

Cuban missile crisis: The other, secret one - drucken
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19930260

======
mjn
Anastas Mikoyan is an interesting character. In another application of tricky
diplomacy, he was one of the few Old Bolsheviks who managed to avoid being
purged by Stalin, but also got ahead of the game on denouncing Stalin soon
after his death, so avoided getting purged during de-Stalinization as well.

Less importantly, he's also the star of one of my favorite full-page magazine
photos of all time, which I discovered while thumbing through an old issue of
_Life_ magazine: <http://www.kmjn.org/notes/mikoyan_taco.html>

~~~
meric
It says "Even for the ruling elite of the USSR, the taco is approached in a
brief encounter, surfacing as trauma.", but I don't really understand. Why is
it brief and why is it surfacing as trauma? It's trying to say something but I
can't decipher it.

~~~
mjn
The final comment is an allusion to the article it links, which is only
tangentially related (in that it's also about tacos):
<http://www.kmjn.org/notes/specters_of_tacology.html>

My goal in that article was to connect some comments I'd been hearing from
philosophers, about taking things seriously in themselves (as opposed to only
reducing things to their cultural roles) with an offhand comment a professor I
know (Ian Bogost) had made about his hypothetical future career studying
"tacology", the science of tacos and burritos, which he argued were woefully
understudied.

So, I wrote a half-satirical "literature review" of the current academic study
of tacos and burritos, surveying tacological references I could find in the
literature. It really is a literature review, but many of the references I
turned up are strangely ominous, discussing "mass psychogenic illness",
violence in the parking lot of Taco Bell, and other such things. Thus, I weave
them into a Lovecraftian hypothesis, which proposes that there is a hidden
evil at the heart of tacology, which leads academics to study tacos and
burritos only superficially, shrinking back at the instant they realize they
have delved too deeply.

~~~
meric
Thanks for the explanation!

I missed the link the first time.

------
mturmon
The article says the deal between the US and the USSR was that the missiles
would be removed from Cuba and the US promised not to invade.

In fact, there was also a private deal for a matching _US_ missile withdrawal
that was not announced at the time. From wiki:

"Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and
return them to the Soviet ... in exchange for a US public declaration and
agreement never to invade Cuba. Secretly, the US agreed that it would
dismantle all US-built Jupiter IRBMs deployed in Turkey and Italy."

------
konstruktor
Those must also have been the warheads that already were on Cuba and McNamara
and Kennedy weren't aware of during the Missile Crisis.
<http://youtu.be/T_kxPwFJOQs?t=16m19s>

------
uberuberuber
Daniel Ellsberg discusses this in a great talk at the Nuclear Age Peace
Foundation. The US didn't think Khrushchev was insane enough to delegate
control over the weapons (which we did and still do), but he in fact had. He
revoked delegation at some point after Kennedy's speech if I recall correctly.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk1-2qtWph0>

~~~
jackpirate
Technically, the US Air Force owns and operates all our nuclear weapons in
Europe; but in the event of war, the control is automatically transfered to
the host country. This isn't _that_ different than what Kennedy thought was
going on in Cuba.

~~~
honestcoyote
Am I understanding you correctly? If war had broken out, say in the early
80's, West Germany, and not the United States, would have had the final word
on launching the Pershings stationed on their soil?

What would happen in the case of differing opinions? West Germany gets to
order a launch even when the US strongly opposes? Or the opposite with the US
wanting a launch and West Germany says no?

~~~
jackpirate
Technically they'd be under the NATO chain of command at that point. In
practice, a rogue major could have easily launched one if he wanted to.

Check out <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing> for more
information.

~~~
honestcoyote
Thank you for the information. Very interesting article and different than how
I had imagined the chain of command regarding nukes. I had always assumed it
was US (or UK or France, depending on who owned the bombs) only.

------
FrojoS
tl;dr: The Russian leaders decided to give Cuba 100 nukes that were still left
in Cuba and which the US hadn't taken notice of. But the russian diplomat
Mikoyan was sane enough to see this was an insane plan and he was brave enough
to stop it single handed. He made up a russian law that would forbid Russia to
hand over nukes to foreign countries. The Cuban's swallowed it and the nukes
were shipped back to Russia.

------
afterburner
So the Russians are saying that they themselves had to defuse another crisis,
and thank goodness, because that Castro was a crazy man? Not impressed...

On an unrelated note, I'm glad the author got the Defcon scale right. Although
it's really usually just Hollywood that gets it wrong.

------
bootload
_"... Tactical weapons include not only gravity bombs and short-range
missiles, but also artillery shells, land mines, depth charges, and torpedoes
for anti-submarine warfare. Also in this category are nuclear armed ground-
based or shipborne surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and air-to-air missiles.
..."_ ~ <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_nuclear_weapon>

Anyone care to speculate what TNW where issued by the Russians?

------
rohamg
I didn't know that! One wonders what the hell they were thinking in the first
place.

~~~
guylhem
They were thinking on a global basis. Cuba could have ceased cooperating with
the USSR, which needed to maintain a "global presence" to look like a good
match for the US.

Giving away missiles that were already there, unknown to the CIA, and not even
concerned by the agreement would certainly have been a good move to keep the
alliance with Cuba strong - IFF the leader was considered stable enough to
consider them as a gift of goodwill to establish long term deterrence, and not
something to be used within the next years - or even right now.

The guy must have mastered the art of negotiation to take them away - or to
have given much more in return to Cuba that was required to maintain an
alliance (ex: exports, money, ...)

