The Cuban Missile Crisis and Ownership of the World
| by Noam Chomsky
( October 16, 2012, Boston, Sri
Lanka Guardian) The world stood still 50 years ago during the last week of
October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed
nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended -- though
unknown to the public, only officially.
The image of the world standing
still is the turn of phrase of
Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library,
who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings
where Kennedy and a close circle of advisers debated how to respond to the
crisis. Those meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might
bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively
temperate compared to other participants, who were unaware that they were
speaking to history.
Stern has just published an
accessible and accurate review of this critically important documentary record,
finally declassified in the late 1990s. I will keep to that here. “Never
before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human civilization been at
stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,” culminating in “the
week the world stood still.”
There was good reason for the
global concern. A nuclear war was all too imminent, a war that might
“destroy the Northern Hemisphere,” President Dwight Eisenhower had
warned. Kennedy’s own judgment was that the probability of war might have
been as high as 50%. Estimates became higher as the confrontation reached its
peak and the “secret doomsday plan to ensure the survival of the government was
put into effect” in Washington, as described by journalist Michael Dobbs in his
well-researched bestseller on the crisis (though he doesn’t explain why there
would be much point in doing so, given the likely nature of nuclear war).
Dobbs quotes Dino Brugioni, “a
key member of the CIA team monitoring the Soviet missile buildup,” who saw no
way out except “war and complete destruction” as the clock moved to “one minute to midnight,” the title of his book.
Kennedy’s close associate, historian Arthur Schlesinger, described the events
as “the most dangerous moment in human history.” Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara wondered aloud whether he “would live to see another Saturday night,”
and later recognized that “we lucked out” -- barely.
“The Most Dangerous
Moment”
A closer look at what took place
adds grim overtones to these judgments, with reverberations to the present
moment.
There are several candidates for “the
most dangerous moment.” One is October 27th, when U.S. destroyers enforcing a
quarantine around Cuba were dropping depth charges on Soviet submarines.
According to Soviet accounts, reported by the National Security Archive,
submarine commanders were “rattled enough to talk about firing nuclear
torpedoes, whose 15 kiloton explosive yields approximated the bomb that
devastated Hiroshima in August 1945.”
In one case, a reported decision
to assemble a nuclear torpedo for battle readiness was aborted at the last
minute by Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov, who may have saved the world from
nuclear disaster. There is little doubt what the U.S. reaction would have
been had the torpedo been fired, or how the Russians would have responded as
their country was going up in smoke.
Kennedy had already declared the
highest nuclear alert short of launch (DEFCON 2), which authorized “NATO
aircraft with Turkish pilots ... [or others] ... to take off, fly to Moscow,
and drop a bomb,” according to the
well-informed Harvard University strategic analyst Graham Allison, writing in
the major establishment journal Foreign
Affairs.
Another candidate is October
26th. That day has been selected as “the most dangerous moment” by B-52
pilot Major Don Clawson, who piloted one of those NATO aircraft and provides a
hair-raising description of details of the Chrome Dome (CD) missions during the
crisis -- “B-52s on airborne alert” with nuclear weapons “on board and ready to
use.”
October 26th was the day when
“the nation was closest to nuclear war,” he writes in his “irreverent anecdotes
of an Air Force pilot,” Is That Something the Crew Should Know? On that day, Clawson himself
was in a good position to set off a likely terminal cataclysm. He
concludes, “We were damned lucky we didn’t blow up the world -- and no thanks
to the political or military leadership of this country.”
The errors, confusions,
near-accidents, and miscomprehension of the leadership that Clawson reports are
startling enough, but nothing like the operative command-and-control rules --
or lack of them. As Clawson recounts his experiences during the 15
24-hour CD missions he flew, the maximum possible, the official commanders “did
not possess the capability to prevent a rogue-crew or crew-member from arming
and releasing their thermonuclear weapons,” or even from broadcasting a mission
that would have sent off “the entire Airborne Alert force without possibility
of recall.” Once the crew was airborne carrying thermonuclear weapons, he
writes, “it would have been possible to arm and drop them all with no further
input from the ground. There was no inhibitor on any of the systems.”
