Cuba’s request for USSR protection from U.S. imperialist interventions was not unfounded. Only the year before, in April 1961, the U.S. had suffered a spectacular defeat at the Bay of Pigs, when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded paramilitary operation to overthrow Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution was thwarted in less than 72 hours and 1,200 mercenaries were taken prisoner by the Cubans.

The plan was carried out by the Kennedy administration, although concocted by the CIA during the Eisenhower administration. Following the U.S. defeat, Kennedy proposed social and economic aid for Latin America under the Alliance for Progress programme – a plan which the U.S. hoped would bring the region under increased dependence on Washington and possibly prevent other socialist revolutions in Latin America.

As Fidel stated in his autobiography, “He [Kennedy] realized that social and economic factors in the region could well lead to a radical revolution across the continent. There could be a second Cuban Revolution, but on a continent-wide scale, and perhaps even more radical.”

Fidel’s acceptance of having medium-range missiles in Cuba was, in his words, “a measure meant to protect Cuba from a direct attack and simultaneously strengthen the Soviet Union and the Socialist camp.

The missiles were detected by the UN on the night between the 14^th and the 15^th of October 1962, with the then U.S. President John F. Kennedy  warning that the Soviet Union should withdraw the missiles or face a nuclear war. Kennedy also imposed a naval blockade on Cuba, preventing the installation of further missiles on the island.

A declassified U.S. document following the discovery of the missiles on Cuban soil warned, “I assume you will recall that President Kennedy said a year and a half ago that only two points were non-negotiable between the Western Hemisphere and Cuba – the Soviet tie and aggressive actions in Latin America.”

The U.S. threat was renewed on September 13 by Kennedy: “If at any time the Communist build-up in Cuba were to endanger or interfere with our security in any way… or if Cuba should ever… become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union, then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.”

On October 25, the U.S. proposed withdrawing its missiles from Turkey, which posed a threat to the Soviet Union, in return for the Soviet Union’s withdrawal of their missiles from Cuba. Notably, the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey was kept secret, in an attempt to twist the outcome as a U.S. victory over the USSR during the Cold War.

Fidel considered the compromise as diverting attention away from the issue of Cuba’s sovereignty and the right to defend itself against U.S. imperialist interventions. One major reason for the political discord on behalf of Fidel would have been the agreement being reached without consulting the Cuban government.

For his part, Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy reiterating that the Soviet Union’s installation of missiles on Cuban territory was done “because Cuba and the Cuban people were constantly under the continuous threat of an invasion of Cuba.” Khrushchev also outlined that the Soviet Union’s actions were defensive not offensive – the latter being the U.S.’s misrepresentation.

Letters exchanged between Khrushchev and Fidel indicate that the Soviet Union sought guarantees that the U.S. “not only will not invade Cuba with their own forces, but will not allow their allies to do so.” However, Khrushchev warned, “Since an agreement is in sight, the Pentagon is looking for a pretext to thwart it.”

A reversal of roles in the current scenario between Russia and Ukraine has NATO and its allies escalating hostile diplomacy. On what grounds is guarding a nation’s borders from NATO violence a security threat?

By Jack F. MATLOCK, Jr.

We are being told each day that war may be imminent in Ukraine. Russian troops, we are told, are massing at Ukraine’s borders and could attack at any time. American citizens are being advised to leave Ukraine and dependents of the American Embassy staff are being evacuated.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has advised against panic and made clear that he does not consider a Russian invasion imminent. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has denied that he has any intention of invading Ukraine.

His demand is that the process of adding new members to NATO cease and that in particular, Russia has assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be members. President Joe Biden has refused to give such assurance but made clear his willingness to continue discussing questions of strategic stability in Europe.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government has made clear it has no intention of implementing the agreement reached in 2015 for reuniting the Donbas provinces into Ukraine with a large degree of local autonomy—an agreement with Russia, France and Germany which the United States endorsed.

Maybe I am wrong—tragically wrong—but I cannot dismiss the suspicion that we are witnessing an elaborate charade, grossly magnified by prominent elements of the American media, to serve a domestic political end. Facing rising inflation, the ravages of Omicron, blame (for the most part unfair) for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, plus the failure to get the full support of his own party for the Build Back Better legislation, the Biden administration is staggering under sagging approval ratings just as it gears up for this year’s congressional elections.

Since clear “victories” on the domestic woes seem increasingly unlikely, why not fabricate one by posing as if he prevented the invasion of Ukraine by “standing up to Vladimir Putin”? Actually, it seems most likely that President Putin’s goals are what he says they are—and as he has been saying since his speech in Munich in 2007. To simplify and paraphrase, I would sum them up as: “Treat us with at least a modicum of respect. We do not threaten you or your allies, why do you refuse us the security you insist for yourself?”

The End of the Cold War

Bush -Gorbachev press conference, Helsinki Summit, Finland. Sept. 9, 1990. (George Bush Presidential Library and Museum)

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, many observers, ignoring the rapidly unfolding events that marked the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, considered that the end of the Cold War. They were wrong. The Cold War had ended at least two years earlier. It ended by negotiation and was in the interest of all the parties. President George H.W. Bush hoped that Mikhail Gorbachev would manage to keep most of the twelve non-Baltic republics in a voluntary federation.

On August 1, 1991, Bush made a speech to the Ukrainian parliament (the Verkhovna Rada) in which he endorsed Gorbachev’s plans for a voluntary federation and warned against “suicidal nationalism.” The latter phrase was inspired by Georgian leader Zviad Gamsakurdia’s attacks on minorities in Soviet Georgia. For reasons I will explain elsewhere, they apply to Ukraine today.

Bottom line: Despite the prevalent belief, both among the “blob” in the United States, and most of the Russian public, the United States did not support, much less cause the break-up of the Soviet Union. We supported throughout the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and one of the last acts of the Soviet parliament was to legalize their claim to independence. And—by the way—despite frequently voiced fears—Putin has never threatened to re-absorb the Baltic countries or to claim any of their territories, though he has criticized some that denied ethnic Russians the full rights of citizenship, a principle that the European Union is pledged to enforce.

But, let’s move on to the first of the assertions in the subtitle:

Was the Crisis Avoidable?

Well, since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.

Maybe we should look at this question more broadly. How do other countries respond to alien military alliances near their borders? Since we are talking about American policy, maybe we should pay some attention to the way the United States has reacted to attempts of outsiders to establish alliances with countries nearby. Anybody remember the Monroe Doctrine, a declaration of a sphere of influence that comprised an entire hemisphere? And we meant it! When we learned that Kaiser’s Germany was attempting to enlist Mexico as an ally during the first world war, that was a powerful incentive for the subsequent declaration of war against Germany.

Then, of course, in my lifetime, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis—something I remember vividly since I was at the American Embassy in Moscow and translated some of Khrushchev’s messages to Kennedy.

Should we look at events like the Cuban Missile Crisis from the standpoint of some of the principles of international law, or from the standpoint of the likely behavior of a country’s leaders if they feel threatened? What did international law at that time say about the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba?

Cuba was a sovereign state and had the right to seek support for its independence from anywhere it chose. It had been threatened by the United States, even an attempt to invade, using anti-Castro Cubans. It asked the Soviet Union for support. Knowing that the United States had deployed nuclear weapons in Turkey, a U.S. ally actually bordering on the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, decided to station nuclear missiles in Cuba. How could the U.S. legitimately object if the Soviet Union was deploying weapons similar to those deployed against it?

Obviously, it was a mistake. A big mistake! (One is reminded of Talleyrand’s remark … “Worse than a crime …”) International relations, like it or not, are not determined by debating, interpreting and applying the finer points of “international law”—which in any case is not the same as municipal law, the law within countries. Kennedy had to react to remove the threat. The Joint Chiefs recommended taking out the missiles by bombing. Fortunately, Kennedy stopped short of that, declared a blockade and demanded the removal of the missiles.

At the end of the week of messages back and forth—I translated Khrushchev’s longest—it was agreed that Khrushchev would remove the nuclear missiles from Cuba. What was not announced was that Kennedy also agreed that he would remove the U.S. missiles from Turkey but that this commitment must not be made public.

We American diplomats in Embassy Moscow were delighted at the outcome, of course. We were not even informed of the agreement regarding missiles in Turkey. We had no idea that we had come close to a nuclear exchange. We knew the U.S. had military superiority in the Caribbean and we would have cheered if the U.S. Air Force had bombed the sites. We were wrong.

Executive Committee meeting of the National Security Council- Cuba Crisis. President Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. White House, Cabinet Room, Oct. 29, 1962.  (Kennedy Library)

In later meetings with Soviet diplomats and military officers, we learned that, if the sites had been bombed, the officers on the spot could have launched the missiles without orders from Moscow. We could have lost Miami, and then what? We also did not know that a Soviet submarine came close to launching a nuclear-armed torpedo against the destroyer that was preventing its coming up for air.

It was a close call. It is quite dangerous to get involved in military confrontations with countries with nuclear weapons. You don’t need an advanced degree in international law to understand that. You need only common sense.

OK—It was predictable. Was it predicted?

“The most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War”

My words, and my voice was not the only one. In 1997, when the question of adding more members to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), I was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In my introductory remarks, I made the following statement:

“I consider the Administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.”

The reason I cited was the presence in the Russian Federation of a nuclear arsenal that, in overall effectiveness, matched if not exceeded that of the United States. Either of our arsenals, if actually used in a hot war, was capable of ending the possibility of civilization on earth, possibly even causing the extinction of the human race and much other life on the planet. Though the United States and the Soviet Union had, as a result of arms control agreements concluded by the Reagan and first Bush administrations, negotiations for further reductions stalled during the Clinton Administration. There was not even an effort to negotiate the removal of short-range nuclear weapons from Europe.

