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:1781 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.
I was 20 years olde at the time of my first A-bomb delivery brie briefing by NSA/SAC.
One has no delusions after such. We all came out much older.
We all have points in our lives that can be identified as "turning points" in our development and the way we perceive the world.
I'm not sure what mine was, but I had some very great experiences growing up in Chicago. I worked concert security for years for extra money.
Three bus loads of us went to Saugerties, NY to work Security for Woodstock '94.
We had "All Access" wrist bands. We would go in the breakfast line and they would change the guard on the front gate. There were three food lines, so we would go thru and eat, then go thru again since those guys never seen us before. We would just go in a different line the 2nd time around.
We were doing all we could to get as much food as we could. We were burning maybe 3,500 calories/day and they were feeding us maybe 2,500. One day we ate the night crew's lunch and they had to replace it. We all came out of there a lot leaner, and meaner. The best meal they had for us was softshell crab. ;)