Russian nuclear bombers in Cuba?

Cuba is cool. And a beautiful tourist destination. If you havent been, I highly recommend it.

JT
http://www.FireME.To/udi

Recent Russian policy seems to be trying to play a sort of “Cold War Lite” with the West, because it knows it’s a great way to provoke a response.
And nothing gets America’s nose up like Cuba, this would just drive them crazy, absolutely crazy.

Only think is it’s unlikely we’ll see a Cuban Missile Crisis II, unless it’s a made-for-TV movie, a lot’s changed since Khrushchev and, ideologically-speaking, I think it’s unlikely that the Castros would allow a second capitalist superpower have a military presence on their island.

I’m sure Fidel had a good chuckle when he heard about it though.

Chavez is spending billions of US$ in Cuba , Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and his country people has no food, no health care, no jobs. He is in Russia buying arms , etc to protect himself from the USA “attacks”

The thing is that the “missle shield” is actualy comprised of U.S. missles that are basic ICBM’s that have the ability to carry nukes, and if pointed at russia, it would only give them less than 10 mins to makea decision. that is not even enough time to verify what would be incoming, and therefore cause a retalitory strike. Just does not give them time to verify. Another moronic plan by the neo-cons.

It would be no surpise if it is considering how and where on the globe it could place military bases in the longer term.

They may have my front garden. Free of charge. 🙂

Apparently the writer of this article is not very informed on the issue.

The Russian bid to station nuclear missiles in Cuba was in response to the US stationing Jupiter missiles in Turkey against the Russians, putting Moscow within 16 minutes reach.

The Americans refused to remove the missiles which led the Russians to reciprocate. Eventually the US agreed to secretly remove the missiles from Turkey.

Alas, nor are you very well informed on the issue. Russia never asked the Americans to remove the missiles in Turkey, and nor did the Americans refuse. There is a recording of Kennedy in the early days of the crisis, once the Soviet missiles were already on Cuba, of him telling his staff that “this is like us putting missiles in Turkey”. One of his staff had to rather embarrassingly tell his boss that they did have missiles in Turkey.

Even that being so, the missiles in Turkey were not the primary, or even secondary, reason for Khrushchev moving missiles into Cuba. His primary concern was the number of ICBMs the US had in comparison to the USSR. Khrushchev fell on the formula “IRBM + Cuba = ICBM”, and blundered his way into handing over nuclear weapons without clear firing authority to an idiot who soon after advocated a nuclear first strike on the US.

And what Britain’s Western neighbours continue to have, if you believe some…

And they’ve concreted our garden over for runways.

That’s effectively what your Eastern neighbours had for 50 years, wasn’t it?

Yep, and the world was a much safer place to live in back then. Being old enough to have profound experience with both systems I’d trade US bases and troops for Russian bases and troops on my country’s soil any time.

Offhand and without checking, as a condition for ending the Cuban missile crisis, I believe the American government secretly (at the time) agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey at a later date from the Soviet missile withrawal from Cuba. Some see this as Kennedy offering a kind of face saving gesture to Khrushchev.

That is correct.

So forgive my skepticism, but I don’t think a Germany full of Russian bases is particularly desirable, or if it is, the Germans for 50 years had an odd way of showing it.

Ok, I’m having a great day today – so I’ll forgive your skepticism as well as your ignorance. I wasn’t comparing the two political systems in E- and W-Germany, I compared bases and troops of the occupying forces. And there is no shaddow of a doubt that for the overwhelming part of their presence on German soil the Russians behaved more civilized and law-abiding while the areas around US-bases weren’t and aren’t an environment you would want to see your wife, daughter or mother to be in … particularly not on weekends – when “the liberators” were unleashed in flocks, drunk and some even drugged before leaving their barracks for “a night in town”.

And there is no shaddow of a doubt that for the overwhelming part of their presence on German soil the Russians behaved more civilized and law-abiding…

Out of interest, which Russian garrison towns were you familiar with? I understand you have first hand experience of an American garrison town, but I am curious as to how you could also have experience of a Russian garrison town. Did you actually live in East Germany amongst Russian soldiers long enough for you to be able to make a comparison? If so, which Russian unit was there?

No need. There is no ignorance to forgive.

Hell yes, there is. I’d be delighted to point it out to you, but I am very well aware that you enjoy some kind of “VIP-Status” on Andy’s blog and therefore are “untouchable”. I really don’t feel like seeing another comment of mine disappear for being too critical regarding Mr Newman.

Yes, being a VIP does indeed bring some advantages. Enjoy ! 🙂

Then you’ll know the reason why the Russian troops were better behaved than their American counterparts – and their British counterparts, for that matter.

I sure know the reasons. The main reason besides a tough discipline is the fact that Russians aren’t spoonfed the idea of being superior to their hosts and may misbehave however and whenever they feel like doing so and having the ASPA and other acts to protect them.

