Obama is in Moscow negotiating a nuclear deal, Ex-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara died and the NY Times has this to say about the missile crisis:
At the height of the missile crisis, on Oct. 27, 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that Cuba be invaded within 36 hours. As the secret White House taping system installed by Kennedy recorded his words, Mr. McNamara laid out the prospects for war.
“The military plan is basically invasion,” he said. “When we attack Cuba, we are going to have to attack with an all-out attack.”
He continued, “The Soviet Union may, and, I think, probably will, attack the Turkish missiles.” The United States would then have to attack Soviet ships or bases in the Black Sea, he said. The chances of an uncontrolled escalation were high.
“And I would say that it is damn dangerous,” he said. “Now, I’m not sure we can avoid anything like that if we attack Cuba. But I think we should make every effort to avoid it. And one way to avoid it is to defuse the Turkish missiles before we attack Cuba.”
That idea — a secret deal in which Kennedy offered to withdraw his missiles in Turkey if Khrushchev removed his warheads from Cuba — resolved the crisis. “In the end, we lucked out — it was luck that prevented nuclear war,” Mr. McNamara said in “The Fog of War,” 40 years after the fact.
