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cuban missile crisis
Could the UN Secretary-General’s 'Good Offices' Help to End the Iran War?
Given the two-week ceasefire, the recent appointment of an experienced personal envoy for the Middle East conflict by UN Secretary-General Guterres and the establishment of a UN Task Force to facilitate the opening of the Strait of Hormuz offer hope for lasting peace.
Apr 09, 2026
While the whole world held its breath, hoping for some way the overcome the ultimatum that President Donald Trump had given to Iran, Pakistan, working feverishly as a third-party mediator (with the help of Türkiye, Egypt, and other regional powers, as well as China), was able to obtain a last-minute agreement from the parties for a two-week cessation of hostilities which would allow commercial shipping to resume (with Iranian supervision) through the Strait of Hormuz.
Although widely welcomed, this brief ceasefire is only the beginning. To bring about a lasting end to the war, over the next two weeks the mediators will have to become involved in intensive negotiations with all of the parties to find a peace settlement acceptable to all.
This will require considerable in-depth, in-person consultations by the mediators with each of the parties to understand the issues and interests of each and to go beyond their incompatible positions to find common ground and develop creative solutions that reconcile differences, especially those related to each party’s security concerns.
Much of this work is best done through intensive shuttle diplomacy, wherein those acting as third parties discuss the issues and possible components of agreements through separate talks with each party. This is preferable to face-to-face plenary meetings between the parties, which are often unproductive, since the parties typically just reiterate and insist on their already well-known confrontational positions. Such work requires sufficient time, considerable finesse and creativity, as well as close coordination between all of those involved. Knowledge of previous peace processes and the substance of peace agreements is also very important.
If successful, however, the UN’s assistance with a viable solution would not only resolve the dangerous hostilities in the Middle East, but could also offer a more permanent off-ramp for the Trump administration.
Two recent initiatives by the United Nations secretary-general may prove useful in this regard. On March 25, Secretary-General António Guterres appointed Jean Arnault, a seasoned peacemaker with 40 years of experience in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, as his “personal envoy of the secretary-general on the Middle East conflict and its consequences” to carry out good offices on his behalf. Although perhaps not widely known, the secretary-general’s good offices functions (often carried out through “quiet diplomacy”) have been widely used since the UN’s inception 80 years ago, in large and small conflicts around the world, with considerable success.
In some situations, the secretary-general’s envoy has worked on their own directly with the parties; in other cases, the envoy has worked in close coordination with a small group of UN Member States. In this situation, the UN secretary-general’s personal envoy could offer his assistance to the already-existing group of state mediators led by Pakistan in their efforts to arrive at a peace agreement. Given the extremely short time frame available, such assistance should be welcomed.
It is likely that Iran will also welcome the involvement of a personal envoy of the secretary-general, since in 1988, the UN Secretary-General’s Personal Representative on Iran-Iraq, Jan Eliasson, helped bring about the end of the very long and destructive Iran-Iraq war. In this and other conflicts, the secretary-general’s good offices have been acceptable to conflicting parties because the UN is viewed as impartial, unlike mediation efforts by states, which have their own interests. As well, the deep experience of UN mediators in applying constructive problem-solving approaches to conflict resolution makes them attractive as third party mediators.
A second recent initiative by Secretary-General Guterres that may prove to be very helpful is the creation of a UN Task Force to facilitate resolution of maritime problems in the Strait of Hormuz. This initiative was based on previous UN experience at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, whereby UN involvement helped overcome the cessation of maritime grain shipments from Ukraine, as well as food and fertilizer from Russia, which were causing a world food crisis.
After extensive talks hosted by Türkiye, with UN assistance, the Black Sea Grain Initiative was signed by Ukraine and Russia, as well as by Türkiye and the UN, in separate but concurrent “mirror” agreements. The first outlined the safe export of grain and related food and fertilizers via demined corridors in the Black Sea, with Türkiye inspecting ships on their way to Ukrainian ports to ensure they weren’t carrying weapons. The second outlined a set of procedures for getting food, fertilizer, and raw material exports safely out of Russia.
Drawing on this previous experience, The UN Task Force will involve some of the same UN specialized agencies that were helpful in the Black Sea Grain Initiative, such as the International Maritime Organization. The Task Force is meant to work out constructive and “operational maritime solutions” that will help to secure the evacuation of over 2,000 ships and 20,000 seafarers currently stranded in the Persian Gulf, as well as facilitate humanitarian corridors for the safe passage of goods.
Since it came to power, the Trump administration has generally ignored the capacities of the United Nations; its history and experience; and its universally-accepted authority. If successful, however, the UN’s assistance with a viable solution would not only resolve the dangerous hostilities in the Middle East, but could also offer a more permanent off-ramp for the Trump administration.
Although not widely known, it is now well-documented, that, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, UN Secretary-General U Thant played a pivotal role in helping to avert a nuclear war and resolve the worst international crisis since the end of the World War II, by using his good offices to make proposals to US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for de-escalation and the ultimate resolution of the crisis.
As explained by the authors of an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the good offices of the secretary-general can offer a unique contribution to world peace:
For U Thant and his UN organization, the Cuban Missile Crisis was their finest hour... It was the week the United Nations helped the superpowers pull back from nuclear destruction. The nuclear clock did not strike midnight, largely because Thant facilitated face-saving and de-escalation, transmitted messages, traveled to Cuba, fostered restraint and hope, and made significant proposals, including the idea for the final settlement of the crisis... it is appropriate to finally give U Thant credit for his remarkable contribution to averting doomsday.
Let us hope that Secretary-General Guterres and his special envoy will be able to play a similarly constructive role in another extremely dangerous conflict and remind the world of the vital role that the UN has played and can continue to play in preventing and resolving violent conflicts among its member states.
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Trump 'Choosing From the War Crimes Menu' With 'Quarantine' on Venezuela Oil Exports
"Economic strangulation is warfare and civilians always pay the price," lamented CodePink.
Dec 25, 2025
President Donald Trump has ordered US military forces to further escalate their aggression against Venezuela by enforcing a "quarantine" on the South American nation's oil—by far its main export—in what one peace group called an attempted act of "economic strangulation."
"While military options still exist, the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking [for]," a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
The move follows the deployment of an armada of US warships and thousands of troops to the region, threats to invade Venezuela, oil tanker seizures off the Venezuelan coast, Trump's authorization of covert CIA action against the socialist government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and airstrikes against boats allegedly running drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed more than 100 people in what critics say are murders and likely war crimes.
This, atop existing economic sanctions that experts say have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans since they were first imposed during the first Trump administration in 2017.
