| Wie "Cuban missle crisis in slow motion" |  |
Ganz spannender Text von the Intercept über die Hintergründe der aktuellen "Krise" und die Parallelen zur Cuban Missile Crisis.
The most important thing to understand about the Cuban missile crisis is why there was such a thing, but never an “Italian missile crisis” or a “Turkish missile crisis.” When the Soviet Union stationed nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, the U.S. found it intolerable because the missiles were just 2,000 kilometers and mere minutes away from Washington, D.C. But the Kennedy administration had already deployed medium-range nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey, about the same distance from Moscow. The Soviets, however, did not immediately engage in nuclear brinkmanship. In other words, the “crisis” part of the Cuban missile crisis was that the U.S. was unwilling to live under the same threat to which we had subjected others.
Exactly the same is true with North Korea. The U.S. has possessed the capacity to destroy North Korea with nuclear weapons for all of North Korea’s existence. But this has never constituted a crisis, even though the U.S. engaged in one of the cruelest air campaigns in history during the Korean War from 1950-53, dropping more conventional bombs on North Korea than we used in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. The situation has only become a crisis now because Kim Jong Un’s regime may be able to do to us some of what we’ve always been able to do to them, and Trump has declared that this cannot stand.
This was the context when Trump threatened North Korea in August 2017 with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” The next month at the United Nations, he insultingly referred to Kim as “Rocket Man” and proclaimed that the U.S. may “have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” One of Trump’s top Senate allies on foreign policy, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, blithely declared that Trump had told him that “There is a military option to destroy … North Korea itself.”
[https://theintercept.com/2018/06/11/who-cares-what-trump-gives-north-korea-at-the-summit-what-matters-is-preventing-him-from-starting-a-nuclear-war/]