Syria is not the Cuban missile crisis of 2018
April 13, 2018
US President Donald Trump told Russia this week to "get ready" for an incoming missile strike in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria. Even before launching strikes on Syria on Friday, Trump followed up the threat by describing the relationship between Russia and the United States as "worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War."
US-Russian dispute. The Cold War. Missiles.
It didn't take long for some observers to invoke the 1962 Cuban missile crisis — the most dangerous episode of the Cold War — to describe the US-Russian standoff over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria.
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'Brink of nuclear conflict' in 1962
"[The Syria dispute] is the first direct threat [of conflict] between the two nuclear powers, the US and Russia, since the Cuban missile crisis," Elmar Brok, a former chairman of the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs, told German daily newspaper Bild.
Ex-chief advisor to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Igor Yurgens, struck a similar note, telling the AFP news agency: "We're in a situation which reminds me of the Caribbean crisis of the 1960s when [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev and [US President John F.] Kennedy were on the brink of nuclear conflict."
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The crisis both men were referring to occurred in October 1962 when the US discovered Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba, a Caribbean island nation close the southern state of Florida. The confrontation, which saw Washington order hundreds of its nuclear-armed bombers to prepare to strike the Soviet mainland, ended when the Soviets agreed to withdraw their missiles in return for the US withdrawing its nuclear missiles from Turkey, a US ally on the Soviet Union's southern border.
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Don't sweat it in 2018
But according to experts, the current dispute over Syria is very different from the Cold War crisis that brought the world to the brink of a full-scale nuclear war.
"There was a lot more at stake back then," said Ivan Tomofeyev of the Russian Council for Foreign Relations in Moscow. Unlike the situation in Syria, "the US saw the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba as an existential threat … and there was a clear ideological confrontation," Tomofeyev said, referring to the US strategy of containing the Soviet Union to prevent the spread of communism.
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Both sides were also willing to risk a war in 1962 to force the other to stand down, according to history professor Bernd Greiner from the University of Hamburg. Soviet forces shot down a US spy plane, and the pilot was killed, while the US started preparations to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. "Syria, in contrast, is a crisis, but not a dispute that will bring both sides to the brink of a world war," he said.
Possibility of escalation
US targeting plans were another key difference between 1962 and 2018, said Steven Pifer, a nuclear weapons expert at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. The US of 1962 had plans to target Soviet forces on Cuba that would have killed hundreds of Soviet soldiers. The US of 2018, in contrast, said it tried to avoid any Russian forces during strikes against Syrian government targets.
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But even if the US strike against Syria were to accidentally kill Russians on the ground, Pifer said, Moscow would not retaliate with nuclear weapons: "My guess is that the Russian military has a pretty good appreciation of what that would lead to."
While the use of nuclear weapons was unlikely, Tomofeyev said a US missile strike against Syria could spark a direct military conflict with Moscow if Russian forces are hit: "Russian deaths could escalate [the situation] to the point where [Russia] attacks US aircraft or navy vessels."
"The biggest risk is false interpretations of [the other side's] intentions."
Roman Goncharenko contributed to this report.