David Carlson: October memories

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A memory from 60 years ago this month of October came back to me recently when I heard the latest news from Ukraine. To use an antiquated term, the memory was “unbidden,” meaning that the memory wasn’t one that I was happy to revisit.

First, the memory.

It was a night in October, 1962, and I, like millions of other people, was listening to the radio. The world was holding its breath as Soviet warships were steaming toward Cuba to support Castro and place nuclear weapons on his island nation. Waiting to intercept the ships was the U.S. military.

The word of the hour was “brinkmanship.”

The meaning of the term comes from the first syllable: brink. Picture two superpowers standing at the brink, at the edge, of an abyss. The abyss could be called “World War III,” “All-Out Nuclear War” or “Armageddon.”

In a sense, another term for the Cuban Missile Crisis could be “blinkmanship.” Don’t bother looking it up in a dictionary or online. I think I invented it. The question we had in October, 1962, was who would “blink” first — Kennedy or Khrushchev?

I remember sitting at a desk in my bedroom, trying to concentrate on my Latin homework even as I wondered if the world I knew would exist the next day. I’m sure that I didn’t catch the irony of the moment — studying Caesar’s Gallic Wars while standing on the brink of the war to end all wars.

Second, the trigger that brought back the memory. It was when I was reading about Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons to achieve his goals in Ukraine when it dawned on me that Putin must be obsessing about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Putin would have been 9 years old in October, 1962, too young to understand the crisis, but he has had plenty of time in the decades following to understand that Khrushchev, thank God, blinked first. Yes, Khrushchev did so as part of a deal that removed U.S. missiles from Turkey, but the reality was that the Soviet leader appeared to be weak on the world stage. Two years later, he was forced to resign.

Khrushchev’s fall from power, his looking weak, is the dark shadow in the corner, the skeleton in the closet, the backdrop to Putin’s latest threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

His war is going badly, so badly that he is freeing inmates from prisons and instituting a draft to shore up his military presence. Russian men, unlike their Ukrainian neighbors, are fleeing the country. Good news? Yes and no.

Yes, David is currently defeating Goliath in this war. The bully is getting his comeuppance, and who can’t celebrate that?

But also no. No, it’s not completely good news that Putin is getting a pasting, because the bully has now been backed into a corner. As world leaders who are closer to Putin have pointed out, he is “all in” in this war. He has no alternative plan, and haunting him must be the ghost of Khrushchev, the one who blinked.

This is the quandary that Western leaders are facing as Putin threatens nuclear warfare. Should we place our hopes in Russian military leaders in Russia who won’t obey Putin’s command, should he give it, to use those weapons?

Should we place our hopes in more reasonable Russian leaders — assuming they still exist — who would risk their careers and undoubtedly their lives to oust Putin?

Or will Western leaders, diplomats, and political scientists discover a way for Putin to withdraw his troops, end the war and still preserve his pride?

Perhaps if we aren’t holding our breath, we should be.

David Carlson of Franklin is a professor emeritus of philosophy and religion. Send comments to [email protected].

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