Sadly for an academic, Nigel Roberts (Upfront, October 29) is, like most of our Western commentators, selective in his facts on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. He doesn’t, for instance, mention Russian unease about the near-identical threat from US Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which were removed following the deal.
And how is Vladimir Putin’s unremarkable, but quite serious, reminder of where the continual escalation of the current proxy war could lead in any way more of an active threat to use nukes than that regularly made by US leaders (“All options are on the table”) during such crises?
The missing ingredient in today’s terrifying time is not a different Russian leader – Nikita Khrushchev’s rhetoric was as bad, if not worse, than Putin’s – but a cool, calm Jack Kennedy as
