Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Kennedy, the Lying Politician | The Cuban Missile Crisis I Prelude 2" video.

  1. Joe Kennedy, the guy who as ambassador the the UK in 1940 advised FDR to let Britain fall to Hitler unassisted by the US.
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  2. It's not enough to do any of that if they are used as they were intended to be used - mostly to target the other side's weapons, not to level cities in uninvolved third countries. And a lot of the point of having 20,000 warheads is to deter the enemy from launching a first strike - even if he succeeds in taking out 99% of your arsenal, what's left is enough to make "winning" such a war a losing proposition. A smaller arsenal increases the risk that the enemy might calculate that he can take out enough of it in a massive first strike to make his vulnerability to retaliation low enough to give him a free hand to do whatever he wants.
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  3. I mean, facing away from the window at least meant you would be blinded by agonizing burns to your retinas in the 10 seconds or so before the shock wave blew the building apart and killed you.
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  4. It was all fun and games until the invention of agriculture.
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  5. Sadly, they perished in the bombing of Dresden in 1945.
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  6. What intelligent person who had the slightest first-hand experience, or even secondhand knowledge, of Soviet communism would ever choose to live under it?
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  7. Dead ones?
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  8. Uncle Junior definitely thinks the world of JFK.
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  9. How did not having such a complex work out for Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Greece, Yugoslavia, et. in the 1940s?
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  10. The ability to survive a first strike. And 300 nuclear warheads is not remotely near enough to "obliterate the earth". It is hopeless to try and understand nuclear policy and the balance of power without understanding the intended use of those weapons and the larger strategic context within which they existed. Leaders at the time did not view them chiefly as weapons of mass destruction to be hurled randomly at cities around the globe to kill as many human beings as possible.
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  11. It was the same half-measures nonsense that plagued the Johnson and Carter administrations. If you're going to invade Cuba, just f$#@ing invade Cuba and do it right. If you're too worried about offending people by invading Cuba, don't invade Cuba. Kennedy foolishly thought that by half-assing the invasion, changing the site, refusing to commit US naval or air cover, and so forth he could avoid looking like an aggressor. So he doomed the invasion to failure and came off looking like an aggressor anyway. As if anyone in Cuba was ever going to see it as anything but a US invasion. Nixon was 100% right about Kennedy and what a terrible president he was going to be, and in the event turned out to be.
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  12. Let's face it, who wouldn't nail M.M. in the White House if they had the chance?
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  13. Ask now what your country can do for you... ask what it can do for ME!
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  14.  Trp Account  That depends on what you're counting. The US has a few more warheads actually deployed, Russia has a few more in reserve, overall they're roughly in parity and both far in excess of the rest of the world combined.
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  15. OsWaLd WaS a PaTsY, it WaS tHe SeCoNd ShOoTeR oN tHe GrAsSy KnOll.
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  16. It really galls me that people idealize a monster like Che Guevara. The date of Che's execution should be a holiday throughout South America.
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  17. Ask someone who live on both sides of the Iron Curtain during that era.
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  18. "But Real Communism has never been tried!!!" In this context, communism is that which is practiced by the Communist Party. "All state, no markets" was defined by them, as by Marx, not as the ultimate desired end state but as a necessary transition stage on the way to the ultimate goal of the classless and stateless society.
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  19. Another crucial factor in his election was Mafia support, which meant the support of the corrupt political machines the Mob controlled. It's been said that the margin of Kennedy's victory in Illinois, which given electoral math was the margin of his victory nationwide, was the voting population of Chicago's cemeteries. JFK's subsequent unleashing of his brother, the AG, on the Mafia is thought by many to be a motive they had for conspiring to assassinate him. If there's one thing the Mafia really, really hates (other than informants) it's someone they buy who refuses to stay bought.
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  20. Because you're a dirty commie?
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  21. That's a pretty low bar.
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  22. Kennedy's margin of victory in 1960 was the voting population of Chicago's cemeteries. Oh, and "they" wanted their casinos back in Havana, which may very well be why "they" conspired to assassinate JFK and then sent "their" man Ruby to tidy up loose ends.
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  23. "Is"? 1991 called, it wants its coup back.
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  24. That wasn't how they were intended to be used.
