Two minutes to midnight

Are we closer to midnight now?

I do not know.

But it looks like we are closer.

No?

Yup. Like 5-year-old boys in the school playground.

https://twitter.com/RusEmbUSA/status/984980480234868736/photo/1

Makes the current situation seem even more dire.  A soon as someone decides on a 'tactical' strike, an escalation becomes inevitable.  Like any other form of human engagement.  A disagreement becomes a row, becomes an argument, becomes a slanging match, becomes a fight, becomes a free-for-all...

I think you'll find it was far worse than that.

"...until 1992, at a conference in Cuba of American, Soviet and Cuban veterans of the crisis, no Americans knew that the Soviets had deployed more than 100 “tactical” nuclear weapons in Cuba. These smaller, battlefield-oriented nuclear weapons were to defend against an expected marine invasion by the United States. Prior to October 22, local Soviet officers were pre-authorized to use them against an American invasion force. The Kennedy brothers and all their advisers had mistakenly thought that the only nuclear-related forces on Cuba were medium- and intermediate-range missiles; intelligence assets were searching for those missiles’ corresponding nuclear warheads, but had not been able to locate them. The deployment of tactical nuclear weapons was unknown, and the delegation to use them utterly unimaginable to American intelligence analysts and leaders."

"Had another American plane been hit, the United States probably would have responded first by bombing missile installations. Depending on how Castro and his forces reacted to that, and whether the Soviets would have begun removing the detected missiles, Kennedy and the military planned that the United States would begin an invasion. The military found the idea of invasion desirable, or at least feasible, because as McNamara told Kennedy, there were “about 8 to 10,000” Soviet “personnel, probably military personnel” in Cuba. As it turned out, this was an “unknown known” — a thing American leaders thought they knew but did not. The Soviets actually had far more troops on the island — 42,000 — which was not revealed until 2008.

If Kennedy had assented to his generals’ constant pressure to invade Cuba, the higher-than-known Soviet troop numbers likely would have made the landing and ground war much more difficult to win. This, in turn, would have created even greater pressure on Kennedy to escalate in order to avoid a politically devastating defeat. Such escalation would have then probably driven the Cubans/Soviets to use some of these nuclear weapons against invading forces. American officials would have assumed that Khrushchev had authorized this use of nuclear weapons. Therefore nuclear war was underway at Khrushchev’s instigation. The United States’ nuclear plans then called for unleashing most of the more than 18,000 nuclear weapons the U.S. military deployed in 1962, against the Soviet bloc and China.

When McNamara learned about the Soviet deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba 30 years after the fact, in 1992, he declared: “We don’t need to speculate what would have happened. It would have been an absolute disaster for the world … No one should believe that a U.S. force could have been attacked by tactical nuclear warheads without responding with nuclear warheads. And where would it have ended? In utter disaster.”

Similar harrowing developments were also occurring at sea, even in the days after the crisis seemingly had ended. In brief, Soviet submarines patrolling around Cuba were equipped with nuclear-armed torpedoes, unbeknownst to U.S. officials. When American vessels dropped “practice” depth-charges intended to signal the submarines to surface, the submarines’ commanders thought they were under attack. Two of the crews prepared to launch their nuclear-armed torpedoes against American ships, but for different reasons ultimately withheld firing. These crews, when they later returned to Russia after the crisis, were reprimanded for not heroically violating orders and firing. Again, none of this was known by Americans until decades after the crisis."

source: https://www.politico.eu/article/terrifying-lesson-of-the-cuban-missile-crisis-nuclear-weapons-kennedy/ 

I think you'll find it was far worse than that.

"...until 1992, at a conference in Cuba of American, Soviet and Cuban veterans of the crisis, no Americans knew that the Soviets had deployed more than 100 “tactical” nuclear weapons in Cuba. These smaller, battlefield-oriented nuclear weapons were to defend against an expected marine invasion by the United States. Prior to October 22, local Soviet officers were pre-authorized to use them against an American invasion force. The Kennedy brothers and all their advisers had mistakenly thought that the only nuclear-related forces on Cuba were medium- and intermediate-range missiles; intelligence assets were searching for those missiles’ corresponding nuclear warheads, but had not been able to locate them. The deployment of tactical nuclear weapons was unknown, and the delegation to use them utterly unimaginable to American intelligence analysts and leaders."

"Had another American plane been hit, the United States probably would have responded first by bombing missile installations. Depending on how Castro and his forces reacted to that, and whether the Soviets would have begun removing the detected missiles, Kennedy and the military planned that the United States would begin an invasion. The military found the idea of invasion desirable, or at least feasible, because as McNamara told Kennedy, there were “about 8 to 10,000” Soviet “personnel, probably military personnel” in Cuba. As it turned out, this was an “unknown known” — a thing American leaders thought they knew but did not. The Soviets actually had far more troops on the island — 42,000 — which was not revealed until 2008.

If Kennedy had assented to his generals’ constant pressure to invade Cuba, the higher-than-known Soviet troop numbers likely would have made the landing and ground war much more difficult to win. This, in turn, would have created even greater pressure on Kennedy to escalate in order to avoid a politically devastating defeat. Such escalation would have then probably driven the Cubans/Soviets to use some of these nuclear weapons against invading forces. American officials would have assumed that Khrushchev had authorized this use of nuclear weapons. Therefore nuclear war was underway at Khrushchev’s instigation. The United States’ nuclear plans then called for unleashing most of the more than 18,000 nuclear weapons the U.S. military deployed in 1962, against the Soviet bloc and China.

When McNamara learned about the Soviet deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba 30 years after the fact, in 1992, he declared: “We don’t need to speculate what would have happened. It would have been an absolute disaster for the world … No one should believe that a U.S. force could have been attacked by tactical nuclear warheads without responding with nuclear warheads. And where would it have ended? In utter disaster.”

Similar harrowing developments were also occurring at sea, even in the days after the crisis seemingly had ended. In brief, Soviet submarines patrolling around Cuba were equipped with nuclear-armed torpedoes, unbeknownst to U.S. officials. When American vessels dropped “practice” depth-charges intended to signal the submarines to surface, the submarines’ commanders thought they were under attack. Two of the crews prepared to launch their nuclear-armed torpedoes against American ships, but for different reasons ultimately withheld firing. These crews, when they later returned to Russia after the crisis, were reprimanded for not heroically violating orders and firing. Again, none of this was known by Americans until decades after the crisis."

source: https://www.politico.eu/article/terrifying-lesson-of-the-cuban-missile-crisis-nuclear-weapons-kennedy/ 

Yup. Like 5-year-old boys in the school playground.

https://twitter.com/RusEmbUSA/status/984980480234868736/photo/1

Makes the current situation seem even more dire.  A soon as someone decides on a 'tactical' strike, an escalation becomes inevitable.  Like any other form of human engagement.  A disagreement becomes a row, becomes an argument, becomes a slanging match, becomes a fight, becomes a free-for-all...