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It’s so surreal how we’re closer to nuclear war than we’ve been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it’s only continuing to escalate, and yet hardly anyone seems to notice and almost everyone is just going about their lives thinking their usual thoughts and having their usual conversations.

Vladimir Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert and has issued threats of nuclear retaliation should western powers try to intervene in Russian military operations in Ukraine. The Biden administration’s first Nuclear Posture Review will be out soon and will likely mirror the changes in Russia’s nuclear posture in some ways. The probability is skyrocketing of a mass extinction event which could easily block out the sun for years and starve everyone to death who isn’t lucky enough to be killed quickly in the initial inferno.

A recent New York Times article titled “The Smaller Bombs That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone” discusses the danger of Russia using a so-called “tactical” or “low-yield” nuke if the war isn’t going well for Moscow, making the calculation that using one of its much less destructive nuclear weapons might succeed in intimidating its enemies into backing down without resulting in full-blown nuclear war.

An excerpt:

“It feels horrible to talk about these things,” Dr. Kühn said in an interview. “But we have to consider that this is becoming a possibility.”

Washington expects more atomic moves from Mr. Putin in the days ahead. Moscow is likely to “increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength” as the war and its consequences weaken Russia, Lt. Gen. Scott D. Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

A truly sapient life form would read those two paragraphs and immediately say, “Oh well we obviously can’t continue along this trajectory anymore. Let’s negotiate a ceasefire by whatever means necessary and move toward detente as swiftly as possible.” But rather than move to de-escalate, all we’re seeing is continual escalation with increasingly shrill calls to escalate further.

It is worth noting here that experts have been warning for years that these “low-yield” nuclear weapons pose a horrifying threat to our species because of the risk of somebody making the calculation that they could get away with using them, as we see in this 2019 article by James Carroll titled “The Most Dangerous Weapon Ever Rolls Off the Nuclear Assembly Line”. Such warnings just didn’t get much attention before because they were about the United States manufacturing those weapons and did little to amplify Russia hysteria.

New from @rjsmithnatsec and @publicintegrity: A technology retrofit is improving the accuracy and destructive power of the United States’ nuclear arsenal. It brings new risks as well. https://t.co/upBeEjeHLd

— Matt DeRienzo (@mattderienzo) October 29, 2021

It is probably also worth noting that the US has been updating its nuclear arsenal with advancements which make its nuclear-armed rivals more likely to calculate the need for a full-scale nuclear first strike. As R Jeffrey Smith explained last year for The Center for Public Integrity, improvements in the ability to perfectly time a nuke’s detonation make it much more destructive and therefore capable of destroying underground nuclear weapons, which would necessarily make a government like Russia more likely to launch a preemptive strike in a moment of tension to avoid being disarmed by a US strike.

Others worry, however, that those leaders — knowing that many of their protected, land-based weapons and associated command posts could not escape destruction — might be more prone to order their use early in a crisis or conflict, simply to ensure they are not destroyed when incoming warheads arrive, promoting a hair-trigger launch policy that could escalate into a general cataclysm.

Physicist James Acton, who co-directs the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has written extensively about the need to avert unnecessary conflicts, said that efforts to modernize the nuclear arsenal should be more focused on ensuring the weapons’ safety, security, and reliability, and less on goosing their accuracy.

“If China or Russia believe in a conflict or a crisis that we are going to attack or destroy their nuclear forces and command posts, that gives them an incentive to use nuclear weapons first, or to threaten their use. They have strong incentives to take steps that would further escalate the crisis and create new dangers,” Acton said.

New air- and sea-launched cruise missiles also place Russia on hair-trigger alert, Smith writes:

New air- and sea-launched cruise missiles in particular, [Nuclear Weapons Council chair Andrew Weber] said, are not necessary, and will undermine deterrence because they are stealthy, surprise-attack weapons that will make opponents nervous enough to adopt hair-trigger launch policies. Since they can be deployed with both conventional and nuclear warheads and it’s impossible for opponents to tell the difference, their use could cause unintentional escalation from a conventional to a nuclear war.

Will Humans Be the Next ‘Freedom Fries’
by Ray McGovern@raymcgovern #nukes #NuclearWar #Russia #Ukraine #UkraineRussianWar https://t.co/2cqhLwVoxo pic.twitter.com/dZVPuoVHbY

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) March 23, 2022

And while everyone’s talking about the fear that Putin may make a calculated decision to initiate a nuclear exchange should he feel backed into a corner, at present the primary risk of nuclear war remains what it’s been for about as long as we’ve had these infernal weapons on our planet: that the explicit understanding in Mutually Assured Destruction will be set into motion by a nuke being discharged by either side due to miscommunication, miscalculation, misunderstanding or malfunction, or some combination of these, amid the chaos and confusion of escalating brinkmanship. Which nearly happened many times during the last cold war.

As Nuclear Age Peace Foundation president David Krieger explained back in 2017:

Nearly 15,000 nuclear weapons are currently under the control of nine countries. Each has a complex system of command and control with many possibilities for error, accident or intentional use.

Error could be the result of human or technological factors, or some combination of human and technological interaction. During the more than seven decades of the Nuclear Age, there have been many accidents and close calls that could have resulted in nuclear disaster. The world narrowly escaped a nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Human factors include miscommunications, misinterpretations and psychological issues. Some leaders believe that threatening behavior makes nuclear deterrence more effective, but it could also result in a preventive first-strike launch by the side being threatened. Psychological pathologies among those in control of nuclear weapons could also play a role. Hubris, or extreme arrogance, is another factor of concern.

Technological factors include computer errors that wrongfully show a country is under nuclear attack. Such false warnings have occurred on numerous occasions but, fortunately, human interactions (often against policy and/or orders) have so far kept a false warning from resulting in a mistaken “retaliatory” attack. In times of severe tensions, a technological error could compound the risks, and human actors might decide to initiate a first strike.

As Ray McGovern explains in a new article for Antiwar titled “Will Humans Be the Next ‘Freedom Fries’?”, the early launch detection system Russia relies on for nuclear deterrence is so technologically lagging and prone to error that could easily lead to a nuclear war as the result of a simple mistake. He discusses an instance when Russia’s early detection equipment falsely reported a potential nuclear attack as recently as 1995, when relations between Washington and Moscow were as warm and cozy as they’ve ever been. It seems reasonable to say that a similar incident would have a good chance of being interpreted and responded to in a very different way should it repeat itself in 2022.

McGovern says that launch-to-target time has shrunk so much with the advancement of technology that there are now probably multiple subordinate commanders out in the field with the authority to launch a nuclear strike:

Here’s the thing: the Russians have good reason to be on hair-trigger alert. Their early-warning radar system is so inadequate that there are situations (including those involving innocent rocket launches) under which Russian President Putin would have only a few minutes — if that — to decide whether or not to launch nuclear missiles to destroy the rest of the world — on the suspicion that Russia was under nuclear attack.

“If that”? Yes, launch-to-target time is now so short that it is altogether likely that the authority to launch nuclear weapons is now vested in subordinate commanders “in the field,” so to speak. Readers of Daniel Ellsberg’s Doomsday Machine are aware of how the US actually devolved this authority during the days of the first cold war. I, for one, was shocked to learn that. Worse: today the subordinate commanders might be non-commissioned computers.

“U.S. pundits and strategic experts seem blissfully unaware of how close we all are to being fried in a nuclear strike by Russia,” McGovern writes.

For a lot more information on how dangerously close we’re getting to the brink, check out former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s epic rant toward the end of his recent chat with The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté, where he talks about all the horrible US government decisions and shredded treaties which have led us from a rare moment of relative nuclear safety to the precarious position we now find ourselves in:

I’m always stunned at how, whenever I talk about the way all this brinkmanship is bringing us ever closer to a precipice from which there is no return, people will often tell me “Yeah well if it happens it will be Putin’s fault for starting it.” Like that’s in any way a sane response to our plight. People are so confused and compartmentalized about this issue they seriously think “If nuclear war happens it will be Putin’s fault” is a complete position on this issue.

I always want to shake them and ask them, “If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, would the words ‘It was Putin’s fault’ give you any comfort? Or would you, perhaps, wish measures had been taken early on to prevent it from getting to this point?”

It’s a useful thought experiment that can be applied in many areas, while we sit here on the brink waiting to see what happens.

If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, how good would you feel about the decision not to guarantee Moscow that Ukraine would never receive NATO membership?

If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, would you be able to say you tried everything you could to prevent this from happening?

If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, would you feel okay about how you’ve been treating the people you care about?

If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, would you feel okay about how you’ve been spending your time?

If you looked outside right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, will you wish you’d spent more time at the office? Wish you’d participated in more social media drama? Wish you’d taken fewer chances? Wish you’d loved with less abandon?

The swelling likelihood of imminent armageddon draws everything into focus. Helps clarify your priorities. Helps you figure out how to live your life from moment to moment.

And from where I’m sitting this clarity brings with it a sense of responsibility as a human being. A responsibility to really be here now. To truly live our lives with presence and appreciation. To drink deeply of the cup of human experience. Because the only thing worse than everything ending would be if it ended without having been seen and valued while it lasted.

We have control over so very little in this insane little pickle we’ve found ourselves in. But one thing we can definitely control is whether we’re really showing up for however much time we’ve got left on this amazing blue planet.

“Treasure each moment” is something you hear so often in life that it becomes a cliche and loses all its meaning. But there has never been a better time to take another look at it with fresh eyes and begin putting it into practice.

Treasure each moment, because there might not be very many of them left. This is the moment. This is our moment. If this does wind up being humanity’s last scene on this stage, let’s at least help make sure we shine as radiantly as possible before the final curtain.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Deterrence works. Russia’s nukes are the only thing keeping the US from full-out war in Ukraine only six months after retreating from Afghanistan. So far, the unprecedented propaganda effort by the Ukraine and its helpers in the American mass media to drag the US and NATO directly into the fight has failed. But this struggle — for your mind space — is not over.

