Word: nikita
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...chilling days in October 1962, it seemed that John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev might be playing out the opening scenes of World War III. The Cuban missile crisis was a uniquely compact moment of history. For the first time in the nuclear age, the two superpowers found themselves in a sort of moral road test of their apocalyptic powers...
...ultimate game of chicken commenced on October 22, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy grimly etched a line 700 miles off the coast of Cuba. Kennedy promised a war that no one wanted if Nikita Krushchev did not call back his battleships and remove his missiles from the island. The Kremlin remained silent. B-52 squadrons scrambled: the Soviet fleet steamed ahead...
Some Soviets have begun to speculate that Brezhnev may retire rather than die in office, as Joseph Stalin did in 1953, or be ousted, as Nikita Khrushchev was in 1964. One possible setting for a resignation: the plenary meeting of the Communist Party's Central Committee at the end of April or the beginning of May. Says one Western European diplomat in Moscow: "If they do it like this, I would expect them to pull out all the stops and make it a grand, very respectable, occasion...
Brezhnev's offer was not the first of its kind, but it was the most direct to date. Said he: "We have never considered normal the state of hostility and estrangement between our countries." Downplaying the doctrinal conflict that caused his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev, to withdraw all Soviet advisers from China in 1960, Brezhnev offered to renew negotiations on the border disputes that provoked major skirmishes along the Ussuri River frontier in 1969. The Soviets have important reasons to seek a reduction in tensions with China. Faced with domestic economic strains and a dangerous hemorrhaging of resources in Poland...
...came. Many went home and saw the fireballs in their dreams. When the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles on Cuba in 1962, instead of hiding under their desks, children filed into school chapels and prayed that John F. Kennedy would be vindicated in his decision to face down Nikita Khrushchev. Again, giant mushroom clouds grew only in dreams...