"The efforts so far have put tremendous pressure on Maduro, and the belief is that by late January, Venezuela will be facing an economic calamity unless it agrees to make significant concessions to the US," the official told Reuters.
The official's use of the word "quarantine" evoked the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, an existential standoff that occurred after the John F. Kennedy administration imposed a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent Soviet nuclear missiles from being deployed on the island, even as the US was surrounding the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons.
"This is an illegal blockade," the women-led peace group CodePink said in response to the Reuters report. "Calling it a 'quarantine' doesn’t change the reality. The US regime is using hunger as a weapon of war to force regime change in Venezuela. Economic strangulation is warfare and civilians always pay the price. The US is a regime of terror."
Critics have also compared Trump's aggression to the George W. Bush administration's buildup to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, initially referred to as Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL). But unlike Bush, Trump—who derided Bush for not seizing Iraq's petroleum resources as spoils of war—has openly acknowledged his desire to take Venezuela's oil.
"Maybe we will sell it, maybe we will keep it,” he Trump said on Monday. “Maybe we’ll use it in the strategic reserves. We’re keeping the ships also.”
On Wednesday, a panel of United Nations experts said that the US blockade and boat strikes constitute "illegal armed aggression" against Venezuela.
Multiple efforts by US lawmakers—mostly Democrats, but also a handful of anti-war Republicans—to pass a war powers resolution blocking the Trump administration from bombing boats or attacking Venezuela have failed.
The blockade and vessel seizures have paralyzed Venezuela's oil exports. Ports are clogged with full tankers whose operators are fearful of entering international waters. Venezuela-bound tankers have also turned back for fear of seizure. Although Venezuelan military vessels are accompanying tankers, the escorts stop once the ships reach international waters.
According to the New York Times, Venezuela is considering putting armed troops aboard tankers bound for China, which, along with Russia, has pledged its support—but little more—for Caracas.
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The US Advances Its Dystopian Plan to Destroy China
Western media tells you that China is the most aggressive nation on Earth, but China has shown extreme restraint in the face of U.S. military buildup and hostile rhetoric calling for war.
Aug 01, 2025
Imagine: It’s the summer of 2025, and the United States has been surrounded by foreign military bases. The bases have been built by some antagonistic country on the other side of the world that drones on about the inevitability of war. Leaders of the nation pump billions into their military, drumming up advanced AI weaponry, building long-range ballistic missile systems targeting the most populated U.S. cities, and sending thousands of troops to the Caribbean in preparation. Large-scale war games are held throughout the region, including drills that simulate nuclear war on the U.S. In the next two years, they say. War is coming, and we need to be ready. Meanwhile, back on domestic soil, the nation’s top thinkers gather to plan the collapse of the U.S. government, releasing a 120-page document outlining the steps to take after the war leaves nothing but dust and instability behind.
But wait. You don’t need to imagine. That is happening, just not to the United States. No, the U.S. is not the victim at all—the U.S. is the antagonistic country on the other side of the world, bloating its military, prepping for war, and outlining the collapse of another nation’s government.
The U.S. has built over 300 military bases in the Asia Pacific alone, installed long-range missile systems pointed at China’s largest cities, and held joint war exercises with regional allies simulating nuclear war with China. And just last week, the federally funded Hudson Institute released its 128-page plan for the collapse of China’s government.
Western media tells you that China is the most aggressive nation on Earth, but China has shown extreme restraint in the face of U.S. military buildup and hostile rhetoric calling for war. If the opposite were true—if China had surrounded the U.S. with missiles, troops, and bases—the U.S. would have already considered that an act of war. Just think back to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba almost led to the U.S. declaring full-scale nuclear war.
We must reject the path of endless war and build a world based on mutual respect, not militarism.
Luckily, the facts speak louder than U.S. war propaganda, and these are the facts: The U.S. has over 700 foreign military bases, while China has just one. The U.S. has surrounded China with over 300 military bases, while China has zero in the entire Western Hemisphere. The U.S. has launched 251 military interventions since just 1991, while China hasn’t intervened in any country for 50 years.
And on July 10, 2025, the U.S. and its allies began conducting the largest military exercises in the Pacific since World War II. Nicknamed Resolute Force Pacific, or REFORPAC 2025, the exercise will involve over 350 aircraft, more than 12,000 service members, and will take place at more than 50 locations across 3,000 miles in the Pacific, including Hawaii, Guam, Japan, and international airspace. The U.S. Air Force says these exercises will “prove how we’ll fight and win” a war against China.
China’s “acts of aggression,” as labeled by mainstream Western media, are often just its own defensive military exercises that it conducts in response to the constant war games off its shores. But please, let’s be honest with ourselves—what country wouldn’t respond that way? If anything, it’s an act of restraint to clear preparation for war.
Just last week, the Hudson Institute (which has received millions from the U.S. Department of Defense) held a conference to discuss the collapse of China’s government and released a 128-page document outlining the plan. The document is heinous and dystopian, outlining a gradual invasion of China through clandestine information campaigns, cultural and psychological restructuring, military intervention, and an overall manipulation of the soul of China from the shadows.
Phase 0 will begin before the collapse. U.S. Special Operations Forces will use psychological and political warfare to sow division between the government, the military, and the people—the government has already funded billions of U.S. tax dollars to do just that. They plan to twist narratives to undermine China’s history, exploit trauma, and mock the Communist Party of China (CPC) through information campaigns. Phase 1 will go into play after China’s collapse, which is U.S. occupation in everything but name. U.S. forces will be deployed to China’s cities and embedded into China’s military. A new puppet government will adhere to the whims of U.S. leaders. Anyone sympathetic to the CPC will be “controlled” while U.S. forces conduct action raids to secure nuclear weapons. And finally, Phase 2 will attempt to rewrite national consciousness by installing a U.S.-approved version of history. They will create a “Voice of China” modeled after the “Voice of America,” the people will be reeducated about the evils of communism, and a “sad but transparent” period of national mourning will pave the way to a new China shaped entirely by the United States.
The rest of the document outlines how to precisely target China’s facilities, restructure China’s financial system to suit U.S. interests, secure assets, restructure the military, and conduct a “reconciliation” campaign. At the end, the document mentions an imaginary, arbitrarily drawn line across China separating East from West, and discusses potentially splitting or partitioning territories. It also considers name changes for China, such as Taiwan or the Chinese Federal Republic.
The document is as Orwellian as it sounds, written by “experts” such as Miles Yu, Ryan Clarke, and Gordon G. Chang. Chang is one of the most frequently cited “China experts” in the U.S., but he’s not an expert so much as a propaganda mouthpiece. He has built an entire career out of making bold, spectacularly wrong predictions about China’s collapse, all while reinforcing U.S. imperial talking points.
