US general warns Russia on nuclear bombers in Cuba
It seems the Russian newspaper Izvestia is reporting that Russia is considering basing long-range bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons at airfields in Cuba as a response to the United States plan to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.
Talk about a "new Cold War" has been common lately among the pundit class, something that I thought was pretty silly since the Cold War was a clash of ideologies - Communism vs. Free Markets and Democracy. You can say a lot of things about Russia, but one thing its not is Communist, so the clash of ideologies just doesn't exist today.
But the tit-for-tat military moves between the US and Russia (and the Soviet Union before it) are showing disturbing signs of coming back. One reason the Soviet Union decided to put missiles in Cuba was because Nikita Khrushchev was outraged that NATO had stationed missiles in Turkey, just a short flight from the southern edge of the Soviet Union. The Crisis was resolved when the Kennedy administration secretly agreed to pull the missiles out of Turkey if the Soviets pulled theirs from Cuba.
Flash forward a few decades. Russia has been uncomfortably watching NATO move steadily closer toward its borders, the United States plan to put missiles in Poland is just a step too far for them (even though the US insists the missile shield they are a part of is aimed at "rogue states" and not Russia). So Russia may again be turning to Cuba as a symbolic move - if you put bases in our back yard, we can put ours in yours.
Strategically, bombers in Cuba wouldn't mean much. If a war ever broke out between the US and Russia it would be fought with missiles, not bombers and tanks (and would be the last war either side ever fought). But they would be a powerful symbol, and in international relations, symbols can sometimes be as strong a weapon as bombs.
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