To understand what follows, you have to wipe away a lot of bullshit being slung your way. Putin is not insane, not a madman. He is carrying out a rational political-military strategy in Ukraine, seizing Russian-speaking territory such as Donbas, demilitarizing by force the eastern Ukraine, and most of all creating a physical buffer zone between himself and NATO. That zone may end at the Dnieper River with a loop around Odessa, or it may end at the Polish border, depending on how smoothly things go on the ground and on what level of “stay away” message Putin wishes to send to NATO. Putin is not making the first moves toward some greater conquest. All the bad takes saying “if we don’t stop Putin now, he’ll invade Moldova/Estonia/Poland/all Europe just like Hitler” ignores the part about the German military in WWII having some 18 million men under arms. The Russian army today has 1.3 million, the best of which are going to be in Ukraine for awhile.

Every war has its “is the juice worth the squeeze” question. In other words, is what you can realistically hope to achieve worth the cost of getting it? For Putin, that means solving his border problem at the cost of maybe a few thousand men killed and wounded and another dollop of weak sanctions. He understood the needs of Europe meant sanctions would never harm sales of the fossil fuels which make up most Russian exports. But no Paypal for you, comrade! Putin could also look to history and see how decades of sanctions have not changed much in Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

Putin most importantly also knew US/NATO would not fight him on the ground for fear of starting a nuclear war. That is exactly what nukes are for, and is the history of the Cold War in a sentence. I have nukes and that allows me to do certain things any way I want because they stay below the threshold of risking atomic war. This is why the US could destroy Quaddafi and Saddam (no nukes to deter) and why the US will never attack North Korea (nukes.) Being a nuclear superpower makes things easier; the US can fight all over Central America and the Middle East, and Russia in the ‘Stans, and none of that is important enough to consider using nukes to stop.

Putin knows that. Biden knows that, as does NATO. Ukraine, however, is still thinking it can change the game.

Ukraine knew on Day One no one was coming to its rescue, and its leaders know they don’t have enough men or weapons to defeat the Russians on their own. Their only hope to remain a unified nation (it is easy to imagine a divided Ukraine, Western Zone and Eastern (Russian) Zone as the end game) is outside help. A no-fly zone, some air strikes to blunt Russian advances. Something, anything.

That’s why every knucklehead in America right now is being blitzed with Ukrainian propaganda, and your brother-in-law is ready to head to Europe with his never-cleaned hunting rifle. The goal is to change public opinion such that a weak guy like Joe Biden starts to doubt himself. Ukrainian lobbyists from K Street take influential Senators to lunch, knowing they’ll return to their offices to find thousands of constituent emails demanding the US “do something.” The goal of Ukrainian propaganda is get Biden to take that Pentagon meeting laying out options for some limited bombing, or to listen to those analysts saying the US could set up a small no-fly zone on Ukraine’s western edge to show the Russians we mean business. Drop in some Special Forces. Something, anything. The goal of the propaganda is to get Biden to sign off on something (hopefully) small enough that it falls below the threshold of provoking a nuclear response. Is it necessary to say that is a very risky and delicate tasking?

The bad news is Ukrainian propaganda is working. A non-partisan 74 percent of Americans say NATO should impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine. And we are just getting started. We’ve had the hero phase with the non-existent Ghost of Kiev and the not surrendering but they surrendered brave Ukrainians, alongside the grandmas and supermodels with guns. We’ve had the Russians are going to kill us all phase, with the faux threat of invasion to the west and the faux scare the Russians were going to create a Chernobyl-like nuclear accident by shelling a power plant. We are currently moving into the not verifiable atrocities phase, where “reports” will claim the Russians are killing children, or using rape as a weapon, or targeting hospitals. Alongside it all is beef cake talk about Zelensky, the likes we haven’t seen since before the cancelations of Andrew Cuomo and Michael Avenatti. The fact-checking mania of Covid is history as America media removes all the filters on pro-Ukrainian content.

The quality of the propaganda is not important (any pile of scrap metal on snowy ground is breaking news of another Russian helo shot down, even if the metal has “Acme Junk Pile” written on it.) The quantity is important, the attempt to overwhelm American mindspace to the point where logic is shoved into the back corner. There is a growing cottage industry of “experts” explaining how to can go to war without going to THAT kind of war. Dissenting voices are few, and are often labeled as “Putin lovers,” with progressives and Late Night hurling homophobic slurs at them like high school kids.

It is not like America does not know how to step away from a fight which isn’t ours when we want to. Crimea, Chechnya, Rwanda, Hungary ’56, Czechoslovakia ’68, Afghanistan ’79, even to a certain extent in Syria 2016.

There are two battles now playing out over Ukraine. The one on the ground, and the one on your social media seeking to drag America into the mud. Only six months after the sad ending in Afghanistan, it is stunning to watch America again contemplate going to war for some abstract purpose far removed from our own core interests. And this time, with the risk of a nuclear exchange to remind us of our mistake, not just an inglorious departure from Kabul.

Sometimes I’m not sure what presents a greater threat to humanity, nuclear war or the colossal stupidity that has made it possible.

Due to the skyrocketing risk of a world-ending confrontation between the United States and Russia, World Socialist Website is re-releasing a series of interviews it conducted in 2017 with experts on the subject of nuclear war. One of them is with a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility named Steven Starr, which WSWS has titled “Nuclear winter — the long-suppressed reality of nuclear war”.

Starr discusses the research which has shown that in addition to the unthinkable horrors of flattened cities and nuclear fallout we’ve all been told about, “a war fought with existing US and Russian nuclear arsenals is predicted to make agriculture impossible for a decade or longer, dooming most people to die from a nuclear famine.”

Starr says a false narrative has been spun that the science behind nuclear winter theory is weak, a narrative I’ve had parroted at me from time to time in my commentary on this subject. He says the science is in fact peer-reviewed and robust, and actually makes very conservative estimates of the environmental havoc that would be unleashed by black carbon soot thrown into the stratosphere by a large nuclear exchange. But this science has been actively suppressed and marginalized by a junk science smear campaign and the slashing of research funding.

“there is no discussion of the existential threat of nuclear war … If we have the best scientists in the world telling us that a nuclear war would wipe out most of the human race, that should be our primary concern”#WW3 #worldwar3 #worldwariii #WWIIIhttps://t.co/A0D5gePl77

— Socialist Equality Party (Australia) (@SEP_Australia) March 15, 2022

“After the success of the smear campaign against nuclear winter, most people eventually accepted this narrative and funding for new research dried up,” Starr said. “This had a big impact on the public, who got the impression that the nuclear winter theory had been disproven. As a result, this issue is hardly ever talked about now in the mainstream media.”

“One of the reasons for this is that over the years, trillions of dollars have been spent on nuclear weapons,” Starr adds. “If the conclusions of the nuclear winter research — that nuclear war is suicide for all peoples and nations — had gained widespread acceptance and understanding, it is likely that the whole nuclear weapons industry would have been shut down.”

Indeed, when you’re talking about the movement of trillions of dollars (Obama committed $1 trillion to modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal for the explicit purpose of better confronting Russia), you’re talking about the kind of money that any amount of underhanded gangster tactics would be employed to secure.

But I think another major part of it is the much more basic fact that if people truly understood how dangerous nuclear war is for everyone on this planet, nobody would consent to the kinds of cold war games that the drivers of empire have been intending to play with these weapons.

If people truly understood that their life and the lives of everyone they love are being gambled like poker chips in nuclear brinkmanship maneuvers geared toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony for an undeclared empire loosely centralized around the United States, those few empire architects would soon find themselves on the losing end of a tooth-and-claw fight against the entire human species. The ability to win cold war power struggles is dependent on the mainstream public not thinking too hard about what nuclear war is and why it is being risked.

When I was growing up Americans were proud of fighting Nazis and afraid of a Nuclear War.

Now Americans are proud of arming Nazis and want to risk a Nuclear War.

— Black in the Empire (@blackintheempir) March 14, 2022

So I think we’re seeing a broad lack of awareness among the general public of just how close to the precipice we are for the same reason nuclear winter theory has been suppressed: because if everyone deeply understood how dangerous these unipolarist grand chessboard power plays are, and how they deliver no real benefit to ordinary people, they wouldn’t permit them to happen.

A responsible news media would be educating the public about things like nuclear winter, and how easy it would be for a nuclear war to be triggered by a malfunction, miscommunication, misunderstanding, or miscalculation in the chaos and confusion of soaring cold war escalations as nearly happened many times during the last cold war. A “news” media whose job is not to report the news but to manufacture consent for imperial agendas will do everything it can to prevent people from paying attention to those things.

This is why, if you really understand nuclear war and what it means and how close we are to its emergence, it feels so surreal and dissonant looking around at the things people are talking about today. How ungrounded in reality it all is, how unseriously people are taking this thing, how willing they are to consent to things like no-fly zones and other direct military action against Russia. It’s because people are prevented from seeing and understanding this reality. You can’t have the riff raff interfering in the mechanics of the imperial machine. Unipolar hegemony is too important to be left to democratic processes. Keep the local fauna confused and distracted while you roll the dice on nuclear armageddon with the hope of ruling the world.

These people are like mobsters, knowing they’ll probably die a violent death but willing to risk it all for a chance at living the high life. There’s not the slightest iota of wisdom guiding their actions. Just the primitive impulse to dominate and control. They’re living their lives and making their decisions essentially on autopilot, guided by unconscious impulses they themselves don’t understand.

The Single Most Important Question In The World Right Now

“Is what the US and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for?”https://t.co/EJk9ErQ2xj

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 28, 2022

In the aforementioned interview Starr also touches on the ease with which a nuclear war could be set off by a technical malfunction, and what the earliest moments of a nuclear war will likely look like:

If the US early warning systems detect a missile launch, the President can order a launch of retaliatory nuclear strike before incoming nuclear warheads take out communication systems and weapons. Of course, if this is a false warning of attack, then the “retaliatory” strike becomes a first-strike and a nuclear war has started.