His most infamous claim came in his 2001 book, The Coming Collapse of China, in which he confidently declared that the Chinese Communist Party would fall by 2011 at the latest. When that didn’t happen, he extended the deadline... and extended it again. He even made Foreign Policy’s “10 Worst Predictions of the Year” twice. Over two decades later, not only has China not collapsed, but grown into one of the world’s most powerful economies and a leading force in global diplomacy and development.
Despite his long track record of failure, Chang remains a regular on Fox News, a speaker at military think tanks like the Hudson Institute, and a go-to figure for anti-China hardliners in Washington. Why? Because he tells them exactly what they want to hear. His role is simply to justify aggression, stir up fear, and promote regime change narratives under the cover of “expertise.” In truth, Gordon C. Chang is no more than a state-aligned propagandist, useful only because he reinforces the U.S. imperial worldview so Congress can use more of your tax dollars to go to war on China.
People like Chang will keep returning to live congressional hearings and federally funded organizations like the Hudson Institute to justify U.S. war and domination abroad. It’s time to demand that lying imperial mouthpieces like Chang no longer get uplifted to be used as a means for global death and destruction—not in Congress, in academia, or anywhere. We must reject the path of endless war and build a world based on mutual respect, not militarism. But that future requires us to stop imagining that we are always the victims and start recognizing when we are the aggressors.
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Maybe Doom Isn’t Scary Enough
I interviewed three anti-nuke activists to understand the Doomsday Clock and how our society thinks about the very real threat of nuclear war.
Jan 27, 2025
“Dear young people who have never experienced war, ‘Wars begin covertly. If you sense it coming, it may be too late.’”—Takato Michishita, survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki.
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in the Catskill Mountains where New Yorkers went for the summer to escape the city heat, Alice Slater’s mother took her to go see a movie in town. It was late summer in 1945, and the second World War had just ended. Alice remembers parading around the Catskills town a few weeks earlier as everyone celebrated the end of the war. When I asked her when she first became aware of nuclear weapons, the first thing she thought to tell me was about her trip to the theater with her mom. Instead of trailers before the movies, they used to show news reels. The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima projected across the screen, and Alice asked her mom, “What is that?”
“That’s a wonderful new weapon, and now all the boys would come home,” her mom answered.
Between what they showed on the screen and what her mom had told her, at that moment Alice had no real idea what a nuclear bomb was, or what it did to the people it was used on. It was only a mushroom cloud, and the mushroom cloud meant the war was over.
The Doomsday Clock was created as a warning—a warning that the most powerful people in the world are playing God.
Seventeen years later, Alice was a young mom who had moved to the suburbs of New York City. Her husband was working for CBS, and one day he didn’t come home—he had to stay at work to deal with breaking news for a handful of days. The world had just found out that the Soviet Union, bringing us to the height of the Cold War between Washinton and Moscow, put nukes just 90 miles off the coast of the United States in Cuba. Alice, even with close proximity to someone who worked in the news, had no idea what was happening. Americans didn’t know the U.S. had nukes near the Russian border in Turkey, too. All they knew was that the communists were threatening them with nuclear bombs. We are far removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis now, but Alice said it was probably the most afraid she’s ever been. People really thought we were about to enter another war and send the entire world into a nuclear winter. Later people found out former U.S. President John F. Kennedy had negotiated to move U.S. nukes out of Turkey. But now they’re back, and scattered all over Europe.
Carol Gilbert, around the same week Alice’s husband didn’t come home from CBS, was at her aunt’s house in Michigan. She was around 15 years old at the time, and she remembered that it must have been during the school year—it was special that she got to go stay there that day, she loved spending time with her cousin. “I remember my mom calling my aunt and saying she was going to come pick us up because they were worried about the bomb,” Carole continued, “At some point I think we knew something bad was happening, but I don’t think I fully understood what was going on.”
On the other side of Lake Michigan from Carol, Kathy Kelly was in her home in Garfield Ridge, Chicago when her mother started putting stuff down in the basement on the day the news broke. Kathy’s parents lived in London during World War II, and tried every way they could to keep her sheltered from the trauma of war, but in the face of nuclear war—what are parents to do?
All three women recall the Cuban Missile Crisis as a time of uncertainty. Where people were freaked out and didn’t know what to do. Alice was afraid for her kids, and Carol’s and Kathy’s moms were clearly afraid for their children too. Then the missiles were taken out of Cuba, and the panic disappeared.
I chose Alice, Kathy, and Carol to interview on this topic because they are anti-war activists I deeply admire. I figured the concern over nuclear weapons amongst my peers may be less than that of older generations because of things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, or even becoming conscious in the years right after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the more elders I talked to, the more I realized how little it may have impacted their trajectory as activists. Alice didn’t become an anti-nuke activist after the missile crisis, and neither Carol nor Kathy mentioned it as a moment they remembered in the awakening of their conscience. Kathy was radicalized on the issue of nukes by the women who worked at the bookshop in downtown Chicago that she would stop into on her way to work as a teenager. Alice was pulled into the movement by the war in Vietnam.
On January 28, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the Doomsday Clock in 1947, will reveal how close we are to midnight, or “doom.” Since the clock was made, nukes have proliferated all over the world. First it was the U.S., and then U.S. and Russia—now nine countries have a nuclear weapons stockpile. It would only take a fraction of that firepower to send us into a nuclear winter, wiping out all life as we know it. The Doomsday Clock was created as a warning—a warning that the most powerful people in the world are playing God. It’s not an exaggeration in the slightest; because of a handful of people, one political misstep or accident and our whole planet is destroyed along with every precious life on it. Governments continue to pour trillions of dollars into developing these weapons while people they are supposed to care about sleep out on the street.
With tensions between the U.S., Russia, China, and Iran at a high, we should all be putting things in the basement, picking our kids up from their playdates, and preparing for disaster. Instead, we walk around like a bomb was never dropped. Like hundreds of thousands of Japanese people didn’t have their lives taken or destroyed. With no reason to believe so, we act like our government would never do it again. While our leaders have bombed a dozen countries to oblivion since World War II ended, we still act like we are the civilians the world ought to care about, like we are untouchable. We aren’t. Mutually assured destruction might be useful if the people with their fingers on the buttons cared for the people they governed, but oftentimes they don’t.
On the other side of doom is just life as we’ve been living it, which isn’t that great for a lot of people.