That was not the only reason I cited for including, rather than excluding Russia from European security. I explained as follows:

“The plan to increase the membership of NATO fails to take account of the real international situation following the end of the Cold War, and proceeds in accord with a logic that made sense only during the Cold War. The division of Europe ended before there was any thought of taking new members into NATO. No one is threatening to re-divide Europe. It is therefore absurd to claim, as some have, that it is necessary to take new members into NATO to avoid a future division of Europe; if NATO is to be the principal instrument for unifying the continent, then logically the only way it can do so is by expanding to include all European countries. But that does not appear to be the aim of the Administration, and even if it is, the way to reach it is not by admitting new members piecemeal.”

Then I added, “All of the purported goals of NATO enlargement are laudable. Of course the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are culturally part of Europe and should be guaranteed a place in European institutions. Of course we have a stake in the development of democracy and stable economies there. But membership in NATO is not the only way to achieve these ends. It is not even the best way in the absence of a clear and identifiable security threat.”

In fact, the decision to expand NATO piecemeal was a reversal of American policies that produced the end of the Cold War and the liberation of Eastern Europe. President George H.W. Bush had proclaimed a goal of a “Europe whole and free.” Soviet President Gorbachev had spoken of “our common European home,” had welcomed representatives of East European governments who threw off their Communist rulers and had ordered radical reductions in Soviet military forces by explaining that for one country to be secure, there must be security for all.

The first President Bush also assured Gorbachev during their meeting on Malta in December, 1989, that if the countries of Eastern Europe were allowed to choose their future orientation by democratic processes, the United States would not “take advantage” of that process. (Obviously, bringing countries into NATO that were then in the Warsaw Pact would be “taking advantage.”) The following year, Gorbachev was assured, though not in a formal treaty, that if a unified Germany was allowed to remain in NATO, there would be no movement of NATO jurisdiction to the east, “not one inch.”

These comments were made to President Gorbachev before the Soviet Union broke up. Once it did, the Russian Federation had less than half the population of the Soviet Union and a military establishment demoralized and in total disarray. While there was no reason to enlarge NATO after the Soviet Union recognized and respected the independence of the East European countries, there was even less reason to fear the Russian Federation as a threat.

Willfully Precipitated?

Putin and Bush sign the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty in Moscow, May 24, 2002. (White House)

Adding countries in Eastern Europe to NATO continued during the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009) but that was not the only thing that stimulated Russian objection. At the same time, the United States began withdrawing from the arms control treaties that had tempered, for a time, an irrational and dangerous arms race and were the foundation agreements for ending the Cold War.

The most significant was the decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) which had been the cornerstone treaty for the series of agreements that halted for a time the nuclear arms race. After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Northern Virginia, President Putin was the first foreign leader to call President Bush and offer support. He was as good as his word by facilitating the attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had harbored Osama ben Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had inspired the attacks.

It was clear at that time that Putin aspired to a security partnership with the United States. The jihadist terrorists who were targeting the United States were also targeting Russia. Nevertheless, the U.S. continued its course of ignoring Russian–and also allied–interests by invading Iraq, an act of aggression which was opposed not only by Russia, but also by France and Germany.

As President Putin pulled Russia out of the bankruptcy that took place in the late 1990s, stabilized the economy, paid off Russia’s foreign debts, reduced the activity of organized crime, and even began building a financial nest egg to weather future financial storms, he was subjected to what he perceived as one insult after another to his perception of Russia’s dignity and security.

He enumerated them in a speech in Munich in 2007. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates responded that we didn’t need a new Cold War. Quite true, of course, but neither he, nor his superiors, nor his successors seemed to take Putin’s warning seriously. Then Senator Joseph Biden, during his candidacy for the presidential election in 2008, pledged to “stand up to Vladimir Putin!” Huh? What in the world had Putin done to him or to the United States?¹

^(Senator Biden, as ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997, had approved NATO expansion. Throughout his tenure in the Senate he opposed lifting the trade restrictions imposed by the Jackson-Vanik amendment even though they never should have applied to the Russian Federation.)

Although President Barack Obama initially promised policy changes, in fact his government continued to ignore the most serious Russian concerns and redoubled earlier American efforts to detach former Soviet republics from Russian influence and, indeed, to encourage “regime change” in Russia itself. American actions in Syria and Ukraine were seen by the Russian president, and most Russians, as indirect attacks on them.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was a brutal dictator but the only effective bulwark against the Islamic state, a movement that had blossomed in Iraq following the U.S. invasion and was spreading into Syria. Military aid to a supposed “democratic opposition” quickly fell into the hands of jihadists allied with the very Al Qaeda that had organized the 9/11 attacks on the United States!

But the threat to nearby Russia was much greater since many of the jihadists hailed from areas of the former Soviet Union including Russia itself. Syria is also Russia’s close neighbor; the U.S. was seen strengthening enemies of both the United States and Russia with its misguided attempt to decapitate the Syrian government.

So far as Ukraine is concerned, U.S. intrusion into its domestic politics was deep—to the point of seeming to select a prime minister. It also, in effect, supported an illegal coup d’etat that changed the Ukrainian government in 2014, a procedure not normally considered consistent with the rule of law or democratic governance. The violence that still simmers in Ukraine started in the “pro-Western” west, not in the Donbass where it was a reaction to what was viewed as the threat of violence against Ukrainians who are ethnic Russian.

During President Obama’s second term, his rhetoric became more personal, joining a rising chorus in the American and British media vilifying the Russian president. Obama spoke of economic sanctions against Russians as “costing” Putin for his “misbehavior” in Ukraine, conveniently forgetting that Putin’s action had been popular in Russia and that Obama’s own predecessor could be credibly accused of being a war criminal.

Obama then began to hurl insults at the Russian nation as a whole, with allegations like “Russia makes nothing anybody wants,” conveniently ignoring the fact that the only way we could get American astronauts to the international space station at that time was with Russian rockets and that his government was trying its best to prevent Iran and Turkey from buying Russian anti-aircraft missiles.

I am sure some will say, “What’s the big deal? Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire, but then negotiated an end of the Cold War.” Right! Reagan condemned the Soviet empire of old—and subsequently gave Gorbachev credit for changing it—but he never publicly castigated the Soviet leaders personally. He treated them with personal respect, and as equals, even treating Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to formal dinners usually reserved for chiefs of state or government. His first words in private meetings was usually something like, “We hold the peace of the world in our hands. We must act responsibly so the world can live in peace.”

Things got worse during the four years of Donald Trump’s tenure. Accused, without evidence, of being a Russian dupe, Trump made sure he embraced every anti-Russian measure that came along, while at the same time flattered Putin as a great leader.

Reciprocal expulsions of diplomats, started by the United States in the final days of Obama’s tenure continued in a grim vicious circle that has resulted in a diplomatic presence so emaciated that for months the United States did not have enough staff in Moscow to issue visas for Russians to visit the United States.

As so many of the other recent developments, the mutual strangulation of diplomatic missions reverses one of the proudest achievements of American diplomacy in latter Cold War years when we worked diligently and successfully to open up the closed society of the Soviet Union, to bring down the iron curtain that separated “East” and “West.” We succeeded, with the cooperation of a Soviet leader who understood that his country desperately needed to join the world.

All right, I rest my case that today’s crisis was “willfully precipitated.” But if that is so, how can I say that it can be easily resolved by the application of common sense?

The short answer is because it can be. What President Putin is demanding, an end to NATO expansion and creation of a security structure in Europe that insures Russia’s security along with that of others is eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is threatening none.

By any pragmatic, common sense standard it is in the interest of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence—the avowed aim of those who agitated for the “color revolutions”—was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Now, to say that approving Putin’s demands is in the objective interest of the United States does not mean that it will be easy to do. The leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have developed such a Russophobic stance (a story requiring a separate study) that it will take great political skill to navigate the treacherous political waters and achieve a rational outcome.

President Biden has made it clear that the United States will not intervene with its own troops if Russia invades Ukraine. So why move them into Eastern Europe? Just to show hawks in Congress that he is standing firm? For what? Nobody is threatening Poland or Bulgaria except waves of refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan and the desiccated areas of the African savannah. So what is the 82^nd Airborne supposed to do?

Well, as I have suggested earlier, maybe this is just an expensive charade. Maybe the subsequent negotiations between the Biden and Putin governments will find a way to meet the Russian concerns. If so, maybe the charade will have served its purpose. And maybe then members of congress will start dealing with the growing problems Americans have at home instead of making them worse.

One can dream, can’t one?

consortiumnews.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

Myth: The war in the Far East only ended in the summer of 1945, when the US president and his advisors felt that, to force the fanatical Japanese to surrender unconditionally, they had no other option than to destroy not one but two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with atom bombs. This decision saved the lives of countless Americans and Japanese who would have perished if the war had continued and required an invasion of Japan.

Reality: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed to prevent the Soviets from making a contribution to the victory against Japan, which would have forced Washington to allow Moscow to participate in the postwar occupation and reconstruction of the country. It was also the intention to intimidate the Soviet leadership and thus to wrest concessions from it with respect to the postwar arrangements in Germany and Eastern Europe. Finally, it was not the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, which caused Tokyo to surrender.

With the German capitulation in early May 1945, the war in Europe was over. The victors, the Big Three,^[1] now faced the complex and delicate problem of the postwar reorganization of Europe. The United States had entered the war rather late, namely in December 1941. And the Americans only started to make a major contribution to the victory against Germany with the landings in Normandy in June 1944, that is, less than one year before the end of the hostilities in Europe. When the war against Germany came to an end, however, Uncle Sam occupied a seat at the table of the victors, ready and eager to look after his interests, to achieve what one might call the American war aims. (It is a myth that the presumably deeply isolationist Americans just wanted to withdraw from Europe: the country’s political, military, and economic leaders had urgent reasons for maintaining a presence on the old continent.) The other big victorious powers, Britain and the Soviet Union, also looked to pursue their interests. It was clear that it would be impossible for one of the three to “have it all”, that compromises would have to be reached. From the American point of view, the British expectations did not present much of a problem, but Soviet aspirations were a concern. What, then, were the war aims of the Soviet Union?

