Xequecal wrote:
Childish? When was the last time you read a college level general History textbook? You know, the ones used by the general History classes pretty much everyone with a degree is required to take?
The last time I was in college. Why the **** would I read a textbook? There's plenty of regular books on history out there to read - many of them written by the same professors that produce the textbooks.
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I give "conservatives" a lot more credit than most.
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These books are usually more than willing to suggest that JFKs conservative military advisers were willing to accept the nuclear annihilation of three continents.
When? During the Cuban Missile Crisis? In the event of a general war? Accept it in return for what, exactly? Who the **** are his "conservative " advisors?
Strategists at that time were willing to accept that widespread nuclear devastation would be the cost of a generalized nuclear war, which in turn would most likely result from a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. They accepted that this was a likely consequence, not that it was something they were perfectly ok with happening. Even LeMay did not (contrary to popular misconception) advocate
preventative nuclear war, but rather
pre-emptive. The difference is important, becuase pre-emptive war is war commenced only when an enemy attack is imminent.
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(the fact that we had total superiority over the Soviets in 1962 is never mentioned) At best, the implication is they do so just so they can say that they "won" or "didn't back down." At worst, the implication is that they just wanted to slaughter Communists so badly that they were willing to pay any price to do so. The famous quote by some General who's name I forget about how, "at the end of the war, if there's two Americans and one Russian, we win" is usually thrown in there.
That was LeMay's quote, and it was intended to illustrate the reality of "victory" in a nuclear war as theory at the time existed - you will note that there's no actual empirical data on the subject.
Frankly, I don't care what your textbooks are implying, since they are fairly obviously trying to preserve the popular image of JFK as some hero statesman who stopped the total destruction of both sides. In point of fact, JFK bought into the fictitious
missile gap" in the 1960 campaign. There was the
Bomber gap as well. Like the Iraqi WMD mirage, this was a matter of people seeing what they wanted to see rather than actually fabricating anything, but the simple fact is that by the time the Cuban Missile Crisis rolled around, Kennedy knew full well that the Russians had no credible intercontinental deterrent - it had around 2 dozen ICBMs and those could take up to 20 hours to prepare for launch; more than enough time for British (much less American) bombers to destroy them.
That was, in fact, why Kruschev wanted missiles in Cuba. The Soviets were doing much better with short range than long range missiles, and that would be a way to maintain a deterrent. Your textbooks, in trying to preserve a fictitious view of history in which the bloodthirsty conservatives want war at any cost, and only the wisdom of the wise liberal messiah Kennedy kept us from it ignores the giant elephant in the room of why the Soviets wanted missiles in Cuba
at all.