I asked Carol why she thinks no one is really freaked out about nuclear weapons like they ought to be, whether they be my age or hers. She said, “We have too much.” She was talking specifically about Americans, whose lives are inherently made more comfortable because of the conquest and wars of our past and present. Whether we would like to admit it or not, the United States and the entire modern life it provides is built on war. When I asked Alice, specifically in relation to the Cuban Missile Crisis, if people were scared into becoming anti-nuke activists she said, “You’re asking me if I was scared… I just kept hoping that democracy would prevail in some way, I guess.”
Carol, a Roman Catholic sister, and two other Dominican nuns were convicted of sabotage after pouring their blood into a Minuteman III missile loaded with a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb in Colorado. She spent two and a half years in federal prison for drawing attention to the real weapons of mass destruction while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney made up fake ones in Iraq. In the 1980s, Kathy was greeted by four armed soldiers riding in a large military vehicle after she planted corn on top of a nuclear missile silo in Missouri. A soldier was left behind with Kathy while she was handcuffed, kneeling on the ground. “Do you think the corn will grow?” she asked him. “I don’t know ma’am,” he responded, “but I sure hope so.” Following a trial, Kathy spent nine months in maximum security prison.
Whether or not the Doomsday Clock reveals we are inching closer to midnight or staying where we are, the fear around nuclear Armageddon seems to freeze most of us in our tracks. If the whole world is going to be annihilated and suffering is imminent anyway, why think about it at all? We can cross that bridge to hell when we get there. If there weren’t a nuclear stockpile that could end life at any moment, maybe people would feel more inspired. Afterall, preventing doom isn’t a particularly motivating notion. On the other side of doom is just life as we’ve been living it, which isn’t that great for a lot of people.
Alice, Carol, and Kathy are all inspired activists. When you talk to them you don’t really ever get the sense that they will stop pushing ahead for what they believe in. I met Carol in the halls of Congress last February, despite being over 50 years older than me she was leaving me in the dust. After 12,000 steps on Capitol Hill, she walked with me to a vigil for Aaron Bushnell, an active duty airman who self-immolated over the genocide in Gaza. Never once in any of my conversations with them did I ever get the sense they did what they did out of fear—whether it be fear of war, nuclear winter, or overall doom. They all talk about a world that gives people what they need to survive and thrive. Kathy talked to me about international cooperation and laughed at the idea of borders: “When there’s a nuclear energy accident like Chernobyl or Fukushima, the poison that floats around in the air doesn’t care about your borders.” And she made note of the brilliant atomic scientists, and how quickly they’d figure out how to address the climate catastrophe if only we were to change our priorities. They talk at length about how the world ought to be, and their vision for a better future is what propels them ahead, not doom. Doom isn’t good enough to get us to where we need to go.
Planting corn over a nuclear silo, disrupting a weapons manufacturer, and creating a community of war resisters are steps we can take toward something much more impactful. A world that is mindful about nuclear weapons can push toward their elimination, and we absolutely must. If you’re not moved away from doom, be moved toward peace. At CODEPINK, we’ve created a Peace Clock to give us ways not to just move away from doom, but to bring us closer to the kind of world we want to see. It’s something that’s been within our sight a thousand times. We have to sprint toward it.
“Dear young people who have never experienced the horrors of war—I fear that some of you may be taking this hard-earned peace for granted.”—Takato Michishita
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The Wisdom of JFK vs. the Recklessness of Joe Biden
Even if you naively believe that the United States is innocent in the crisis in Ukraine, you should still strongly support negotiations, to save Ukraine and Russia from further destruction, and to prevent the very real risk of World War III.
Dec 02, 2024
Sixty-two years ago President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had the wisdom to peacefully resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Kennedy understood that Soviet missiles in Cuba were a response, in part, to US missiles near the USSR, in Türkiye. Kennedy wisely removed the missiles from Türkiye in a secret negotiated settlement, in exchange for the Soviets removing their missiles from Cuba. Kennedy and Khrushchev thereby stepped away from the brink of nuclear war.
Kennedy had to keep the peace settlement secret, because he knew that anti-Communist crusaders in Congress and the security state would regard his actions as treasonous. He was in open conflict with the CIA, whose head, Allen Dulles, he had fired over the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Today the U.S. and Russia are, again, dangerously close to being at total war. In many ways, the crisis in Ukraine is the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, given that Russia, rightly or wrongly, views NATO expansion up to its borders as an unacceptable infringement on its sphere of influence.
NATO and Russia continue to climb the escalatory ladder over the war in Ukraine. The recent launching of ATACM and Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory crosses a red line for President Putin, whose expected reprisal (e.g., with Oreshnik ballistic missiles) may provoke NATO to climb another rung up the ladder.
These tit-for-tat escalations can all too easily spiral out of control, resulting in open warfare between NATO and Russia, as well as the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.
These tit-for-tat escalations can all too easily spiral out of control, resulting in open warfare between NATO and Russia, as well as the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. It is doubtful that a limited nuclear exchange can occur without it escalating to all-out nuclear warfare and the end of human civilization.
Even a one percent chance of such an outcome is an unacceptable risk.
Kennedy and Khrushchev had the wisdom, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to pull back from the brink. Will American, British and Russian leaders have the wisdom now to peacefully resolve the war in Ukraine? The question is urgent.
For perspective and inspiration, we highly recommend that everyone read President Kennedy’s commencement address (also known as Kennedy’s “peace speech”), delivered at American University on June 10, 1963. In that speech, Kennedy urged that we “conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interests to agree to a genuine peace. And above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world."
Today it is vital that people understand the relevance and urgency of Kennedy’s point about making sure that our actions do not provoke a nuclear war.
It is also vital that lines of communication between the U.S. and Russia be kept open. In the speech, Kennedy announced the establishment of a hotline with Moscow to prevent future misunderstandings and the accidental launching of a nuclear exchange. Kennedy proposed to start negotiations towards a comprehensive test ban treaty. And he announced an end to above ground nuclear weapons testing. Lastly, Kennedy wrote in the speech, “We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded.”
The speech was given at a critical point in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the time, the speech so impressed Khrushchev that he had it reprinted in newspapers throughout the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately nothing like those things is happening now. Rather, in recent years, nearly all high-level contacts between Moscow and D.C. have been shunned, based on the notion that we must not negotiate with a Hitler. Furthermore, the U.S. withdrew from multiple arms deals with Russia: the ABM treaty during the second Bush Administration, and the INF Treaty and Open Skies Treaty during the Trump Administration. The New Start Treaty is now at risk, too, of being abrogated. Lastly, the U.S. government has, effectively, blocked Americans from viewing Russian media outlets such as RT.com.
