friday night caryn and i went over to joey’s house to watch a movie w/ him and catherine. the movie we ended up watching was Thirteen Days, a movie about the cuban missile crisis. in high school, despite the many years of history we had to take, unfortunately we never really spent too much time concentrating on any modern history… like pretty much anything after WWII. sure we kind of glossed over the vietnam war, kennedy, and the cuban missile crisis, but we really only learned a tiny bit about each and most of that information i’ve already forgotten.
watching that movie was pretty crazy. it’s totally insane to think just how close we came to having a nuclear war that would probably have wiped out most of the planet. the nuclear missiles that russia had in cuba could travel to the US in a mere 5 minutes, so any attempt at defense or hiding in bomb shelters etc would have been totally useless. due to some insanely lucky circumstances, and a president who wanted so badly to avert war, we somehow managed to pull through the situation. but it so easily could have ended differently. what if a situation like that had happened when we had an incompetent trigger-happy president like bush in control? i shudder to think what might have been.
-v