nuclear-news

Global nuclear war danger still, 50 years after Cuban missile crisis

Nuclear weapons still have the power to instantly destroy the world  October 23, 2012, This month is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis — which took place Oct. 16-28 in 1962 — so we’re going to hear a great deal about the weeks when the world almost died. But the past is a foreign country, a place where everything was in black and white, and men still wore hats, so it’s just scary stories about a long-gone time.

Or so it seems.
The outlines of the tale are well known. It was 17 years since the United States had used nuclear weapons on Japan, and the Soviet Union now had them, too. Lots of them. The American and Soviet arsenals included some 30,000 nuclear weapons, and not all of them were carried by bombers any more. Some were mounted on rockets that could reach
their targets in the other country in half an hour……

What almost nobody knew until very recently is that the crisis did not really end on Oct. 28. A new book by Sergo Mikoyan — “The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of November” — reveals that it continued all the way through November……. the whole world could have ended.

As Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defence secretary in 1962, said 40 years later: “We were just plain lucky in October 1962 — and without that luck most of you would never have been born because the world would have been destroyed instantly or made unlivable in October 1962.”

Then he said the bit that applies to us. “Something like that could happen today, tomorrow, next year. It will happen at some point. That is why we must abolish nuclear weapons as soon as possible.” They are still there, you know, and human beings still make mistakes.
http://www.capebretonpost.com/Opinion/Columns/2012-10-23/article-3105130/Nuclear-weapons-still-have-the-power-to-instantly-destroy-the-world/1

October 27, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | resources - print