Kennedy called for Americans to see the Soviet point of view. He warned “the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”
Likewise, today Americans need to see the Russian point of view with respect to NATO expansion towards their borders. However, this is not the place to go into detail about the history of NATO expansion (e.g., U.S. involvement in the 2014 Maidan coup and the arming by the CIA of far-right militias) or about the hypocrisy of the U.S. position, given its many interventions far from U.S. borders (e.g., the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Syria, where the U.S. currently occupies one third of the territory, the parts with oil). The details are voluminous, and we would be accused of repeating Putin’s talking points. When the house is on fire, the urgent need is to save lives.
Therefore, even if you naively believe that the United States is innocent in the crisis in Ukraine, you should still strongly support negotiations, to save Ukraine and Russia from further destruction, and to prevent the very real risk of World War III.
We need Kennedy’s wisdom now, because of the looming threat of nuclear war. Kennedy regarded world peace as "the most important topic on earth.... What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war -- not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace -- the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living."
We believe it is urgent that a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine be reached immediately.
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Presidents Who Gamble With Nuclear Armageddon
Each of the last five presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, have brought us closer to the brink. We desperately need leaders with a knack for peace who can steer the nation, and the world, toward a more secure and less dangerous future.
May 29, 2024
The overriding job of any U.S. president is to keep the nation safe. In the nuclear age, that mainly means avoiding nuclear Armageddon. Joe Biden’s reckless and incompetent foreign policy is pushing us closer to annihilation. He joins a long and undistinguished list of presidents who have gambled with Armageddon, including his immediate predecessor and rival, Donald Trump.
Talk of nuclear war is currently everywhere. Leaders of NATO countries call for Russia’s defeat and even dismemberment, while telling us not to worry about Russia’s 6,000 nuclear warheads. Ukraine uses NATO-supplied missiles to knock out parts of Russia’s nuclear-attack early-warning system inside Russia. Russia, in the meantime, engages in nuclear drills near its border with Ukraine. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg give the green light to Ukraine to use NATO weapons to hit Russian territory as an increasingly desperate and extremist Ukrainian regime sees fit.
These leaders neglect at our greatest peril the most basic lesson of the nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as told by President John F. Kennedy, one of the few American presidents in the nuclear age to take our survival seriously. In the aftermath of the crisis, Kennedy told us, and his successors:
Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.
Yet this is exactly what Biden is doing today, carrying out a bankrupt and reckless policy.
Nuclear war can easily arise from an escalation of non-nuclear war, or by a hothead leader with access to nuclear arms deciding on a surprise first strike, or by a gross miscalculation. The last of these nearly occurred even after Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev had negotiated an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a disabled Soviet submarine came within a hair’s breadth of launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo.
The Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight when Clinton came to office, but just 9 minutes when he left it. Bush pushed the clock to just 5 minutes, Obama to 3 minutes, and Trump to a mere 100 seconds. Now Biden has taken the clock to 90 seconds.
Most presidents, and most Americans, have little idea how close to the abyss we are. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which was founded in 1947 in part to help the world avoid nuclear annihilation, established the Doomsday Clock to help the public understand the gravity of the risks we face. National security experts adjust the clock depending how far or how close we are to “midnight,” meaning extinction. They put the clock today at just 90 seconds to midnight, the closest that it’s ever been in the nuclear age.
The clock is a useful measure of which presidents have “gotten it” and which have not. The sad fact is that most presidents have recklessly gambled with our survival in the name of national honor, or to prove their personal toughness, or to avoid political attacks from the warmongers, or as the result of sheer incompetence. By a simple and straightforward count, five presidents have gotten it right, moving the clock away from midnight, while nine have moved us closer to Armageddon, including the most recent five.
Truman was president when the Doomsday Clock was unveiled in 1947, at 7 minutes to midnight. Truman stoked the nuclear arms race and left office with the clock at just 3 minutes to midnight. Eisenhower continued the nuclear arms race but also entered into the first-ever negotiations with the Soviet Union regarding nuclear disarmament. By the time he left office, the clock was put back to 7 minutes to midnight.
Kennedy saved the world by coolly reasoning his way through the Cuban Missile Crisis, rather than following the advice of hothead advisors who called for war (for a detailed account, see Martin Sherwin’s magisterial Gambling with Armageddon, 2020). He then negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev in 1963. By the time of his death, which may well have been a government coup resulting from Kennedy’s peace initiative, JFK had pushed the clock back to 12 minutes to midnight, a magnificent and historic achievement.
It was not to last. Lyndon Johnson soon escalated in Vietnam and pushed the clock back again to just 7 minutes to midnight. Richard Nixon eased tensions with both the Soviet Union and China, and concluded the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), pushing the clock again to 12 minutes from midnight. Yet Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter failed to secure SALT II, and Carter fatefully and unwisely gave a green light to the CIA in 1979 to destabilize Afghanistan. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, the clock was at just 4 minutes to midnight.
The next 12 years marked the end of the Cold War. Much of the credit is due to Mikhail Gorbachev, who aimed to reform the Soviet Union politically and economically, and to end the confrontation with the West. Yet credit is also due to Reagan and his successor George Bush, Sr., who successfully worked with Gorbachev to end the Cold War, which in turn was followed by the end of the Soviet Union itself in December 1991. By the time Bush left office, the Doomsday clock was at 17 minutes to midnight, the safest since the start of the nuclear age.
Sadly, the U.S. security establishment could not take “Yes” for an answer when Russia said an emphatic yes to peaceful and cooperative relations. The U.S. needed to “win” the Cold War, not just end it. It needed to declare itself and prove itself to be the sole superpower of the world, the one that would unilaterally write the rules of a new U.S.-led “rules-based order.” The post-1992 U.S. therefore launched wars and expanded its vast network of military bases as it saw fit, steadfastly and ostentatiously ignoring the red lines of other nations, indeed aiming to drive nuclear adversaries into humiliating retreats.
Since 1992, every president has left the U.S. and the world closer to nuclear annihilation than his predecessor. The Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight when Clinton came to office, but just 9 minutes when he left it. Bush pushed the clock to just 5 minutes, Obama to 3 minutes, and Trump to a mere 100 seconds. Now Biden has taken the clock to 90 seconds.
Biden has led the U.S. into three fulminant crises, any one of which could end up in Armageddon. By insisting on NATO enlargement to Ukraine, against Russia’s bright red line, Biden has repeatedly pushed for Russia’s humiliating retreat. By siding with a genocidal Israel, he has stoked a new Middle East arms race and a dangerously expanding Middle East conflict. By taunting China over Taiwan, which the U.S. ostensibly recognizes as part of one China, he is inviting a war with China. Trump similarly stirred the nuclear pot on several fronts, most flagrantly with China and Iran.
