How wrong is “completely wrong”? I’ve only read Cummings up to the paywall. His two examples are 1) that the USSR planned to use nuclear weapons quickly if war broke out and 2) that B-59 almost used a nuclear weapon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Re: 1), this is significant, but AIUI NATO planners never had all that much hope of avoiding the conventional war → nuclear war escalation. The core of the strategy was avoiding the big conventional war in the first place, and this succeeded.
Re: 2), Cummings leaves out some very important context on B-59: the captain ordered a nuclear attack specifically because he did not know what was going on and thought war might have already broken out. It’s scary that it happened, but it’s a huge leap to claim this falsifies the ‘myth’ of Kennedy successfully negotiating with Khrushchev.
How wrong is “completely wrong”? I’ve only read Cummings up to the paywall. His two examples are 1) that the USSR planned to use nuclear weapons quickly if war broke out and 2) that B-59 almost used a nuclear weapon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Re: 1), this is significant, but AIUI NATO planners never had all that much hope of avoiding the conventional war → nuclear war escalation. The core of the strategy was avoiding the big conventional war in the first place, and this succeeded.
Re: 2), Cummings leaves out some very important context on B-59: the captain ordered a nuclear attack specifically because he did not know what was going on and thought war might have already broken out. It’s scary that it happened, but it’s a huge leap to claim this falsifies the ‘myth’ of Kennedy successfully negotiating with Khrushchev.