As the country that had made the biggest contribution by far to the common victory over Nazi Germany and suffered enormous casualties in the process, the Soviet Union had two major objectives. First, hefty reparation payments from Germany as compensation for the huge destruction wrought by Nazi aggression, a demand similar to the French and Belgian demands for reparations payments from the Reich after World War I. Second, security against potential future threats emanating from Germany. These security concerns also involved Eastern Europe, especially Poland, a potential springboard for German aggression against the USSR. Moscow wanted to ensure that in Germany, Poland, and other Eastern European countries, no regimes hostile to the Soviet Union would ever come to power again. The Soviets also expected the Western allies to certify their recuperation of territories lost by revolutionary Russia during the Revolution and the Civil War, such as “Eastern Poland”, and to recognize the metamorphosis of the three Baltic states from independent countries to autonomous republics within the Soviet Union.  Finally, now that the nightmare of the war was over, the Soviets expected that they would be able to go back to work on the construction of a socialist society. It is well known that the Soviet supremo, Stalin, was a firm believer in the idea that it was possible and even necessary to create “socialism in one country”, hence the hostility between him and Trotsky, an apostle of worldwide revolution. Less well known is the fact that, as the war came to an end, Stalin did not plan to install communist regimes in Germany or in any of the Eastern European countries liberated by the Red Army, and that he also discouraged communist parties in France, Italy, and elsewhere in Western Europe, liberated by the Americans and their allies, from trying to come to power. He had already formally stopped promoting worldwide revolution in 1943, when he dissolved the Comintern, the communist international organization created for that purpose by Lenin in 1919. This policy was resented by many communists outside of the Soviet Union, but it pleased Moscow’s Western allies, especially the US and Britain. Stalin was eager to maintain good relations with them, because he needed their goodwill and cooperation to achieve the objectives, described above, aimed at providing the Soviet Union with reparations, security, and the opportunity to resume work on the construction of a socialist society. His American and British partners had never indicated to Stalin that they found these expectations unreasonable. To the contrary, the legitimacy of these Soviet war aims had been recognized repeatedly, either explicitly or implicitly, in Tehran, Yalta, and elsewhere.

The Americans and their British, Canadian, and other partners had liberated most of Western Europe by the end of 1944. And they had made sure that in Italy, France, and elsewhere, regimes were established that were congenial to them, if not always to the population at large. This usually meant that the local communists were sidelined entirely; if that proved impossible, for example in France, they were denied a share of power commensurate with the important role they had played in the resistance or the considerable popular support they enjoyed. And even though the inter-allied agreements had stipulated that the “big three” would collaborate closely in the administration and reconstruction of liberated countries, the Americans and British prevented their Soviet ally from providing any input into the affairs of Italy, for example, the first country to be liberated, already in 1943. In that country, the Americans and British sidelined the communists, who were very popular because of their role in the resistance, in favour of former fascists such as Badoglio, without allowing the Soviets any input. This modus operandi was to set a fateful precedent. Stalin had no choice but to accept that arrangement, but, as US historian Gabriel Kolko has observed, “the Russians accepted the [Italian] ‘formula’ without much enthusiasm, but carefully noted the arrangement for future reference and as a precedent”.^[2] (The Soviets were unquestionably entitled to a voice in the affairs of Italy, since Italian troops had participated in Operation Barbarossa.)

In Western Europe, in 1943-1944, the American and British liberators had acted ad libitum, ignoring not only the wishes of a large part of the local population but also the interests of their Soviet ally, and Stalin had accepted that arrangement. In 1945, on the other hand, the shoe was on the other foot: the Soviets clearly enjoyed the advantage in an Eastern Europe liberated by the Red Army. Even so, the Western Allies could hope that they might be able to provide a measure of input into the reorganization of this part of Europe as well. Everything was still possible over there. The Soviets had obviously favoured the local communists but had not yet created any faits accomplis. And the Western Allies were well aware that Stalin craved their goodwill and cooperation and would therefore be willing to make concessions. The political and military leaders in Washington and London also expected that Stalin would be indulgent because, if not, he had reason to fear the consequences. The Soviet leader was keenly aware that it was already an enormous achievement fort his country to have emerged victoriously from a life-and-death struggle with the Nazi behemoth. But he also knew that many US and British leaders, exemplified by Patton and Churchill, hated the Soviet Union and were even considering waging war against it as soon as the common German enemy was defeated, preferably in a march on Moscow side-by-side with the remainder of the Nazi host; that plan called Operation Unthinkable, had been hatched by Churchill. Stalin had reason to try to avoid such a scenario.

The aspirations of the Soviets with respect to reparations and security, described above, were not unreasonable, and the US and British leaders had recognized their legitimacy, explicitly or implicitly, during a meeting of the Big Three in Yalta in February 1945. But Washington and London were far from enchanted by the prospect of seeing the Soviet Union receiving its due after having made such outstanding efforts and sacrifices on behalf of the common anti-Nazi cause. The Americans, in particular, had their own ideas with respect to postwar Germany and Eastern as well as Western Europe, to be examined in the next chapter. Reparations, for example, would enable the Soviets to resume work, possibly successfully, on the project of a communist society, a counter system to the international capitalist system of which the USA had become the great champion.

Essentially, in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Uncle Sam wanted governments, democratic or not, that would pursue a liberal economic policy, involving an “open door” for American products and investment capital. Roosevelt had displayed a measure of empathy vis-à-vis the Soviets, but after his death on April 12, 1945, his successor, Harry Truman, had little or no sympathy or understanding for the Soviet point of view. He and his advisors loathed the idea that the Soviet Union might receive major reparations from Germany, since this was likely to disqualify Germany as a potentially lucrative market for American products and investment capital. And they also found it abominable that the Soviets were certain to use that German capital to build a socialist system, an undesirable form of competition for capitalism.

The Soviet aspirations were reasonable, and the Soviet leaders, including Stalin, who is usually wrongly depicted as making all the decisions by himself, were certainly willing to make major concessions. It was possible to talk with them, but such a dialogue also required patience and understanding of the Soviet viewpoint and had to be carried out in the knowledge that the Soviet Union was not prepared to leave the conference table empty-handed. Truman, however, had no desire to engage in such a dialogue. (That Stalin was interested in dialogue and could be most reasonable was to be reflected in his approach to the postwar arrangements regarding Finland and Austria; the Red Army would in due course pull out of these countries without leaving behind any communist regimes.)

Truman and his advisors hoped that it would prove possible to force the Soviets to abstain from German reparations and withdraw not only from the eastern reaches of German territory but also from Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, so that the Americans and their British partners could operate there as they had already done in Western Europe. Truman even hoped that it might be possible to cause the Soviets to put an end to their communist experiment, which remained a source of inspiration for “reds” and other radicals and revolutionaries everywhere on earth, even in the United States itself.

In the early spring of 1945, Churchill had flogged the idea of having US and British troops march to Moscow together with the remaining Nazi forces. But that plan, called Operation Unthinkable, had to be abandoned. mainly because of the same stiff kind of opposition displayed by soldiers and civilians that had led to the aborting of the armed intervention in the Russian Civil War. Like Patton, who had looked forward to playing a major role in “Barbarossa Bis”, Truman must have been disappointed. But on April 25, 1945, only days before the German capitulation, the president received electrifying news. He was briefed about the top-secret Manhattan Project, or S-1, the code name for the construction of the atom bomb. That new and powerful weapon, on which the Americans had been working for years, was almost ready and, if tested successfully, would soon be available for use. Truman and his advisors thus fell under the spell of what the renowned American historian William Appleman Williams has called a “vision of omnipotence”. They convinced themselves that the new weapon would enable them to force their will on the Soviet Union. The atomic bomb was “a hammer”, as Truman himself put it, that he would wave over the heads of “those boys in the Kremlin”.^[3]

Thanks to the bomb, it would now be possible to force Moscow to withdraw the Red Army from Germany and to deny Stalin a say in its postwar affairs. It now also seemed a feasible proposition to install pro-Western and even anticommunist regimes in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and to prevent Stalin from exerting any influence there. It even became thinkable that the Soviet Union itself might be opened up to American investment capital as well as American political and economic influence, and that this communist heretic might thus be returned to the bosom of the universal capitalist church. “There is evidence”, writes the German historian Jost Dülffer, that Truman believed that the monopoly of the nuclear bomb would be “a passepartout for the implementation of the United States’ ideas for a new world order”.^[4] Indeed, with the nuclear pistol on his hip, the American president did not feel that he had to treat “the boys in the Kremlin”, who did not have such a super-weapon, as his equals. “The American leaders waxed self-righteous and excoriated Russia”, writes Gabriel Kolko, “[and] they refused to negotiate in any serious way simply because as self-confident master of economic and military powers the United States felt it could ultimately define the world order”.^[5]

Possession of a mighty new weapon also opened up all sorts of possibilities with respect to the ongoing war in the Far East and the postwar arrangements to be made for that part of the world, of great importance to the leaders of the US, as we have seen when dealing with Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, playing that powerful trump card would only be possible after the bomb had been successfully tested and was available to be used. Truman needed to bide his time. He therefore did not heed Churchill’s advice to discuss the fate of Germany and Eastern Europe with Stalin as soon as possible, “before the armies of democracy melted”, that is, before the American troops were to pull out of Europe. Eventually, Truman did agree to a summit meeting of the Big Three in Berlin, but not before the summer, when the bomb was supposed to be ready.