Moreover, if somebody has launched a nuclear strike against the silos in which your nuclear weapons are housed in, you don’t retaliate by targeting their empty silos. You target their cities. Russia only has about 230 cities with a population greater than 100,000 and the US has 312. So it’s not that hard to wipe out a couple hundred cities in an initial salvo.

Starr also discusses the insane belief that Russia will probably back down when threatened with the possibility of nuclear war, a line of thinking that’s becoming so common today that it’s almost its own genre of natsec punditry:

The strategists often say, “Oh, well, Russia will back down.” What if they don’t? And why would they back down on their own border? Any US/NATO-Russian direct military conflict will very likely lead to a full-scale nuclear war.

In another 2017 World Socialist Website interview, this one with Los Alamos Study Group secretary and executive director Greg Mello, we get some more insight into the reality of the nuclear threat:

To a first approximation, in a nuclear war between the US and Russia, everybody in the world would die. Some people in the southern hemisphere might survive, but probably not even them.

…

The imagination cannot encompass nuclear war. Nuclear war means nuclear winter. It means the collapse of very fragile electronic, financial, governmental, administrative systems that keep everyone alive. We’d be lucky to reboot in the early 19th century. And if enough weapons are detonated, the collapse of the Earth’s ozone layer would mean that every form of life that has eyes could be blinded. The combined effects of a US-Russian nuclear war would mean that pretty much every terrestrial mammal, and many plants, would become extinct. There would be a dramatic biological thinning.

The gulf between these expert analyses and what people are consuming in the news could not possibly be wider. People simply don’t understand what’s being done with their lives by powerful people who care only about imperial domination, and the powerful intend to keep it that way.

It doesn’t need to be like this. There’s no reason our planet needs to be dominated by any one single power structure, especially if doing so means risking complete annihilation. We should all be pushing for de-escalation, diplomacy and detente, and for the nations and peoples of this world to begin working together for the good of everyone.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

We hold in our hands vast power to both create and destroy the likes of which has never been seen in history.

Up until the turn of the 20^th century, the only forces capable of wrecking extinction-level havoc onto the biosphere remained comets and asteroids travelling 18 km/second which periodically slammed into the earth every few million years. But with the discovery of atomic decay in the form of fission and also the associated processes of fusion (where lighter isotopes were found to fuse together forming heavier atoms holding masses that were slightly less than the total of the fused atoms), suddenly a new force of destruction was added to the list.

After the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the top secret Manhattan Project with its three nuclear bombs was revealed to a confused Harry Truman who was quick to dump two of them onto a defeated Japan in 1945 establishing a new set of geopolitical rules that would profoundly misshape the 20^th century.

The 14 kiloton bomb “Little Boy” which erupted over Hiroshima killed 140 thousand people instantly, with countless tens of thousands more who died in agony during the weeks and months following the explosion. The bomb that destroyed Nagasaki days later was 23 kilotons.

To put this into perspective, one modern U.S. Ohio Class Submarine travelling in the waters of China’s back yard carries 24 Trident missiles.

Each Trident missile can carry up to 8 nuclear warheads and each warhead utilizing thermonuclear technology packs the equivalent of 475 kilotons of TNT. When all warheads contained on one Trident II missile are added together, a force 253 times more powerful than the bomb that annihilated Hiroshima is unleashed. Although nuclear reduction treaties established since 1991 have reduced the global nuclear stockpiles from 64,000 warheads in 1986 to approximately 20,000 today, the fact Is that over 5000 megatons of nuclear bombs ready to be unleashed still litter the face of the earth.

Throughout the Cold War, scientists on both sides of the iron curtain were directed increasingly to put their creative energy towards the development of ever greater atomic weapons rather than solve world problems which for the most part was always the true purpose of science.

When the MAD doctrine (and a few too many war hawks devoted to computer models instead of human thinking) propelled the world towards a nuclear showdown in October 1962, cooler heads thankfully prevailed. During this period, mature statecraft took the form of backchannel and public dialogue between John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev who agreed upon respecting each others’ security interests with Russia removing its nuclear weapons from Cuba and the U.S.A following suite by removing their nuclear weapons from Turkey soon thereafter.

With this dance with mass death, Kennedy created several precedents for future leaders to learn from starting with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, his call to pull the U.S.A out of an oncoming Vietnam quagmire and launching a beautiful vision for U.S.-Russian joint space program presented to the UN General Assembly in New York on September 20 1963. This was an offer which Khrushchev’s son admitted his father had wished to accept during a 1997 interview, but sadly assassins’ bullets and Cold Warriors devoid of wisdom got in the way of that vision.

We are now sitting on the cusp of the 60^th anniversary of the October Crisis and sadly very few statesmen in today’s U.S.A think on the strategic level of President Kennedy.

NATO has continued to expand across Russia’s soft underbelly in total renunciation of the promises made in 1991 between U.S. delegations and their Russian counterparts. With each new member added to NATO since 1998, a policy of military containment of Russia has been advanced with ever more troops, anti-ballistic missiles and bases installed across former Soviet Nations.

To stop the race towards nuclear annihilation now unfolding over the chaos in Ukraine, it is absolutely requisite that the leadership of the U.S.A and Russia conduct emergency meetings immediately with the intention of resolving the danger of nuclear extinction once and for all.

The way forward is not as difficult and only requires a willingness to compromise on certain actions which have no benefit to anyone. At the top of this list is the need to flush the strange obsession to expand NATO to the detriment of Russian security interests.

If this simple act were accomplished, then getting Russia to extract itself militarily from Ukraine would be no small difficulty.

Beyond simply putting out the immediate fires threatening to engulf our collective home, a longer term plan to avoid future fires from taking hold is also necessary. To this end, cooperation on matters of common interest is vital to establish a new security architecture founded upon firm principles. This means seeking out projects that unite the goals of eastern and western blocks into a common destiny, rather than amplifying divisions of “us” vs “them” with “good guys” invited to democracy summits which exclude nearly half of the worlds’ population.

Like Kennedy’s promotion of U.S.A-Russian scientific cooperation on space development and atomic development, today’s statesmen must discuss such programs as Asteroid Defense (dubbed by Roscosmos’ Dimitry Rogozin as “Strategic Defense of Earth” in 2011), Arctic Development, Bering Strait rail development, and re-forestation of the earth for starters. The Chinese (who are facing no shortage of threats to their security in the Pacific theater) have recently offered the Trans-Atlantic Community the chance to work together on the Belt and Road Initiative which could only benefit humanity as the BRI has already pulled hundreds of millions of souls out of poverty.

What makes these positive steps towards a sustainable global security doctrine so attractive is that they involve re-orienting nuclear science from the perverse path of self-destruction towards the path of creation which this beautiful field of research was always destined to be. The peaceful use of atomic power both in advanced fission reactors, atomic medicine and the long-overdue holy grail of fusion energy provides humanity the master key to do what no other species has been able to do: Break an extinction cycle and end the “four horsemen” of famines, war, disease and ignorance that have plagued humanity since time immemorial.

If humanity is morally fit to survive the current storm, it will be due to the rectification of those fallacious rules underlying geopolitics as have been practiced throughout recent history. Rule by “might makes right” which shaped the pre-nuclear era must finally come to an end, as a new age of “right makes might” must finally be permitted to have its chance in the sun.

Appendix: President Kennedy’s remarks of July 26, 1963:

“A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history. A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, “the survivors would envy the dead.” For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors. So let us try to turn the world away from war. Let us make the most of this opportunity, and every opportunity, to reduce tension, to slow down the perilous nuclear arms race, and to check the world’s slide toward final annihilation.”

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

To any Serb who has not lost his mind or has just become numb from three decades of relentless anti-Serbian propaganda and lies emanating from the “free and democratic” West’s power centers and media – the speed and totalitarian scope of anti-Russian measures and the intensity of anti-Russian propaganda censorship that has captured the West cannot come as a surprise. As Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic stated a few days before the beginning of Russia’s denazification and demilitarization campaign in the Ukraine, about 85% of Serbs are “always” on the side of Russia. Even as Serbia has, over the past several days, come under immense Western pressure as the lone independent enclave in Europe, a sort of a West Berlin of the new multipolar world in the making, surrounded by NATO and/or EU countries that have been, with varying degrees of voluntarity, sucked into the ongoing anti-Russian hysteria and the accompanying sanctions, closing of airspace to Russian planes, etc.

The reason is simple, even if one sets aside the centuries-old spiritual, ethnic and just plain fraternal ties between the two peoples. For the Serbs were, so to speak, the canaries in the coal mine in the years that followed George Bush Senior’s proclamation of a “new world order.” Early on after the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the beginning of the 1990s, while innocents and just plain people of good will were still enamored with the announced “end of history” and the glorious triumph of “liberal democracy,” in the Serbian parts of Yugoslavia, we were experiencing, firsthand, something completely different, dark and ominous. We were witnessing the gradual return of pure, cynical power politics, only this time couched in the clothing of politically correct, sugarcoated homilies invoking “human rights,” “democracy,” “European integration” and “peace,” which, as it soon enough turned out, served as a mere “liberal” fog of war, as a preparatory rhetorical, diplomatic and media artillery fire for legitimizing the West’s self-anointed right to define what is good and what is not and to, on the basis of the newly prescribed definitions, interfere and expand its purely pragmatic, base interests wherever it could. The world was the victorious West’s oyster, “democracy expansion” its new quasi-religion, putting a moral veneer on its newest geopolitical outreach, a modernized version of the “white man’s burden” couched in the newfangled terminology of a supposedly post-ideological era.

