Pandemic recalls missile crisis

The end of the world has come and gone so many times now that it’s getting hard to put your affairs in order. They tend to get scrambled and stay scrambled.

The current pandemic has a lot of folks worried — and the world that re-emerges from this one will be something we haven’t seen before. But the ender of all times was probably the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, one that those who lived through it can never forget.

That crisis was a 13-day battle of nerves between the United States and the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War.

It began when U.S. intelligence officers determined from spy-plane information that the Soviets had positioned nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba.

The Cuban missile deployment was a bold move by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev taken at the request of Fidel Castro, leader of the island’s ruling Communist Party. Castro made the request after the ill-fated 1961 invasion at the Bay of Pigs initiated by Cuban exiles based in the United States.

The Cuban leader wanted the Russian missiles to deter any future invasion efforts from the United States. Khrushchev leaped at the invitation and deployed his missiles on the island in the Caribbean. Things were also getting tense at that time in Berlin, where the United States and Soviet Russia were facing off in the city divided between East and West.

President John Kennedy initiated a blockade of Cuba to block further missile deliveries and demanded that those already on the island be dismantled and removed. The face-off eventually ended but not before the world spent days looking at the possibility of nuclear devastation.

One of the big problems with the Soviet presence in Cuba was that it was so close to the United States and the face-off that followed was the closest the United States and the Soviet Union ever came to all-out nuclear war.

That would have been the world ender of all world enders and people everywhere were worried. If the missiles of both sides were launched — and there were a great many people worried that might happen — the world would have effectively ended for millions of people.

But as with all such near-misses, some good came out of it. The worldwide worry and the possibility of fatal errors caused by bad information resulted in establishment of a hotline between Moscow and Washington for use in communications when things got tough. That has proved valuable many times over the years.

In fact, the Cold War eventually ended when both sides realized they had more to gain than to lose by working together and resolving their differences in mutually-beneficial ways.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic will cause great damage to the world economy and that has yet to be measured. But it has also caused an unprecedented effort by scientists and medical researchers worldwide to join forces and find a way to end the epidemic.

Medical protocols and other complications that would ordinarily involve extended discussions and negotiations are now being resolved in record time.

People who would ordinarily be competing against each other are working together to deal with a common enemy. You can be sure they will be successful even if we don’t know how or when just yet. But they will.