About one-third of the total
force was in the air, according to General David Burchinal, director of plans
on the Air Staff at Air Force Headquarters. The Strategic Air Command
(SAC), technically in charge, appears to have had little control. And
according to Clawson’s account, the civilian National Command Authority was
kept in the dark by SAC, which means that the ExComm “deciders” pondering the
fate of the world knew even less. General Burchinal’s oral history is no
less hair-raising, and reveals even greater contempt for the civilian
command. According to him, Russian capitulation was never in doubt.
The CD operations were designed to make it crystal clear to the Russians that
they were hardly even competing in the military confrontation, and could quickly
have been destroyed.
From the ExComm records, Stern
concludes that, on October 26th, President Kennedy was “leaning towards
military action to eliminate the missiles” in Cuba, to be followed by invasion,
according to Pentagon plans. It was evident then that the act might have
led to terminal war, a conclusion fortified by much later revelations that
tactical nuclear weapons had been deployed and that Russian forces were far
greater than U.S. intelligence had reported.
As the ExComm meetings were drawing
to a close at 6 p.m. on the 26th, a letter arrived from Soviet Prime Minister
Nikita Khrushchev, sent directly to President Kennedy. His “message
seemed clear,” Stern writes: “the missiles would be removed if the U.S.
promised not to invade Cuba.”
The next day, at 10 am, the
president again turned on the secret tape. He read aloud a wire service
report that had just been handed to him: “Premier Khrushchev told President
Kennedy in a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the
United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey” -- Jupiter missiles with
nuclear warheads. The report was soon authenticated.
Though received by the committee
as an unexpected bolt from the blue, it had actually been anticipated: “we’ve
known this might be coming for a week,” Kennedy informed them. To refuse
public acquiescence would be difficult, he realized. These were obsolete
missiles, already slated for withdrawal, soon to be replaced by far more lethal
and effectively invulnerable Polaris submarines. Kennedy recognized that
he would be in an “insupportable position
if this becomes [Khrushchev’s] proposal,” both because the Turkish missiles
were useless and were being withdrawn anyway, and because “it’s gonna -- to any
man at the United Nations or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair
trade.”
Keeping U.S. Power
Unrestrained
The planners therefore faced a
serious dilemma. They had in hand two somewhat different proposals from
Khrushchev to end the threat of catastrophic war, and each would seem to any
“rational man” to be a fair trade. How then to react?
One possibility would have been
to breathe a sigh of relief that civilization could survive and to eagerly
accept both offers; to announce that the U.S. would adhere to international law
and remove any threat to invade Cuba; and to carry forward the withdrawal of
the obsolete missiles in Turkey, proceeding as planned to upgrade the nuclear
threat against the Soviet Union to a far greater one -- only part, of course,
of the global encirclement of Russia. But that was unthinkable.
The basic reason why no such
thought could be contemplated was spelled out by National Security Adviser
McGeorge Bundy, former Harvard dean and reputedly the brightest star in the
Camelot firmament. The world, he insisted, must come to understand that
“[t]he current threat to peace is not in Turkey, it is in Cuba,” where missiles were
directed against the U.S. A vastly more powerful U.S. missile force
trained on the much weaker and more vulnerable Soviet enemy could not possibly
be regarded as a threat to peace, because we are Good, as a great many people
in the Western hemisphere and beyond could testify -- among numerous others,
the victims of the ongoing terrorist war that
the U.S. was then waging against Cuba, or those swept up in the “campaign of hatred” in the Arab world that so puzzled
Eisenhower, though not the National Security Council, which explained it
clearly.
Of course, the idea that the U.S.
should be restrained by international law was too ridiculous to merit
consideration. As explained recently by
the respected left-liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias, “one of the main
functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by
western powers” -- meaning the U.S. -- so that it is “amazingly naïve,”
indeed quite “silly,” to suggest that it should obey international law or other
conditions that we impose on the powerless. This was a frank and welcome
exposition of operative assumptions, reflexively taken for granted by the
ExComm assemblage.
In subsequent colloquy, the
president stressed that we would be “in a bad position” if we chose to set off
an international conflagration by rejecting proposals that would seem quite
reasonable to survivors (if any cared). This “pragmatic” stance was about
as far as moral considerations could reach.