Washington seems of a single mind these days: more funding for wars in Ukraine and Gaza, more armaments for Taiwan. We slouch ever closer to Armageddon. Polls show the American people overwhelmingly disapprove of U.S. foreign policy, but their opinion counts for very little. We need to shout for peace from every hilltop. The survival of our children and grandchildren depends on it.Keep ReadingShow Less
The Legacy of JFK’s ‘Strategy for Peace’
I have always thought that the global peace movement began in the wake of the escalation of the Vietnam War, but reading Kennedy’s speech has made me realize otherwise.
Jun 15, 2023
Was he kidding? Are these words for real?
“I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived—yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.”
This was 60 years ago: June 10, 1963. John F. Kennedy—less than six months before his assassination—delivered a commencement address at American University. He spoke like a renegade, defying the certainties of state, the old Cross of Iron, that war is inevitable and always (when we wage it) necessary. At the time, the United States was ankle-deep in the Vietnam War and, at least according to some accounts, Kennedy wanted out. He was also in direct communication with Nikita Khrushchev; the two, working in sync, had averted a nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis less than a year earlier, and were in the process of establishing a nuclear disarmament treaty.
You mean peace actually had political traction then, at least for a brief moment in time? It wasn’t just a cry of protest from the social margins, aka, a fantasy?
My takeaway, after reading Kennedy’s speech—“A Strategy of Peace”—all these decades later, is stunned wonderment. You mean peace actually had political traction then, at least for a brief moment in time? It wasn’t just a cry of protest from the social margins, aka, a fantasy? The creation of a global political structure based on cooperation rather than domination (or mutually assured destruction), was truly in the works?
“Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles—which can only destroy and never create—is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.”
Kennedy’s words dig deeper into basic sanity than the generic political blather I’ve gotten used to in my lifetime, which would never, ever, ever challenge U.S. militarism or fail to glorify it, much less suggest that the creation of peace requires the participation of everyone on the planet, including our declared enemies.
“So, let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
This is an American president, acknowledging that the commies breathe the same air that we do, and cherish their children as much as we do? He didn’t simply want “them” to disarm. His own country also needed to disarm. Yeah, he was a renegade. He had come to realize that the generals who surrounded him, some of whom were pushing for the use of nukes in Vietnam, were a far greater threat to global peace and sanity than Khrushchev.
And, oh yeah, as Al Jazeera noted: “After Kennedy’s assassination, instead of an end to American involvement in Vietnam, the U.S. deployed 100,000 troops in 1965—with more than 530,000 in country by 1968—and a decade of carnage was under way.”
That’s the country I live in. How many stupid and horrific wars have we waged in my lifetime? How many politicians have defended, and voted for, these wars? When it comes to peace, when it comes to disarmament, are we not a democracy in name only? “Democracy”—oh, what a useful public-relations cliché! But when it comes to countering militarism, it means absolutely nothing, because that’s not allowed. The U.S. has one role only: to destroy evil, and that requires a trillion-dollar annual military budget.
So digging 60 years into the past, reading the words of a president who—my God—declared that this nation must look inward, at its own wrongs and shortcomings, rather than merely condemn its enemies, opens up the peace movement, links it, oh so tentatively, to the highest levels of government.
“What kind of peace do I mean?” he asked. “What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
A president transcending nationalism, envisioning a world beyond “USA! USA!”? Was Kennedy daring to look beyond his own interests—his own re-election—and the interests of his party? Apparently so. He understood that “the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war” but decided to pursue it anyway, because “we have no more urgent task.”
But Kennedy was killed and the pursuit of peace ground to a halt. Soon enough, the war in Vietnam “escalated.” I have always thought that the global peace movement began in the wake of this escalation, but reading Kennedy’s speech has made me realize otherwise. The peace movement—the peace process, to be more precise—was already under way. Then it was interrupted by one magic bullet.
It’s been in the political margins ever since.
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The Doomsday Clock
Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and the Prospects for Survival
Jun 13, 2016
In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced its famous Doomsday Clock to three minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for 30 years. The Bulletin's statement explaining this advance toward catastrophe invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and "unchecked climate change." The call condemned world leaders, who "have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe," endangering "every person on Earth [by] failing to perform their most important duty -- ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization."
Since then, there has been good reason to consider moving the hands even closer to doomsday.
As 2015 ended, world leaders met in Paris to address the severe problem of "unchecked climate change." Hardly a day passes without new evidence of how severe the crisis is. To pick almost at random, shortly before the opening of the Paris conference, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab released a study that both surprised and alarmed scientists who have been studying Arctic ice. The study showed that a huge Greenland glacier, Zachariae Isstrom, "broke loose from a glaciologically stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat," an unexpected and ominous development. The glacier "holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) if it were to melt completely. And now it's on a crash diet, losing 5 billion tons of mass every year. All that ice is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean."
Yet there was little expectation that world leaders in Paris would "act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe." And even if by some miracle they had, it would have been of limited value, for reasons that should be deeply disturbing.
When the agreement was approved in Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who hosted the talks, announced that it is "legally binding." That may be the hope, but there are more than a few obstacles that are worthy of careful attention.
In all of the extensive media coverage of the Paris conference, perhaps the most important sentences were these, buried near the end of a long New York Times analysis: "Traditionally, negotiators have sought to forge a legally binding treaty that needed ratification by the governments of the participating countries to have force. There is no way to get that in this case, because of the United States. A treaty would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill without the required two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. So the voluntary plans are taking the place of mandatory, top-down targets." And voluntary plans are a guarantee of failure.
"Because of the United States." More precisely, because of the Republican Party, which by now is becoming a real danger to decent human survival.
The conclusions are underscored in another Times piece on the Paris agreement. At the end of a long story lauding the achievement, the article notes that the system created at the conference "depends heavily on the views of the future world leaders who will carry out those policies. In the United States, every Republican candidate running for president in 2016 has publicly questioned or denied the science of climate change, and has voiced opposition to Mr. Obama's climate change policies. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, who has led the charge against Mr. Obama's climate change agenda, said, 'Before his international partners pop the champagne, they should remember that this is an unattainable deal based on a domestic energy plan that is likely illegal, that half the states have sued to halt, and that Congress has already voted to reject.'"
"The undermining of functioning democracy is one of the contributions of the neoliberal assault on the world's population in the past generation."
