https://quillette.com/2022/10/25/in-the-shadow-of-the-mushroom-cloud/
The threat of a nuclear war, absent from our headlines for decades, is in the news again. Putin threatens Ukraine with an atomic strike and Biden tells us we’re closer to Armageddon than any time in the last 60 years. Meanwhile, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace flies to the US to discuss the danger of Russia detonating a nuclear bomb over the Black Sea as a show of destructive strength. A bumper crop of articles have appeared in the world press announcing that this time the nuclear threat could be in earnest. British MP Robert Seely, a long-time Russia expert, reminds us of the country’s first-use policy and warns that “saying Putin is bluffing is no longer serious.”
In the Spectator, historian Mark Galeotti tries to calm nerves by walking us through all the complicated steps the Kremlin would have to take in order to release a nuclear device. But in April, Galeotti was writing about Putin’s RS-28 Sarmat missile—a new super-weapon with a range of 11,000 miles and a maximum load-capacity of 50 megatons (over 2,500 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb), which carries 15 nuclear warheads dispersible to multiple locations. Reportedly, it is due to be operational in December. Meanwhile, in the US, bunker sales are soaring, with one company reporting that, following the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine in February, enquiries regarding shelters had risen from less than 100 a month to over 3,000. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, indolently at grass since the end of the Cold War, are apparently cantering over the horizon towards us once again.
Biden’s reference point for nuclear danger was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the comparison was apt. Go back exactly 60 years this week and we find a crisis with at least superficial similarities to the one we are experiencing today—two rival camps stonily contemplating one another, one of which had a smaller, less powerful country in its gunsights; a nation led by a charismatic leader in combat fatigues desperately calling for help from the other side. In 1962, however, the war was cold not hot, and the small country was Cuba, a Caribbean island just 90 miles from the United States.
That Cuba was menaced by the US is not in doubt. Since Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in 1958, it had been near the top of America’s “to do” list. The doomed and disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961—in which 1,400 anti-Castro Cubans were encouraged to storm the island, insufficiently supported by the White House, and duly captured and imprisoned by Castro—was only a temporary setback. It was followed by a US economic blockade and the infamous Operation Mongoose, a series of botched US assassination plots against Castro. A communist takeover on America’s doorstep was anathema to the White House. What if other Latin American nations followed suit?
