It is not the first time that Moscow has come under military pressure. In the 1980s came a War in Afghanistan lost, there were also deliveries of arms from the West. At the time, the Soviet Union did not threaten to use nuclear weapons, Greiner emphasizes. “I am not aware that after Nikita Khrushchev any Kremlin boss threatened to use nuclear weapons – until Putin.”
Khrushchev did that after the Suez Crisis and during various Berlin crises between 1958 and 1961 and during the Cuba Crisis done again and again. “But Khrushchev knew exactly when he had overplayed his cards. He started the Cuban Missile Crisis, but also ended it again. The experience of the Second World War was still in his bones,” says historian Greiner.
(by Nils Metzger)