The meeting of the Big Three took place, not in bombed-out Berlin but in nearby Potsdam, from July 17 to August 2, 1945. It was there that Truman received the long-awaited message that the atomic bomb had been tested successfully on July 16 in New Mexico. The American president now felt strong enough to make his move. He no longer bothered to present proposals to Stalin but made all sorts of non-negotiable demands; at the same time, he rejected out of hand all proposals emanating from the Soviet side, for example proposals concerning German reparation payments. But Stalin did not capitulate, not even when Truman attempted to intimidate him by whispering into his ear that America had acquired an incredibly powerful new weapon. The Soviet leader, who had certainly been informed already about the Manhattan Project by his spies, listened in stony silence. Truman concluded that only an actual demonstration of the atomic bomb could persuade the Soviets to give way. Consequently, no general agreement on important issues could be achieved at Potsdam^.[6]

In the meantime, the Japanese battled on in the Far East, even though their situation was totally hopeless. They were in fact prepared to surrender, but not unconditionally as the Americans demanded. To the Japanese mind, an unconditional capitulation conjured up the supreme humiliation, namely, that Emperor Hirohito might be forced to step down and possibly be accused of war crimes. American leaders were aware of this, and some of them, for example Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, believed, as historian Gar Alperovitz writes, “that a statement reassuring the Japanese that unconditional surrender did not mean dethronement of the Emperor would probably bring an end to the war”.^[7]

The demand for an unconditional surrender was actually far from sacrosanct: in General Eisenhower’s HQ in Reims on May 7, a German condition had been accepted, namely their request for the cease-fire to be implemented only after a delay of no less than 45 hours, long enough to permit a large number of their troops to slip away from the eastern front in order to end up in not in Soviet but in American or British captivity; even at this late stage, many of these units would be kept ready – in uniform, armed, and under the command of their own officers – for possible use against the Red Army, as Churchill was to admit after the war.^[8] It was therefore quite possible to bring about a Japanese capitulation in spite of the demand for immunity for Hirohito. Furthermore, Tokyo’s condition was far from essential: after an unconditional surrender was finally wrested from the Japanese, the Americans never bothered to lay charges against Hirohito, and it was thanks to Washington that he was able to remain emperor for many more decades.

Why did the Japanese think that they could still afford the luxury of attaching a condition to their offer of surrender? The reason was that in China the main force of their army remained intact. They thought that they could use this army to defend Japan itself and thus exact a high price from the Americans for their admittedly inevitable final victory. This scheme would only work, however, if the Soviet Union did not get involved in the war in the Far East, thus pinning the Japanese forces down on the Chinese mainland. Soviet neutrality, in other words, allowed Tokyo a small measure of hope, not hope for a victory of course, but hope that Washington might accept the condition about their emperor. To a certain extent, the war with Japan dragged on because the USSR was not yet involved in it. But Stalin had already promised in 1943 to declare war on Japan within three months after the capitulation of Germany, and he had reiterated this commitment as recently as July 17, 1945, in Potsdam. Consequently, Washington counted on a Soviet attack on Japan in early August. The Americans thus knew only too well that the situation of the Japanese was hopeless. “Fini Japs when that comes about”, Truman wrote in his diary, referring to the expected Soviet intervention in the war in the Far East.^[9]

In addition, the American navy assured Washington that it was able to prevent the Japanese from transferring their army from China to defend the homeland against an American invasion. Finally, it was questionable whether an American invasion of Japan would be necessary at all, since the mighty US Navy could also simply blockade that island nation and thus confront it with a choice between capitulating or starving to death.

In order to finish the war against Japan without having to make more sacrifices, Truman thus had a range of attractive options. He could accept the trivial Japanese condition, immunity for their emperor; he could also wait until the Red Army attacked the Japanese in China, thus forcing Tokyo into accepting an unconditional surrender after all; and he could have instituted a naval blockade that would have forced Tokyo to sue for peace sooner or later. But Truman and his advisors chose none of these options. Instead, they decided to knock Japan out with the atomic bomb.

This fateful decision, which was to cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians, offered the Americans considerable advantages. First, the bomb might still force Tokyo to surrender before the Soviets got involved in the war in Asia. In this case it would not be necessary to allow Moscow a say in the coming decisions about postwar Japan, about the territories that had been occupied by Japan (such as Korea and Manchuria), and about the Far East and the Pacific region in general. The United States would then enjoy total hegemony over that part of the world, something that was Washington’s true, albeit unspoken, war aim in the conflict with Japan, as we have seen in the previous chapter. It is for this reason that the option of a blockade was also rejected: in this case, the Japanese would have capitulated only many months after the entry into the war of the Soviet Union.

A Soviet intervention in the war in the Far East threatened to achieve for the Soviets the same advantage that the Americans’ own relatively late intervention in the war in Europe had produced for themselves, namely, a place at the round table of the victors who would force their will on the defeated enemy, decide on borders, determine postwar socio-economic and political structures, and thereby achieve enormous benefits and prestige. Washington absolutely did not want the Soviet Union to enjoy this kind of input. The Americans had eliminated their great imperialist competitor in that part of the world and did not relish the idea of being saddled with a new potential rival, a rival, moreover, whose detested communist ideology was already becoming dangerously influential in many Asiatic countries, including China. By making use of the atom bomb, US leaders hoped to finish off the Japanese quickly and start to rearrange the Far East without a potentially pesky Soviet partner.

The atom bomb seemed to offer the American leaders an additional important advantage. Truman’s experience in Potsdam had persuaded him that only an actual demonstration of this new weapon would make Stalin pliable. Using the atom bomb to obliterate a Japanese city seemed to be the perfect stratagem to intimidate the Soviets and coerce them to make major concessions with respect to postwar arrangements in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Truman’s secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, reportedly declared later that the atom bomb had been used because such a demonstration of power was likely to make the Soviets more accommodating in Europe.

To make the desired terrifying impression on the Soviets – and the rest of the world -, the bomb obviously had to be dropped on a big city. It is probably for this reason that Truman turned down a proposal, made by some of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, to demonstrate the power of the bomb by dropping it on some uninhabited Pacific island: there would not have been sufficient death and destruction. It would also have been extremely embarrassing if the weapon had failed to work its deadly magic; but if the unannounced atomic bombing of a Japanese city backfired, no one would have known and no one would have been embarrassed. A big Japanese city had to be selected, but the capital, Tokyo, did not qualify, since it was already flattened by previous conventional bombing raids, so that additional damage was unlikely to loom sufficiently impressive. In fact, very few cities qualified as the required “virgin” target. Why? In early August 1945, only ten cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants remained relatively unscathed by bombing raids, and quite a few of those were beyond the range of the bombers which. (On account of inexistant Japanese air defences, the latter had already started to obliterate towns with a population of less than 30,000.) But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unlucky enough to qualify.^[10]

The atom bomb was ready just in time to be put to use before the USSR had a chance to become involved in the Far East. Hiroshima was obliterated on August 6, 1945, but the Japanese leaders did not react immediately with an unconditional capitulation. The reason was that the damage was great, but not greater than that caused by earlier bombing raids on Tokyo, where an attack by thousands of bombers on March 9 and 10, 1945, had caused more destruction and killed more people than at the “virgin” target of Hiroshima. This ruined Truman’s delicate scenario, at least partly. Tokyo had not yet surrendered when on August 8, 1945 — exactly three months after the German capitulation in Berlin — the USSR declared war on Japan, and the next day the Red Army attacked the Japanese troops stationed in northern China. Truman and his advisors now wanted to end the war as quickly as possible in order to limit the “damage” (from their perspective) done by the Soviet intervention.

Already on August 10, 1945, just one day after the Soviet Union’s entry into the war in the Far East, a second bomb was dropped, this time on the city of Nagasaki. About this bombardment, in which many Japanese Catholics perished, a former American army chaplain later stated: “That’s one of the reasons I think they dropped the second bomb. To hurry it up. To make them surrender before Russians came”.^[11] (The chaplain may or may not have been aware that among the 75,000 human beings who were “instantaneously incinerated, carbonized and evaporated” in Nagasaki were many Japanese Catholics as well an unknown number of inmates of a camp for allied POWs, whose presence had been reported to the air command, to no avail.)^[12]

Japan capitulated not because of the atom bombs but because of the Soviet entry into the conflict. After the obliteration of most of the country’s big cities, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter how horrible, made little or no difference from a strategic viewpoint. The Soviet declaration of war, on the other hand, was a fatal blow, because it eliminated Tokyo’s very last hope for attaching some minor conditions to the inevitable capitulation. Moreover, even after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese leaders knew that it would take many months before American troops might land in Japan, but the Red Army was making such rapid progress that it was estimated to cross into Japan’s own territory within ten days. Because of the Russian involvement, in other words, Tokyo ran out of time and of options other than unconditional surrender. Japan capitulated because of the Soviet declaration of war, not because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even without the atomic bombs, the Soviet entry into the war would have triggered a surrender.^[13] But the Japanese leaders took their time. Their formal capitulation occurred on August 14, 1945.

To the great chagrin of Truman and his advisors, the Red Army was able to make considerable progress during those final days of the war. The Soviet even began to drive the Japanese out of their Korean colony, and did so in collaboration with a Korean liberation movement led by Kim Il-sung, which proved to be immensely popular and therefore poised to come to power after the liberation of the entire country from Japan’s nasty colonial yoke. But the prospect of an independent, socialist Korea did not fit into American plans for the postwar Far East. Washington therefore quickly send troops to occupy the south of the peninsula, and the Soviets agreed to a division of the country that was supposed to be only temporary but has lasted until the present.^[14]

It looked as if the Americans would be stuck with a Soviet partner in the Far East after all, but Truman made sure that this was not the case. He acted as if the earlier cooperation of the three great powers in Europe had not set a precedent by rejecting Stalin’s request for a Soviet occupation zone in the defeated Land of the Rising Sun on August 15, 1945. And when on September 2, 1945, General MacArthur officially accepted the Japanese surrender on the American battleship Missouri in the Bay of Tokyo, representatives of the Soviet Union, and of other allies in the Far East, including Great Britain and the Netherlands, were allowed to be present only as insignificant extras. Japan was not carved up into occupation zones, like Germany. America’s defeated rival was to be occupied in its entirety by the Americans only, and as American viceroy in Tokyo, General MacArthur would ensure that, regardless of contributions made to the common victory, no other power would have a say in the affairs of postwar Japan.