Thus, during the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia, its chief external instigators and facilitators – led by Germany and Austria, with essential help from the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia – could, thanks to their vast domination of the media-informational space, present themselves as “peace brokers” and, even more sickening, as moral arbiters. The new-old expansionist West could portray itself to the uninformed and the gullible as some sort of force for good, while painting the enemy – the Serbs then, the Russians today – as evil incarnate. It was on the ashes of the Western-fomented destruction of Yugoslavia that the myth of “indispensable NATO”, “benevolent EU” and the “good West” received much of their subsequent affirmation and post-Cold War soft power. And therein lies much of the reason why Russia’s – and not only Russia’s – endless polite requests and pleas to halt the North Atlantic military pact’s steady expansion to the east, were not taken seriously, or at least seriously enough, by a critical mass of those who had no direct contact with the Western wolves in sheep’s clothing, like the Serbs (and the Syrians, Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Somalis, Venezuelans, etc.) did. Simply put, the West was only starting to spend the huge surplus moral value it had accrued as victor of a global struggle with an “evil empire,” the chinks in the (artificially manufactured) armor were still too microscopic for the ordinary, inexperienced, well-meaning eye to detect.

Even NATO’s illegal bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in spring of 1999, in the name of “prevention of genocide” in Serbia’s historic and sacred Kosovo province – of which no evidence has ever been presented over the ensuing 23 years – did not awaken the critical mass of Western public opinion and decision-makers necessary to reexamine the wisdom and necessity of continuing on the path of, essentially, a new Drang nach Osten (however, seeing what happened with Trump, much later in the game, it’s beyond obvious that election outcomes and decision-making in the West have been captured by the military-industrial complex even then, just as Eisenhower had warned back in 1961) .

It did, however, finally awaken Moscow, opening the way to Vladimir Putin’s ascendance to Russia’s highest office on the last day of that fateful year. Like the Serbs, the Russians still remembered the true horrors of the last world war and could recognize the all-too-familiar patterns far more easily than most on the European continent. Unfortunately, Moscow could not do much about them initially, other than to ceaselessly warn, beginning with Munich in early 2007, ask for a general reassessment and renegotiation of common European security and – aware that its tactful warnings, suggestions and proposals were being blithely ignored in the key Western capitals – rearm and prepare itself for the inevitable. Which finally came with the collective West’s refusal to talk about Ukraine’s neutrality and the halting of NATO’s further expansion, in parallel with the Ukrainian puppet president’s raising of the threat of Ukraine becoming a nuclear state.

Why would Moscow agree to the very real possibility of nuclear missiles deployed at its borders, which could reach it in 7-8 minutes (and, in the case of future hypersonic missiles, in 5-6 minutes)? Why would it trust NATO’s (true) power centers, whose leading figures had assured it that not one further inch would be taken to the east as the Warsaw pact self-dissolved – and then proceeded to do precisely the opposite?

So, no, the endless verbal assurances and endless empty talk of the past three decades would no longer work, as all Russia had gotten out of it was a hostile, Axis-like alliance at its borders and a campaign of steadily rising demonization that had, of late, in many aspects exceeded that experienced by the U.S.S.R. at the height of the Cold War. When threatened with nuclear missiles under its nose in Cuba, the U.S. was willing to launch nuclear war to prevent it. Russia has threatened no such thing.

A day after the beginning of the Russian demilitarization and denazification campaign, Serbia’s president announced Serbia’s official position regarding the situation in Ukraine, as outlined in the conclusions of the Serbian National Security Council. In essence, Serbia’s position is that it respects Ukraine’s territorial integrity as it respects the territorial integrity of all states in accordance with the UN Charter and the Helsinki Act of 1975, that it considers the violation of the territorial integrity of any state, including Ukraine “very wrong,” but that it will not impose sanctions against the Russian Federation.

It is enough just to look at a current political map of Europe to see the significance, courage and difficulty of Serbia’s decision. Serbia and neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) are islands in the NATO sea that surrounds them – and BiH is not a NATO member only due to the opposition of the Serbs in that country, led by the Serbian member of the BiH Presidency, Milorad Dodik. In addition, all the surrounding states have joined the Western condemnations of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and have joined or voiced support for the newest sanctions imposed on Russia, including the EU’s closure of air space to Russian planes.

As expected, over the past few days, as testified by Vucic himself, Serbia has been subjected to “intense” Western pressure to join the sanctions and condemnations front against Russia. The EU Parliament Rapporteur for Serbia, Vladimir Bilchik has already stated that Serbia’s decision not to join the EU’s sanctions against Russia is a “defining foreign policy decision for much broader relations between the EU and Serbia.” Former Swedish foreign and prime minister and the first High Representative for BiH Carl Bildt Tweeted that Serbia has “de facto disqualified itself from the EU accession process,” as new members are expected to share in the EU’s “fundamental values and interests.” European Commission spokespeople Ana Pisonero and Eric Mamer have also voiced expectations that Serbia would join the EU sanctions policy.

These are all rather ominous words – and not because anyone in Serbia, other than a handful of well-paid diehards and hopeless cases, truly believes that the country will ever be admitted to the self-proclaimed “most successful peace project in human history” (which expressly approved the sending of fighter jets to neo-Nazi “democrats” in Ukraine), but because the out-of-control Western elites’ “either you’re with us or against us” mentality is certain to find ways to make its displeasure known to all dissidents. Especially to an encircled, friendly-to-Russia enclave that stubbornly refuses to join the anti-Russian hysteria being fanned all over the Western “liberal” landscape. After all, Serbia was viciously and illegally bombed by NATO in 1999 for not voluntarily agreeing to its own occupation by the alliance of “democratic values.” Since then, the alliance has gained 11 more members and about a thousand kilometers to the east. So, we shall wait and see in the coming days and weeks what practical measures of punishment or censure will be applied by the EU (and NATO) against Serbia, which has been an official candidate for EU membership since 2012 and is, thus, obliged to gradually harmonize its policies, including foreign policy, with the “peace loving” union.

Russia has shown appreciation and understanding for Serbia’s position. In his reaction to Serbia’s official stance, the Russian ambassador in Belgrade stated that Russia “understands that Serbia is being pressured and does not ask anything of Serbia,” being well aware of the mutual respect and trust that exist between President Vucic and Russia’s President Putin, that Serbia “respects Russia’s national interest,” and that Russia is “at peace” with Serbia’s position and its foreign policy.

In addition, as stated in the National Security Council conclusions, Serbia was itself a victim of Western sanctions during the 1990s and, even more importantly, aggression on the part of 19 NATO states in 1999 precisely for defending its own territorial integrity. In other words, Serbia is not only refusing to join Western sanctions against a traditional friend and ally but also to be a part of traditional Western double standards, which it has felt on its own skin both in the past and in the present. Towards that end, the speaker of the Serbian parliament, Ivica Dacic, clearly stated that, unlike the rest of “democratic” Europe, Serbia would not join in the “totalitarian” methods and close or censor either Sputnik or RT. So, as things stand, Sputnik’s last non-Russian European outpost now sits in Belgrade, which is, nevertheless, still not sufficiently “democratic” to pass muster with the free-thinking bureaucrats in Brussels

On that same tangent, because you can never have too much trans-Atlantic hypocrisy, the U.S. embassy in Belgrade also reacted to Serbia’s position regarding the Russian intervention in Ukraine by Tweeting that the U.S. “salute Serbia’s and President Aleksandar Vucic’s repeated position of support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, which was violated by Russia’s illegal and completely unprovoked attacks.”

Aside from the brazen twisting and pure invention in which the U.S. embassy engaged – as no Serbian official has used any remotely harsh words to describe Russia’s intervention – American diplomats are conveniently ignoring the fact that their own country has been consistently and aggressively violating Serbia’s own territorial integrity since February 2008, when the U.S. recognized the independence of Serbia’s historical and sacred province of Kosovo (Kosovo and Metohija is the full name of the province, in accordance with the Serbian constitution). And, of course, except for the 5 EU states that have refused to recognize the secession of so-called Kosovo from Serbia (Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Spain and Slovakia) – the rest of the EU, headed by its most powerful members (Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries), is also being its usual hypocritical self in expecting Serbia to condemn violations of other’s territories when the majority of its own member states have also recognized the violation of Serbia’s territorial integrity by recognizing “Kosovo” and, indeed, actively promoting its “independence” which, in practice, is non-existent, as the territory is a black hole of drug and human trafficking, whose politicians take orders from abroad, as well as home to a large U.S. military base built on land stolen from Serbs.

The Serbian leadership’s initial decision met with the support of the great majority of the Serbian public, which is, nevertheless, well aware of Serbia’s difficult position.  However, on March 2, Serbia joined the majority in the UN General Assembly and condemned the Russian “aggression against Ukraine.” In a rather sorry display of public self-pity, Vucic tried to justify the vote at a press conference by explaining that Serbia still refused calls to join the anti-Russian sanctions, as well as resisting new Western pressures to nationalize Russian-owned property in Serbia. However, his popularity will suffer as a result, so it’s still a win-win for Western interests in Belgrade, because they always prefer to weak(ened) leaderships, as they are more pliable and, thus, sensitive to outside pressure.

Serbia’s current position is eerily reminiscent of the country’s position in the spring of 1941. At that time as well, the Serbian elite in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was the lone voice of opposition in the country against joining the Axis powers, even though Yugoslavia itself was, along with Greece, surrounded by countries that had fallen under the occupation or political domination of the Axis powers. As a result of the coup of March 27, 1941, organized by Serbian officers opposed to a pact with the Axis, Yugoslavia was attacked by Germany and its allies on April 6, 1941, the country itself dismembered and occupied, and the Serbian population subjected to political repression and genocidal annihilation over the next four years. Although the Serbs organized two large guerilla liberation fronts, it was only with the aid of the Soviet Red Army that the territory of Yugoslavia was fully liberated in the fall of 1944. Alone among the former peoples that made up Yugoslavia (which also included Croats, Slovenes and Slavic Muslims, along with substantial Albanian and Hungarian minorities), the Serbs still remember

this, just as many Russians remember that only the Serbs refused to join Nazi German troops on the Eastern Front against the U.S.S.R.

