Um... say what?
Neela said:
I'm surprised that JFK didn't manage to blow Earth right into nuclear winter.
There were top-level U.S. generals who strenuously pushed for that. They argued that by massively nuking the former Soviet Union we could start, end, and somehow "win" World War III. Curtis Lemay, who ran the B-29 fire-bombing campaigns over Japan during the late stages of WW II that resulted in immense numbers of Japanese being horribly burned to death and disfigured had no problem with the concepts of mass death, suffering and destruction. (Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to be removed from LeMay's fire-bombing target list so they could be nuked.) Dwight Eisenhower, with his clear memories of the horrors of the Allied invasion of Europe, had to hold off LeMay and his fellow right-wing militarists.
John Kennedy had to do the same. Curtis LeMay (among others) hated him. JFK narrowly averted a global nuclear holocaust when he faced down Nikita Kruschev during the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962, which is considered "the closest the world ever came to nuclear catastrophe." It was a crisis way beyond nail-biting intensity.
In the former Soviet Union, the Cold War scene was analogous (according to a Russian I met at a conference, who was in a position to know). The top-level generals pushed hard for a massive peremptory nuclear strike on the U.S., similarly thinking it would enable them to start, end, and somehow "win" W.W.III. The older members of the Politburo, who clearly remembered the horrors brought to Russia by the German invasion of W.W. II, were hard put to hold them in check. Fortunately for all of us, they succeeded.
Most Americans and, I would guess, most Russians have no real appreciation of how closely the world teetered on the brink of nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War years.* We with our short memories owe John F. Kennedy a great debt of gratitude. If he took medications to alleviate his pain — which was real, and as many, many people whose responsibilities are negligible by comparison do today — so be it.
*See, for instance:
Kennedy, Robert F., 1969, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