The American conquerors recreated the Land of the Rising Sun according to their ideas and to their advantage. In September 1951, a satisfied America would sign a peace treaty with Japan. The USSR, however, whose interests had never been taken into account, did not co-sign this treaty. The Soviets did pull out of the parts of China and Korea they had liberated, but they refused to evacuate Japanese territories such as Sakhalin and the Kurils, which had been occupied by the Red Army during the last days of the war. They would be mercilessly criticized for this in the United States afterwards, as if the attitude of the American government itself had nothing to do with this issue.

American leaders believed that after the Japanese rape of China and its humiliation of traditional colonial powers such as Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands, and after their own victory over Japan, only the elimination of the USSR from the Far East — seemingly a mere formality — was required in order to realize their dream of absolute hegemony in that part of the world. Their disappointment and chagrin were all the greater when, after the war, China was “lost” to Mao’s Communists. To make things worse, the northern half of Korea, a former Japanese colony the US had hoped to reduce to vassalage together with Japan itself, opted for an idiosyncratic path to socialism, and in Vietnam a popular independence movement under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh likewise turned out to have plans that proved to be incompatible with the grand Asian ambitions of the United States. No wonder, then, that it would come to war in Korea and Vietnam, and almost to an armed conflict with “Red China”.

To force Japan to its knees, it was not necessary to use the atom bomb. As a thorough American study of the war in the air, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, was to acknowledge categorically, “Japan would certainly have surrendered prior to 31 December 1945, even if the atom bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated”.^[15] Several American military leaders have publicly acknowledged this, including Henry “Hap ” Arnold, Chester Nimitz, William “Bull ” Halsey, Curtis LeMay, and a future president, Dwight Eisenhower. Truman, however, wanted to use the bomb for a number of reasons, and not just to get the Japanese to surrender. He expected that dropping the atom bomb would keep the Soviets out of the Far East and terrorize that country’s leaders, so that Washington could impose its will on the Kremlin with respect to European affairs. And so, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pulverized.  Many American historians realize this only too well. Sean Dennis Cashman writes:

With the passing of time, many historians have concluded that the bomb was used as much for political reasons… Vannevar Bush [the head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development] stated that the bomb “was also delivered on time, so that there was no necessity for any concessions to Russia at the end of the war”. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes [Truman’s secretary of state] never denied a statement attributed to him that the bomb had been used to demonstrate American power to the Soviet Union in order to make [the Soviets] more manageable in Europe.^[16]

Truman himself, however, hypocritically declared at the time that the purpose of the two nuclear bombardments had been “to bring the boys home”, that is, to quickly finish the war without any further major loss of life on the American side. This explanation was uncritically broadcast in the American media and thus was born a myth eagerly propagated by them and by mainstream historians in the US and in the Western World in general, and of course by Hollywood.

The myth that two Japanese cities were nuked to force Tokyo to surrender, thus shortening the war and saving lives, was “made in USA”, but it was to be eagerly espoused in Japan, whose post-war leaders, vassals of the US, found it extremely useful for a number of reasons, as War Wilson has pointed out in his excellent article on the Bomb. First, the emperor and his ministers, who were in many ways responsible for a war that had caused so much misery for the Japanese people, found it extremely convenient to blame their defeat, as Wilson puts it, on “an amazing scientific breakthrough that no one could have predicted”. The blinding light of the atomic blasts made it impossible, so to speak, to see their “mistakes and misjudgments”. The Japanese people had been lied to about how bad the situation really was, and how the misery had dragged on so long just to save the emperor, but the Bomb provided

the perfect excuse for having lost the war. No need to apportion blame; no court of enquiry need be held. Japan’s leaders were able to claim they had done their best. So, at the most general level the Bomb served to deflect blame from Japan’s leaders.

Second, the Bomb earned Japan international sympathy. Like Germany, Japan had waged a war of aggression and committed all sorts of war crimes. Both countries looked for ways to improve their image, seeking to exchange the mantle of perpetrator. for that of victim. In that context, post-war (West-)Germany invented the myth of the Red Army, depicted as a latter-day horde of racially inferior Mongols, storming towards Berlin, raping blond Frauleins and pillaging peaceful gingerbread towns en route to Berlin. Hiroshima and Nagasaki similarly permitted Japan to pose as “a victimized nation, one that had been unfairly bombed with a cruel and horrifying instrument of war”.

Third, echoing the American notion that the Bomb had ended the war was certain to please Japan’s post-war American overlords. The latter would protect Japan’s upper class against the demands for radical societal change emanating from radical elements, including communists, whose gospel “resonated among Japan’s poor, threatening plutocratic rule”.^[17] But for quite some time, the elite worried hat the Americans might abolish the institution of the emperor and put many top government officials, bankers, and industrialists on trial for war crimes. It was therefore deemed useful to please the Americans and, as a Japanese historian has put, “if they wanted to believe that the Bomb won the war, why disappoint them?” Japanese acceptance of their Hiroshima myth gratified the Americans because it served to spread the word in Japan, elsewhere in Asia, and around the world, that the US was militarily all-powerful yet peace-loving, and willing to use its monopoly of the atom bomb only when absolutely necessary. Ward Wilson continues and concludes as follows:

If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced. And once the Cold War was underway, asserting that the Soviet entry had been the decisive factor would have been tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.^[18]

Over the years, the myth that the “nuking” of two Japanese cities was justified, has lost much of its appeal on both sides of the Pacific. In 1945, an overwhelming 85% of Americans saw it that way, but that share declined to 63% in 1991 and 29% 2015; of the Japanese population, only 29% approved in 2015, and in 2015 merely 14%.^[19] The myth obviously needed a boost, and it was duly provided by one of Truman’s successors, President Barack Obama.

Obama visited Hiroshima in May 2016. In a public address he coolly described the pulverization of the city by means of the atom bomb in 1945 as “death falling from the sky”, as if it had been a hailstorm or some other natural phenomenon his country had nothing to do with, and he neglected to utter a single word of regret, let alone an apology, on behalf of Uncle Sam. In an enthusiastic report about this presidential performance, the New York Times, one of America’s leading newspapers, wrote that “many historians believe the bombings on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, which together took the lives of more than 200,000 people, saved lives on balance, since an invasion of the islands would have led to far greater bloodshed”.^[20] That numerous facts contradict this “belief”, and that numerous historians believe the exact opposite was not mentioned at all. This is how myths, even ailing myths, are kept alive.

SOURCES

Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power, new edition, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1985 (original edition 1965).

Cashman, Sean Dennis. Roosevelt, and World War II, New York and London, 1989.

Cummings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History, New York, 2011.

Dülffer, Jost. Jalta, 4. Februar 1945: Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der bipolaren Welt, Munich, 1998.

Gowans, Stephen. Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, Montreal, 2018.

Harris, Gardiner. “At Hiroshima Memorial, Obama Says Nuclear Arms Require ‘Moral Revolution’”, The New York Times, May 27, 2016

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, Cambridge, MA, 2005.

Kohls, Gary G. “Whitewashing Hiroshima: The Uncritical Glorification of American Militarism,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/kohls1.html

Kolko, Gabriel. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York, 1968.

Kolko, Gabriel. Main Currents in Modern American History, New York, 1976.

Pauwels, Jacques R. The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, revised edition, Toronto, 2015.

Stokes, Bruce. “70 years after Hiroshima, opinions have shifted on use of atomic bomb”, Factank, August 4, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/04/70-years-after-hiroshima-opinions-have-shifted-on-use-of-atomic-bomb.

Terkel, Studs. “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two, New York, 1984.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, revised edition, New York, 1962.

Wilson, Ward. “The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan … Stalin Did. Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?”, F[oreign]P[olicy], May 30, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did.

Notes

[1] France was to join this trio later, thus making it the Big Four.
[2] Kolko (1968), pp. 50-51.
[3] Williams, p. 250.
[4] Dülffer, p. 155.
[5] Kolko (1976), p. 355.
[6] Alperovitz, p. 223.
[7] Alperovitz, p.156.
[8] Pauwels, pp. 178-79.
[9] Quoted in Alperovitz, p. 24.
[10] Wilson.
[11] Quoted in Terkel, p. 535.
[12] Kohls.
[13] Hasegawa, pp. 185-86, 295-97; Wilson.
[14] For a myth-free history of the tragedy if the division of Korea, see the books by Cummings and by Gowans.
[15] Quotation in Horowitz, p. 53.
[16] Cashman, p. 369.
[17] American historian Sarah C. Paine as quoted in Gowans, p. 106.
[18] Wilson
[19] Stokes.
[20] Harris.

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“They who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Many have increasingly come to terms with the reality that today’s multipolar system led by Russia and China has premised itself upon the defense of international law and national sovereignty as outlined in the UN Charter signed into law on June 26, 1945.

The Imperial Roots of the Rules-Based-Order

The opposing paradigm which emerged with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992 has taken the form of a security doctrine entitled Responsibility to Protect (R2P) which set the tone for the Unipolar “rules based order” of the Anglo-American establishment which has incrementally sought to replace all traces of nation states with supranational mechanisms that render the UN Charter and all associated legal structures built upon it null and void.

This post-nation state paradigm was most recently outlined in the absurd “New Atlantic Charter” co-signed by President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson on June 10, 2021.

