While the debate about whether or not female members of the ADF should be frontline fighters continues , there is a woman quietly living in Darwin’s rural area who was at the front in a confrontation which could have started a global nuclear war , the l962 Cuban missile crisis. A journalist in the US Navy at the time, Toni was serving at the American base at Guantanamo Bay, part of Cuba. After a spy plane picked up missile launching sites on Cuba , President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade and issued an ultimatum for Russia to remove its nuclear weapons . Tension mounted further when a U2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba. Russian leader , Nikita Kruschev , demanded the US remove missiles from Turkey , a request ignored.
A member of a family with a military history , whose father was a high ranking USAF officer, Toni took photographs from an observation plane that flew over Russian merchant ships on which nuclear missiles were laid out on deck , their covers rolled back, for aerial inspection . One of her photographs appeared in Life magazine , but was wrongly attributed to a male - Tom instead of Toni. While she did not get the credit for the photograph ,she did meet her husband who ran the Guantanamo Bay base radio station , a situation like the movie , Good Morning ,Vietnam!
It was said Russia only backed down because it had a weak naval capacity and thereafter threw itself into a massive naval expansion, which inevitably led to further tensions between the superpowers. While we say Toni now leads a quite life in Darwin , there are times ,while watching Fox News and ironing, that she has the urge to launch missiles at the box .
