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EmphasisFinal t1_j6dm6i3 wrote

During the height of the cold war, the US had nukes all over the world.

The Cuban missile crisis was the USSR's response to the US having nukes in turkey.

The US folded and removed the nukes from turkey, although they refused to publicly acknowledge this at the time.

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Captainmanic OP t1_j6dnp7a wrote

Currently their are nukes stored in NATO Turkey's Incirlik airbase near Adana, attached to warplanes aimed at striking Tehran and Moscow.

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ShEsHy t1_j6du7qz wrote

Doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things whether they're in Turkey or Montana, now that ICBMs exist than can hit anywhere on the planet. That wasn't the case back then.

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Groundbreaking_War52 t1_j6eay4v wrote

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The wild part to me is that a the US missiles in question, the Jupiter series, were sort of dogshit and already outdated when the cuban missile crisis finally rolled around.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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ShEsHy t1_j6dvdi6 wrote

> The Cuban missile crisis was the USSR's response to the US having nukes in turkey. > >

This is only the second time I've seen someone comment this in my 8 years of Reddit. It's honestly both amazing and terrifying how good the US' PR is, that they've managed to convince the general populace in the West that the closest the world has been to a war between the US and the USSR was completely and solely the Soviet's fault, and not the direct result of the US placing nukes in Italy and Turkey that could reach Moscow.

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1984happens t1_j6drbiw wrote

Some nukes (air bombs - not misilles, which was what was removed) are still in Turkey, in Incirlik air base, about 50 of them, B61 type, unuarmed (thank God...) - source: i am a Greek!

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1984happens t1_j6dppba wrote

We had some in Greece (as NATO members) but after popular demand we removed them decades ago. Comically (or tragically, if you know about the genocide of the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians...) a neighbour country (and NATO member also) that threratens us constantly still has about 50 of them (B61 type), thank God, unarmed, but when the USA tried to remove them they strongly complained - the funny (or sad...) thing is that some of their top generals and politicians make claims that they are theirs and not of USA property anymore and even make public threats against us (intended more for "internal consumption"...) about using them!

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moyismoy t1_j6dgde4 wrote

wait till you learn how we stored them in Denmark.

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Hot-Judge-2613 t1_j6djg4g wrote

US lost 1 nuke head after it dropped in the sea. It is still there to this date.

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