Might this be, in Yogi Berra’s immortal words, déjà vu all over again?

There is one question today that is more important than any other question that could possibly be asked, and it’s this:

“Is what the US and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for?”

Russian state media have confirmed that Vladimir Putin’s orders to move the nation’s nuclear deterrent forces into “special combat duty mode” have been carried out, citing “aggressive statements from NATO related to the Russian military operation in Ukraine.”

“Russia’s ground, air and submarine-based nuclear deterrent forces have begun standby alert duty with reinforced personnel, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has informed President Putin,” Sputnik reports.

This comes days after Putin issued a thinly veiled threat of an immediate nuclear strike should western powers interfere in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying, “Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so, to create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate. And it will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history.”

This also comes as the US and EU countries commit to sending fighter jets and stinger missiles to assist Ukraine in fighting an unwinnable war against a longtime target of the US empire, perhaps with the hope of dragging Moscow into a costly military quagmire like it deliberately worked to do in Afghanistan and in Syria.

This also comes as the ruble crashes following crushing sanctions and the banning of Russian banks from the international money transfer system SWIFT by the US and its allies. The economic hardship that follows will hurt ordinary people and may foment unrest, and it is here worth noting that in 2019 then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted that the goal of brutal sanctions on Iran was to push people to rise up and overthrow their government.

We’re also seeing the all-too-familiar phrase “regime change” used in reference to Putin by prominent western narrative managers like Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haas, European Council on Foreign Relations Co-Chair Carl Bildt, Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institute and Hoover Institution, as well as USA Today.

All of this has made nuclear war in the near term a whole lot more likely than it was just a few days ago… which is a really strange thing to type.

As I’m always saying, the primary risk of nuclear war is not that anyone will choose to start one, it’s that one could be triggered by any combination of miscommunication, miscalculation, misunderstanding or technical malfunction amid the chaos and confusion of escalating cold war tensions. This nearly happened, repeatedly, in the last cold war. The more tense things get, the greater the likelihood of an unthinkable chain of events from which there is no coming back.

Cold war brinkmanship has far too many small, unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that they can ramp up aggressions without triggering a nuclear exchange. Anyone who feels safe with these games of nuclear chicken simply does not understand them.

To get some insight into how easily an unpredictable scenario can lead to nuclear war I recommend watching this hour-long documentary or reading this article about Vasili Arkhipov, the Soviet submariner who single-handedly saved the world from obliteration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was one of three senior officers aboard a nuclear-armed sub that was cornered near Cuba by US war ships who did not know the sub had a nuclear weapon on board.

The US navy was dropping explosives onto the sub to get it to surface, and the Soviets didn’t know what they were doing as they had cut off all communications. It took all three senior officers to launch the nuke their ship was armed with, and two of them, thinking this was the beginning of World War 3, saw it as their duty to use it. Only Arkhipov, who had witnessed the horrific effects that radiation can have on the human body during a nuclear-powered submarine meltdown years earlier, refused.

You, and everyone you know, exist because Arkhipov made that decision. Had his personal history and conditioning been a little bit different, or had another officer been on board that particular ship on that particular day, nothing around you right now would be there. We got lucky. So lucky it’s uncomfortable to even think about it. But it’s important to.

This again is just one of the many nuclear close calls we’ve experienced since our species began its insane practice of stockpiling armageddon weapons around the world. We survived the last cold war by sheer, dumb luck. We were never in control. Not once. And there’s no reason to believe we’ll get lucky again.

A 2014 study by Earth’s Future found that just a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would throw 5 Tg of black carbon into the stratosphere, blocking out the sun for decades and potentially starving everything to death. India and Pakistan have 160 and 165 nukes each, respectively. The US and Russia have 5,550 and 6,257.

So I repeat again the world’s most important question: is what the US and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for?

Well? Is it?

It’s not really a question you can just compartmentalize away from if you have integrity. It demands to be answered.

Is it worth it to continue along this trajectory? Is it? Is it really? Perhaps there might be some things that would be worth risking the life of every creature on earth to obtain, but is refusing to concede to Moscow’s demands in Ukraine one of them?

Whatever your values are, whatever your analysis is, whatever beliefs you’ve been holding to justify your support for the west’s side of this conflict, will you still proudly stand by them if you look outside and see a mushroom cloud growing in the distance?

Well? Will you?

Here’s a hint: if your answer to this question is premised on the assumption that nuclear war can’t or will never happen, then you don’t have a position that’s grounded in reality, because you’re not accounting for real possibilities. You’re justifying your position with fantasy.

I understand the argument that if we let tyrants do whatever they want just because they have nukes they’ll just do whatever they want. I understand the argument that if we don’t stop Putin now he’s going to take over all of Europe because he’s literally Hitler and blah blah blah. I understand why people ask “Well if we don’t stand up to him now, then when? Where is your line??” I really do.

But the US has been making risk-to-benefit calculations based on the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons every single day since Stalin got the bomb. There are things Russia has been permitted to do that weaker nations would have been forcefully stopped from doing, like annexing Crimea and intervening in Syria, exactly because they have nukes. If those weren’t the line, why specifically does Ukraine have to be? Surely there’s a line somewhere, but it would have to exist at a point where it would be worth risking the life of every living creature for.

So is it? Is keeping the possibility of NATO membership open and retaining control of the Donbas really so important that we should roll the dice on the existence of the entire human species on it? Is maintaining a hostile client state on Russia’s border truly worth gambling the life of every terrestrial organism for? Are the desperate unipolarist grand chessboard maneuverings of a few powerful people in Washington, Langley and Arlington really worth risking the life of everyone you know and love?

If the answer is no, then building some opposition to what we’re seeing here becomes a very urgent matter. Very urgent indeed.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

“She [the United States] has seen that probably for centuries to come, contests of inveterate power, and emerging right [will persist]…But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy…She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own…she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…”

– speech in 1821 by John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-1829), and the first American Ambassador to Russia in 1809.

This three part series will discuss how American foreign policy and ideology came to be what Eisenhower would refer to in his farewell address on January 17th, 1961 as the “military-industrial complex” that held whether sought or unsought, the power to acquire unwarranted influence, and that such a “power exists, and will persist,” leaving the following generations of Americans “a legacy of ashes,” for a once great nation.

This series will explain how in particular, the philosophy of the American establishment, including that of the military, formed their “understanding” of nuclear strategy which continues to influence thought today such as in the belief in the winnability of a limited nuclear war. It will also explain the reasons for why the Vietnam war was fought with the approach used as well as the War on Terror, and most importantly why.

A Foreign Attack on American Soil

On December 7th, 1941, the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was attacked by the Japanese navy, killing 2,403 Americans and wounding 1,178. However, the Americans would only begin their military air campaign against Japan by mid-1944.

General MacArthur estimated that a million Americans would die in only the first phase of the Pacific War. The Russians were being heavily courted by the Americans to break their Neutrality Pact with Japan and enter into the Pacific War for the very straightforward reason that fewer Americans would die.

After three years of the most savage warfare against the German Nazis, where over 25 million Russian soldiers and civilians died, Russia was now prepared to enter into another war with Japan, only months later, to offer military support to the U.S., a country that had suffered minute losses in comparison.

When Admiral King, chief of naval operations, was informed that the Russians would definitely enter the fight against Japan, he was immensely relieved commenting “We’ve just saved two million Americans.”

* * *

On April 12th, 1945 President Roosevelt passed away and much of the American-Russian partnership with him.

On July 16th, 1945, the first successful atomic bomb was tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Seven days later, Stalin was informed at the Potsdam conference by Truman that America now had the bomb.

Truman, contrary to what he was advised to do, made no mention of collaboration, no mention of making the world peaceful and safe, and no offer to share information with the Russians, not even in return for any quid pro quo. Simply that America now had the bomb.

On August 6th, 1945, Little Boy, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

On August 9th at 1:00 am, one million Soviet troops crossed the border into eastern Manchuria to face the Kwantung, the culmination of ten months of coordinated planning. Later that same day a second atomic bomb, Fat Man (named after Churchill), was dropped on Nagasaki.

The Russians were completely taken aback. They had not been notified of this plan, and it was certainly not a “friendly” message that the U.S. was sending to their supposed allies.

On August 15th, six days later, Japan surrendered. Many historians have agreed that the Russian attack in Manchuria had the greater weight in causing the Japanese to surrender. (1) But it did not matter.

Most in the West would either never know or would soon forget about the Russian sacrifice.

The decision to drop the bomb, Truman would write in a letter to his daughter Margaret, was “no great decision…not any decision you would have to worry about.”

Nuclear physicist Yuli Khariton would voice a common Russian reaction when he wrote that the two bombs that were dropped on Japan were used “as atomic blackmail against the USSR, as a threat to unleash a new, even more terrible and devastating war,” if Russia refused to play by the rules decided for her.

By the end of WWII, the contrast between the United States and Soviet Union were enormous. The U.S. was supplying over half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, more than half of the world’s electricity, holding two-thirds of the world’s gold stocks and half of all the monetary reserves. It had suffered 405,000 casualties, 2.9 percent of its population (The size of the American population in 1945 was approximately 140 million).

Russia suffered 27 million casualties, 16 percent of its population. The Germans burned 70,000 Russian villages to the ground and destroyed 100,000 farms. Twenty-five million Russians were homeless. 32,000 factories and 65,000 railroad tracks were destroyed. And its major cities: Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow were in shambles.

The Godfather of RAND: Air Force General Curtis LeMay

“If we had lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

– Air Force General Curtis LeMay in “The Fog of War”

On October 1st, 1945, less than two months after the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan, Commanding General Henry Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces, inspired by what the scientists under the Manhattan Project could do, met with Franklin R. Collbohm, Arthur E. Raymond, Donald Douglas, and Edward Bowles. This was the pioneering team that would create RAND.

