re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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and I don't believe any of the details about the deal to remove the nukes in Turkey and Italy were known and confirmed until the fall of the Soviet Union


This is very ignorant, surely you dont believe what you just posted.

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How old are you?

I can remember when the Soviet Union collapsed, and all of the information that then trickled out from Russia and from the US since it was "old news" at that point, including that bit about the nukes being removed in Turkey and Italy.

The world thought Kennedy "beat" Krushev, and that was Krushev's undoing though it took a few years for the party to remove him from power for looking weak. The Russians never made a big deal out of the nukes in Turkey and Italy because it also would make them look weaker... the US could blockade Cuba and prevent the Soviets from supplying it (with anything... pretty much dooming the island), the Soviets could not keep anything from being deployed in Southern and Western Europe.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was - in reality - kind of a US PR stunt. One that did almost cause a nuclear war, but things like this weren't usually handled over the public airwaves. Kennedy said he regretted going public with it and plunging the world into hysteria... and it was more about making sure the world was opposed to Castro than with the USSR, really... that's why you look at the Turkey+Italy missile deployments and say "but we did the same thing, so why did we react that way?"

Reagan later helped destroy the Soviet Union by making it a nuclear spending competition, knowing the USSR could not keep up and would have to choose between feeding its people and trying to keep up.

But Reagan later watched a TV movie called "The Day After" and seemed to realize suddenly that a nuclear war would not have a good outcome and worked with the Russians to reduce the number of nukes on both sides (look up “INF” and “START”)... Reagan wanted to get rid of ALL nukes, but the Pentagon flipped out and argued with him that without some of them left there'd be no deterrent to the USSR overrunning Western Europe. Still, the reduction gave the USSR a financial lifeline of a few more years since it didn't have to try to produce more nukes (and they were faking a lot of them, anyway... a former Soviet military official said that when you see those military parades in Moscow from the early 80s, and those missiles being a part of it, they were empty shells... because they weren't able to produce enough of them).