In a review of recently released
documents on Kennedy-era terror, Harvard University Latin Americanist Jorge
Domínguez observes, “Only once in these nearly thousand pages of
documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral
objection to U.S.-government sponsored terrorism”: a member of the National
Security Council staff suggested that raids that are “haphazard and kill
innocents... might mean a bad press in some friendly countries.”
The same attitudes prevailed
throughout the internal discussions during the missile crisis, as when Robert
Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would “kill an awful lot of
people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it.” And they prevail
to the present, with only the rarest of exceptions, as easily documented.
We might have been “in even a
worse position” if the world had known more about what the U.S. was doing at
the time. Only recently was it learned that, six months earlier, the U.S.
had secretly deployed missiles in Okinawa virtually identical to those the
Russians would send to Cuba. These were surely aimed at China at a moment
of elevated regional tensions. To this day, Okinawa remains a major
offensive U.S. military base over the bitter objections of its inhabitants who,
right now, are less than enthusiastic about the dispatch of accident-prone V-22 Osprey
helicopters to the Futenma military base, located at the heart of a heavily
populated urban center.
An Indecent Disrespect
for the Opinions of Humankind
The deliberations that followed
are revealing, but I will put them aside here. They did reach a
conclusion. The U.S. pledged to withdraw the obsolete missiles from
Turkey, but would not do so publicly or put the offer in writing: it was
important that Khrushchev be seen to capitulate. An interesting reason
was offered, and is accepted as reasonable by scholarship and commentary.
As Dobbs puts it, “If it appeared that the United States was dismantling the
missile bases unilaterally, under pressure from the Soviet Union, the [NATO]
alliance might crack” -- or to rephrase a little more accurately, if the U.S.
replaced useless missiles with a far more lethal threat, as already planned, in
a trade with Russia that any “rational man” would regard as very fair, then the
NATO alliance might crack.
To be sure, when Russia withdrew Cuba’s only deterrent
against an ongoing U.S. attack -- with a severe threat to proceed to direct
invasion still in the air -- and quietly departed from the scene, the Cubans
would be infuriated (as, in fact, they understandably were). But that is
an unfair comparison for the standard reasons: we are human beings who matter,
while they are merely “unpeople,” to adapt George Orwell’s useful phrase.
Kennedy also made an informal
pledge not to invade Cuba, but with conditions: not just the withdrawal of the
missiles, but also termination, or at least “a great lessening,” of any Russian
military presence. (Unlike Turkey, on Russia’s borders, where nothing of
the kind could be contemplated.) When Cuba is no longer an “armed camp,”
then “we probably wouldn’t invade,” in the president’s words. He added
that, if it hoped to be free from the threat of U.S. invasion, Cuba must end
its “political subversion” (Stern’s phrase) in Latin America.
"Political subversion” had been a constant theme for years, invoked for
example when Eisenhower overthrew the parliamentary government of Guatemala and
plunged that tortured country into an abyss from which it has yet to
emerge. And these themes remained alive and well right through Ronald
Reagan’s vicious terror wars in Central America in the 1980s. Cuba’s
“political subversion” consisted of support for those resisting the murderous
assaults of the U.S. and its client regimes, and sometimes even perhaps --
horror of horrors -- providing arms to the victims.
The usage is standard.
Thus, in 1955, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had outlined “three basic forms of
aggression.” The first was armed attack across a border, that is, aggression as
defined in international law. The second was “overt armed attack from
within the area of each of the sovereign states,” as when guerrilla forces
undertake armed resistance against a regime backed or imposed by Washington,
though not of course when “freedom fighters” resist an official enemy.
The third: “Aggression other than armed, i.e., political warfare, or
subversion.” The primary example at the time was South Vietnam, where the
United States was defending a free people from “internal aggression,” as
Kennedy’s U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson explained -- from “an assault from
within” in the president’s words.
Though these assumptions are so
deeply embedded in prevailing doctrine as to be virtually invisible, they are
occasionally articulated in the internal record. In the case of Cuba, the
State Department Policy Planning Council explained that “the primary danger we
face in Castro is… in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist
movement in many Latin American countries… The simple fact is that Castro
represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric
policy of almost a century and a half,” since the Monroe Doctrine announced
Washington’s intention, then unrealizable, to dominate the Western
hemisphere.