Franklin R. Collbohm was the right-hand man of Donald Douglas, head of Douglas Aircraft, America’s largest airplane manufacturer, and the special assistant to Arthur E. Raymond, the company’s vice president and head of engineering. Edward Bowles, a consultant from MIT, worked with Collbohm on the notorious B-29 Special Bombardment Project against Japan in 1944.

After witnessing the atomic bomb, Arnold foresaw that the future in warfare would revolve around the technology of long-distance missiles and was adamant that only the Air Force and no other branch of armed forces should control the new weapon. Arnold pledged $10 million from unspent wartime research money to set up the research group and keep it running independently for a few years. (2) Collbohm nominated himself to head the group, which he did for the next 20 years.

Air Force Deputy Chief Curtis LeMay of Air Staff for Research and Development, was soon after brought in by General Arnold and tasked with supervising the new research group.

LeMay, whom it is said Kubrick based his military brass off of in “Dr. Strangelove,” was known for many military “feats” but the most notorious of these was when Arnold sent LeMay to the Mariana, to head the 21st Bomber Command that would execute the inhumane raids over Japanese cities in 1945.

It was there that LeMay first worked with Collbohm, Raymond and Bowles. It was because of Collbohm’s team that the B-29 bombers were able to inflict maximum damage. These incendiary bombs were dropped on the civilian population of Japan, burning alive hundreds of thousands of people. Homes, shops, and buildings of no apparent military value were consumed by the fiery rain that fell from the low-flying B-29s night after night.

This was the same tactic that had been used in Dresden by the European Allies, killing 25,000 civilians (3) but it had never before been used by the Americans who had up until this point avoided civilian populations.

As would occur during the Korean and Vietnam wars, the concept of the enemy was beginning to become blurred for the Americans. They were finding it harder and harder to combat a clearly defined opponent, rather, the “enemy” was increasingly looking like the vague unfamiliarity of an entire people, a whole population of seemingly soulless faces not like their own.

Unlike all the other countries involved in the world war, the Pearl Harbour attack was the first direct foreign offense against the United States other than the war of 1812. It did not matter how much more damage or destruction the Americans would inflict upon the Japanese in response to this, for it was justified as self-defence. An attempt to ensure that such an attack would never dare be repeated against the United States. It was an outlook that would continue on into the war arenas of Korea and Vietnam.

Because of the Pearl Harbor attack, many in the United States began to see large swaths of the world population like a swarming mountain of flesh-eating ants, wishing nothing more than to destroy American values and liberty. It was thought by many that the only way to save oneself and loved ones was to scourge the earth of them.

As General Arnold wrote, “We must not get soft. War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.” (4)

Alex Abella writes in his “Soldiers of Reason”:

“…the carpet bombing of Japan left the founding fathers of RAND and the future secretary of defense Robert McNamara, who also collaborated on the B-29 project – with the reputation of looking only to the practical aspect of a problem without concern for morality. Their numbers-driven perspective had the effect, intentional or not, of divorcing ethical questions from the job at hand. Eventually RAND doctrine would come to view scientists and researchers as facilitators, not independent judges. As LeMay himself said, ‘All war is immoral. If you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.’ “

On March 1st, 1946, RAND had an official charter:

“Project RAND is a continuing program of scientific study and research on the broad subject of air warfare with the object of recommending to the Air Force preferred methods, techniques and instrumentalities for this purpose.” (5)

Unlike other government contractors, RAND would be exempt from reporting to a contracting command. Instead, the unfiltered results would be delivered straight to LeMay. (6)

Within a few years, a new mind-set would take hold in government: science, rather than diplomacy, could provide the answers needed to cope with threats to national security.

Rather than nationalize key military industries, as the UK and France had done, the U.S. government opted to contract out scientific research development to the private sector, which was not bounded by the Pentagon. RAND would be a bridge between the two worlds of military planning and civilian development.

And in a very real way, this great country with an island philosophy went into a fit of madness over the realisation that they were not invulnerable to an outside attack. This realisation, though they were to suffer minor losses compared to that in Europe and Asia during the two world wars, turned into a gaping wound of constant “what ifs,” a never-ending barrage of paranoid suppositions.

From then on, the United States would become obsessed with thwarting the next enemy attack, which they were certain was always in the works.

In Search of a Prophet: Enter the RAND Mathematicians

By March 1st, 1946 there were but four full-time RAND employees. Collbohm’s fifth hire to RAND was John Davis Williams who was to serve as director of the newly created Mathematics Division and would become Collbohm’s right-hand man. (7)

In 1947, Ed Paxson, a RAND engineer created the term “systems analysis” when Williams placed him in charge of the Evaluation of Military Worth Section. Paxson had been a scientific adviser to the U.S. Army Air Forces and a consultant to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945-46.

During WWII, the considered shortcomings of operational research (OR) was that it could not function without hard data, what was already known about a system.

As Alex Abella puts it in his “Soldiers of Reason”:

“RAND’s systems analysis…refused to be constrained by existing reality…Systems analysis was the freedom to dream and to dream big, to turn away from the idea that reality is a limited set of choices, to strive to bend to the world to one’s will…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract. Sadly, most RAND analysts failed to perceive this inherent flaw in their wondrous construct. Not only that, the methodology of systems analysis required that all the aspects of a particular problem be broken down into quantities…Those things that could not be eased into a mathematical formula…were left out of the analysis… By extension, if a subject could not be measured, ranged, and classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.”

On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet nuclear test RDS-1 was conducted, with the yield of 22 kilotons.

With this advent, there was mounting concern over what were the intentions of the Soviet bloc. Did they create their own atomic bomb as simply a defensive manoeuvre or was there the possibility they were planning an offensive?

In response to these questions, RAND put forward the doctrine of “rational choice theory,” developed by a 29 year old economist named Kenneth Arrow. The bulk of Arrow’s work at RAND is still classified top secret to this day. (8)

Arrow was tasked with establishing a collective “utility function” for the Soviet Union. In other words, “rational choice theory” meant to establish mathematically a fixed set of preferences in order to determine what were the best actions that would yield the greatest service to the Soviet leadership’s collective interests.

Since there was a lack of hard evidence, western policy makers became increasingly reliant on mathematical and also psychoanalytical speculation in order to create hypothetical scenarios, such that counter-strategies could be formed. RAND needed Arrow’s “utility function” so its analysts could simulate the actions of the Soviets during a nuclear conflict in order to justify increased funding and military buildup.

As long as somewhat complex mathematical explanations could be used to create such speculations, it was considered under the domain of “science,” and there was no need to cross-check the validity or accuracy of such speculations.

Arrow’s paradox, otherwise known as Arrow’s impossibility theorem, had demonstrated through a mathematical argument that collective rational group decisions are logically impossible.

Abella writes:

“Arrow utilized his findings to concoct a value system based on economics that destroyed the Marxist notion of a collective will. To achieve this result, Arrow borrowed freely from elements of positivist philosophy, such as its concern for axiomization, universally objective scientific truth and the belief that social processes can be reduced to interactions between individuals.” (9)

Arrow’s impossibility theorem lay a theoretical foundation for universal scientific objectivity, individualism and “rational choice.” That the so called “science,” in the form of a mathematical argument, has determined the collective is nothing, the individual is all.

And if we are all just reduced to our petty individual selfish self-interests, who is to challenge the players of the game who wish to shape the world stage?

As Abella phrased it, “Put in everyday terms, RAND’s rational choice theory is the Matrix code of the West.”

In 1950, William’s fascination with game theory peaked after the success of Arrow’s rational choice theory for RAND, and he hired John von Neumann, the father of game theory as a full-time staffer for RAND. Like Williams, von Neumann was an advocate of an all-out pre-emptive nuclear war on the Soviet Union. (10)

Together with Oskar Morgenstern, Neumann cowrote the book that lay the foundation for the field, “Theory Games and Economic Behavior,” published in 1944. Morgenstern and Neumann assumed that players in every game are rational (motivated by selfish self-interests) and that any given situation has a rational outcome. It was Neumann who coined the term “zero-sum game,” referring to a set of circumstances in which a player stands to gain only if his opponent loses.

By the mid-1950s, RAND became the world center for game theory.

Years later RANDites would ruefully acknowledge the futility of attempting to reduce human behavior to numbers. Yet, that has not deterred its continued use in military strategy as well as in numerous fields in academia to this day.

Out of the “science” of systems analysis, governed by a rational choice outlook, a plan to strike pre-emptively at the Soviet Union was born in the halls of RAND.

First Strike: The Revenge of the Technocrats

“Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

– Bhagavad Gita

In seeking out further independence from its exclusive client the Air Force, RAND under the direction of Collbohm, would be reborn as a non-profit corporation.

1956. Rowan Gaither, the attorney who was drafting the RAND articles of incorporation, contacted the Ford Foundation about funding RAND. Gaither obtained not only close to half a million dollars from the Ford Foundation for RAND but he also became Ford Foundation’s president from 1953 to 1956. (11)

It was a steamy love affair in the midst of a Cold War. Ford Foundation was the largest philanthropic organization of the time and was in the process of reorganizing itself to lend financial support for world peace and the advancement of scientific knowledge. What better benefactor than RAND for such noble endeavours?

In a statement Gaither crafted after assuming the presidency of the Ford Foundation, he stated as his goal a society where technocrats ruled using objective analysis, stating:

“This very non-partisanship and objectivity gives the [Ford] foundation a great positive force, and enables it to play a unique and effective role in the difficult and sometimes controversial task of helping to realize democracy’s goals.” (12)

By 1950 administration policy had changed from the theory of containment advocated by George F. Kennan to open military competition. A notable RAND associate, Paul Nitze brought about that change almost single-handedly.

On January 1st, 1950, Paul Nitze replaced Kennan as head of the president’s Policy Planning Staff and wrote a memorandum for the NSC on how to conduct foreign policy in the nuclear age. The paper called NSC-68 warned apocalyptically about the “Kremlin’s design for world domination.”