While the original August 12, 1941 Atlantic Charter co-signed by FDR and Churchill framed international sovereignty and self-determination as its organizing principle, the new Atlantic Charter attempts to establish adherence to NATO’s Collective Defense, “Open Society” and “Rule of Law” as primal. Under these conditions, any attempt to maintain a veneer of harmonious co-existence on earth is less than meaningless.

It isn’t much of a wonder that this Rules-Based Order” should unwelcoming for the vast majority of UN member states and why it is a direct attack on the UN Charter itself (which had itself been drafted only two days after the Atlantic Charter was made public on August 14, 1941).

Since R2P’s cancerous growth in world affairs, the unipolar system has masqueraded behind humanitarian bombing campaigns, supranational regimes that demand submission to new decarbonization protocols and new international banking regimes that demand national sovereignty be replaced by something called “shareholder capitalism” where private corporations, big tech, intelligence agencies, civil society groups, and shadowy teams of technocrats managing a dumbed down society in lieu of those irresponsible democratic institutions that we are told gave rise to all the evils of the last 200 years.

What is the UN Charter and Why Must it be Defended?

Since Putin and Xi Jinping have called out this fraud and made their choice to stand for win-win cooperation over Hobbesian Zero Sum thinking, and since their entire strategy is premised upon the UN Charter, it is worth taking the time to briefly examine this legal document, how it came into being and why its beautiful principles were sabotaged while it was still in the cradle.

Let us start by reviewing the first four sections of article one of the charter, where we find that the new organization was mandated:

1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

And just in case any imperially minded legalist wished to read the charter loosely, Article two quickly made it clear that “the Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.”

These and other articles contained within this historic document which should be read in full here, are a clear break from the earlier League of Nations created in the wake of World War I and which demanded a total dissolution to the national sovereignty of all members. While patriotic forces across the world rallied to block the League of Nations from implementing its imperial agenda by the mid-1930s, the young United Nations established was premised on the intention to extend capital intensive infrastructure across the world in the form of an international New Deal.

These were programs designed to give economic vitality and meaning to the post war age as hundreds of international delegates from India, Latin America, China, Russia and Africa outlined great infrastructure programs at Bretton Woods. These projects enjoyed the full support of the American delegation led by Harry Dexter White and Henry Morgenthau on the one hand and the disdain of the British imperial delegation led by Lord Keynes and his Bancor-loving fellow British delegates loyal only to the City of London and Bank of England.

Despite the fact that this history should be common knowledge to all, 80 years of revisionism does wonders to confuse the zeitgeist and so the question should still be asked: was FDR’s intention to dismantle the British Empire only a ruse to create the Anglo-American special relationship in a new US-led reconquest of the world, or was his plan genuine?

As FDR’s son Elliot Roosevelt outlined in his 1946 book “As He Saw It”, a telling 1941 confrontation took place between his late father and Winston Churchill. In the course of this clash, FDR’s intention for a post-world of win-win cooperation drove his strategic thinking to Churchill’s chagrin.

Elliot recounts his father telling Churchill of the need to let go of 19^th century methods in favor of 20^th century methods of governance saying:

“Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation—by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.”

Around the room, all of us were leaning forward attentively. Hopkins was grinning. Commander Thompson, Churchill’s aide, was looking glum and alarmed. The P.M. himself was beginning to look apoplectic.

“You mentioned India,” he growled.

“Yes. I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.”

“What about the Philippines?”

“I’m glad you mentioned them. They get their independence, you know, in 1946. And they’ve gotten modern sanitation, modern education; their rate of illiteracy has gone steadily down…”

“There can be no tampering with the Empire’s economic agreements.”

“They’re artificial…”

“They’re the foundation of our greatness.”

“The peace,” said Father firmly, “cannot include any continued despotism. The structure of the peace demands and will get equality of peoples. Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade. Will anyone suggest that Germany’s attempt to dominate trade in central Europe was not a major contributing factor to war?”

Elliot described the following day’s conversation where Churchill began by saying:

“Mr. President,” he cried, “I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire. Every idea you entertain about the structure of the postwar world demonstrates it. But in spite of that”—and his forefinger waved—”in spite of that, we know that you constitute our only hope. And”—his voice sank dramatically—”you know that we know it. You know that we know that without America, the Empire won’t stand.”

Churchill admitted, in that moment, that he knew the peace could only be won according to precepts which the United States of America would lay down. And in saying what he did, he was acknowledging that British colonial policy would be a dead duck, and British attempts to dominate world trade would be a dead duck, and British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck. Or would have been, if Father had lived.”

It was but two months after this meeting, that an angry Churchill acquiesced to FDR’s drafting of the August 12, 1941 Atlantic Charter that pulled the British for the first time in history into a new paradigm of cooperation, and multipolarism. When read alongside FDR’s 1941 Four Freedoms speech to congress earlier that year, one can see not only the germ seeds of the later UN Charter drafted on August 14, 1941 and signed into law on June 26, 1945, but also the rise of the Multipolar Alliance and BRI Framework today.

Tragically, FDR died under questionable circumstances on April 12, 1945 resulting in a swift takeover of the US government by supranational forces which have today come to be called “the deep state”. It was within a short interval of time of FDR’s death that every major ally who shared the great president’s vision for a post-war age of cooperation was either dead or labelled a red-commie traitor, never to regain influence again.

Stalin’s Warning to Elliot

Explaining to Elliot why his mother’s request for entry to Russia was rejected, Stalin stated passionately that it was due to Eleanor’s denial of all requests by Soviet representatives to examine the body or even allow for an autopsy. When Elliot pressed for answers to those whom Stalin believed to be his father’s murders, the Russian leader responded: “The Churchill gang! They poisoned your father, and they continue to try to poison me…the Churchill gang!”

It is also telling that Churchill could not bring himself to accept the Order of the Garter at the end of WW2 since he failed to achieve his primary mission as Britain’s wartime leader. Unbeknownst to many historians even today, Churchill’s primary mission was not the winning of the war, or the crushing of fascism, but rather the salvation of the British Empire which had created a Frankenstein monster that refused to play the second string in the New World Order realizing that Germany’s military power gave Hitler the edge he needed to lead in this dystopian dance.

However only a week after Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Churchill’s conscience allowed him to accept the honor. Perhaps the rabid imperialist looked upon the new Cold War age that he had earlier set into motion alongside the Anglo-American Alliance that he put into place that the rabid imperialist could sleep satisfied knowing that he did his job.

In the next installment we will review the origins of the UN Charter in greater detail followed by a third part on the Westphalian Treaty of 1648 that ended the 30 years war and the strategic importance of this world-changing policy for today.

This week marks 8o years since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. What ensued was a long night of horror during which the Second World War escalated to obliterate tens of millions of lives.

Operation Barbarossa was launched on June 22, 1941, within hours of the summer solstice – the longest day annually in the Northern Hemisphere. The invasion comprised 3.3 million troops of the Nazi Reich deployed across a frontline of nearly 3,000 kilometers. It is reckoned to be the largest invasion force in military history.

Nazi Germany was already at war with Britain and France after conquering Poland in September 1939. But what followed in the offensive against the Soviet Union was the Final Solution of Nazi genocide going full throttle.

Among the regular Wehrmacht troops were SS death squads whose infernal task assigned by the Nazi leadership was the extermination of Jews, Slavs and Bolsheviks. Over the next two and half years before the Red Army repelled and eventually defeated Nazi Germany, up to 27 million Soviet citizens would die from violence and deprivation.

Many of the victims were killed in large-scale massacres or from being forced into extermination camps, most of which were assembled on Polish territory. The most notorious were Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Majdanek, where gas chambers and crematoria disposed of millions of lives.

At a commemoration ceremony in Berlin, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke solemnly about the Nazi war launched on the Soviet Union, describing its horror as “murderous barbarism”.

“From the first day, the German campaign was driven by hatred, by antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism, by racist madness against the Slavic and Asian peoples of the Soviet Union,” Steinmeier said.

“Those who waged this war killed in every possible way, with unprecedented brutality and cruelty,” he added. “It was German barbarism, it cost millions of lives and devastated the continent.”

An important correction to those remarks is that it wasn’t “German barbarism” alone. The Nazi murder machine was aided and abetted by other European forces, including ranks of collaborators from Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Hungary, among others, as well as from the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It was fascist barbarism.

Germany’s Steinmeier went on to comment: “Only those who learn to read the traces of the past in the present will be able to contribute to a future that avoids wars, rejects tyranny, and enables peaceful coexistence in freedom.”

And that is what is disconcerting. Many politicians across Europe and in the United States seem incapable of reading “the traces of the past in the present” to avoid wars and enable peaceful coexistence.

The relentless expansion of NATO forces around Russia’s borders continues unabated and with twisted rationalization. As Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out in an article published in German media this week to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the reckless expansion of NATO is directly threatening the security of Europe.

At its annual summit held last week in Brussels, the US-led NATO alliance repeatedly vilified Russia for “threatening Europe’s security”. The accusations turn reality on its head. It is NATO’s offensive posture towards Russia that is jeopardizing strategic stability.

As Putin noted, when the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union ended three decades ago, there was a missed opportunity for Europe to evolve security structures with Russia’s partnership. Under the direction of the United States, NATO became a recruiting agency against Moscow. Confrontation instead of cooperation. Lamentably, there is little sign of that dynamic changing, notwithstanding appeals by Russia for more reasoned relations.

The 30-member alliance now includes European states whose politicians express rabid Russophobia. Under the malign influence of ultra-nationalist Polish and Baltic parties, there has come disturbing revisionism concerning the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War as it is known in Russia, whereby the crimes of Nazi Germany are equated, contemptibly, with the Soviet Union.