Both parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period of the past generation. Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called "moderate Republicans." Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a "radical insurgency" that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics. With the rightward drift, the Republican Party's dedication to wealth and privilege has become so extreme that its actual policies could not attract voters, so it has had to seek a new popular base, mobilized on other grounds: evangelical Christians who await the Second Coming, nativists who fear that "they" are taking our country away from us, unreconstructed racists, people with real grievances who gravely mistake their causes, and others like them who are easy prey to demagogues and can readily become a radical insurgency.
In recent years, the Republican establishment had managed to suppress the voices of the base that it has mobilized. But no longer. By the end of 2015 the establishment was expressing considerable dismay and desperation over its inability to do so, as the Republican base and its choices fell out of control.
Republican elected officials and contenders for the next presidential election expressed open contempt for the Paris deliberations, refusing to even attend the proceedings. The three candidates who led in the polls at the time -- Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson -- adopted the stand of the largely evangelical base: humans have no impact on global warming, if it is happening at all.
The other candidates reject government action to deal with the matter. Immediately after Obama spoke in Paris, pledging that the United States would be in the vanguard seeking global action, the Republican-dominated Congress voted to scuttle his recent Environmental Protection Agency rules to cut carbon emissions. As the press reported, this was "a provocative message to more than 100 [world] leaders that the American president does not have the full support of his government on climate policy" -- a bit of an understatement. Meanwhile Lamar Smith, Republican head of the House's Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, carried forward his jihad against government scientists who dare to report the facts.
The message is clear. American citizens face an enormous responsibility right at home.
A companion story in the New York Times reports that "two-thirds of Americans support the United States joining a binding international agreement to curb growth of greenhouse gas emissions." And by a five-to-three margin, Americans regard the climate as more important than the economy. But it doesn't matter. Public opinion is dismissed. That fact, once again, sends a strong message to Americans. It is their task to cure the dysfunctional political system, in which popular opinion is a marginal factor. The disparity between public opinion and policy, in this case, has significant implications for the fate of the world.
We should, of course, have no illusions about a past "golden age." Nevertheless, the developments just reviewed constitute significant changes. The undermining of functioning democracy is one of the contributions of the neoliberal assault on the world's population in the past generation. And this is not happening just in the U.S.; in Europe the impact may be even worse.
The Black Swan We Can Never See
Let us turn to the other (and traditional) concern of the atomic scientists who adjust the Doomsday Clock: nuclear weapons. The current threat of nuclear war amply justifies their January 2015 decision to advance the clock two minutes toward midnight. What has happened since reveals the growing threat even more clearly, a matter that elicits insufficient concern, in my opinion.
The last time the Doomsday Clock reached three minutes before midnight was in 1983, at the time of the Able Archer exercises of the Reagan administration; these exercises simulated attacks on the Soviet Union to test their defense systems. Recently released Russian archives reveal that the Russians were deeply concerned by the operations and were preparing to respond, which would have meant, simply: The End.
We have learned more about these rash and reckless exercises, and about how close the world was to disaster, from U.S. military and intelligence analyst Melvin Goodman, who was CIA division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs at the time. "In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed the Kremlin," Goodman writes, "the Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon's risky measures included sending U.S. strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, and naval exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on Soviet targets."
We now know that the world was saved from likely nuclear destruction in those frightening days by the decision of a Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to transmit to higher authorities the report of automated detection systems that the USSR was under missile attack. Accordingly, Petrov takes his place alongside Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov, who, at a dangerous moment of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, refused to authorize the launching of nuclear torpedoes when the subs were under attack by U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine.
Other recently revealed examples enrich the already frightening record. Nuclear security expert Bruce Blair reports that "the closest the U.S. came to an inadvertent strategic launch decision by the President happened in 1979, when a NORAD early warning training tape depicting a full-scale Soviet strategic strike inadvertently coursed through the actual early warning network. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was called twice in the night and told the U.S. was under attack, and he was just picking up the phone to persuade President Carter that a full-scale response needed to be authorized right away, when a third call told him it was a false alarm."
This newly revealed example brings to mind a critical incident of 1995, when the trajectory of a U.S.-Norwegian rocket carrying scientific equipment resembled the path of a nuclear missile. This elicited Russian concerns that quickly reached President Boris Yeltsin, who had to decide whether to launch a nuclear strike.
Blair adds other examples from his own experience. In one case, at the time of the 1967 Middle East war, "a carrier nuclear-aircraft crew was sent an actual attack order instead of an exercise/training nuclear order." A few years later, in the early 1970s, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha "retransmitted an exercise... launch order as an actual real-world launch order." In both cases code checks had failed; human intervention prevented the launch. "But you get the drift here," Blair adds. "It just wasn't that rare for these kinds of snafus to occur."
Blair made these comments in reaction to a report by airman John Bordne that has only recently been cleared by the U.S. Air Force. Bordne was serving on the U.S. military base in Okinawa in October 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a moment of serious tensions in Asia as well. The U.S. nuclear alert system had been raised to DEFCON 2, one level below DEFCON 1, when nuclear missiles can be launched immediately. At the peak of the crisis, on October 28th, a missile crew received authorization to launch its nuclear missiles, in error. They decided not to, averting likely nuclear war and joining Petrov and Arkhipov in the pantheon of men who decided to disobey protocol and thereby saved the world.
As Blair observed, such incidents are not uncommon. One recent expert study found dozens of false alarms every year during the period reviewed, 1977 to 1983; the study concluded that the range is 43 to 255 per year. The author of the study, Seth Baum, summarizes with appropriate words: "Nuclear war is the black swan we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us. We delay eliminating the risk at our own peril. Now is the time to address the threat, because now we are still alive."
These reports, like those in Eric Schlosser's book Command and Control, keep mostly to U.S. systems.The Russian ones aredoubtless much more error-prone. That is not to mention the extreme danger posed by the systems of others, notably Pakistan.
"A War Is No Longer Unthinkable"
Sometimes the threat has not been accident, but adventurism, as in the case of Able Archer. The most extreme case was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the threat of disaster was all too real. The way it was handled is shocking; so is the manner in which it is commonly interpreted.
With this grim record in mind, it is useful to look at strategic debates and planning. One chilling case is the Clinton-era 1995 STRATCOM study "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence." The study calls for retaining the right of first strike, even against nonnuclear states. It explains that nuclear weapons are constantly used, in the sense that they "cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict." It also urges a "national persona" of irrationality and vindictiveness to intimidate the world.
