58th book of 2020
** Man plans and god laughs, nuclear war doesn’t change the equation. **
- If Kennedy had followed the general’s advice and launched airstrikes against Cuba, with the Americans unaware of the strategic depth and tactical nuclear weapons already deployed in Cuba.
- If Vasily Arkhipov had not held his ground against the Submarine captain when the officers of b39 perceived they were under attack and the order came to fire a tactical warhead.
- The clean game theory and thoughts of linear escalation didn’t fit nicely into what happened.
** There’s always some son of a bitch that doesn’t get the word **
- America bungled into sabotage operations as well as a U2 overflight of the USSR at the most critical parts of the crisis.
- The ‘signaling strategy’ for telling USSR submarines to surface had not been communicated to soviet submarines, causing them to misinterpret practice depth charges as an attack.
- Khrushchev had not authorized the use of the SAM missile battery that shot down the U2 over Cuba.
- Both sides were ‘negotiating’ based on inaccurate information of what the other’s position was.
- Casualties on the USSR side included a missile truck that drove off a cliff while forces aimed to get into position to annihilate the Guantanamo base.
- The CIA was unable to locate the nuclear weapons in Cuba, despite the actual location being one of the prime targets, because it was insufficiently guarded.
- USSR had almost no security protocols around most of its nuclear weapons in Cuba.
** No one man should have all that power **
- Kennedy|Khrushchev meeting went poorly for Kennedy, which meant he now had something to prove.
- Kennedy felt constrained by political considerations as much as by the reactions from USSR.
- USSR Being behind in the strategic arms race made the Cuba gambit a more legitimate strategy
- the guns of august