an old friend wrote:
wrote:
K=D8HB wrote:
wrote

They valued warfare higher.

As someone who has "been there, done that" I can assure you that nobo=
dy values
warfare except arms vendors.

Warfare is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a method to OBTAIN some =
thing or
some result of value.

Well said!

JFK needed something that looked good to
counter his critics about the Bay of Pigs and
the Cuban missile crisis.

"Been there, done that, got the medals both times". The only critics=
of the
results of the "Cuban missile crisis" wore poorly fitting suits and d=
rank lots
of vodka.

Not the results but that the whole thing happened in the first place.

IIRC, the Soviets were ticked off about the placement of Jupiter-C
IRBMs in Turkey. Of course Turkey was and is a NATO country. Moscow's
objection to the IRBMs was that they could hit targets inside the
Soviet Union in minutes, and were virtually impossible to stop,
compared to conventional bombers. They demanded that the IRBMs be
removed, and of course NATO refused - even though the Jupiters were
becoming outdated by ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles.

So the Soviets retaliated by trying to install similar IRBMs in Cuba.
Fortunately the preparations were discovered and their plans thwarted.

But what was kept rather quiet is that some months after the Soviets
backed down from installing their missiles in Cuba, the Jupiters were
quietly removed from Turkey.

bull**** Jim

Which part of what I wrote is not true, Mark?

Perhaps you mean my reference to the Jupiter-Cs as "IRBMs"
(Intermediate-Range-Ballistic-Missiles) which are elsewhere called
"MRBMs" (Medium-Range-Ballistic-Missiles).

every movie or account of those days mentions it

Even if true, so what?

Those movies and accounts were done long after the crisis. What I wrote
is true: some months after the Soviets backed down from installing
their missiles in Cuba, the Jupiters were quietly removed from Turkey.

That they were scheduled to be removed, were obsolete, and were already
replaced by more-effective submarine-launched missiles and ICBMs is
inconsequential. The point is that the Soviets backed down publicly and
visibly, while *at the time*, the removal of the missiles in Turkey was
kept quiet until long after it was an accomplished fact.

and that the Jupiters were obsolete and scheduled for withdraw

and the Kendy had ordered their withdraw several time

Inconsequential - they were operational in October 1962 and were a big
reason for the Soviets' actions in Cuba. Moscow figured that if the USA
could have missiles so close to Soviet cities, then the USSR should
have similar missiles at similar distances from US cities. That the
Jupiters were actually meant to defend all of NATO, not just the USA,
was lost on the Soviets.

You also missed the point of the whole discussion: JFK pushed the
"space race" in general, and the
man-on-the-moon-before-this-decade-is-out, as a way to divert attention
from the Soviets' early space successes, and Kennedy administration
embarrassments like the Bay of Pigs. Space was a way to go mano-a-mano
with the Rooskies *without* fighting, and while they had a head start,
getting to the moon was far enough away that the USA had a good chance
of getting there first.

IOW, it *wasn't* about science, or exploration, or "the final
frontier", new technologies, etc. Those things were side benefits - the
main game was beating the Russians at something. But after July 1969,
there wasn't another clear goal nor obvious opponent. In July 1975 the
US and USSR did the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission, which would have been
all but unimaginable ten years earlier.

Just look at a partial list of early Soviet space "firsts":

1957 - Sputnik 1, first artificial earth satellite
1957 - Sputnik 2, first animal in space (Laika the dog)
1959 - Luna 2 impacts moon (intentionally!)
1961 - Vostok 1 - Yuri Gagarin is first human in space and first to
orbit the earth
1962 - Mars 1 - First flyby of Mars
1964 - Voskhod 1 - First multiperson mission (three cosmonauts)
1965 - Voskhod 2 - Alexei Leonov makes first space walk
1966 - Luna 9 soft lands on the Moon and returns TV pictures
1966 - Venera 3 is first spacecraft to enter atmosphere of another
planet (Venus)
1966 - Luna 10 orbits Moon (first spacecraft to orbit another world)

Also the first woman in space, first pictures of the far side of the
moon, and much more.

And a "hot-line" was installed between Washington and Moscow so that
things could be discussed more directly by the leaders of the two
countries, and their representatives.

73 de Jim, N2EY