Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "USA Starts the Atomic Arms Race | The Cuban Missile Crisis I Prelude 1" video.

  1. He hated Wayne's politics, but he loved him as an actor. Stagecoach was one of his favorite movies. He was a big fan of westerns (as well as gangster movies) in general.
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  2. Why would the USSR be asked to join NATO, when the whole point of NATO was contain the USSR? It's like asking why Stalin wasn't invited to join the Anti-Comintern Pact. Blaming the US military-industrial complex for the Cold War is a bad joke. After WW2 the West demobilized to the point that in 1948 the total size of the US Army was less than 400,000 troops. Stalin maintained an army of 4 million. The Cold War resulted solely from Stalin's continued militarization, aggression, and empire-building in the face of Western disarmament.
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  3. No, it was about political systems, with communism being the excuse offered in favor of totalitarianism. There was no one enforcing monolithic capitalism in the West, and much of Europe saw a substantial transition toward social democracy during this period without a word of complaint from Washington. It was only in the Soviet bloc that any deviation from the strict party line brought down the Soviet hammer as seen in Prague in 1968.
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  4.  @dalereynolds7638  There's "okay", and there's "better than being a slave in a totalitarian hellhole". Everything you mention is definitely the latter. More important, it's the choice that Americans made freely. Whether it was a wise or foolish choice is beside the point. Other western nations like Sweden made different choices. Again, the point is that they were able to make these choices freely, no one held a gun to their head and forced them to choose one system as was done by the Soviets in Eastern Europe for 44 years after WW2.
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  5. It was. Khrushchev lied massively about the Soviet ability to produce nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles; the US government knew it was a lie and so did Kennedy but he used it shamelessly for his campaign anyway. The government didn't give away the lie because it didn't want to compromise its intelligence assets in the USSR.
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  6. You can't understand nuclear weapons in the early 1960s in isolation, they were seen as one component in a comprehensive national defense strategy. For the US, nuclear weapons were seen as a counterbalance to the massive Soviet superiority in conventional weapons in Europe - the Soviets wouldn't dare use that massive superiority to overrun West Germany and France for fear of provoking nuclear retaliation. If the Soviets could effectively retaliate with a nuclear strike of their own, that would deter the US from launching a nuclear strike in any circumstances, which meant the nuclear deterrent against a Soviet conventional attack was now off the table. This made the prospect of a massive conventional war in Europe much more likely. That, and not the unlikely event of an actual Soviet strike on American cities, was the threat that Kennedy and his administration were so concerned about during the crisis. That's something the western public never understood about the Reagan-era buildup of short and intermediate ranged nuclear missiles in Europe in the 1980s. The point of those weapons was to have a force that could be used against a Soviet conventional invasion force without provoking a general nuclear exchange, because they didn't have the range to hit the USSR itself. Of course, the idea of their country becoming a "limited" nuclear battlefield was understandably very unpopular with the German people for reasons that should have been obvious. As it tuns out, the Soviet leadership never really had much stomach for starting a massive conventional war in Europe, but the western leaders had no way to be sure of that.
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  7. That's always been the standard commie playbook - it worked the same way in Nicaragua and for that matter in St. Petersburg. Insinuate yourself into a broad-based coalition of revolutionaries, and while your supposed comrades are working to overthrow the reactionary government you're spending your efforts putting yourself into position to stage a communist coup and hijack the revolution once the old government is out of the way. That's why, for example, the Contras in Nicaragua contained more ex-popular front members than former Somozistas - they were people who had been purged by the communist Sandinistas once they were no longer needed for the revolution.
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  8. I'm a bit irritated that Indy left out this crucial piece of information. The Red Army was about ten times the size of the US Army in 1948. Nuclear weapons were seen as a relatively inexpensive way to balance out that massive Soviet superiority in conventional arms. That policy continued throughout the Eisenhower administration; the conventional military was built up substantially from its late 1940s low point but it wasn't until the Vietnam War that it approached anything like the size of the Soviet military establishment.
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  9. He was right on the general point that there was a massive pro-Soviet conspiracy in America, but many of his specific allegations were complete lies and his methods were inexcusable. Even Nixon, whose anti-communist cred was as high as anyone's, thought McCarthy was off his nut.
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  10. You'd think they'd want to stock up before something like the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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  11. No. We do not talk about the cat.
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  12.  @TimeGhost  What you're leaving out is the massive demobilization of conventional forces by the US and UK at the end of WW2 which was not matched by the USSR. For the US, and particularly Eisenhower, atomic weapons were seen as a more cost-effective way to balance the massive perceived Soviet superiority in conventional weapons. See, for example, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2007/N2859.pdf
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  13. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't actually out to get you.
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  14. It was costing them heavily in public opinion. Trying to starve people never plays well in the media.
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  15. Yeah, how'd that work out under Stalin though? Or Mao, or Kim, or Castro, or Pol Pot, or any other communist dictator in the history of ever?
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  16. The US never backed Mao's China, we did thaw relations with them in the 1970s but that's something very different. As far as backing countries like Yugoslavia that was a way to try to woo them out from the communist bloc - the idea being that once they got out from under Moscow's thumb they might eventually liberalize, while the countries remaining in Moscow's grip would never be allowed to do so (as seen in Czechoslovakia in 1968).
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  17.  @Kanbei11  "Democratically elected in free and fair elections" - you mean like Hitler was? And if you're talking about Cuba, when has Cuba ever had a free and fair election? For that matter, when did Castro ever hold any contested election at all?
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  18. Just imagine how different history would be if the Yankees had signed Fidel.
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  19. Probably less that than the filming of The Conqueror on the nuclear test sites - that movie killed quite a few of the people who worked on it.
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