Oh. So there is ignorance on my part, but you’re going to come up with possibly the lamest excuse this side of the Oder to avoid having to substantiate this claim.

I am not sure about side of the Oder, but it actually shouldn’t be much different from my side of it. I simply see no sense in making any effort of substantianting the fact (note: not the claim) that you are probably the most ignorant and arrogant person on the English language blogosphere. The task of the English language blogosphere is to howl about the assumed lacking of democracy in Russia (and anywhere else in the “non-English” world), not to practice democracy itself. Where is the sense in substantiating my point when all people can read is something like Comment removed by moderator as soon as I attempt to do so ?

The main reason besides a tough discipline is the fact that Russians aren’t spoonfed the idea of being superior to their hosts and may misbehave however and whenever they feel like doing so and having the ASPA and other acts to protect them.

Heh! You keep believing that, matey.

I simply see no sense in making any effort of substantianting the fact (note: not the claim) that you are probably the most ignorant and arrogant person on the English language blogosphere.

No, let me correct you. You see sense in it, but you can’t, so you won’t.

Where is the sense in substantiating my point when all people can read is something like Comment removed by moderator as soon as I attempt to do so ?

The reason you keep getting your comments deleted is not because you are trying to substantiate a point, but because you continually use abusive language when trying – unsuccessfully – to do so. That you need to resort to such behaviour when trying to substantiate your claims to my ignorance says all that need be said as regards your actual claims.

Since when is calling an ignorant and arrogant person what he is “abusive language” ?

Isn’t, and nor have I said that it is. I said that your efforts to substantiate your baseless claims of my ignorance usually involve abusive language, and as such get deleted.

As for arrogance: guilty as charged.

After all, how would you know what is written in my deleted comments if they are deleted ?

I know having seen you throw a total wobbler on web forums before in which you used absuve language when asked to substantiate some dubious claim or other; and also, Andy doesn’t get an SMS as soon as you posts an idiotic comment, he has to labouriously come and check all the commments first, something which takes time. In the interim, your comments are there for all to see.

”Offhand and without checking, as a condition for ending the Cuban missile crisis, I believe the American government secretly (at the time) agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey at a later date from the Soviet missile withrawal from Cuba. Some see this as Kennedy offering a kind of face saving gesture to Khrushchev.

That is correct.”

The version of events I have often heard from Russians is that the USSR removed the missiles publicly and in full view of the world, but a short time afterwards put them right back where they were secretly. Russians say that Krushchev decided to do this to calm the situation down, with the Americans knowing that the missiles would return eventually. How true all that is I dont know, but its a typical response I get when I tell the Russians that an ”Irishman” kicked their butts out of Cuba:-)

As per some Hungarian friends of mine and a NYT article from awhile back, the Soviet military presence in Hungary was low key in terms of interaction with the locals.

Regarding the above conversation and putting aside military operations like 1953, ‘56 and ‘68, it’s reasonable to believe that the Red Army had a shorter leash when it came to off duty interaction among the locals when compared to their American counterparts.

Jesus! Twice in one thread I find myself commending Mike Averko on his correctness!

The reason the Russian soldiers appear well behaved is that they generally were not, and are not, permitted to go on the piss in the local towns and interaction with locals is severely restricted. You never, ever see any groups of the thousands of Russian servicemen on Sakhalin out of their barracks unless they’re being marched somewhere.

The idea that the American soldiers behaved worse than the Russians because they thought themselves superior to the Germans, whereas the Russians presumably thought themselves equal or inferior, I suspect is little more than the result of some pretty Fraulein scorning a certain local in favour of an American soldier a decade and a half ago.

” I suspect is little more than the result of some pretty Fraulein scorning a certain local in favour of an American soldier a decade and a half ago.”

🙂 There’s a bunch of old women here in our village that never married, and local legend has it that during the building of a bridge here in the 1940s by Irish soldiers those women ignored the local lads for the duration of the troops stay (a few years…yeah, yeah, I know, Irish builders!). Anyway when the troops up and went the local men had all acquired women from nearby villages and the ladies who’d spurned them in favour of the blow-ins were left high and dry. Far Away Fields, etc etc..:-)

Overall, the Poles in the few decades following WW II hated the Germans more than the Soviets (especially Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians). Thereafter, the mood swing changed.

Towards the end of the war, Soviet behavior in Poland doesn’t appear as bad as in Germany and Hungary. A major reason no doubt having to do with Germans and Hungarians fighting against the USSR during WW II unlike the Poles.

”Overall, the Poles in the few decades following WW II hated the Germans more than the Soviets (especially Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians). Thereafter, the mood swing changed.”

