Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (61244)	3/22/2005 9:52:54 PM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Raymond, Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I am a long term lurker here and an occasional poster. I think maybe in 1999 or 2000 I had a discussion with Jay though maybe it was at "CFZ" and not in the BBR. I read your posts with great intrest and also those of Jay, Maurice, EP and the rest. I don't suppose that it will suprise you to find that I may have a quibble or two myself. First on the Cuban missle crisis: In May 1961 Kennedy openly placed the 15 medium-range Jupiter missiles based in Turkey on operational status and a year later Khrushchev replied with the deployment of Russian missiles in Cuba, though the Soviet deployment was done under a cloak of secrecy. The Jupiters were a real irritation to Khrushchev and that coupled with his and Castro's belief that Kennedy was planning to launch a large scale invasion of Cuba led to the Cuban deployment, the biggest gamble of Khrushchev's career. The missile crisis, which played out over the summer and through October of 1962 is a fasicinating subject and now the subject of many well written volumes with the latter day works having the benefit of information from the Russian archives which has become available since the fall of the USSR. Read "One Hell of a Gamble" by Fursenko and Naftali c. 1997 and also the Seymour Hersh book "Camelot" In the heat of the crisis Castro was pushing the Soviet commander in Cuba, General Issa Pliyev to launch a first strike, Castro thinking that a US invasion force was on the way. If this had happened we would have replied with a full strike upon the Soviet Union itself and they would have replied to the extent they were able. At the time we possessed over 1500 B-52 and B-47 strategic bombers and nearly 200 ICBM's and untold thousands of nuclear warheads. The Soviets had essentially no bomber fleet and only a handfull of ICBM's but still their reply would have destroyed some American cities while leaving our strategic capacity undiminished. Can you imagine what would the American military might have done, after watching NY, DC, maybe Boston and Chicago smolder? They would have systematically nuked the Soviet Union back to the stone age and far beyond and probably would have done the same thing to Red China and any other potential threat. At the peak of the crisis this is the impossible challenge Khrushchev faced and he folded completely. JFK told intimates that he "cut of Khrushchev's balls". You say that the US Quid pro quo was the removal of the Jupiters in Turkey; later day revelations are that the real trade off was a firm promice by the Kennedy brothers not to invade Cuba. The Jupiters were useless anyway, first they were obsolete and slow to launch. And due to their location they were vunerable to a Soviet first strike, unlike our ICBM's, bombers and submarines, which we had in abundance. At the time of the missile crisis my uncle was a Georgia Democrat politician of some stature. He was informed through his connections to the administration to "start digging that the Russian missiles are coming" and we started digging. Maybe the info came from Dean Rusk, JFK's Secretary of State, a fellow Georgian and neighbor and friend of my uncle. I remember that the idea being that the primary target was Lockheed Aircraft, some 40 miles away but that the missiles that were coming "were as likely to land on us as on Lockheed". In the aftermath of the crisis we were told that the missiles were never armed; their warheads being on those ships that the navy repelled. Now we know that General Pliyev had at least 134 operational warheads, maybe more. Slagle