Details Emerge Of Cold War Nuclear Threat By Cuba

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USS ALASKA
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Details Emerge Of Cold War Nuclear Threat By Cuba

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New York Times
September 22, 2009
Pg. D4


Details Emerge Of Cold War Nuclear Threat By Cuba

By William J. Broad

In the early 1980s, according to newly released documents, Fidel Castro was suggesting a Soviet nuclear strike against the United States, until Moscow dissuaded him by patiently explaining how the radioactive cloud resulting from such a strike would also devastate Cuba.

The cold war was then in one of its chilliest phases. President Ronald Reagan had begun a trillion-dollar arms buildup, called the Soviet Union “an evil empire” and ordered scores of atomic detonations under the Nevada desert as a means of developing new arms. Some Reagan aides talked of fighting and winning a nuclear war.

Dozens of books warned that Reagan’s policies threatened to end most life on earth. In June 1982, a million protesters gathered in Central Park.

Barack Obama, then an undergraduate at Columbia University, worried about the nuclear threat and later wrote as a student and a journalist about ways to avoid global annihilation.

The future president didn’t know half the danger.

The National Security Archive, a private research group at George Washington University, recently made public documents that reveal the nuclear threat in new detail. The two-volume study, “Soviet Intentions 1965-1985,” was prepared in 1995 by a Pentagon contractor and based on extensive interviewing of former top Soviet military officials.

It took the security archive two years to get the Pentagon to release the study. Censors excised a few sections on nuclear tests and weapon effects, and the archive recently posted the redacted study on its Web site.

The Pentagon study attributes the Cuba revelation to Andrian A. Danilevich, a Soviet general staff officer from 1964 to ’90 and director of the staff officers who wrote the Soviet Union’s final reference guide on strategic and nuclear planning.

In the early 1980s, the study quotes him as saying that Mr. Castro “pressed hard for a tougher Soviet line against the U.S. up to and including possible nuclear strikes.”

The general staff, General Danilevich continued, “had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S.”

That information, the general concluded, “changed Castro’s positions considerably.”

Moscow’s effort to enlighten Mr. Castro to the innate messiness of nuclear warfare is among a number of disclosures in the Pentagon study. Other findings in the study include how the Soviets strove for nuclear superiority but “understood the devastating consequences of nuclear war” and believed that the use of nuclear weapons had to be avoided “at all costs.”

The study includes a sharp critique of American analyses of Soviet intentions, saying the Pentagon tended to err “on the side of overestimating Soviet aggressiveness.”
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Karl Heidenreich
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Re: Details Emerge Of Cold War Nuclear Threat By Cuba

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Good to know that Obama, the guy that now has to defend the western hemisphere against every kind of threat, use to "boo" Reagan, the guy that actually defeated soviet comunism. People can sleep and rest assured of their leader...
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Karl Heidenreich
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Re: Details Emerge Of Cold War Nuclear Threat By Cuba

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Ooops, forgot about congratulating Obama for handing a victory to Medvev (Putin) for withdrawing of the missile shield (and leaving Poland, again, with their ass in the air)in exchange of... NOTHING. Obama would have been Brezhnev´s wet dream....
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
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RF
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Re: Details Emerge Of Cold War Nuclear Threat By Cuba

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The revelations here don't exactly show Castro as a very astute leader. I am puzzled as to why Bill Casey didn't have this situation exposed at the time, to discredit Castro, presumably it was to protect the sources of the info?
''Give me a Ping and one Ping only'' - Sean Connery.
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RF
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Re: Details Emerge Of Cold War Nuclear Threat By Cuba

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Karl Heidenreich wrote: Obama would have been Brezhnev´s wet dream....
Barack Obama the student activist and Barack Obama as US President I suspect are two very different political animals. Barack as student activist would no doubt be totally opposed to US forces being in Afghanistan, President Obama is piling more forces in because he says the US isn't winning. In that respect he isn't very different from Lyndon Johnson.

As for Brezhnev's wet dream, well that was Harold Wilson - until Wilson became Prime Minister and MI5 told him how the Soviets were spying on him....
''Give me a Ping and one Ping only'' - Sean Connery.
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Re: Details Emerge Of Cold War Nuclear Threat By Cuba

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RF wrote:
Barack Obama the student activist and Barack Obama as US President I suspect are two very different political animals. Barack as student activist would no doubt be totally opposed to US forces being in Afghanistan, President Obama is piling more forces in because he says the US isn't winning. In that respect he isn't very different from Lyndon Johnson.

As for Brezhnev's wet dream, well that was Harold Wilson - until Wilson became Prime Minister and MI5 told him how the Soviets were spying on him....
As I understand it, he is carefully weighing the military and political situation and trying to determine whether Afghanistan is worth a lot more US lives and treasure. The greatest problem is the government there is pretty thoroughly corrupt and isn't really supported by the majority of the people, who don't see it helping them much. Big parts of the country are controlled by warlords whom the government doesn't really dictate to. Then we have the Taliban, and while they are strict Islamic fundamentalists and suppress women, not all Afghanis see that as a problem. They weren't nearly as corrupt as the current regime and suppressed the drug trade until they needed the money to fight us. Then you have the US populace, who don't necessarily support our presence there, and the other countries of the world, who don't seem to care much one way or the other.

If you can't solve some of these fundamental problems, having a powerful military on the ground there still isn't going to win. We won every major battle in Vietnam, but still lost the war. It cost us the lives of 50,000 young men and ripped apart our political fabic, which still hasn't healed. Some people think that if you just blow up enough stuff, that's all it takes. Maybe that's true if you have enough soldiers and want a huge empire and your moral outlook allows slaughtering enough people out of hand, but that's not the USA. That's Ghengis Khan.
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Re: Details Emerge Of Cold War Nuclear Threat By Cuba

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Then the answer is to pull out. Problem: how to do that without it appearing to be a defeat.
''Give me a Ping and one Ping only'' - Sean Connery.
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