Bay of Pigs

[Erwin]

"82nd AB is an interesting division, as it's the one regular division trained to conduct military operations within the US"

What is different re training than in another country? (How to deal with 3rd Mech Valley Girls, or how to tell the difference between members of govt. and insurgents?)

[Sublime]

My father was an USAF officer in the late 70s through to 2005. He started his career as a WSO in the backseat of F-4 Phantoms based in Spain. He often told me when he talked about it that they pretty much figured their first mission would be their last, that even if they made it in to drop the tactical nukes they had on russian marshalling areas the threat of being shot down by friendlies on the way back was huge. I also remember him telling me around 2000 that a little known secret at the time was that the US only had an air to air missile supplie for 3 days of combat in Europe! The whole situation would have been awful, NATO and the US planned as a matter of course to use tactical nuclear weapons right away. escalation would have been a matter of course as well.

Ill check out the book, unfortunately my plate is full, I started reading With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge (fantastic!) and after that Ive got an interesting book on the Dirlewanger Brigade by Christian Ingrao. Not sure if its any good, but Ill give it a loook.

[Sublime]

for some reason I cant edit, I meant missile supply on hand in Europe, not the total USAF stock worldwide or stateside.

[John Kettler]

LongLeftFlank,

Don't panic just yet. The article at the link is from The Miami Herald, under the byline of Juan O. Tamayo, Herald Staff Writer, and is dated May 4, 1998. It's titled:

"A nuclear secret in '62 Cuba crisis

100 Soviet warheads undetected by U.S."

You should be okay!

Sublime,

When I was at Hughes, one of our people calculated that with all the air defense radars in the European theater powered up, an aircraft at, say, 30K feet would be under a microwave flux density exceeding that of a microwave oven. Recall this was well before gold flashed cockpit transparencies for Stealth, so what we were looking at was a sky full of pilots with fried eyeballs. Acrylic is microwave transparent, you see!

While we're on eyeballs, I learned from a former B-52 pilot that nuclear missions were always flown with a lead eyepatch on one eye. This was in case radiation "cooked" one eye (defenses included interceptors and SAMs armed with nuclear weapons).

One last Cold War snippet: My brother, Ed, talked to a former Skyraider pilot whose solo mission was to nuke the sub pen entrance at Sevastapol, Russia. This is the one seen in that History Channel program called "Cities of the Underground." You'd think they'd send at least a pair of planes for such an important mission!

Regards,

John Kettler

[Sublime]

the idea of a third world war in europe is so incredible I dont think its completely possible for the human mind to completely envision and comprehend. Nuclear weapons have never been used anywhere near as extensively in warfare, nor biological and chemical weapons as well. It would have been a godawful mess and disaster. I often read about how spetznaz groups would use suitcase nukes on US targets in West Germany, attack bases and everything else. My 3 year old self, and my mom would have been vaporized, along with millions of others in Germany, my dad, dead somewhere else nearby. And thats speaking for US around the Wiesbaden area in the mid to late 80s.

thank god cooler heads prevailed.

'only 10-15 million Americans'

Lemay had become an idiot, if he thought America could withstand such losses. The most war dead we ever had was from the Civil War, and news did not travel as quickly or reach everyone as it has in the last 40-50 years. And that was about 1/15th of LeMays extremely optimistic assessment.

[LongLeftFlank]

Don't panic just yet. The article at the link is from The Miami Herald, under the byline of Juan O. Tamayo, Herald Staff Writer, and is dated May 4, 1998. It's titled:

"A nuclear secret in '62 Cuba crisis

100 Soviet warheads undetected by U.S."

You should be okay!

Umm, John, have you actually READ the Miami Herald? They cannot be trusted on any matter relating to Cuba. And why might that be? (Something to do with the reporting and editorial staff not wanting their cars exploding when they start, maybe?)

John, you're a bright, curious guy and I for one enjoy your contributions to the forum. But I'd say you're just a touch credulous when it comes to Big Conspiracy Theories. And that goes for your vaunted In The Know Contacts In the National Security Apparatus too.... and come to think of it, why haven't They warned you to keep your mouth shut especially on Internet chat boards? (or else your car might just blow up too)

Sure, sure, life eventually teaches us all that the way Winners and Losers are chosen in the world usually doesn't have much to do with the virtues they teach you in church, Civics class or MBA school.

But even if Star Chambers of Wise Mandarins / Illuminati / Koch Brothers do get together in remote secure locations and dream up Thousand Year Plans to Rule the Universe (Bwahahahaaha), they really aren't any better than the rest of us at actually sticking to them. At the end of the day, even Bilderbergers need to pull down their pants to take a dump (or jump hotel maids, as the case may be). The banality of evil, all that.

