Yes, I lived through it. It was an unnecessary crisis. It risked millions of lives over what was not an attack (which would have been insane and suicidal anyway on the part of both Cuba and Russia), but simply a deployment of weapons onto the soil of a willing ally. The USA deploys weapons onto the soil of any willing ally it chooses, whether or not they are close to Russia.

My point about Cuba was this: Cuba was agreeable to having the Soviets place nuclear weaponry on the island. They wanted it done. That was not the case at all with your example of Japan, for obvious reasons...they have already been the recipients of atomic bomb attacks. They were not willing to serve as a base for such weapons. I am not sure what the case was with Taiwan or if the question ever even came up in regards to Taiwan.

Yes, it was very easy in 1962 to justify the stance taken by the Kennedy administration. Uh-huh. People had been terrorized and propagandized ever since the late 40's into the idea of a never-ending war between the "Free World" (some of it not free at all) and the Soviets (none of them free at all). The blame for that can be placed equally on both Stalin and the West, as far as I'm concerned. It was, again, an insane situation that menaced hundreds of millions of lives to no useful purpose whatsoever. Further such insane situations, I believe, are just around the corner in the early 21st century, but the playing cards have been shuffled into a slightly different deck. Same insane rationale, different "bad guys" to obsess about.

It's a mistake in thinking. It leads nowhere but to disaster. It is completely unproductive, and it is wasting our collective time and our resources while risking the lives of all of us needlessly.