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  25.  @andersonandrighi4539  Not if the other guy gets a first strike in and take out most of your arsenal. The reason to have 20,000 bombs is that even if they other guy takes out 95% of them with a successful first strike you'll still have enough to annihilate him in retaliation. That's the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction - the fact that it is impossible to attack without being destroyed by the counterstrike deters anyone from attacking to begin with. If you have 100 bombs, and a first strike takes out 95 of them, sure, you can do horrific damage in reply, but WW2 showed that nations could take far worse than that and keep fighting. So the other guy might be tempted to strike first if it looked like war might be on the horizon.
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  26. Maybe on Mars. Care to study the respective figures for military demobilization following WW2 in the US and the USSR?
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  27. The practical answer is that the Cold War started and the US realized it needed a rebuilt Germany as part of its alliance to contain the Soviets. As to why the US didn't invade Cuba, the two main reason were that the US public had little stomach for taking the heavy casualties that would inevitably have resulted (as was seen later in Vietnam), and the government was afraid that such an invasion would provoke a violent Soviet response somewhere else in the world that might lead to WW3.
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  28. Because that's not how they were intended to be used.
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  29. The greater US missile threat against the USSR was meant to be a counterweight to the massive Soviet superiority in conventional military forces.
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  30. They couldn't, though. Sputnik was smaller and lighter than any nuclear warhead the Soviets had.
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  31. Not even close. And not anywhere near the league of Ronald Reagan.
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  32. The press had been keeping a lid on his scandalous extramarital affairs (how different things were back then!) but by the time of his death they were getting fed up and about ready to blow the lid off. That probably would have doomed him in the 1964 election.
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  33. If you're going to discuss the origins of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, it borders on the criminal to exclude the crucial fact that in the wake of WW2 the US and UK underwent a massive demobilization while the USSR did not - sources vary, but in 1948 the US Army probably had approximately 400,000 soldiers while the Soviet Red Army still had something like 4 million. You speak of, for example, confrontations in Berlin as if these confrontations were on anything remotely approaching an equal basis militarily, which is absolutely contrary to fact. For the US, nuclear weapons were seen as a relatively inexpensive way to balance out this massive Soviet conventional military superiority. This policy continued throughout the Eisenhower administration: conventional US forces were built up substantially after the outbreak of the Korean War, but never to anything approaching the level of Soviet forces until the Vietnam War escalation. NATO was another part of the western response to this massive Soviet military establishment, the largest peacetime military force in the history of the planet. This becomes particularly important in looking at the Cuban missile crisis. Less informed observers will point to the US superiority in nuclear warheads, and the deployment of land-based nuclear missiles in places like Turkey with the ability to strike the USSR, and say the US was overreacting because the missiles in Cuba weren't doing anything the US wasn't already doing to the Soviets. But this ignores the larger strategic context in which these weapons were deployed. No world leaders in 1962 saw nuclear weapons solely in terms of a nuclear exchange trying to wipe out the other's cities; they were assets in a much larger and more complex strategic picture. Specifically, the US nuclear threat was seen primarily as a deterrent to Soviet use of their massive conventional superiority to overrun western Europe. NATO didn't have the conventional military capacity to invade eastern Europe, while the USSR and the Warsaw Pact didn't dare invade western Europe for fear of provoking nuclear retaliation; thus, there was a stalemate in which neither side had much to gain by starting a war. Putting missiles in Cuba or anywhere else that gave the USSR a substantial capacity to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike changed the situation dramatically. The threat Kennedy and the military planners feared from this wasn't a Soviet first strike (which still would have been suicidal), it was that by making Soviet retaliation a serious threat it removed NATO's nuclear deterrent from the table in the scenario of a conventional war in Europe, and thus gave the Soviets a free hand to launch such an invasion if they chose without having to worry about a nuclear response. Put simply, Soviet missiles in Cuba made the threat of a massive conventional war in Europe much more likely than it was in the absence of those missiles.
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  34. I mean, at least he wasn't being chased by a giant killer rabbit.
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  35. Everyone knows that it was the vile Hun and his villainous empire building that led to WW1!
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  36. God made men, Sam Colt made men equal.
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  37. The Japanese destroyer was doing 25 knots or more when they collided and didn't stop or turn back. It was in a hurry to get back to Rabaul before daylight brought the threat of American air attack. It was pretty obvious to them that the PT boat had been completely destroyed.
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