Missiles of August
North Korea situation calls for leadership, national unity
October will mark the 55th anniversary of Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war.
Many of our readers can remember that time from personal experience. Others have only learned about the crisis in school, from history books or documentaries.
It’s hard to explain to younger folks exactly how afraid we all were. The Cold War was still going strong. We saw the Soviets and communism as evil forces bent on destroying the U.S. and democracy. The threat was very real to us. As children we had Civil Defense drills, we saw films on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. There were municipal fallout shelters and some folks even had their own bomb shelters built in the back yard.
And in October of 1962, it looked like everything we feared was coming true.
Fortunately reason prevailed. President John F. Kennedy wisely decided to forego an airstrike—which we now know from declassified Soviet documents would have been met by a nuclear strike—and instead blockaded Cuba. After a tense standoff, the Soviets removed their missiles from the island.
The situation we face right now with North Korea isn’t as potentially devastating—we are not, for example, facing retaliation from the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal—but it’s enough to raise fear on some levels. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has shown himself to be unstable and obsessed with power at best, seriously demented at worst. We hope he won’t do anything stupid but we must be prepared if he does.
President Donald Trump must approach this crisis with careful consideration, weighing options and listening to advisers. In the end, any decisions will be his alone, but those decisions will have consequences that could impact our national security for years to come. It’s time for serious leadership.
Right now his bravado is not helping things. This isn’t a schoolyard shouting match. We don’t have to have the last word, lob the last threat. It’s time to tone down the rhetoric.
It is also important our president has the nation’s support in any crisis. We must stand together as one. And it follows that President Trump must be his most presidential in every way. We don’t think disaster is imminent but this may be the closest we have been to seeing a nuclear weapon used in aggression since that October 55 years ago. It’s through no fault of our own. And with any luck this will all end peacefully.