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Groundbreaking_War52 t1_j6eay4v wrote

Reply to comment by EmphasisFinal in TIL that the USA once stored nuclear weapons in the Philippines. by Captainmanic

And the USSR removed it’s missiles from Cuba while the US continued to keep nuclear missiles elsewhere in Europe and the western Pacific. Both sides also had missiles on submarines nearly everywhere. I’m not sure that anyone ‘won’ except the military-industrial complex.

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notallthatrelevant t1_j6ejn46 wrote

The wild part to me is that a the US missiles in question, the Jupiter series, were sort of dogshit and already outdated when the cuban missile crisis finally rolled around. They were stored above ground which made them easy targets, and they had a minimum response time of 15 minutes so they were pretty useless as retaliatory weapons. I mean at the end of the day it was all about projecting power, but still.

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Groundbreaking_War52 t1_j6ekroe wrote

Part of what made that era particularly scary. It was all about building more, bigger warheads while delivery systems were still far from the reliability and accuracy that one would expect.

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