The polarization of Europe has been a deliberate policy under NATO which has resulted in extreme tensions between the US and its allies, on the one hand, and Russia on the other. The designation of the Ukraine and Georgia, both former Soviet republics, for future membership of NATO is a calculated provocation to Russia. That move potentially could see American ballistic missiles installed on Russia’s border by a military alliance that defines Russia as a threat to Europe.

At the recent commemorative event presided over by German President Steinmeier to remind the world of the worst horror in modern history, it should be deplored that the Ukrainian ambassador refused to attend. The event was held at the German-Russian Museum in Berlin. It was the site where Nazi Germany signed an unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, before representatives of the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain. (The date was May 9 in Moscow time.)

Ukrainian ambassador Andrij Melnyk rejected the invitation because he said the venue was “an affront” and too much focused on Russia’s suffering.

This is while the NATO-backed Ukrainian forces under the control of a regime in Kiev that glorifies Nazi collaborators are shelling the ethnic Russian people in Eastern Ukraine in a war that has been going on for over seven years.

The Kiev regime was brought to power by an American and European-backed coup d’état against an elected president in February 2014. The regime is emboldened in its anti-Russia aggression by financial and military support from Washington and Brussels.

It is indeed disturbing that even when leaders like German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier appear to talk solemnly and wisely about the horror of war, there is still an astounding lack of awareness about the danger of war as evidenced by the policies of Washington and its NATO allies. Is it really lack of awareness or something more cynical?

The fascist shadow from the longest night of Operation Barbarossa still haunts Europe. That is incredibly vexing.

In part one of this series, I discussed how a massive U.S. arms stockpile in Okinawa, Japan that was originally intended to be used for the planned American invasion of Japan was cancelled once the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the U.S. Air Force, remarks in his book “The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy,” that these massive arms shipments were not returned to the United States but rather, half were transported to Korea and the other half to Vietnam.

The implications of this are enormous.

It signifies that there were Cold War preparations already underway as early as August 1945 and likely much earlier, and that the two regions selected, Korea and Vietnam, were pre-planned five years in advance and the other ten years in advance respectively, before the actual wars were to take place.

What this means is that the official narrative for why the Korean War and the Vietnam War were fought are fabrications of the Cold War “reality.”

Therefore, it should be asked, what was the real reason that Americans entered these two brutal wars? Why did leading figures among the American elite, many who were so adamant on not joining in the combat against fascism in WWII, become so quickly convinced, that everything having to do with communism, was their personal responsibility to destroy?

These questions will be answered in this series titled “The Fascist Roots of the CIA.”

The CIA and the Pentagon: A Tale of Two Star Crossed Lovers

As discussed in part one of this series, with the Eisenhower-Nixon victory in 1952, the culmination of years of political strategizing by Wall Street Republican power brokers, the new heads of the State Department and the CIA were selected as none other than Foster and Allen Dulles respectively; and they would go on to direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world.

It is for this reason that the 1952 presidential election has gone down in history as the triumph of “the power elite.”

The entire period of April 12^th 1945 to that fateful Election Day can be best understood as the first stage of America’s coup. This is especially clear between the period of 1945 and 1949, when a number of new pieces of legislation were passed which successfully reorganised the departments within the United States such that much of the government and military decisions would be beholden to the authority of a few men, men who were much more powerful than the president himself.

The National Security Act of 1947, a Trojan horse, was one of the first of this new breed of legislation and led to the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, placing it under the direction of the National Security Council.

Although it did not explicitly authorize the CIA to conduct covert operations, Section 102 was sufficiently vague to permit abuse. By December 1947, (less than four months after the creation of the CIA), the perceived necessity to “stem the flow of communism” in Western Europe—particularly Italy—by overt and covert “psychological warfare” forced the issue and NSC 4-A was born.

NSC 4-A was a new directive to cover “clandestine paramilitary operations, as well as political and economic warfare,” this provided the authorization for the intervention of the CIA in the Italian elections of April 1948.

It was understood that the U.S. military could have no “direct” role in covert operations, since that would defeat the purpose of deniability.

The Communist Party of Italy, admired for leading the fight against Mussolini, was expected to win in Italy’s first post-war election. This, of course, was considered intolerable under the Iron Curtain diktat and American covert operations were deployed to block the anti-fascist victory. Investigative journalist Christopher Simpson writes in his book “Blowback,” how a substantial part of this funding came from captured Nazi assets. This intervention, according to Simpson, tipped the balance in favour of Italy’s Christian Democrats Party, which hid thousands of fascists in its ranks.

In just a few months from its creation, the CIA went from what was supposed to be a civilian intelligence gathering arm of the government to being responsible for covert operations including “psychological warfare.” This was a far cry from what had organised the United States prior to WWII, and which relied on a civilian army. Such a government mandate for cloak and dagger operations during a time of peace would have been considered unthinkable.

But that is why the Cold War narrative was so imperative, since under this paranoid schizophrenic nightmare, it was thought the world would never be at peace until a significant portion of it was wiped out. The Cold War defined a pixelated enemy that was under-defined and invisible to the eye. The enemy was what your superiors told you were the enemy, and like a shape-shifter could take the form of anybody, including your neighbour, your colleague, your partner…even the president.

There would always be an enemy, because there would always be people who would resist the Grand Strategy.

NSC 4-A was replaced by NSC 10/2, approved by President Truman on June 18^th 1948, creating the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). NSC 10/2 was the first presidential document which specified a mechanism to approve and manage covert operations, and also the first in which the term “covert operations” was defined.

From 1948-1950 the OPC was not under CIA’s control, but rather was a renegade operation run by Allen Dulles. OPC was brought under CIA control in October 1950, when Walter Bedell Smith became Director of Central Intelligence, and it was renamed the Directorate of Plans.

Although the CIA was strictly in charge of covert operations, it often needed the military for additional personnel, transport, overseas bases, weapons, aircraft, ships, and all the other things the Department of Defense had in abundance. In reality, the military, whether it liked it or not, found itself forever in the embrace of its toxic lover, the CIA.

Prouty writes in 1992:

“OPC and other CIA personnel were concealed in military units and provided with military cover whenever possible, especially within the far-flung bases of the military around the world… The covert or invisible operational methods developed by the CIA and the military during the 1950s are still being used today despite the apparent demise of the Cold War, in such covert activities as those going on in Central America and Africa…the distinction between the CIA and the military is hard to discern, since they always work together.”

A Daring Declaration

On Sept. 2^nd, 1945, Ho Chi Minh signed the Declaration of Independence for a new nation, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which stated the following lines:

 “A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years—such a people must be free and independent.”

Ho Chi Minh had been leading the nationalist Viet Minh independence movement since 1941 against the colonial rule of Japan. Like most of the world, Ho Chi Minh viewed the war against the fascists as aligned to a war against imperialism. He believed that if the world was to finally make a stand against such tyranny, than there would be no place for colonialism in the post-war world. The world would have to be organised according to the recognition and respect of independent nation states, along the lines of Roosevelt’s post-war vision.

After a long and horrific battle against the ruthless Japanese fascists, with support during the war from the United States and China, it was the hope of Ho Chi Minh that Vietnam could return to its former days of peace with its new-found independence from colonial rule.

The Japanese had surrendered and were leaving. The French had been defeated by the Japanese and would not return—or so it was thought.

Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh’s brilliant military commander, while serving as Minister of the Interior of the provisional government, delivered a speech describing the United States as a good friend of the Viet Minh. That, too, was in September 1945. Ho Chi Minh had been supplied with a tremendous stock of military equipment by the United States, and he expected to be able to administer his new government in Vietnam without further opposition.

But on September 23, 1945, shortly after the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had issued its Declaration of Independence, a group of former French troops, acting with the consent of the British forces (who had been given jurisdiction of the area from the Potsdam Conference) and armed with Japanese weapons stolen from surrender stockpiles, staged a local coup d’état and seized control of the administration of Saigon, in South Vietnam, known today as Ho Chi Minh City.

By January 1946, the French had assumed all military commitments in Vietnam and reinstalled the French government.

It should be understood that the removal of the French presence in Indochina was no small feat, since it was not only their military presence that had to be dealt with, but also its business interests including French banks, among the most powerful in Asia. The French had imposed its colonial presence in Indochina since 1787.

Negotiations between the French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam began early in 1946. Ho Chi Minh traveled to Paris, but the conference failed due to French intransigence.

The French Indochina War broke out in 1946 and went on for eight years, with France’s war effort largely funded and supplied by the United States.

In 1949, Bao Dai, the former emperor who spent most of his time in the lap of luxury in Paris, France, was set up by foreign interest to be the puppet government of the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam).

On May 8, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that the United States would give both economic and military aid to France and to the State of Vietnam. The value of this military assistance surpassed $3 billion.

There was never any official reason for why the United States changed its allegiance from Ho Chi Minh to the French colonial interests and their puppet government. Although Ho Chi Minh’s belief in communism was used to justify this betrayal, the truth was that he was a threat because he considered himself first and foremost a nationalist, who believed that the Vietnamese people were one and that his nation deserved independence from colonial dominance.

It was this nationalism that could not be tolerated in areas of the world which were regarded as imperial territories and subject lands. It is for this very same reason that MI6 and the CIA staged a coup against the beloved nationalist Mosaddegh in Iran, a non-communist who held a Ph.D. in law and was well on his way to removing all British imperial claims on oil in the country after winning his case against the British at the Hague and at the UN Security Council in 1951.

This is why the interests of imperialism and fascism were often linked hand in hand, as seen with Edward VIII (though he was not alone in the British Royal family in his views), the Vichy government in France, King of Italy Victor Emmanuel III who appointed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister in 1922 (who only deposed Mussolini in 1943 when it was clear they were going to lose the war) and Imperial Japan under Emperor Hirohito.