NSC-68 declared that the U.S. was in the moral equivalent of war with the Soviet Union and called for a massive military buildup to be completed by 1954 dubbed the “year of maximum danger,” the year JIC-502 (drafted January 20th, 1950) claimed the Soviets would achieve military superiority and be able to launch war against the United States.

President Truman accepted NSC 68 as the official policy and increased the national defense budget by almost $40 billion.

It is now known that such a prediction of the Soviet threat was indeed baseless, yet nonetheless, managed to create a deranged positive feedback loop in the ceaseless striving for the largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal. It entered the United States into the maniacal mindset that one must always have the greater firing power in order to have the greatest number of options in a nuclear scenario.

This was considered the only option, and not only put the Soviet Union in a difficult position, but the rest of the world as well, for who could withstand such a mighty force if it wished to inflict its will, let alone its paranoia, on any nation?

It is no wonder that the Soviet publication Pravda at this time (late 1950s) famously called RAND “the academy of science and death.” (13)

The Father of all technocrats at RAND, was Albert Wohlstetter.

Albert would be recruited into the dysfunctional RAND family in 1951 by Charles J. Hitch, the head of the RAND economics department. Within a very short period of time Albert would rise to the very top of the RAND food chain.

In achieving this king of the unruly jungle status, he first had to battle with RAND colleague Bernard Brodie. Brodie was an advocate of nuclear deterrence, he was the true developer of the “second-strike capability” doctrine as the ultimate agent of deterrence and the key to global stability in the thermonuclear age.

The only alternative to such mutually assured destruction, Brodie argued, was a fundamental shift in humanity’s understanding of warfare.

This thought had established Brodie in 1951 as a major strategist of nuclear war. However, this status was short-lived, in large part because he simply could not play the game as well as Albert. That is, Brodie did not understand something that was at the fundamental core of RAND philosophy, to “win” at all costs.

What was the game? To ascend and conquer…no matter the game and no matter the terms.

Albert endorsed the idea of creating a strategy for controlled and discriminate warfare in which nuclear weapons would play an active role. He would take Brodie’s second-strike stratagem and turn it into a justification for what he would term a “the delicate balance of terror.” Counterforce, Albert’s version of Brodie’s second-strike, advocated for engaging a gradual, precisely controlled use of nuclear weapons against strictly military targets.

Insane? Yes.

Albert would put forward “Insofar as we can limit the damage to ourselves we reduce his [the Soviets] ability to deter us and, therefore, his confidence that we will not strike first. But decreasing his confidence in our not striking increases the likelihood of his doing so, since striking first is nearly always preferable to striking second. And so any attempt to contain the catastrophe if it comes also in some degree invites it.”

For those who are unfamiliar with Albert’s proposed theories or of the greater majority of those who worked at RAND, which was mostly made up of mathematicians devoid of hearts, the purpose of anything they do is simply to win, to get what is desired. Thus if a certain theory works in a certain case, use this theory, if not in another case, simply use another theory.

They view the world quite literally as a game. It is all about justifying the means to the goal in which you ultimately seek for. It is like starting with the desired answer and working backwards to justify the proof and hypothesis.

Albert argued for an American strategy based on “possibilities”— the entire spectrum of enemy options, both rational and irrational — rather than “probabilities,” the latter being the dominant characteristic in game theory.

Ron Robin writes in his “The Cold World They Made”:

“Albert now rejected that premise [of rational theory], proposing instead a theory of ‘limited irrationality,’ the notion that when faced with existential dilemmas, ‘people aren’t always irrational.’ One had to prepare for contingencies based on the assumption that the enemy may behave irrationally in contemplating a nuclear strike, but that the enemy is also ‘sometimes rational enough to be able to see that there is a grossly greater danger in taking the course of using nuclear weapons than if he takes the next course.’”

It is like a short-circuiting to the mentally constipated challenge of the so-called “prisoner’s dilemma,” in the end even game theorists said all options were “rational,” and couldn’t even agree which option was more rational vs. irrational.

For Albert, the Soviets were entirely to blame for the Cold War due to their assumed aggressive motives and predatory behavior, rather than the fact that the atomic bomb was created by the Americans in the first place.

Albert’s Soviets were cruel despots who would willingly sacrifice tens of millions of their citizens for the price of strategic advantage and world domination. Thus, it was the responsibility of the United States to prevent such a calamity as their primary objective, and that this could only be achieved, according to Albert, through an unrelenting investment in nuclear arms development and improvement.

Fred Kaplan writes in his “The Wizards of Armageddon”:

“Echoing his colleague Herman Kahn, he [Albert] wondered what the difference was ‘between two such unimaginable disasters as sixty and 160 million Americans dead? The only answer to that is ‘100 million.’ Starting from the smaller losses, it would be possible to recover the industrial and political power of the United States. Even smaller differences would justify an attempt to reduce the damage to our society in the event of war.’” (14)

According to Albert, the 25 million sacrifice of the Soviets in fighting WWII was nothing valiant or noble, but rather showed how coldly and callously the Soviet leadership regarded their own people that they could sacrifice them, without any apparent concern, into the burning furnace of war as nothing but cheap fuel for the military engine.

Ironically (or perhaps not…), this Soviet monstrosity that Albert had convinced himself, was used as the very justification for Albert’s push towards a nuclear confrontation, that would sacrifice many more lives.

Strangely Albert justifies the sacrifice of what he ultimately regards as just a number, whether it be 60 or 160 million (the population size of the U.S. in 1954 was 161,881,000). Thus, the possibility of 100 million Americans dead as the number Albert lands upon, was at the time 62% of the American population. This is not even taking into account how many Russians would die in such a scenario.

It appears what Albert is saying is that the United States is justified in becoming the greatest monstrosity in the world such that it can end all other monstrosities, whether real or merely speculative.

However, we are expected to believe that our sacrifice and murder in such numbers will be the most noble of all?

Together, Paul Nizte, Albert and his wife Roberta Wohlstetter (all RAND associates) would dominate the theory and policy surrounding nuclear strategy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In Nov. 1985, Reagan would award all three with the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Roberta, an authority on the “academic historical” work around the attack on Pearl Harbour and the psychological uses this had, had great insight into what could stir the sleeping madness that slumbered within the most powerful nation in the world.

Her work was used, by Albert and others at RAND, in scare-mongering and manipulating the mind-set of the military and the American population into thinking another Pearl Harbour was always just around the corner. It would be the foundation upon which Albert based all of his “hypotheses” and “revelations” in nuclear strategy.

It is difficult not to wonder where America would be today in its understanding of Russia along with its relations and orientation in nuclear policy if Albert Wohlstetter, the principal architect of American nuclear strategy, had been exposed as a “former” Trotskyist…

[Shortly to follow: Part 2 of this series titled “Albert Wohlstetter’s ‘Delicate Balance of Terror’: The Story of How a Trotskyist Became the Authority on Nuclear Strategy for America.”]

The author can be reached at https://cynthiachung.substack.com

(1) Susan Butler, Portrait of a Partnership: Roosevelt and Stalin
(2) Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason, pg 13
(3) Ibid, pg 18
(4) Ibid, pg 10
(5) Ibid, pg 14
(6) Ibid, pg 14
(7) Ibid, pg 21
(8) Ibid, pg 49
(9) Ibid, pg 51
(10) Ibid, pg 53
(11) Ibid, pg 32
(12) Ibid, pg 32
(13) Ibid, pg 92
(14) Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, pg 368

This is fairly trivial, but it is such an excellent example of how wokeness has conquered the collective brain of the Left that I can’t pass it by. It was flagged on N.S. Lyons’s excellent Substack newsletter, The Upheaval.

It’s a call for grant proposals by the Ploughshares Fund, a major philanthropy funding projects that combat nuclear weapons proliferation, and advance the goals of peace. Nothing wrong with that. But look at what the San Francisco-based philanthropy is after in the 2022 funding cycle:

“Challenging racism and white supremacy in nuclear policies and institutions”? Like, I dunno, the fact that nuclear-armed powers don’t have their missiles pointed at African countries, thus othering them? What about Chinese nukes? Are they problematic? Should we send nuclear weapons to Africa and Latin America for the sake of equity? Are we trying to avoid a future headline: “US-Russia Nuclear Exchange Causes Global Apocalypse; BIPOCs, LGBTQQIA+ Worst Affected”?

More:

Wow. You can get up to $75,000 if you can figure out how to extend the woke grift to (checks notes) the nuclear proliferation cause. You don’t even have to have experience in the field! Just be a BIPOC or LGBTQQIA+, and be able to string intersectional jargon together, and these agonized woke philanthropists will open their purse and throw money at you.

In case it isn’t clear to you yet that this is a scam to separate wealthy leftie do-gooders from their money, and redistribute it to wokedom’s Chosen People:

What’s funny about this is that Ploughshares signals that it is not serious about spending its resources to figure out ways to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war, which is says is its reason for being. It is more concerned with appeasing its own woke conscience by buying indulgences with woke constituencies. Are the donors — both individuals and philanthropies — cool with that? Look, Ploughshares can do whatever it wants to with its money, but it means something when the purpose for which the organization exists takes a back seat to advancing woke goals. They would rather throw cash behind a third-rate grant proposal that ticked all the right intersectional boxes than actually advance the work of nuclear non-proliferation.

In this, though, they are no different than Woke Capitalists, who are less interested in their theoretical prime directive — making money by providing top-quality goods and services — than they are in feeling virtuous about themselves. It’s fun and easy to laugh at these ideologues for wasting their money on virtue signaling, but the loss of a sense of mission within companies, institutions, and organizations, all led by people who have gone crazy for ideology, is yet another sign of decadence.

theamericanconservative.com

As the U.S. moves nuclear forces closer and closer to the border of Russia, and as our corporate media bang their war drums louder and louder, does anyone remember the Cuban missile crisis?