One man*'s opinion.

* Not sure at this point whether he is one of the Winners or Losers. Stay tuned.

[John Kettler]

LongLeftFlank,

I do have the contacts, and part of my job is precisely to get the word out. I have some very scary people watching over me and have no car to blow up in any event. I found the Herald article to be well written and highly informative. Recall, too, that I spent 11+ years at Hughes and Rockwell as a professional analyst of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Am very good at sorting the rat manure from the coffee, though I don't always get it right.

Speaking of Cuba, may I commend to your attention Castro's analysis of JFK's death in HISTORY WILL NOT ABSOLVE US, by Schotz? http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/14th_issue/history.html

Regards,

John Kettler

[Sublime]

Kettler - excuse my stupidity but a quick scan of the link gives reasons the CIA wanted Kennedy dead and a fictitious exchange between JFK and Dulles in heaven (ha!) after they both die. I didnt see anything from Castro?

[LongLeftFlank]

Kettler - excuse my stupidity but a quick scan of the link gives reasons the CIA wanted Kennedy dead and a fictitious exchange between JFK and Dulles in heaven (ha!) after they both die. I didnt see anything from Castro?

Ah yes, the Oliver Stone "Imaginary Friend" theory of the Missile Crisis.

[Sublime]

Care to elaborate LLF?

[John Kettler]

Sublime,

You missed this (Fair Use):

"A case in point is the text of a speech delivered by Fidel Castro the day after the assassination. It is simply astonishing, if this document is to be believed, what was known to Castro about Oswald in so short a time. "How strange that this former marine should go to the Soviet Union," Castro said, "and try to become a Soviet citizen, and that the Soviets should not accept him, that he should say at the American Embassy that he intended to disclose to the Soviet Union the secrets of everything he learned while he was in the U.S. service..." This, one day after the assassination, when Oswald was still alive!"

Regards,

John Kettler

[John Kettler]

LongLeftFlank,

I believe you'll find this analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis to be extremely credible and a most informative read. It's highly detailed as to what we knew, when we knew it, how we knew it and how long it took to get to the right people.

[PDF]

Mind-Sets and Missiles: A First Hand Account of the Cuban Missile ...

www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub935.pdf

Regards,

John Kettler

[Michael Emrys]

...a little known secret at the time was that the US only had an air to air missile supplie for 3 days of combat in Europe!

It was referred to in some circles at the time as "The Come As You Are War", the idea being that everybody would pretty much shoot through their supply of munitions in a few days. It would take weeks to organize large scale resupply from the States. The Soviets and their WARPAC allies might have been a little better off, but only if the trains were still running and those would probably have been priority targets after the first 24 hours.

Speaking of nuclear escalation, one of the things that may have brought the USSR to seriously discuss disarmament was the deployment of the Pershing II missile. Those could put a nuke on a headquarters or other high priority target in the theater before they even knew they were coming. It was one of the first things they insisted that we get rid of.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

Yes, the LeMay story was true and verified from multiple sources. The big guy had lost his marbles by that time...

And the really scary thing is that he was not alone. Up until that time every commander of SAC and every CoS of the Air Force was thinking the same thing even if they weren't saying so publicly.

Michael

[LongLeftFlank]

Well, many of these officer had incinerated Nuremberg and Tokyo 20 years earlier in their careers, so millions of civilian casualties weren't as instinctively repugnant to them as they might be to us. The Cold War was seen very much as a war to the death between mutually irreconcilable political systems, and this too was not a surprise to the Greatest Generation. Time and other news magazines from the 1950s talked almost glibly about the chances of war with the Russians.

While many voices even then (Churchill, Einstein) spoke of the likelihood of WWIII would be apocalyptic for humanity, remember that the mainstream credibility of much of the New Deal Left in the US was hopelessly compromised by its continued embrace of Soviet communism (McCarthyism didn't come out of nowhere), even after Hungary. Whereas the average veteran turned union steelworker looked at the Red Army and accurately recognized a totalitarian force.

By the Sixties, things had eased off and public opinion had returned to the center, but there remained plenty of islands of the "old thinking". On the other hand, with the military offering generous early retirements, demographics worked its magic mercifully quickly. The "Jack D Rippers" and their Soviet counterparts were replaced by a bright new generation of technocrats who then proceeded to get the US stuck in Vietnam and, eventually, the Soviets stuck in Afghanistan. All with the best intentions of course, but at least our part of the world didn't blow up....