It was a different type of Red October 60 years ago this month that involved not the Phillies but a world series of events that turned Halloween into a real-life scare.
“We will bury you!” blurted out Nikita Khrushchev, clad in funereal finery as any fashionable premiere of the Soviet Union would be. But he wasn’t without holiday spirit: The Red Menace toted a trick bag of polished apples spiked with nuggets of nukes.
In the U.S., President John F. Kennedy wasn’t buying; he had his own costume, one that etched his handsome profile in courage.
And it was all must-see TV as the world watched two superpowers plow their way through what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, 13 days that shook the world with the U.S./USSR poised for a missile-a-missile confrontation in late October 1962 over whether the Soviets would remove secretly installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, just a bomb’s blast from the shores of Florida.
It was a surreal game of “Battleship,” where the stakes were global survival amid a surfeit of Sturm und Drang.
In a nationally broadcasted speech airing Oct. 22, 1962, Kennedy delineated what he would do for his country: choreograph a naval blockade of Cuba that would stymie the Communist bloc country from receiving any more Soviet bombs.
Such was the Cold War at its most heated.
The potential catastrophic confrontation was resolved at the last-second, with the Soviets agreeing to pull their arsenal from Cuba and the Americans vowing not to invade Cuba in the future and also to pull their own nukes from Turkey.
Surely, in the 60 years since, lessons must have been learned. But Russia is proving that it has learned nothing, opting for a blast from the past to demonstrate its illusion of dominance.
For Vladimir Putin, when putsch comes to shove, it’s all a matter of shifted geography: “We will bury you!” has literally, frighteningly, been transposed to the killing field of the Ukraine as its target, with Putin now pulling his nuclear-war-card-threat out of the graveyards he has created throughout the sovereign state.
Will we come as close as Kennedy did to unleashing weapons of mass destruction to push back? Will the humiliated Putin try to save face by destroying the planet? Is there hope or heartache ahead?
Ultimately, as noted, Khrushchev caved and Kennedy compromised to help the Soviet dictator save face. But protecting Ukraine is not a question of compromise as it faces a renewed Evil Empire out to eviscerate it. As Russian rhetoric rampages on and Ukraine does a U-turn, winning skirmishes as Russian soldiers scatter, scared of the once perceived patsies now winning warriors, Putin’s bombshell threats of nuclear retaliation rattle cages the way Khrushchev considered cratering the world caused global chaos.
President Biden has heard the rattle, calling the current threats the closest the world has come to Armageddon since the edge-of-the-seat scenario in 1962.
Sales of Putin masks should do very well this Halloween, when horror stories take center stage before ceding to reality. But what could happen when reality unmasks a true monster threatening to extend the season for real with a nuclear arsenal in his trick bag?
One has to look at the current horizon of hate and headlines and fearfully wonder what comes next on this 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Michael Elkin is an award-winning playwright, theater critic and novelist whose produced works include “Saddam,” a drama about the Persian Gulf War. He lives in Abington.
This article originally appeared on The Intelligencer: Guest Opinion: Did Russia learn nothing from the Cuban Missile Crisis?