In June of 1961, just three months after the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was defeated,  the United States began the deployment of fifteen Jupiter nuclear missiles to Turkey, which shared a border with the Soviet Union. Each missile, armed with a W49 1.4 megaton thermonuclear warhead, was equivalent to 175 Hiroshima bombs. With their fifteen-hundred-mile range, the missiles were capable of annihilating Moscow, Leningrad, and every major city and base in the Russian heartland. Each missile could incinerate Moscow in just sixteen minutes from launch, thus wildly raising the possibility of thermonuclear war caused by technological accident, human error, miscommunication, or preemptive attack.

We didn’t hear about the Jupiter missiles and of course we didn’t hear anything about Operation Mongoose, the top-secret plan launched on November 1, 1961, to overthrow the government of Cuba through a systematic campaign of sabotage, coastal raids, assassinations, subversion leading to CIA-sponsored guerrilla warfare, and an eventual invasion by the U.S. military. The armed raids and sabotage succeeded in killing many Cubans and damaging the economy, which was hit much harder by the economic embargo announced in February. However, the assassination plots were foiled, and all attempts to develop an internal opposition failed. Many of the CIA agents and Cuban exiles who infiltrated the island by sea and air were captured, and quite a few of them talked, even on Cuban radio, about the plans for a new U.S. invasion, which was planned for October. Cuba requested military help from the Soviet Union, which by July was sending troops, air defense missiles, battlefield nuclear weapons, and medium-range ballistic missiles equivalent to the U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey.

At 7 p.m. eastern time on Monday, October 22, 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered the most terrifying presidential message of my lifetime. Declaring that the Soviet Union had created a “clear and present danger” by placing in Cuba “large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction” “capable of striking Washington, D.C.,” he announced that U.S. ships would immediatly impose a “strict quarantine,” a transparent euphemism for a blockade, on the island. Knowing that the American people knew nothing about the recent and ongoing U.S. deployment of the Jupiter ballistic missiles capable of striking all the cities of the Russian heartland, he stated, “Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift that any . . . change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.” And knowing the American people knew nothing about Operation Mongoose and its previously planned invasion of Cuba in October, the president stated over and over again that these Soviet missiles were “offensive threats” with no defensive purpose. Here was his most frightening sentence: “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”

On Friday Jane wrote a long letter to her family:

Oct. 26, 1962

Dear Family,

Marie, your letter from the east helped rouse me from a state of paralysis in which I have been suspended since Kennedy’s speech on Monday… Bo, I am glad your orders so far are not changed… I had figured Bill must be in the blockade…

Thursday night Bruce was one of three faculty who spoke on this crisis. Dr. Leppert, a nuclear physicist (he watched the effects of nuclear blasts in Nevada) and Dr. Holman of the medical school were the two other speakers.  There was a large audience.  The discussion afterwards was intelligent and constructive.  But part of the time there I felt like crying because all their hope and desire for reason is, in effect upon those in power, like the vaguest ripple of a breeze.  When we once sent a telegram urging no resumption of nuclear testing, we received in return a very brisk, official pamphlet on how to prepare for a nuclear attack…

Tuesday in the middle of the night Karen appeared at our bed and said through tears, “I’ve been having a nightmare about an atomic bomb.”  We had been being careful about our words around them, but the radio had been on constantly…  Tuesday I had periods of wishing I weren’t pregnant, but I keep telling myself that instead of bringing one more person into the shadow of nuclear war, I’ll be bringing one more person up to hate hate, respect respect, and love love.

Until I recently read her letter, I had forgotten my talk. According to the Stanford Daily, I had explained how Kennedy’s blockade of Cuba violated international law and asked the audience to judge it on “pragmatic, ideological, and ethical” grounds. That all sounds embarrassingly tame and bookish. Jane obviously would have done better.

The recipients of Jane’s letter included her sister Marie and her husband Bo Sims, a Marine lieutenant colonel stationed at the Pentagon, and her sister Bobbie and her husband Bill Morgan, the captain of a destroyer.  Back in 1956, Bill has cut our wedding cake with his ceremonial Navy sword. Although he and I rarely agreed about anything—except the Gulf of Tonkin incidents of 1964—I always figured that he was probably a good, albeit gung-ho, naval officer, fair to his crew and responsible about his duty. Only in 2017 did I discover that the destroyer under Bill’s command was the USS Cony, one of the U.S. warships searching the Cuban coast for surviving invaders the Bay of Pigs the year before.  The day after Jane was writing her letter, Bill was indeed carrying out his orders professionally and efficiently. On October 27, the Cony discovered and then tracked for four hours the Soviet diesel-electric submarine B-59 out in the North Atlantic Ocean several hundred miles from Cuba.

The Cony was one of eight destroyers and an aircraft carrier hunting for Soviet submarines that might be heading for Cuba. They were under orders to force any such sub to surface by bombarding it with “signaling depth charges,” designed to cause explosions powerful enough to rock the sub, while also pounding it with ultra-high-amplitude sound waves from the destroyer’s sonar dome.

Meanwhile, the B-59’s last orders from Moscow were not to cross Kennedy’s “quarantine line” — 500 miles from Cuba–but to hold its position in the Sargasso Sea. After that, it received no communication from the Soviet Union for several days. It had been monitoring Miami radio stations that were broadcasting the increasingly ominous news. When the sub-hunting fleet of U.S. ships and planes arrived, the submarine was forced to run deep, making it lose all communication with the outside world, and to run silent, relying on battery power. The batteries were close to depleted, the air conditioning had broken down, and water, food, and oxygen were running low when the Cony began its hours of bombardment with the depth charges and high-amplitude sonar blasts. Other destroyers joined in an ongoing barrage of hand grenades and depth charges.

The Soviet officers were unaware of the existence of “signaling depth charges,” and international law has no provision allowing one warship to bombard another with small explosives unless they are in a state of war. Since the B-59 was hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, not within the blockade area and not heading toward Cuba, its crew and officers logically deduced that war had started. If so, it was their duty to attack. The officers knew that with one weapon on board, they could destroy the entire sub-hunting fleet of destroyers and the aircraft carrier that had been pursuing them—along with themselves.

Neither Bill Morgan nor anyone else in the U.S. Navy or government was aware that the B-59 was armed with a T-5 nuclear torpedo, approximately equivalent in explosive force to the Hiroshima bomb. If the sub fired its T-5, it would plunge the world into nuclear holocaust.

One nuclear weapon fired from any of the American or Russian subs still prowling the oceans would do the same today, decades after the end of the Cold War. Hardly anyone in America then or now is aware of the command-and-control protocol on nuclear-armed submarines. In order to deter an opponent’s “decapitating” first strike, which would wipe out all the nation’s leaders with the authority to launch a nuclear retaliation, the three top officers of a nuclear-armed sub have the authority and ability to launch a nuclear attack under certain circumstances. On October 27, 1962, the Soviet command-and-control protocol for launching nuclear torpedoes was even riskier: only the sub’s captain and its political officer had to agree.

On the B-59, Captain Valentin Savitsky and his political officer realized that it was now or never. Their choice was either to surface—which was equivalent to surrender while they, perhaps alone, had the ability to launch a significant counterattack—or to fire their nuclear torpedo. They decided to attack and readied to aim for the aircraft carrier at the core of the submarine-hunting fleet.

Only one man stood in the way of a nuclear Armageddon, and he was on board the B-59 by chance. He was Vasili Arkhipov, the commander of the four-submarine Soviet flotilla, who vetoed the attack, leaving Captain Savitsky with no alternative but to surface.

“This week’s events have brought home,” Jane had written in her letter a day earlier, how few people have any say “about nuclear war before it may be brought down upon their heads by the handful of people who decide man’s fate.” Even that handful of people in the White House and Pentagon didn’t know about those nuclear torpedoes. And that handful of people in the Kremlin didn’t know that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had been itching for an excuse to launch a full-scale thermonuclear attack on the Soviet Union and that now, led by the “mad”—President Kennedy’s word—ravings of my ex-boss Curtis LeMay, these dogs of war were demanding to be let off their leashes.

The Missile Crisis ended with the USSR removing all “offensive” weapons from Cuba in return for a public U.S. commitment not to invade Cuba and a secret agreement to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within several months. Years after the Jupiter missiles were withdrawn, we were told that they were “obsolete,” a term still used in almost all accounts of the crisis. But if the Jupiter missiles in Turkey were obsolete, then so were the equivalent Soviet missiles in Cuba. In reality, the problem with both deployments was not obsolescence but reckless brinkmanship, initiated by the United States. Fortunately, Moscow and Washington ended up mutually recognizing that neither was willing to live with a gun that close to its head.

What may have looked to the public like a Soviet capitulation turned out to be a successful, desperate, and potentially fatal gamble by the Soviet Union. They won a tit-for-tat removal of the land-based missiles within sixteen minutes of incinerating either Moscow or Washington, with a bonus of stopping the imminent invasion of Cuba and possibly future invasions as well, all without having to commit to the future defense of Cuba.

Behind the scenes, Kennedy now had to deal with the shrieking hawks, furious at the president both for missing the golden opportunity to annihilate the Soviet Union and for an ignominious surrender of America’s exceptional right to invade Cuba and to station nuclear weapons wherever it pleased.

Alarmed by how close we had come to nuclear apocalypse, Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev set up a telephone hot line to enable direct communication, developed a personal relationship to ease tensions, and succeeded in August 1963 in banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, under water, or in space. The president inspired many of us with an eloquent June 1963 American University commencement address about the world’s crucial need for an enduring peace. He even urged “every thoughtful citizen” who desired peace to “begin by looking inward—by examining his own attitude toward peace, toward the Soviet Union,” which he extolled for its heroic World War II sacrifices. But then of course he went on to claim: “The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today.”  Since today Russia is as capitalist as Saudi Arabia, Australia, and United States, what is “the primary cause of world tension today?”

President Kennedy’s final remarks began with this statement: “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”  So it must have been Vietnam that started a war with the United States.

counterpunch.org