Cite?
This site implies otherwise. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/press4.htm
I think I misinterpreted your post. You didn’t mean to say that the warheads were there until 1989, did you?
Why didn’t we nuke Rusia in '49?I’d wager for the same reason we didn’t go after them in Czechoslovakia,Hungary and other countries where they installed puppet figureheads.We didn’t ** want ** war.The previous war was enough to convince most people that the preferred policy was containment,with hope eventually,the West would win the propaganda war and every one would agree our way is the best way.
If you’re too young to remember that mindset,think of post Vietnam.You fight a long war,enough is enough for most people,especially the ones that were doing the grunt work.War in those days wasn’t like contemplating a turkey shoot in Afghanistan or Iraq.And as was mentioned previously, we didn’t have a fraction of the atomic ordinance or the sophistication of delivery systems and intelligence,as we do today.
** Most people**didn’t want it,that is, except some of the more hawkish military.Fortunately you had at the time a CCO who wouldn’t let the Hawks rule.Imagine if the Bush mindset was at work when MacArthur wanted to nuke Manchuria.
I meant it was 1989 when the West first learned that during the Cuban missile crisis that there were Soviet warheads and missiles in Cuba capable of targeting US cities as far North as DC. I already mentioned my cite, “Dark Sun” by Richard Rhodes.
Quibble: there was actually another en route to Tinian (and thence Japan) at the time.
As regards the thread in general, it may be worth noting that c.1950 Bertrand Russell apparently did advocate that the US bomb Russia while they still had strategic advantage. (Whether he did or not was the subject of correspondence in The Economist last year, concluding with Nigel Lawson, father of Nigella and former Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, claiming that he’d heard Russell state this in a speech to his school at the time.)