Tuesday, September 26, 2017

62-10-16 Cuban Missile Crisis 62-10-28

Weapon Specs - CoCa >> .

Cuban President Fidel Castro had met with Khrushchev in July 1961, and the two men had agreed to station short-range nuclear missiles on Cuba. America already had a number of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey that threatened the USSR, and had supported the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.

Although the missiles were identified by American reconnaissance on 15 October, the thirteen days of the crisis officially began when President John F. Kennedy was informed the following morning.

Threatened by the discovery of the missiles on Cuba, which lay barely 90 miles from the coast of Florida, the USA responded by enforcing a naval blockade around the island in an attempt to stop any more missiles being delivered. The Soviet Union initially refused to recognize the blockade, but the ships carrying missiles later turned back while Kennedy and Khrushchev continued a series of tense negotiations.

An agreement was eventually struck in which the USSR would publicly remove the missiles from Cuba while the USA would secretly remove its own from Turkey and Italy. The Soviet Union broadcast its intention to remove the missiles on Radio Moscow on the morning of 28 October, and the first dismantled missiles were shipped out of Cuba on 5 November.

Because America’s part of the agreement was kept secret, Khrushchev appeared to have ‘lost’. The reality is that both sides made concessions.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962 (Crisis de Octubre), the Caribbean Crisis (Карибский кризис, Karibsky krizis), or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day (October 16–28, 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union initiated by Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.

In response to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 and the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to Cuba's request to place nuclear missiles on the island to deter a future invasion. An agreement was reached during a secret meeting between Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in July 1962, and construction of a number of missile launch facilities started later that summer.

Meanwhile, the 1962 United States elections were under way, and the White House had denied charges for months that it was ignoring dangerous Soviet missiles 90 miles (140 km) from Florida. The missile preparations were confirmed when an Air Force U-2 spy plane produced clear photographic evidence of medium-range (SS-4) and intermediate-range (R-14) ballistic missile facilities.

When this was reported to President John F. Kennedy he then convened a meeting of the nine members of the National Security Council and five other key advisers in a group that became known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM). After consultation with them, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade on October 22 to prevent further missiles from reaching Cuba. The US announced it would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba and demanded that the weapons already in Cuba be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union.

After several days of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement to avoid invading Cuba again. Secretly, the United States agreed that it would dismantle all US-built Jupiter MRBMs, which had been deployed in Turkey against the Soviet Union; there has been debate on whether or not Italy was included in the agreement as well.

When all offensive missiles and Ilyushin Il-28 light bombers had been withdrawn from Cuba, the blockade was formally ended on November 21, 1962. The negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union pointed out the necessity of a quick, clear, and direct communication line between the two Superpowers. As a result, the Moscow–Washington hotline was established. A series of agreements later reduced US–Soviet tensions for several years until both parties began to build their nuclear arsenals even further.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis .

62-2-10 U-2 prisoner exchange

62, 10th February: Captured U-2 pilot Gary Powers, prisoner exchange - HiPo >
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Cold War mapped - '45-'91 ..

The CIA completed the first test flight of the U-2 high altitude reconnaissance aircraft in 1955. The plane was able to fly at 70,000 feet (21,300 m), which its developers believed would place it beyond the reach of Soviet technology and enable it to conduct aerial reconnaissance of the USSR thanks to advanced cameras and optics.

Following successful tests, pilot training began in earnest. Francis Gary Powers had enlisted in the United States Air Force in October 1950, and joined the CIA as a pilot in the U-2 program six years later. At the end of April 1960 he departed Peshawar Air Station on a U-2 reconnaissance mission that would take him across the Soviet Union to Bodø military airfield in Norway. However, approximately halfway into his mission his plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile in the Ural Region and he was forced to bail out.

After parachuting safely on to Soviet soil, Powers was captured by the KGB, and eventually convicted of espionage. He was sentenced to 10 years’ confinement but a year later, amidst concerns that he might reveal any remaining secrets to the Soviet authorities, the U.S. government agreed to exchange Powers and imprisoned student Frederic Pryor in return for Soviet Colonel Rudolf Abel.

Abel had been convicted by a New York court on three counts of conspiracy as a Soviet spy in 1957. The exchange of prisoners took place on 10 February 1962 at the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, but Powers received a frosty reception on his return the United States due to his failure to activate the aircraft’s self-destruct system that allowed the Soviets to study the wreckage.

Monday, September 25, 2017

DoD

Ash Carter >
At around 40 minutes an American cites a book by an almost undoubtedly CONservative Canadian who is pushing the notion of merging Canada and the USA into a single nation. No prizes for guessing that the average Canadian would refuse to be merged with an inferior, too-far-wrong society. Happily, Carter sees that a merger would only be advantageous for America.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Eastern Bloc (former)

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Life in East Germany - Armchair > .
Soviets [Disastrous Attempt] to Abolish Money - Asianometry > .
Berlin Wall: A stroke of fate that changed history - DW > .

