is awesome yet also educational

The article says the deal between the US and the USSR was that the missiles would be removed from Cuba and the US promised not to invade.

In fact, there was also a private deal for a matching US missile withdrawal that was not announced at the time. From wiki:

"Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet ... in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement never to invade Cuba. Secretly, the US agreed that it would dismantle all US-built Jupiter IRBMs deployed in Turkey and Italy."

Those must also have been the warheads that already were on Cuba and McNamara and Kennedy weren't aware of during the Missile Crisis. http://youtu.be/T_kxPwFJOQs?t=16m19s

Daniel Ellsberg discusses this in a great talk at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The US didn't think Khrushchev was insane enough to delegate control over the weapons (which we did and still do), but he in fact had. He revoked delegation at some point after Kennedy's speech if I recall correctly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk1-2qtWph0

Technically, the US Air Force owns and operates all our nuclear weapons in Europe; but in the event of war, the control is automatically transfered to the host country. This isn't that different than what Kennedy thought was going on in Cuba.

Am I understanding you correctly? If war had broken out, say in the early 80's, West Germany, and not the United States, would have had the final word on launching the Pershings stationed on their soil?

What would happen in the case of differing opinions? West Germany gets to order a launch even when the US strongly opposes? Or the opposite with the US wanting a launch and West Germany says no?

Technically they'd be under the NATO chain of command at that point. In practice, a rogue major could have easily launched one if he wanted to.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing for more information.

Thank you for the information. Very interesting article and different than how I had imagined the chain of command regarding nukes. I had always assumed it was US (or UK or France, depending on who owned the bombs) only.

tl;dr: The Russian leaders decided to give Cuba 100 nukes that were still left in Cuba and which the US hadn't taken notice of. But the russian diplomat Mikoyan was sane enough to see this was an insane plan and he was brave enough to stop it single handed. He made up a russian law that would forbid Russia to hand over nukes to foreign countries. The Cuban's swallowed it and the nukes were shipped back to Russia.

So the Russians are saying that they themselves had to defuse another crisis, and thank goodness, because that Castro was a crazy man? Not impressed...

On an unrelated note, I'm glad the author got the Defcon scale right. Although it's really usually just Hollywood that gets it wrong.

"... Tactical weapons include not only gravity bombs and short-range missiles, but also artillery shells, land mines, depth charges, and torpedoes for anti-submarine warfare. Also in this category are nuclear armed ground-based or shipborne surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and air-to-air missiles. ..." ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_nuclear_weapon

Anyone care to speculate what TNW where issued by the Russians?

I didn't know that! One wonders what the hell they were thinking in the first place.

They were thinking on a global basis. Cuba could have ceased cooperating with the USSR, which needed to maintain a "global presence" to look like a good match for the US.

Giving away missiles that were already there, unknown to the CIA, and not even concerned by the agreement would certainly have been a good move to keep the alliance with Cuba strong - IFF the leader was considered stable enough to consider them as a gift of goodwill to establish long term deterrence, and not something to be used within the next years - or even right now.

The guy must have mastered the art of negotiation to take them away - or to have given much more in return to Cuba that was required to maintain an alliance (ex: exports, money, ...)

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