It is for this reason that we saw, before WWII was even over,the imperialists and the fascists in discussion with each other as to what would form the post-war world. It is for this reason that the countries chosen to oversee this Grand Strategy would be the U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Japan, rather than Roosevelt’s choice of the U.S., Russia, Britain and China.

It is for this reason that the Iron Curtain, that was originally announced, not by Churchill, but rather by German Foreign Minister Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, reported in the London Times on May 3, 1945, was to announce the terms of an indefinite war against communism. In reality, it meant any country opposed to imperial rule, opposed to the idea that some were born to rule and others to be ruled, in other words, imperialism and sovereign nation states could not co-exist.

Ho Chi Minh was an ally to the Americans under the leadership of Roosevelt. However, with Roosevelt’s death and the soft coup that followed, Ho Chi Minh was now an enemy.

The Saigon Military Mission

On January 8, 1954, at a meeting of the National Security Council, President Eisenhower made his views clear that Americans did not belong in the Vietnam War. But that did not really matter.

Eisenhower, who was used to people diligently following his line of command as a General of WWII, was soon to learn that this did not apply as President of the United States.

Among those at the January 8, 1954 meeting of the National Security Council were Allen W. Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles. There was no way that the Dulles brothers could have misunderstood the words of President Eisenhower.

Yet, on January 14, 1954, only six days after the President’s “vehement” statement against the entry of U.S. armed forces in Indochina, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said:

“Despite everything that we do, there remained a possibility that the French position in Indochina would collapse. If this happened and the French were thrown out, it would, of course, become the responsibility of the victorious Vietminh to set up a government and maintain order in Vietnam…[I do] not believe that in this contingency this country [the United States] would simply say, “Too bad; we’re licked and that’s the end of it.”

Thus, the seed was planted. If the French were forced out, which was rather predictable, it was understood that the U.S. would not engage in open warfare with the Viet Minh. However, it could carry out clandestine operations against Ho Chi Minh’s forces so as to cause them trouble, or in the words of Foster Dulles “to raise hell.”

This is how American intervention and direct involvement in the Vietnam War began, a war in which the Americans had been arming both sides since 1945 and to which there was no official military objective except “to raise hell.”

According to a record of the January 14, 1954 National Security Council meeting, it was:

“Agreed that the Director of Central Intelligence [Allen Dulles], in collaboration with other appropriate departments and agencies should develop plans, as suggested by the Secretary of State [John Foster Dulles], for certain contingencies in Indochina.”

And, just like that, the entire overseeing of the Vietnam War was placed into the hands of the Dulles brothers.

Two weeks later, on January 29, Allen Dulles, selected Colonel Lansdale to head the team that was going to be deployed in Vietnam “to raise hell.”

Edward G. Lansdale, chief of the Saigon Military Mission, arrived in Saigon on June 1, 1954, less than one month after the defeat of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, for the purpose of a covert operation to conduct psychological warfare and paramilitary activities in South Vietnam.

Prouty writes:

“It was not a military mission in the conventional sense, as the secretary of state had said. It was a CIA organization with a clandestine mission designed to “raise hell” with “guerrilla operations” everywhere in Indochina, a skilled terrorist organization capable of carrying out its sinister role in accordance with the Grand Strategy of those Cold War years.

…With this action, the CIA established the Saigon Military Mission (SMM) in Vietnam. It was not often in Saigon. It was not military. It was CIA. Its mission was to work with the anti-Vietminh Indochinese and not to work with the French. With this background and these stipulations, this new CIA unit was not going to win the war for the French. As we learned the hard way later, it was not going to win the war for South Vietnam, either, or for the United States. Was it supposed to?”

It should be noted here that although NSC and Department of State records show that the Saigon Military Mission did not begin until January 1954, there were other CIA activities in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (such as the White Cloud teams) long before 1954, and some members of the SMM had participated in these earlier activities as far back as 1945. (1)

Though Lansdale is listed as a U.S. Air Force Col. who was put in charge of the SMM, this was just a ploy. He would continue in Vietnam, as he had in the Philippines, to exploit the cover of an air force officer and to be assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) for “cover assignment’’ purposes. He was always an agent of the CIA, and his actual bosses were always with the CIA.

With Ho Chi Minh’s defeat of the French in 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, ending the First Indochina War, it was understood that new oppositional leadership would be required if Ho Chi Minh were to be prevented from taking control of South Vietnam.

Ngo Dinh Diem would oust Bao Dai in a rigged referendum vote in 1955, becoming the first President of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The South Vietnamese were not interested in either candidate.

The reader should take note here that South Vietnam (otherwise known as Cochinchina for centuries), had never had a real form of government because it had never been a nation in its entire existence but rather had been made up of ancient villages for several centuries with relatively little change. There was no congress, no police, and no tax-system – nothing essential to the function of a nation. Diem’s “government” was nothing but a façade of bureaucracy.

Despite this, Diem’s Republic of Vietnam was treated as an equal member of the family of nations, as if it could stand on its own two feet and respond accordingly to the crisis its people were being thrown into. The Vietnamese government that Eisenhower believed ought to be fighting the Viet Minh on its own behalf did not exist.

The choice of a predominant number of Indochinese was overwhelmingly for Ho Chi Minh. They felt no loyalty to Bao Dai, who lived in Paris, and they hated the French. Ngo Dinh Diem was a nobody, who never accomplished anything to win the hearts of his people.

The Vietnam War, as it understood today, was full of oversights. But perhaps the most serious oversight of all was that not one of the six U.S. administrations who oversaw the Vietnam War ever stated a positive American military objective for that war. The generals sent to Saigon were told not to let the “communists” take over Vietnam, period. As Prouty stated repeatedly in his book, this does not constitute a military objective.

The Saigon Military Mission was sent to Vietnam to preside over the dissolution of French colonial power. The Dulles brothers knew, by January 1954 if not long before that, that they would be creating a new Vietnamese government that would be neither French nor Vietminh and that this new government would then become the base for continuing the decade-old war in Indochina.

That was their primary objective.

The Geneva Conference, A Genocidal Exodus

The defeat of the French resulted in the Geneva Accords in July 1954 which established the 17th parallel as a temporary demarcation line separating the military forces of the French and the Viet Minh. Within 300 days of the signing of the accords, a demilitarized zone, or DMZ, was created, and the transfer of any civilians who wished to leave either side was to be completed.

Ho Chi Minh and all northern Vietnamese believed the nation to be “one.” They did not want a division of their country, as the Geneva Agreements had guaranteed.

The closing article of the Geneva Agreements, Number 14, a scarcely noticed few lines, read; “…any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party, who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party, shall be permitted and helped to do so by the authorities in that district.”

The ominous meaning of this was concealed under the guise of humanitarian words. The American-British note spoke of a “peaceful and humane transfer,” as if they were being kind and sensitive to the situation at hand, ready to uproot people who had lived all their lives in a settled village that had existed for tens of thousands of years.

The people of the world, most of whom had no knowledge of the Tonkinese, were led to believe that this offer was a most compassionate gesture. And, what is worse, the planners of this sinister plot were certain that the people of the world would never learn the truth, that this movement of one million North Vietnamese was really intended to be the kindling that would set the country on fire. It was a set-up and would lay the essential groundwork for America’s direct entry into the war.

The mass exodus of North Vietnamese to South Vietnam would be orchestrated by the Saigon Military Mission. This was a terrible upheaval for these people but it was sold to the West as if they were refugees fleeing Ho Chi Minh. In reality, they were fleeing the “psychological warfare” and “paramilitary tactics” today called “terrorism” that the SMM were unleashing in these small Northern villages.

In their own words, as found in documents released with the Pentagon Papers, leaders of the SMM wrote that the mission had been sent into North Vietnam to carry out “unconventional warfare,” “paramilitary operations, ” “political-psychological warfare,” and rumor campaigns and to set up a Combat Psy War course for the Vietnamese. The members of the SMM were classic “agents provocateurs.”

Prouty writes:

“This movement of Catholics—or natives whom the SMM called “Catholics”—from the northern provinces of Vietnam to the south, under the provisions of the Geneva Agreement, became the most important activity of the Saigon Military Mission and one of the root causes of the Vietnam War. The terrible burden these 1,100,000 destitute strangers imposed upon the equally poor native residents of the south created a pressure on the country and the Diem administration that proved to be overwhelming.

These penniless natives…were herded into Haiphong by the Saigon Military Mission and put aboard U.S. Navy transport vessels. About 300,000 traveled on the CIA’s Civil Air Transport aircraft, and others walked out. They were transported, like cattle, to the southernmost part of Vietnam, where, despite promises of money and other basic support, they were turned loose upon the local population. These northerners are Tonkinese, more Chinese than the Cochinese of the south. They have never mixed under normal conditions. wherever these poor people were dumped on the south were given the name ‘‘Communist insurgencies,” and much of the worst and most pernicious part of the twenty years of warfare that followed was the direct result of this terrible activity that had been incited and carried out by CIA’s terroristic Saigon Military Mission.

…Nothing that occurred during these thirty years of warfare, 1945-75, was more pernicious than this movement of these 1,100,000 “Catholics” from the north to the south at a time when the government of the south scarcely existed. ”

It didn’t take long before the disturbance caused by the Diem-favored northern intruders onto the southern natives broke out into violence. Before long, the “friends,” according to the Diem government and its CIA backers were the one million northern Catholics, and the “enemy”—or at least the “problem”—was the native Cochinese of the south.

The time was right to fan the flames into war and to bring in the Americans.

Part three of this series “The Fascist Roots of the CIA” will discuss the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations in relation to the Vietnam War and Kennedy’s last stand against Allen Dulles before he was gunned down on the streets of Dallas, Texas in broad daylight.

The author can be reached at cynthiachung@tutanota.com

Note

(1) L. Fletcher Prouty “The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy” pg 61