Title: 53 years ago, the Cuban Missile Crisis began Source:
http://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/ URL Source:[None] Published:Oct 17, 2015 Author:Kennedy Library Post Date:2015-10-17 08:19:06 by Jethro Tull Keywords:None Views:2302 Comments:29
I was just a kid in the 8th grade but I remember it like it was yesterday. The link provided gives a good overview of the crisis from the Kennedy Library.
At that point in history, this country would have suffered greatly, Russia however would have been made a nuclear wasteland, end to end.
I know you are right about this. But, such a great nuclear exchange would have likely brought about a "nuclear winter" scenario.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
Nuclear winter (also known as atomic winter) is a hypothetical climatic effect, most often considered a potential threat following a countervalue, or city- targeted, nuclear war. Climate models suggest that the ignition of 100 firestorms that are comparable in intensity to that observed in Hiroshima in 1945 would produce a small nuclear winter.[1] The burning of these firestorms would result in the injection of soot into the Earth's stratosphere, producing an anti-greenhouse effect, that lowers the Earth's surface temperature. With the the the models concluding that the size of this effect, from the cumulative products of 100 of these firestorms, would unmistakably cool the global climate by approximately 1 °C for two to three years; with which the authors speculate, but do not model, would have global agricultural losses as a consequence.[2]
Whereas a much larger number of firestorms,[quantify] which are assumed to be the result of any city-targeted, US-Russia total war, is modeled to cause a much deeper nuclear winter, with catastrophic summer cooling by about 20 °C in core agricultural regions of the US, Europe and China, and by as much as 35 °C in Russia.