(August 14, 2014 at 4:57 pm)Diablo Wrote: So what was the truth here? On the one hand the Soviets climbed down and Kennedy claimed a victory, which is the way the West saw it. On the other hand the Russians got rid of a perceived threat, if not an actual one. I wonder if it was actually a fair deal in the end. Maybe the Soviets came out on top because of the removal of the threat from Turkey. They also found out about how good US surveillance was from the presentation they made in public.As I understand it, Kruschev believed that JFK was soft and would back down in the event of a confrontation. When Kennedy made it clear that he wasn't going to back off, and a nuclear exchange appeared to be possible, he decided that it wasn't worth the risk. It's possible that the removal of missiles in Turkey was a way of avoiding a complete loss of face, but the fact that he backed down from sending missiles to Cuba was a pretty big victory for JFK. I think that if Kruschev really did see JFK as a lightweight, being forced to back down would have been pretty humiliating.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
