Time at last to tell the true story of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Rating: 7/10 (1 July 2011)

Now that we are removed almost 50 years from this event, can we at last give the straightforward account of the Cuban Missle Crisis.
In 1961 the United States moved one hundred Intermediate Range Ballastic Missiles onto the territory of its allies Turkey and Italy. These missiles could strike Moscow with nuclear warheads on very short notice.
The Soviet Union, not being pleased by this, countered by moving intermediate range ballistic missiles into its ally Cuba, where they could strike Washington on short notice.
The United States showed outrage at this provocative policy without drawing the obvious comparison with the US missiles in Turkey and Italy, except to getting around to saying that the missiles were obsolete anyway one year after being deployed. The US threatened to attack the missiles in Cuba and then invade.
This supposedly would move us to the brink of mutual nuclear annihilation. But given the reasonable sanity of our government (except for Gen. Curtis Lemay, the mass murderer of millions of Japanese women and children in WWII), would this have actually happened? Someone would have pulled back from the brink at the cost of looking weak.
This someone turned out to be the "stupid peasant" leader of the USSR Nikita Khrushchev, who arranged a back door deal to break the deadlock.
What the deal came down to really required brilliance: the Russians would remove the missiles from Cuba and the US would remove the missiles from Turkey (which were obsolete, you recall). But the removal of the Turkish missiles was not to be made public. Instead it would be said that the missiles were being removed because the US promised never to invade Cuba. As if a diplomatic promise between two enemies was ever good for anything.
So the hero turns out to be stupid Khrushchev, who appeared to be making the bargain of a weak fool, but did not let that stop him from preventing the destruction of the world.