Letters To The Editor

26/10/62

US Backed on Cuba

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

  In constructing offensive missile bases in Cuba the Soviet Union has recklessly added to those already existing a new and dangerous area of nuclear confrontation between the superpowers. This is not, as some would have it, a delayed kind of tit-for-tat. American nuclear bases in Turkey and Italy were our public response to bellicose Soviet announcements in 1956-57 that her missiles, deployed throughout Easter Europe, were trained on the heartland of each of our NATO allies.

  What the Soviet Union has tried to do is to tip the precarious balance of the last six years resoundingly in her own favor. In an age fraught with peri enough for all the world, when men of goodwill on both sides are trying to move toward a stable peace, this latest Russian move is a deliberate aggressive act designed no doubt to serve a number of ends-not least among them the eliciting of an American response. That response has come forceful but phased, and permitting the Soviet Government to lead us all back from a slippery edge, if she so chooses. I devoutly hope she does.

  For those who question the necessity for the kind of response we've made at this juncture and whose perspective on events becomes clearer only when they can find "parallels" between the Soviet and American Behaviour, I offer the following hypothetical one:

  What would Russia have done if, in the last three months the United States had constructed missile sites, Cuban style, in Finland, a bullied little country on the Soviet threshold?

ALLIE F OLAFSON, BALTIMORE, Md., OCT. 24, 1962.