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3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The week the world stood
still By Noam Chomsky
The world stood still 50 years ago during
the last week of October 1962, 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 in Boston, who
published the authoritative version of the tapes
of the ExComm (Executive Committee of the National
Security Council) 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 with 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", US 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 best-seller 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 27, 1962, when US 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
US 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, Defense Readiness
Condition (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 26t. That day
has been selected as "the most dangerous moment"
by B-52 pilot Major Don Clawson, who flew one of
those North Atlantic Treaty Organization 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 26
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, Soviet capitulation was never in
doubt. The CD operations were designed to make it
crystal-clear to the Soviets 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 26, 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 Soviet forces were far greater
than US intelligence had reported.
As the
ExComm meetings were drawing to a close at 6pm on
the 26th, a letter arrived from Soviet premier
Nikita Khrushchev, sent directly to Kennedy. His
"message seemed clear", Stern writes: "the
missiles would be removed if the US promised not
to invade Cuba".
The next day, at 10am,
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 in effect
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 US 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 eagerly to accept both offers; to
announce that the US 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 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 "the current threat
to peace is not in Turkey, it is in Cuba", where
missiles were directed against the US. A vastly
more powerful US 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 terrorist war
that the US 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 US
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 US - so that it is
"amazingly naive", indeed quite "silly", to
suggest that it should obey international law or
other conditions that it imposes 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
the US would be "in a bad position" if it 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
Domํnguez observes: "Only once in these nearly
thousand pages of documentation did a US official
raise something that resembled a faint moral
objection to US-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.
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