Certainly there may well be a fair degree of revisionist history reflected in my workmate’s opinion. I must ask her again tommorow. In fairness until recent years the history taught in our own schools here was vehemently anti-Brit, and has now been softened totally. There probably was a major swing against the Russians/USSR after the Poles removed the Soviet yoke in the 1980s.

Poles can be of varying opinions.

In Poland, there now seems to be a bitter dispute on the legacies of Walesa and Jaruzelski.

Among the two extremes is the view that they both collaborated and should be punished. Another view sees a difference between the two, that includes a willingness to forgive Jaruzelski as someone with limited options.

There’s a bunch of old women here in our village that never married…

🙂

”Just to make things a bit more confusing, my wife’s grandmother was a child during the 3-year German occupation of her village somewhere in Belorussia”

Some of these babushki are just hilarious. My wife was in a queue in Moscow a few years back during the summer for some other useless piece of red tape. The queue was full of dyevushki in their summer clothes, arses proudly being shown to the world, as is the norm in Moscow. Anyway all of sudden a babushka in the queue suddenly piped up ”look at the state of you! Showing off your tits and arses! Is this what we fought for in the War, so you can waltz around Moscow dressed like slappers”?!

”It was still a better option than the Nazi period in Poland.”

That is doubtless. And funny enough my workmate has moaned about Walesa – she reckons he wasnt all that bright and shouldnt have actually led the country. She’s from Krakow and has some hilarious stories about the Wisla and Legia Ultras.

When discussing WW II, I try to make it a point to say Nazi or Nazi German as opposed to just German.

I don’t accept that Nazism was a natural outgrowth of traditional German patriotism. Rather, it was an unfortunate aberration.

This is consistent with not making the Russia automatically equals Soviet claim.

Fact of the matter is that Nazi Germany had much help from many non-Germans. Ditto the USSR with many non-Russians. This leads to why I think Russians and Germans can bury the hatchet with each other.

During WW II, the Croat Ustasha, Galician Ukrainian nationalists and Austrians had elements every bit as brutal if not more so than many of the Germans stationed in the same area.

”This leads to why I think Russians and Germans can bury the hatchet with each other.”

They already have. A long time ago, actually.

As a follow-up to the very beginning of my last set of comments, it could (more precisely be better).

I’m managing a number of other things at the moment.

It includes projects like a very well received last bullshit free AC article of mine, which took Kiselyov, Lourie and Bovt to task.

For the past week, a series of stories and denials have been published in the Russian media surrounding a possible plan for Russia to relocate a refueling base in Cuba and resume flights of Russia’s Tu-160 “Blackjack” and Tu-95 “Bear” nuclear-capable strategic bombers back into the Western Hemisphere. All the noise reached a crescendo when another piece of information — true or not — was leaked to the Russian press that a crew of the Russian bombers had gone to Cuba on Thursday to conduct preliminary surveys.

Thus far, there is no confirmation that Russia is indeed returning militarily to Cuba. It is, however, a signal of what could happen if the United Stated does not heed Russian demands for Washington to back off from Moscow’s turf. This would be, in Moscow’s eyes, an equal response to the United States’ signing ballistic missile defense system treaties with the Czech Republic and Poland — right on Russia’s doorstep — as well as discussing NATO membership with the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia.

Russia did, in fact, respond to the West’s encroachment: cutting energy supplies to Europe and sending more military into Georgia’s secessionist regions. But the problem was that Moscow simply hadn’t gotten Washington’s attention.

Washington has been too wrapped up in other issues — such as the upcoming presidential election, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, negotiations with Iran and simply not believing Russia had any real tools with which to threaten it –- that it airily dismissed all of Moscow’s provocations. This has made Russia’s reprisals Europe’s problem at a time when Moscow wants to prove it once again is a global power and can stand up against its traditional foe: the United States. So Russia sent a signal of something that the United States simply cannot ignore — the moving of the Russian-U.S. tug-of-war from Russia’s doorstep to the U.S. doorstep. This is a serious threat and one with which Washington is quite familiar.

The Cuba option would be a powerful move against the United States — just as it was during the 1950s and 1960s — because it directly penetrates the United States’ immediate periphery. Combine the Cuba rumors with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s trip to Moscow this past week — which held its own flurry of rumored deals over Russian bases and defense deals — and Moscow is reminding the Americans of a prior miscalculation. In the 1950s, Washington assumed that it could threaten the Soviet Union along its borders in Europe, South Asia and East Asia. And the United States believed it could not be threatened in its homeland, in the Western Hemisphere — America assumed no foreign power would dare violate the Monroe Doctrine. Washington bet that Moscow did not have an equivalent threat, and it was wrong.

