Plenty of questions as Stalin’s successor wages war

FOR 35 days in OctoberNovember 1962 the world held its collective breath at the real prospect of nuclear war between the then USSR and the US.

In America it was a midterm election year, with the

Kennedy gloss already fading after a failed Us-sponsored attempted 1961 invasion of Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs.

Kennedy’s louche personal dalliances and nepotism were also serving his family’s many enemies in the wider, entrenched US bureaucracy.

Kennedy ordered nuclear missile redeployments in Turkey and Italy, which raised concerns with Russia and its allies, including the mercurial Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro, who convinced the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to deploy nuclear weapons to Cuba to protect it against further US attack.

US reconnaissance flights confirmed construction of missile launchers in Cuba, just 140km from Florida. America declared a naval quarantine of Cuba, while the Executive

Committee of the National Security Council considered a pre-emptive air strike on the construction. World anxiety increased, even in Australia, where memories of World War II remained raw.

After tense negotiations amid military posturing both sides backed off. The Russians withdrew their missiles and heavy bombers and the US cancelled missile deployments to Turkey. A nuclear confrontation and possibly the next world war were narrowly averted. The Cuban crisis was another nail in the coffin of Kennedy’s failing administration, despite subsequent revisionist hagiographies, which have attempted to portray JFK as a strong, decisive leader.

For a decade from 1937 Khrushchev had been Stalin’s proxy in the Ukraine, purging officials, intellectuals and those who simply were suspected of opposing Stalin by executions and exile.

Although he subsequently denounced Stalin, Khrushchev had been a loyal henchman.

The Ukraine is again the focus of international attention as the world watches Stalin’s natural successor Vladimir Putin ignore world opinion to test how the West might react, if at all, to military provocation. In 2022 Joe Biden is US president, a career politician by any assessment past his use by date.

With the US usual allies dealing with internal political dissent over restrictive Covid regulations and increasing leadership tensions, the inscrutable, ever patient Putin simply has to keep applying military pressure. China’s Xi Jinping leadership is not as secure as his propagandists would have the world believe.

To use the uncertainty to create a major regional diversion must be tempting. How rogue state North Korea might react remains an unknown.