Not the Russians of that moment
then, but rather the right to dominate, a leading principle of foreign policy
found almost everywhere, though typically concealed in defensive terms: during
the Cold War years, routinely by invoking the “Russian threat,” even when
Russians were nowhere in sight. An example of great contemporary import
is revealed in Iran scholar Ervand Abrahamian’s importantupcoming book of
the U.S.-U.K. coup that overthrew the parliamentary regime of Iran in
1953. With scrupulous examination of internal records, he shows
convincingly that standard accounts cannot be sustained. The primary
causes were not Cold War concerns, nor Iranian irrationality that undermined
Washington's “benign intentions,” nor even access to oil or profits, but rather
the way the U.S. demand for “overall controls” -- with its broader implications
for global dominance -- was threatened by independent nationalism.
That is what we discover over and
over by investigating particular cases, including Cuba (not surprisingly)
though the fanaticism in that particular case might merit examination.
U.S. policy towards Cuba is harshly condemned throughout Latin America and indeed
most of the world, but “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” is
understood to be meaningless rhetoric intoned mindlessly on July 4th.
Ever since polls have been taken on the matter, a considerable majority of the
U.S. population has favored normalization of relations with Cuba, but that too is
insignificant.
Dismissal of public opinion is of
course quite normal. What is interesting in this case is dismissal of
powerful sectors of U.S. economic power, which also favor normalization, and
are usually highly influential in setting policy: energy, agribusiness,
pharmaceuticals, and others. That suggests that, in addition to the cultural
factors revealed in the hysteria of the Camelot intellectuals, there is a
powerful state interest involved in punishing Cubans.
Saving the World from the
Threat of Nuclear Destruction
The missile crisis officially
ended on October 28th. The outcome was not obscure. That evening,
in a special CBS News broadcast, Charles Collingwood reported that the world
had come out “from under the most terrible threat of nuclear holocaust since
World War II” with a “humiliating defeat for Soviet policy.” Dobbs comments
that the Russians tried to pretend that the outcome was “yet another triumph
for Moscow’s peace-loving foreign policy over warmongering imperialists,” and
that “[t]he supremely wise, always reasonable Soviet leadership had saved the
world from the threat of nuclear destruction.”
Extricating the basic facts from
the fashionable ridicule, Khrushchev’s agreement to capitulate had indeed
“saved the world from the threat of nuclear destruction.”
The crisis, however, was not
over. On November 8th, the Pentagon announced that all known Soviet
missile bases had been dismantled. On the same day, Stern reports, “a
sabotage team carried out an attack on a Cuban factory,” though Kennedy’s
terror campaign, Operation Mongoose, had been formally curtailed at the peak of
the crisis. The November 8th terror attack lends support to Bundy’s
observation that the threat to peace was Cuba, not Turkey, where the Russians
were not continuing a lethal assault -- though that was certainly not what
Bundy had in mind or could have understood.
More details are added by the
highly respected scholar Raymond Garthoff, who also had rich experience within
the government, in his careful 1987 account of the missile crisis. On November 8th, he
writes, “a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States
successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility,” killing 400 workers
according to a Cuban government letter to the U.N. Secretary General.
Garthoff comments: “The Soviets
could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them,
the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba,”
particularly since the terrorist attack was launched from the U.S. These
and other “third party actions” reveal again, he concludes, “that the risk and
danger to both sides could have been extreme, and catastrophe not excluded.”
Garthoff also reviews the murderous and destructive operations of Kennedy’s
terrorist campaign, which we would certainly regard as more than ample
justification for war, if the U.S. or its allies or clients were victims, not
perpetrators.
From the same source we learn
further that, on August 23, 1962, the president had issued National Security
Memorandum No. 181, “a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be
followed by U.S. military intervention,” involving “significant U.S. military
plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and equipment” that were surely known
to Cuba and Russia. Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified,
including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel “where Soviet
military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans”;
attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; the contamination of sugar shipments;
and other atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile
organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida. Shortly after came
“the most dangerous moment in human history,” not exactly out of the blue.
