Andrew Cockburn

Kennedy was perfectly aware that nuclear missiles in Cuba posed no real threat to national security, even if they slightly narrowed America’s enormous lead in weapons capable of reaching the other’s homeland. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had told him that a US nuclear attack would obliterate Soviet society but the inevitable retaliation might still kill as many as fifteen million Americans. War with the USSR was therefore out of the question. ‘What difference does it make?’ Kennedy said on 16 October 1962, the day he was presented with photographic evidence of the Cuban rockets. ‘They’ve got enough to blow us up anyway.’ But the presence of an enemy nuclear base in America’s backyard nonetheless threatened him with political disaster. He dealt with the problem by making a deal with Khrushchev, behind the backs of most of his senior advisers, to withdraw US missiles from Turkey in return for a similar Soviet withdrawal from Cuba. The deal remained buried in secrecy long after Kennedy was dead.

Amid​ the death and destruction of the current conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, one shining success story has emerged: the Turkish-designed and manufactured Bayraktar TB2 drone, widely credited with stellar results against Armenian forces. ‘Thanks to advanced Turkish drones owned by the Azerbaijan military, our casualties on the front shrank,’ Azerbaijan’s...

At​ the end of last year the Russian military announced that it had deployed a revolutionary weapon, designed to give Russia a decisive advantage in the strategic nuclear arms race. Avangard, as the new system is called, is a ‘hypersonic glide’ missile. Unlike traditional Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, which follow a fixed and predictable trajectory, arcing up as high as...

It’s generally assumed that with the Iraq War officially over and troops withdrawing from Afghanistan, US defence spending will drop. Obama’s reference in his State of the Union address to ‘saving half a trillion dollars’ from the defence budget encouraged this assumption, as have Republican complaints that such cuts would ‘decimate’ the nation’s...

Tamara Chalabi’s chronicle of her family might make for an ideal TV series, recounting as it does a comforting upper-class idyll complete with loyal attendants, marred only by revolution, exile and controversy and concluding with a triumphant return home to prosperity. An honest recounting of the story would have to feature among its climactic episodes the chequered career of the...