Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "If Paris Was Nuked | The Cuban Missile Crisis | Day 00" video.

  1. You're ignoring the larger strategic context. The US nuclear threat was seen as a counterbalance to the massive Soviet superority in conventional weapons and soldiers in western Europe. It was a nuclear deterrent to a possible conventional invasion of western Europe. Putting missiles in Cuba was an aggressive move because it had the potential to take the US nuclear deterrent off the table, thereby freeing the Soviets to launch a massive conventional invasion of West Germany whenever they chose. Simply put, Soviet missiles in Cuba made Soviet aggression in Europe immune to nuclear retaliation and therefore made WW3 much more likely.
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  2. Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.
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  3. It was never a conflict of words. From before the day WW2 ended it was about a Soviet boot on the neck of eastern Europe backed by the most massive peacetime military establishment the world had, or still has, ever seen. Tanks running over protesters in East Berlin, Budapest, and Prague were never just words.
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  4.  @LiamE69  The General Secretary Bomb?
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  5. Well, it did getopretty warm there during the test. ;-)
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  6. They just didn't get creative. Hide it in a civilian freighter and park it in international waters a few miles off the coast of whatever city you want to destroy, then just cruise in and detonate whenever needed. Imagine the effect of that sucker went off in New York Harbor or San Francisco Bay. Of course you'd need an operator willing to commit suicide, but historically those haven;t been that hard to find... the US actually had backpack nukes deployed in Vietnam but thankfully never used.
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  7. An exchange of 48,00 nuclear warheads: not great, not terrible.
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  8. Well, hiding under your desk and facing away from the blast would have meant you wouldn't have been suffering from agonizing burns to your retinas during the seconds it took for the shock wave to reach you and obliterate you and the building you were in. make more sense now?
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  9.  @BigJon410  But the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!
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  10. Well, after a while it would be thousands and thousands of little pretty fires.
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  11. Because you're not looking at the larger strategic context in which the missiles were deployed. That's okay, neither is Indy. The US missiles were seen as a deterrent to the Soviets from using their massive superiority in conventional weapons and troops to launch an invasion of western Europe - a conventional force that NATO couldn't hope to match in the 1940s or 50s. It was a stalemate: the Soviets could easily win a conventional war in Europe, but they didn't dare start one for fear of nuclear retaliation, so neither side had anything to gain by starting a war. But if the Soviets could retaliate with their own nuclear strike, that meant neither side dared use nuclear weapons, which in turn meant that NATO had no practical means to either deter or defeat a massive Soviet conventional attack. So the weapons in Cuba were dangerous because they gave the Soviets a free hand to launch a massive conventional attack if they chose, which made war much more likely. In the long run that strategic balance shifted anyway as the Soviets developed more ICBMs and SLBMs that made a US nuclear attack on the USSR unthinkable, so the US and NATO had to beef up their conventional forces in Europe and elsewhere and look to other strategies (like shorter-ranged tactical nukes that might be used without provoking an ICBM exchange) to deter a conventional attack. And that process had already started by 1962, but the Cuban missiles threatened to destabilize the situation faster than NATO could respond.
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  12.  @LiamE69  DETERRENT. Not precisely the same as defensive. The USSR's defense was its massive superiority in conventional forces. They balanced each other out, but Soviet missiles in Cuba threatened to upset that balance and thus destabilize the situation. Are you actually too stupid to understand that, or just pretending to be?
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  13.  @SpartanThe300th  You are making the same error of ignoring the larger strategic context. Nuclear weapons did not exist in a vacuum.
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