Kennedy officially renewed the
terrorist operations after the crisis ebbed. Ten days before his
assassination he approved a CIA plan for “destruction operations” by U.S. proxy
forces “against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric
plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater
demolition of docks and ships.” A plot to assassinate Castro was apparently
initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The terrorist campaign was
called off in 1965, but reports Garthoff, “one of Nixon’s first acts in office
in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba.”
We can, at last, hear the voices
of the victims in Canadian historian Keith Bolender’s Voices From the Other Side, the first oral history of the
terror campaign -- one of many books unlikely to receive more than casual
notice, if that, in the West because the contents are too revealing.
In the current issue of Political Science Quarterly,
the professional journal of the association of American political scientists,
Montague Kern observes that the Cuban missile crisis is one
of those “full-bore crises… in which an ideological enemy (the Soviet Union) is
universally perceived to have gone on the attack, leading to a
rally-’round-the-flag effect that greatly expands support for a president,
increasing his policy options.”
Kern is right that it is
“universally perceived” that way, apart from those who have escaped
sufficiently from the ideological shackles to pay some attention to the
facts. Kern is, in fact, one of them. Another is Sheldon Stern, who
recognizes what has long been known to such deviants. As he writes, we
now know that “Khrushchev’s original explanation for shipping missiles to Cuba
had been fundamentally true: the Soviet leader had never intended these weapons
as a threat to the security of the United States, but rather considered their
deployment a defensive move to protect his Cuban allies from American attacks
and as a desperate effort to give the U.S.S.R. the appearance of equality in
the nuclear balance of power.” Dobbs, too, recognizes that “Castro and his
Soviet patrons had real reasons to fear American attempts at regime change,
including, as a last resort, a U.S. invasion of Cuba... [Khrushchev] was also
sincere in his desire to defend the Cuban revolution from the mighty neighbor
to the north.”
“Terrors of the Earth”
The American attacks are often
dismissed in U.S. commentary as silly pranks, CIA shenanigans that got out of
hand. That is far from the truth. The best and the brightest had
reacted to the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion with near hysteria,
including the president, who solemnly informed the country: “The complacent,
the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the
debris of history. Only the strong... can possibly survive." And
they could only survive, he evidently believed, by massive terror -- though
that addendum was kept secret, and is still not known to loyalists who perceive
the ideological enemy as having “gone on the attack” (the near universal perception,
as Kern observes). After the Bay of Pigs defeat, historian Piero
Gleijeses writes, JFK launched a crushing embargo to punish the Cubans
for defeating a U.S.-run invasion, and “asked his brother, Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation
Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and sabotage
he launched in late 1961 to visit the 'terrors of the earth' on Fidel Castro
and, more prosaically, to topple him.”
The phrase “terrors of the earth”
is Arthur Schlesinger’s, in his quasi-official biography of Robert Kennedy, who
was assigned responsibility for conducting the terrorist war, and informed the
CIA that the Cuban problem carries “[t]he top priority in the United States
Government -- all else is secondary -- no time, no effort, or manpower is to be
spared” in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime. The Mongoose
operations were run by Edward Lansdale, who had ample experience in
“counterinsurgency” -- a standard term for terrorism that we direct. He
provided a timetable leading to “open revolt and overthrow of the Communist
regime” in October 1962. The “final definition” of the program recognized
that “final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention,” after
terrorism and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is that U.S.
military intervention would take place in October 1962 -- when the missile crisis
erupted. The events just reviewed help explain why Cuba and Russia had
good reason to take such threats seriously.
Years later, Robert McNamara
recognized that Cuba was justified in fearing an attack. “If I were in Cuban or
Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too,” he observed at a major conference
on the missile crisis on the 40th anniversary.
As for Russia’s “desperate effort
to give the U.S.S.R. the appearance of equality,” to which Stern refers, recall
that Kennedy’s very narrow victory in the 1960 election relied heavily on a
fabricated “missile gap” concocted to terrify the country and to condemn the
Eisenhower administration as soft on national security. There was indeed
a “missile gap,” but strongly in favor of the U.S.