The Soviet Union’s move into Cuba back then changed the entire dynamic of the Cold War. The Soviet presence threatened the sea lanes out of the Gulf of Mexico, major facilities in Florida, all of the Caribbean airspace and some of the Eastern Seaboard. It forced the U.S. Navy and Air Force to shift resources and account for Soviet units there. It diverted the CIA into Latin America, forcing the conflicts in Central American and Grenada. Despite its inherent military vulnerability, Cuba was one of the most strategic Soviet assets. Nothing was the same after Cuba.

The Russians are reminding the Americans of their prior miscalculations on how Russians respond to perceived threats. The United States has shifted its focus from its periphery and once again moved to responding to threats that could never truly physically hit the homeland — such as an Iranian missile threat. In the nearly 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has returned to and enjoyed a world where any potential military threat is an ocean and half a world away.

For now, this is just a signal and no real movement on the ground has been made. Russia is serious, however, about its ability to follow through if the United States does not release the pressure elsewhere. The moves over Cuba are not an indicator of the Russians’ global intentions, but are meant to signal an increase in Moscow’s assertiveness. It is a gutsy and interesting move by the Russians. We have yet to see whether the Americans have really noticed (or want to admit that they noticed) and can divert attention from the Middle East and domestic politics to address the Russian threat — either by backing down or by escalating the situation, which would bring back a Cold War standoff.

Of course, if Washington and Moscow do get serious about things such as Cuba, then the U.S. escalation would go far beyond what Russia currently feels threatened over.

Toss the former KGB agent and current Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin into the mix and let him get back to his old drinking buddys from the “good ole'” days of smuggling arms in Latin America and heck who needs a Jihad to keep the military machine rolling were back to 1962, except now the Russians have a little bit of money to work with and the US is in Afganistan. Will Czar Vlady start banging his shoe on the podium?? I watch with curisoity

It’s a game that the U.S. and Russia play. You do this, I will do this. You propose a missile shield, I will propose a bomber base near your shores. The missile shield is clearly a weapon, because it doesnt pose solely defensive capabilities, or else Russia wouldnt be making a big stink about it. When I listen to Condoleeza Rice say the the missile shield is aimed to prevent attacks from rogue threats, I buckle in pity because I can’t believe she has such the character to lie about anything and everything. I sometimes model myself behind Condoleeza Rice, a black American youth seeking to learn Russian and go into a career field catering to U.S./Russian affairs. But, I can’t model myslef behind a liar. Who are the rogue threats. Iran, who has missiles that can reach Europe, but has no reason to attack Europe. And North Korea, who is in the stages of disarming themselves of their minuscule nuclear armament. And out intelligence sources here in the U.S. have already stated that Iran is using their nuclear facilities for peaceful purposes, such as France, and many other nations that have nuclear power plants. Why can France produce nuclear energy but not Iran? The missile shield is clearly aimed at Russia, no matter how it gets twisted. A threat can be a nuclear launch from one of the breakaway republics, or maybe the Islamic extremist could get their hand on a weapon and reak havoc on that side of the world. I think it’s better to tell the truth. If Russia wants to build the base, let them. As long as we continue to push their buttons, so will they. Can’t you see the coalitions forming. Russia talking cordially to our enemies, but blasting us. The U.S. is definely in need of some policy changing. Hopefully we will get that in November.

I don’t think Russia has the will nor capacity to fight a war with the U.S. Maybe back then in the Soviet days, but not today. Alot of what goes on today is saber rattling, then much speculation and interpretation, and crazy twists by the American media. Wars today are also more difficult to initiate. Russia’s main goal right now is to continue to improve their economy, fight corruption, and improve their defenses. We may get into disagreements with them, but ultimately I believe the bombers won’t go to Cuba, and this is why. I for one believe that Barrack Obama will be the next president of the U.S., and the polls show it, the world likes him, and McCain gets nothing but negative attention. McCain’s stand on Russia is eliminate them from the G8. He also once can to the assumption that president ex-president and now prime minister Putin was the president of Germany http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5ENwej0fpc> . But Obama will do what is necessary to halt the missile shield program. He wants strong ties with Russia, and I’m not sure if Russia wants the same. But I’m sure that Russia doesn’t want conflict with us. So if the missile shield doesn’t get built, then bombers wont go to Cuba. Trade is essential for us, it’s the only way for the U.S. and Russia to settle their differences. The U.S. really doesn’t like the way China is ran, but middle class Americans sure do like cheap goods at WalMart. And I also here that Russians like the few McDonald’s sparsely spread out in Moscow. So hopefully this conflict bolds over. Sooner or later the U.S. won’t be led by complete idiots, and Russia won’t be led by authoritarian ex-KGB operatives and maybe we can all get along. Pointing to the KGB deal-there’s nothing bad about these operatives, they are just harsh and cold spirited, they do push the country in the right direction, at a fast pace, but these people, does anyone want to start a separate thread on how Russia is ran but mostly KGB?

LOLLOLO
Humanitarian help for ?uba ,damaged from winds.But they think that this bombs….. ha ha ha