The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc, the Socialist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia under the influence of the Soviet Union and its ideology (communism) that existed during the Cold War 1947–1991 in opposition to the capitalist Western Bloc. The Eastern Bloc was often called the Second World, whereas the term "First World" referred to the Western Bloc and "Third World" referred to the non-aligned countries that were mainly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 

Within Western Europe, the term Eastern Bloc generally referred to the USSR and its satellite states in the Comecon (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania).


Within the Americas the countries aligned with the Soviet Union included Cuba since 1961 and for limited periods Nicaragua and Grenada.

Soviet control of the Eastern Bloc was first tested by the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état and the Tito–Stalin split over the direction of the People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Chinese Communist Revolution (1949) and Chinese participation in the Korean War. After Stalin's death in 1953, the Korean War ceased with the 1954 Geneva Conference. In Europe, anti-Soviet sentiment provoked the East German uprising of 1953. The break-up of the Eastern Bloc is often attributed to Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences in 1956. This speech was a factor in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which the Soviet Union suppressed. The Sino–Soviet split gave North Korea and North Vietnam more independence from both and facilitated the Albanian–Soviet split. The Cuban Missile Crisis preserved the Cuban Revolution from rollback by the United States but Fidel Castro became increasingly independent of Soviet influence afterwards, most notably during the 1975 Cuban intervention in Angola. In 1975, the communist victory in former French Indochina following the end of the Vietnam War gave the Eastern Bloc renewed confidence after it had been frayed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring. This led to the People's Republic of Albania withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact, briefly aligning with Mao Zedong's China until the Sino-Albanian split.

Under the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Soviet Union reserved the right to intervene in other socialist states. In response, China moved towards the United States following the Sino-Soviet border conflict and later reformed and liberalized its economy while the Eastern Bloc saw the Era of Stagnation in comparison with the capitalist First World. The Soviet–Afghan War nominally expanded the Eastern Bloc, but the war proved unwinnable and too costly for the Soviets, challenged in Eastern Europe by the civil resistance of Solidarity. In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pursued policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) to reform the Eastern Bloc and end the Cold War, which brought forth unrest throughout the bloc.

The start of the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc can be attributed to the opening of a border gate between Austria and Hungary at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989. On November 9, 1989, East Germany reunited with West Germany due to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Due to the inconsistent action of the Eastern European rulers, the bracket of the Eastern Bloc was broken. Unlike previous Soviet leaders in 1953, 1956 and 1968, Gorbachev refused to use force to end the 1989 Revolutions against Marxist–Leninist rule in Eastern Europe. The fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Warsaw Pact spread nationalist and liberal ideals throughout the Soviet Union. In 1991, Conservative communist elites launched a 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, which hastened the end of Marxist–Leninist rule in Eastern Europe. However, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China were violently repressed by the communist government there, which maintained its grip on power.

The term Eastern Bloc was often used interchangeably with the term Second World. This broadest usage of the term would include not only Maoist China and Cambodia, but short-lived Soviet satellites such as the Second East Turkestan Republic (1944–1949), the People's Republic of Azerbaijan, and Republic of Mahabad (1946), as well as the Marxist–Leninist states straddling the Second and Third Worlds before the end of the Cold War: the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (from 1967), the People's Republic of the Congo (from 1969), the People's Republic of Benin, the People's Republic of Angola and People's Republic of Mozambique from 1975, the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada from 1979 to 1983, the Derg/People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia from 1974, and the Somali Democratic Republic from 1969 until the Ogaden War in 1977. Many states were accused by the Western Bloc of being in the Eastern Bloc when they were actually part of the Non-Aligned Movement. The most limited definition of the Eastern Bloc would only include the Warsaw Pact states and the Mongolian People's Republic as former satellite states most dominated by the Soviet Union. Cuba's defiance of complete Soviet control was noteworthy enough that Cuba was sometimes excluded as a satellite state altogether, as it sometimes intervened in other Third World countries even when the Soviet Union opposed this.

The only surviving (pseudo)communist states are China, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos. Their state-socialist experience was more in line with decolonization from the Global North and anti-imperialism towards the West instead of the Red Army occupation of the former Eastern Bloc. The four states all adopted economic reforms to varying degrees. China and Vietnam are usually described as more state capitalist than the more traditionalist Cuba and Laos. The exception is North Korea, which replaced Marxism-Leninism with its nationalist ideology of Juche. Cambodia and Kazakhstan are still led by the same Eastern Bloc leaders as during the Cold War, though they are not officially Marxist–Leninist states. This was previously the case in Kazakhstan's fellow post-Soviet states of Uzbekistan until 2016, Turkmenistan until 2006, Kyrgyzstan until 2005, and Azerbaijan and Georgia until 2003. All presidents of post-Soviet Russia were members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Boris Yeltsin before 1990, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev before 1991). Azerbaijan is an authoritarian dominant-party state and North Korea is a totalitarian one-party state led by the heirs of their Eastern Bloc leaders, yet both have officially eliminated mentions of communism from their constitutions. In addition, the term "New Eastern Bloc" recently applies to countries allied with China and Russia such as North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Belarus, Serbia and many other countries.

Economic Recovery - Japan

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Indo-Pacific Economies 

sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...