The first “public, unequivocal
administration statement” on the true facts, according to strategic analyst
Desmond Ball in his authoritative study of the Kennedy missile program, was in
October 1961, when Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric informed the
Business Council that “the U.S. would have a larger nuclear delivery system
left after a surprise attack than the nuclear force which the Soviet Union
could employ in its first strike.” The Russians of course were well aware of
their relative weakness and vulnerability. They were also aware of
Kennedy’s reaction when Khrushchev offered to sharply reduce offensive military
capacity and proceeded to do so unilaterally. The president failed to
respond, undertaking instead a huge armaments program.
Owning the World, Then
and Now
The two most crucial questions
about the missile crisis are: How did it begin, and how did it end? It
began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion
in October 1962. It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers
that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they
would have undermined the fundamental principle that the U.S. has the
unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere, aimed at China or Russia
or anyone else, and right on their borders; and the accompanying principle that
Cuba had no right to have missiles for defense against what appeared to be an
imminent U.S. invasion. To establish these principles firmly it was
entirely proper to face a high risk of war of unimaginable destruction, and to
reject simple and admittedly fair ways to end the threat.
Garthoff observes that “in the
United States, there was almost universal approbation for President Kennedy’s
handling of the crisis.” Dobbs writes, “The relentlessly upbeat tone was
established by the court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote that
Kennedy had ‘dazzled the world’ through a ‘combination of toughness and
restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly
calibrated.’” Rather more soberly, Stern partially agrees, noting that Kennedy
repeatedly rejected the militant advice of his advisers and associates who
called for military force and the dismissal of peaceful options. The
events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour. Graham
Allison joins many others in presenting them as “a guide for how to defuse
conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and make sound decisions about
foreign policy in general.”
In a very narrow sense, that
judgment seems reasonable. The ExComm tapes reveal that the president
stood apart from others, sometimes almost all others, in rejecting premature
violence. There is, however, a further question: How should JFK’s
relative moderation in the management of the crisis be evaluated against the
background of the broader considerations just reviewed? But that question
does not arise in a disciplined intellectual and moral culture, which accepts
without question the basic principle that the U.S. effectively owns the world
by right, and is by definition a force for good despite occasional errors and
misunderstandings, one in which it is plainly entirely proper for the U.S. to
deploy massive offensive force all over the world while it is an outrage for
others (allies and clients apart) to make even the slightest gesture in that
direction or even to think of deterring the threatened use of violence by the
benign global hegemon.
That doctrine is the primary
official charge against Iran today: it might pose a deterrent to U.S. and
Israeli force. It was a consideration during the missile crisis as well.
In internal discussion, the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that Cuban
missiles might deter a U.S. invasion of Venezuela, then under
consideration. So “the Bay of Pigs was really right,” JFK concluded.
These principles still contribute
to the constant risk of nuclear war. There has been no shortage of severe
dangers since the missile crisis. Ten years later, during the 1973
Israel-Arab war, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called a high-level
nuclear alert (DEFCON 3) to warn the Russians to keep their hands off while he
was secretly authorizing Israel to violate the cease-fire imposed by the U.S.
and Russia. When Reagan came into office a few years later, the U.S. launched
operations probing Russian defenses and simulating air and naval attacks, while
placing Pershing missiles in Germany with a five-minute flight time to Russian
targets, providing what the CIA called a “super-sudden first strike”
capability. Naturally this caused great alarm in Russia, which unlike the
U.S. has repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a
major war scare in 1983. There have been hundreds of cases when human
intervention aborted a first strike minutes before launch, after automated
systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian records, but there’s no
doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone.
Meanwhile, India and Pakistan
have come close to nuclear war several times, and the sources of the conflict
remain. Both have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, along
with Israel, and have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear
weapons programs -- until today in the case of India, now a U.S. ally.
War threats in the Middle East, which might become reality very soon, once
again escalate the dangers.
In 1962, war was avoided by
Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands. But we
can hardly count on such sanity forever. It’s a near miracle that nuclear
war has so far been avoided. There is more reason than ever to attend to
the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, almost 60 years ago, that
we must face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put
an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”
Noam Chomsky is Institute
Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous
best-selling political works, most recently, Hopes and Prospects,Making the Future, and Occupy.
Copyright 2012 Noam Chomsky
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