China Hand — How Fidel Castro Almost Made Cuba the World's 5th Nuclear Power

Have a good laugh.

Recently, the tape recordings of the Oval Office discussions during the crisis were declassified and, according to Benjamin Schwartz in The Atlantic, yielded this priceless nugget:

On the first day of the crisis, October 16, when pondering Khrushchev’s motives for sending the missiles to Cuba, Kennedy made what must be one of the most staggeringly absentminded (or sarcastic) observations in the annals of American national-security policy: “Why does he put these in there, though? … It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a majornumber of MRBMs [medium-range ballistic missiles] in Turkey. Now that’d be goddamned dangerous, I would think.” McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, immediately pointed out: “Well we did it, Mr. President.”

This post is longish but worth the read if you are into history. It would be almost unbelievable if it weren't for the release of the transcripts.

China Matters
How Fidel Castro Almost Made Cuba the World's 5th Nuclear Power
China Hand

Masakatsu Ota — U.S. veterans reveal 1962 nuclear close call dodged in Okinawa

Another close call. Launch order issued mistakenly.

"Since I was trained on the nuclear weapon I knew that if all the missiles were unleashed there would not be much left of this world or the people on it. That haunts me to this day," Havemann, 73, told Kyodo News in Sparks, Nevada.

Kyodo News
U.S. veterans reveal 1962 nuclear close call dodged in Okinawa
Masakatsu Ota

William R. Polk — Ukraine War: A Reverse Cuban Missile Crisis

Guided by an aggressive neocon “regime change” strategy, the United States has stumbled into a potential military confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, a dangerous predicament that could become a Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, as ex-U.S. diplomat William R. Polk explains.

Not just me getting concerned with the direction this is going.

Consortium News
Ukraine War: A Reverse Cuban Missile Crisis

William R. Polk

William R. Polk is a veteran foreign policy consultant, author and professor who taught Middle Eastern studies at Harvard. President John F. Kennedy appointed Polk to the State Department’s Policy Planning Council where he served during the Cuban Missile Crisis.