Word: destroying
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...Joint Chiefs recommended to President John F. Kennedy that the U.S. attack Cuba within 36 hours and destroy the Soviet missiles we had detected, believing--as the CIA estimated--the nuclear warheads had not yet been delivered. It would be a huge attack: the first day's air strike would be 1,080 sorties. This would be followed by an invasion; we had 180,000 troops mobilized in southeastern U.S. ports. We didn't learn until 30 years later that the Soviets already had 162 warheads in Cuba, and Fidel Castro had already recommended to Nikita Khrushchev that nuclear weapons...
...other group recommended an attack. Kennedy asked General Walter Sweeney, chief of the Tactical Air Command, if he was certain he could take out all the missiles. Sweeney replied, "We have the finest fighter force in the world; we have trained for this kind of operation, and they would destroy the great majority. But there might be one or two or five left." What President would knowingly take the risk of exposing millions of Americans to attack by not destroying one, two or five nuclear weapons? At that moment I knew Kennedy would decide on a quarantine...
PLAN TO CLOSE MISSION AT ABOUT 0430 30 APRIL LOCAL TIME. DUE TO NECESSITY TO DESTROY [COMMUNICATIONS] GEAR THIS IS THE LAST MESSAGE FROM EMBASSY SAIGON...
...Kuwait. Edhem Pasic, a Bosnian ambassador who befriended Saddam in 1979, went to Baghdad after the July 1990 invasion to persuade Saddam to withdraw. "I told him, 'Of all the reasons to leave Kuwait, maybe the most important reason for you is that the Western countries will destroy you,'" Pasic says. "He answered, 'You do not know what I know,'" preferring to believe his own misguided assessment. When, as the Allies ripped through Iraq, a general finally told Saddam that his army was being destroyed, he replied coldly, "That is your opinion." But he proved right in one crucial calculation...
...experts generally believe that for Saddam, power is everything and death is a better alternative than losing it. Any other outcome, says Phebe Marr, a former Pentagon consultant and author of a book on Iraq, would destroy the monumental myth Saddam has spent his life creating. "His legacy would disappear...