Skip to main content

Cuban Missile Crisis

junoi.jpg


Today is the 53d anniversary of the day that President John Kennedy's advisors first informed him of the photographic evidence of offensive missiles in Cuba.

Thus, Oct. 16th might be considered the date of the start of the crisis that was resolved 12 days later, when Nikita Khrushchev publicly agreed to the dismantling or withdrawal of those missiles.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is important not only as one intense incident within the long Cold War, a stand-off stretching from 1945 to 1987. It is important as an example of game theory playing itself out in great power politics. The key was that the President had solid domestic political reasons not to be seen making concessions to the Soviet in return for the withdrawal of these missiles. Nonetheless, he also understood that he had to make some sort of concessions to NK in return for the withdrawal of these missiles.

The key concession was successfully kept secret not only at that time, but for more than a decade thereafter: JFK agreed to the withdrawal of the Jupiter missiles (the sort diagrammed above) from southern Italy and Turkey, as a quo pro quo. But as a political matter, he had to pretend that he had made no such agreement. The quid pro quo would have seemed a matter of weakness.

[I'm not clear now on when and through what means the news of this agreement became declassified/public knowledge. I've done a bit of googling but no hard research on the question. A little steerage from a reader of this blog in the right direction would be appreciated.]

At any rate, it seems to me that this act of deception had lamentable consequences. For the remainder of the Cold War period, there was a war-whoop party int he US that believed that if the US only when to the brink repeatedly and made its willingness to incite Armageddon known, the other side would back down on issue after issue. The resolution of the Cuba crisis, as the public falsely understood it, was an exhibit used by the war-whoop party each time.

It is a lucky thing we all survived the combination of nuclear confrontation and such deception.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak