Surviving 70 years of nuclear jingoism
August 6, 2014As Hiroshima Day dawns, why are we still tempting nuclear fate?
It is a wonder we have survived all these decades, given US policies on nuclear armament since Hiroshima
Noam Chomsky for TomDispatch, part of the Guardian Comment Network
Wednesday 6 August 2014 05.19 EDT
Seventy-years ago today the Harry Truman administration launched the scariest era of mankind by incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, invented by the United States. It has imbued every successive American presidency with a proclivity for dangerous jingoism. Noam Chomsky commemorates the 70th anniversary of the historical event in a highly instructive article, published in the Guardian and TomDispartch. He wonders if ‘divine intervention’ has preserved the human species through this era of irrational era of brinkmanship. We consider the article a must-read, and present below its important excerpts and the link.
– The Host, Beyond Freedom
EXCERPTS:
Some reflections on the grim [U.S. nuclear strategy] were offered by General Lee Butler, former head of the US strategic air command (Stratcom), which controls nuclear weapons and strategy….
He termed the US strategic plan of 1960, which called for an automated all-out strike on the communist world, ‘the single most absurd and irresponsible document I have ever reviewed in my life’….
The Russians, far behind in industrial development and technological sophistication, were in a far more threatening environment. Hence, they were significantly more vulnerable to [nuclear] weapons systems than the US….
Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at the Yalta Conference in 1945. Photograph: PhotoQuest/Getty Images
One indication of possible opportunities to blunt the threat [of a nuclear war] was a remarkable proposal by the Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin in 1952, offering to allow Germany to be unified with free elections on the condition that it would not then join a hostile military alliance. That was hardly an extreme condition in light of the history of the previous half-century during which Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia twice, exacting a terrible toll.
Reviewing recent research in Soviet archives, one of the most respected cold war scholars, Melvyn Leffler, has observed that many scholars were surprised to discover ‘[Lavrenti] Beria – the sinister, brutal head of the [Russian] secret police – propos[ed] that the Kremlin offer the west a deal on the unification and neutralization of Germany,’ agreeing ‘to sacrifice the East German communist regime to reduce east-west tensions’ and improve internal political and economic conditions in Russia – opportunities that were squandered in favor of securing German participation in Nato….
John F. Kennedy arriving in the USSR for talks with Nikita Khrushchev. Photograph: Hank Walker/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
That conclusion was underscored repeatedly in the years that followed. When Nikita Khrushchev took control in Russia in 1953 after Stalin’s death, he recognized that the USSR could not compete militarily with the US, the richest and most powerful country in history….
Accordingly, Khrushchev proposed sharp mutual reductions in offensive weapons. The incoming Kennedy administration considered the offer and rejected it, instead turning to rapid military expansion, even though it was already far in the lead. The late Kenneth Waltz, supported by other strategic analysts with close connections to US intelligence, wrote then that the Kennedy administration ‘undertook the largest strategic and conventional peacetime military build-up the world has yet seen … even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in the conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favoured the United States’. … In 1963, Khrushchev again called for new reductions. As a gesture, he withdrew troops from East Germany and called on Washington to reciprocate. That call, too, was rejected….
The Soviet reaction to the US build-up of those years was to place nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962 to try to redress the balance at least slightly. The move was also motivated in part by Kennedy’s terrorist campaign against Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which was scheduled to lead to invasion that very month, as Russia and Cuba may have known. The ensuing ‘missile crisis’ was ‘the most dangerous moment in history,’ in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s adviser and confidant.
As the crisis peaked in late October, Kennedy received a secret letter from Khrushchev offering to end it by simultaneous public withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and US Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The latter were obsolete missiles, already ordered withdrawn by the Kennedy administration because they were being replaced by far more lethal Polaris submarines to be stationed in the Mediterranean.
Kennedy’s subjective estimate at that moment was that if he refused the Soviet premier’s offer, there was a 33% to 50% probability of nuclear war – a war that, as President Eisenhower had warned, would have destroyed the northern hemisphere. Kennedy nonetheless refused Khrushchev’s proposal for public withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba and Turkey; only the withdrawal from Cuba could be public, so as to protect the US right to place missiles on Russia’s borders or anywhere else it chose.
It is hard to think of a more horrendous decision in history – and for this, he is still highly praised for his cool courage and statesmanship.
Ten years later, in the last days of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser to President Nixon, called a nuclear alert. The purpose was to warn the Russians not to interfere with his delicate diplomatic manoeuvres designed to ensure an Israeli victory, but of a limited sort so that the US would still be in control of the region unilaterally. And the manoeuvres were indeed delicate. The US and Russia had jointly imposed a ceasefire, but Kissinger secretly informed the Israelis that they could ignore it. Hence the need for the nuclear alert to frighten the Russians away. The security of Americans had its usual status.
Ten years later, the Reagan administration launched operations to probe Russian air defenses by simulating air and naval attacks and a high-level nuclear alert that the Russians were intended to detect. These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment. Washington was deploying Pershing II strategic missiles in Europe with a five-minute flight time to Moscow. President Reagan had also announced the strategic defence initiative (“star wars”) programme, which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike weapon, a standard interpretation of missile defence on all sides. And other tensions were rising.
“Naturally, these actions caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the US, was quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. Newly released archives reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously assumed. A CIA study entitled A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare concluded that US intelligence may have underestimated Russian concerns and the threat of a Russian preventative nuclear strike. The exercises “almost became a prelude to a preventative nuclear strike,” according to an account in the Journal of Strategic Studies.
It was even more dangerous than that, as we learned last September, when the BBC reported that right in the midst of these world-threatening developments, Russia’s early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the United States, sending its nuclear system onto the highest-level alert. The protocol for the Soviet military was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own. Fortunately, the officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, decided to disobey orders and not report the warnings to his superiors. He received an official reprimand. And thanks to his dereliction of duty, we’re still alive to talk about it.
The security of the population was no more a high priority for Reagan administration planners than for their predecessors. And so it continues to the present, even putting aside the numerous near-catastrophic nuclear accidents that occurred over the years, many reviewed in Eric Schlosser’s chilling study Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. In other words, it is hard to contest General Butler’s conclusions….
The record of post-cold war actions and doctrines is hardly reassuring either. Every self-respecting president has to have a doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was encapsulated in the slogan ‘multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must’. In congressional testimony, the phrase ‘when we must’ was explained more fully: the US is entitled to resort to ‘unilateral use of military power’ to ensure ‘uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.’ Meanwhile, Stratcom in the Clinton era produced an important study entitled Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, issued well after the Soviet Union had collapsed, while Clinton was extending President George Bush Sr’s programme of expanding Nato to the east in violation of promises to Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev – with reverberations to the present.
That Stratcom study was concerned with “the role of nuclear weapons in the post-cold war era”. A central conclusion: that the US must maintain the right to launch a first strike, even against non-nuclear states. Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be at the ready because they “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict”. They were, that is, constantly being used, just as you’re using a gun if you aim but don’t fire one while robbing a store (a point that Daniel Ellsberg has repeatedly stressed). Stratcom went on to advise that “planners should not be too rational about determining … what the opponent values the most”. Everything should simply be targeted. “[I]t hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed… That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project”. It is “beneficial [for our strategic posture] if some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control’, thus posing a constant threat of nuclear attack – a severe violation of the UN charter, if anyone cares.
Not much here about the noble goals constantly proclaimed – or for that matter the obligation under the non-proliferation treaty to make ‘good faith’ efforts to eliminate this scourge of the earth….
Barack Obama [came] with pleasant words about working to abolish nuclear weapons – combined with plans to spend $1trn on the US nuclear arsenal in the next 30 years, a percentage of the military budget ‘comparable to spending for procurement of new strategic systems in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan,’ according to a study by the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Barack Obama in control room of US operation to capture Osama bin Laden. Photograph: PETE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images
Obama has also not hesitated to play with fire for political gain. Take for example the capture and assassination of Osama bin Laden by navy Seals. Obama brought it up with pride in an important speech on national security in May 2013. It was widely covered, but one crucial paragraph was ignored.
Obama hailed the operation but added that it could not be the norm. The reason, he said, was that the risks ‘were immense’. The Seals might have been ‘embroiled in an extended firefight’….
The Seals were ordered to fight their way out if apprehended. They would not have been left to their fate if ‘embroiled in an extended firefight’. The full force of the US military would have been used to extricate them. Pakistan has a powerful, well-trained military, highly protective of state sovereignty. It also has nuclear weapons, and Pakistani specialists are concerned about the possible penetration of their nuclear security system by jihadi elements. It is also no secret that the population has been embittered and radicalised by Washington’s drone terror campaign and other policies.
While the Seals were still in the bin Laden compound, Pakistani chief of staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was informed of the raid and ordered the military “to confront any unidentified aircraft,” which he assumed would be from India. Meanwhile in Kabul, US war commander General David Petraeus ordered “warplanes to respond” if the Pakistanis ‘scrambled their fighter jets’. As Obama said, by luck the worst didn’t happen, though it could have been quite ugly. But the risks were faced without noticeable concern….
As General Butler observed, it is a near miracle that we have escaped destruction so far, and the longer we tempt fate, the less likely it is that we can hope for divine intervention to perpetuate the miracle.
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