[techdragon]

Yea, but you have to factor into your analysis the fact that at the time Soviet nuclear weapon design was leaning more towards inaccurate but with enough boom it doesn’t matter, so their weapons were on average larger and this limited their effective ballistic missile ranges. So Cuba, while a provocative encroachment, was from the Soviet side a necessary escalation of their military forces to counter things like the deployment of intermediate range ballistic missiles, such as the Jupiter, in Turkey and Italy.

Also … While the “Cuban” part of the crisis can be viewed as instigated by the Soviets, it would be awfully foolish to ignore the fact that they were reacting to the US/NATO moves to deploy missile forces in Europe… by accepting the request from Cuba for nuclear weapons to defend their country from America, which they only asked for after the failed invasion effort in the Bay of Pigs.

It’s never just as simple as “they started it”…

[hef19898]

True. Also interesting that part of the de-escalation was the quiet withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey. More often than not, there is no side starting something (WW2 is one example). The whole cold war was, it seems, a tit for tat between two nuclear powers, sometimes led by old seniles and drunks, over ideological differences. There was no Good vs. Evil.