"We Showed Them"

Belligerent, bellicose, roaring with anger and pride, the Cold War antagonists faced off in a showdown that would prove one or the other the victor in the game of chicken.  In the final analysis, with what is now shown to have occurred, what did the face off represent?  That one was more cold-bloodedly fearless than the other, certain of the outcome and prepared to wager that the other would blink, but not they?

A soldier looks at the outer casing of an old empty Soviet missile on exhibit as he works to paint it at the military complex Morro Cabana in Havana, Cuba. The world stood at the brink of Armageddon for 13 days in October 1962.

 Or, perhaps, that one was more rash and full of hubris than the other, unwilling to surrender the authority of his position as 'leader of the free world', while the other was in reality a more rational, realistic person who understood and recognized the finality of the intention, and thus chose to back down rather than provoke his adversary into a position from which no power could retrieve itself whole.

This was a serious game being played by two grown-up males, world leaders ostensibly aware of the toys they were playing with in their existential face-off.  Their decisions would impact horrendously on their immediate world, send shock waves of terror and destruction through their countries, and take the world back to a primitive place from which it had long and laboriously elevated itself, only to be thrown back to the end of times.

When we think of what might have occurred, it hardly impinges on our consciousness because the raw reality of total destruction is too awful, too complex and too surreal to begin to imagine.  And then, we are reminded that the very reality of total destruction that was avoided by a hairsbreadth back then is still quite possible, and possibly even more acutely possible than before.

Before, away back in 1962, two adversaries, two chiefs of the most powerful, technologically advanced nations of the time, flirted with the possibility and potential of goading one another into a first strike, each convinced the other meant to strike, and determined to take the initiative through proaction.  Currently, there are lethal-minded terror militias for whom no act of destruction is too intense to consider.

In their inexorable march to impose terror and eventually, in their aspirations, control and power, they will employ every and any act of destructive force, slaughtering untold numbers by design, to achieve their triumphal purpose.  Their mission is one guided by an imperial theocracy, and the use of nuclear weapons would only enhance their mission's purpose.  Should they ever obtain atomic warheads, they will be used.

The sobering assessment of the Cuban Missile Crisis in retrospect is that, in fact, the two principles, in their passion of rage against one another, behaved little better than terrorists.  "It was not this masterful exercise in precise, rational crisis management that everybody thought it was.  And it started to be this huge, scary thing that we got through by the skin of our teeth because a whole bunch of things broke in the right direction - and mostly because the two leaders in Moscow and Washington were scared out of their wits", according to David Welch, director, Balsillie School, interpreting the findings of historians Jim Blight and Janet Lang.

The two University of Waterloo historians analyzed the Cold War contretemps in a book they have just published, The Armageddon Letters.  Their conclusions are available also on www.armageddonletters.com.  The two Americans, Blight and Lang, who joined the Balsillie School of International Affairs, make the informed claim that "the conditions are all in place right now which make Armageddon possible."

John F. Kennedy placed a naval blockade in Cuban waters to prevent warheads from the Soviet Union reaching their intended Cuban launch sites.  Nikita Khrushchev chafed at this interruption of his plans when he reconsidered, thinking of the potential consequences.  His thought was of the "abyss of a world nuclear missile war", that he would have helped bring into the commission of reality by continuing to challenge American  belligerence.

The United States could not, in fact, countenance its Cold War enemy placing nuclear weapons at its back door; the USSR would have reacted in a similar fashion had the U.S. been successful at that time in persuading Ukraine that it should place nuclear missiles on its soil.  Moscow agreed it would dismantle the Cuban bases, the US. reciprocated by withdrawing nuclear installations from Turkey and Italy. 

And the world exhaled.