Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Shall we wipe Cuba off the Map? | The Cuban Missile Crisis I Day 01" video.

  1. The Soviets already had their knife, a massive conventional army threatening western Europe that NATO couldn't hope to oppose except by deterrence through the threat of a nuclear response. The provocation of the Cuban missiles was that by taking the US nuclear deterrent off the table they would free the Soviets to launch a conventional invasion if they chose.
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  2. Have you considered the possibility that the situation might possibly, maybe be slightly more complex than that analysis allows for?
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  3. You're ignoring the larger strategic context in both cases.
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  4. It's neither a right nor a privilege, it is merely the power.
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  5. It's not a matter of "right," it's a matter of strategic balance. And Stephen Jenkins' post above has it right: the US nuclear deterrent was a response to continued Soviet aggression backed a massive conventional military far beyond anything the west possessed, while the effect (both intended and practical) of the Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba was to upset that balance and give the USSR the ability to use its massive conventional forces to bully the west without fear of retaliation.
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  6.  @lyndondowling2733  You can only paint it as a balance if you ignore the massive Soviet advantage in conventional armaments and soldiers.
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  7. Completely ignoring the larger strategic context of those deployments, which was to deter the Soviets from launching an invasion with their massively greater conventional forces in Europe. The US did not have a corresponding conventional threat to the Soviets or their empire. The US had thoroughly disarmed following WW2 and the USSR had not; after the pattern of Soviet aggression culminating in the Korean War the US response was to look to its nuclear arsenal to deter the Soviets from launching any further conventional wars.
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  8. You can only arrive at that view by ignoring the larger strategic balance. The USSR had millions of men and tens of thousands of tanks ready to overrun West Germany and France, the US and NATO had no corresponding force and no threat of invading eastern Europe, let alone Russia itself. The US nuclear deterrent was meant to counter-balance that massive Soviet conventional threat, achieving a stalemate that would make war unlikely; the Soviet missile threat was meant to take that US deterrent off the table, thus freeing them to invade with that massive conventional army whenever they chose or, more realistically, to use the threat of such an invasion to bully western Europe and the US. It was a "balance" that made war a more attractive prospect to the Soviets and thus much more likely.
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  9. How it started was less relevant than how it turned out. Commies have always been great at hijacking legitimate popular revolutions, that's how the Bolsheviks took power to begin with.
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