Current doctrine is explored in the lead article in the journal International Security, one of the most authoritative in the domain of strategic doctrine. The authors explain that the United States is committed to "strategic primacy" -- that is, insulation from retaliatory strike. This is the logic behind Obama's "new triad" (strengthening submarine and land-based missiles and the bomber force), along with missile defense to counter a retaliatory strike. The concern raised by the authors is that the U.S. demand for strategic primacy might induce China to react by abandoning its "no first use" policy and by expanding its limited deterrent. The authors think that they will not, but the prospect remains uncertain. Clearly the doctrine enhances the dangers in a tense and conflicted region.
The same is true of NATO expansion to the east in violation of verbal promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev when the USSR was collapsing and he agreed to allow a unified Germany to become part of NATO -- quite a remarkable concession when one thinks about the history of the century. Expansion to East Germany took place at once. In the following years, NATO expanded to Russia's borders; there are now substantial threats even to incorporate Ukraine, in Russia's geostrategic heartland. One can imagine how the United States would react if the Warsaw Pact were still alive, most of Latin America had joined, and now Mexico and Canada were applying for membership.
Aside from that, Russia understands as well as China (and U.S. strategists, for that matter) that the U.S. missile defense systems near Russia's borders are, in effect, a first-strike weapon, aimed to establish strategic primacy -- immunity from retaliation. Perhaps their mission is utterly unfeasible, as some specialists argue. But the targets can never be confident of that. And Russia's militant reactions are quite naturally interpreted by NATO as a threat to the West.
One prominent British Ukraine scholar poses what he calls a "fateful geographical paradox": that NATO "exists to manage the risks created by its existence."
The threats are very real right now. Fortunately, the shooting down of a Russian plane by a Turkish F-16 in November 2015 did not lead to an international incident, but it might have, particularly given the circumstances. The plane was on a bombing mission in Syria. It passed for a mere 17 seconds through a fringe of Turkish territory that protrudes into Syria, and evidently was heading for Syria, where it crashed. Shooting it down appears to have been a needlessly reckless and provocative act, and an act with consequences.
"It has been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear winter."
In reaction, Russia announced that its bombers will henceforth be accompanied by jet fighters and that it is deploying sophisticated anti-aircraft missile systems in Syria. Russia also ordered its missile cruiser Moskva, with its long-range air defense system, to move closer to shore, so that it may be "ready to destroy any aerial target posing a potential danger to our aircraft," Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced. All of this sets the stage for confrontations that could be lethal.
Tensions are also constant at NATO-Russian borders, including military maneuvers on both sides. Shortly after the Doomsday Clock was moved ominously close to midnight, the national press reported that "U.S. military combat vehicles paraded Wednesday through an Estonian city that juts into Russia, a symbolic act that highlighted the stakes for both sides amid the worst tensions between the West and Russia since the Cold War." Shortly before, a Russian warplane came within seconds of colliding with a Danish civilian airliner. Both sides are practicing rapid mobilization and redeployment of forces to the Russia-NATO border, and "both believe a war is no longer unthinkable."
Prospects for Survival
If that is so, both sides are beyond insanity, since a war might well destroy everything. It has been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear winter.
But that is today's world. And not just today's -- that is what we have been living with for 70 years. The reasoning throughout is remarkable. As we have seen, security for the population is typically not a leading concern of policymakers. That has been true from the earliest days of the nuclear age, when in the centers of policy formation there were no efforts -- apparently not even expressed thoughts -- to eliminate the one serious potential threat to the United States, as might have been possible. And so matters continue to the present, in ways just briefly sampled.
"Prospects for decent long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course."
That is the world we have been living in, and live in today. Nuclear weapons pose a constant danger of instant destruction, but at least we know in principle how to alleviate the threat, even to eliminate it, an obligation undertaken (and disregarded) by the nuclear powers that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The threat of global warming is not instantaneous, though it is dire in the longer term and might escalate suddenly. That we have the capacity to deal with it is not entirely clear, but there can be no doubt that the longer the delay, the more extreme the calamity.
Prospects for decent long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course. A large share of the responsibility is in our hands -- the opportunities as well.
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This LGBT Pride, Let's Celebrate Difference Not Sameness
Jun 04, 2015
It's hard to imagine an American poet more celebrated than four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost, whose most famous poem concludes:
"Two roads diverged in a wood and I --I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
When the most celebrated poet's most well-known lines praise difference why is it that we're so scared of it?
Maybe we need more poets. That's what John F Kennedy said just weeks before his death, at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. It was soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War was raging on, ten million Americans needed jobs, and America needed strength, said Kennedy, but strength, he said, "takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant."
The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation's greatness, the President continued, "but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable... for they determine whether we use power or power uses us."
Music and poetry and the arts push us, said Kennedy. "When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence."
That was half a century ago. Today we have entire months supposedly dedicated to "diversity", including this one, June, LGBTQI Pride Month.
Mostly, we don't celebrate diversity; we celebrate sameness. We honor all the progress that we lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans Americans have made, becoming "accepted" as, well, just like everybody else.
Now I'm all for everyone enjoying the same rights in these United States. I support that - on-going - project. But I'd like to celebrate something else too: roads less travelled. Especially the roads less travelled that LGBTQI people take daily, opening up the possibilities for everybody.
The same old roads will take us to the same old destinations. It's divergence, as the straight, white poet once wrote, that makes all the difference.
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Why National Security Has Nothing to Do With Security
How Many Minutes to Midnight? Hiroshima Day 2014
Aug 05, 2014
If some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of Homo sapiens, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before nuclear weapons) and NWE (the nuclear weapons era). The latter era, of course, opened on August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but -- so the evidence suggests -- not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts.
Day one of the NWE was marked by the "success" of Little Boy, a simple atomic bomb. On day four, Nagasaki experienced the technological triumph of Fat Man, a more sophisticated design. Five days later came what the official Air Force history calls the "grand finale," a 1,000-plane raid -- no mean logistical achievement -- attacking Japan's cities and killing many thousands of people, with leaflets falling among the bombs reading "Japan has surrendered." Truman announced that surrender before the last B-29 returned to its base.
Those were the auspicious opening days of the NWE. As we now enter its 70th year, we should be contemplating with wonder that we have survived. We can only guess how many years remain.
Some reflections on these grim prospects were offered by General Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which controls nuclear weapons and strategy. Twenty years ago, he wrote that we had so far survived the NWE "by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion."
Reflecting on his long career in developing nuclear weapons strategies and organizing the forces to implement them efficiently, he described himself ruefully as having been "among the most avid of these keepers of the faith in nuclear weapons." But, he continued, he had come to realize that it was now his "burden to declare with all of the conviction I can muster that in my judgment they served us extremely ill." And he asked, "By what authority do succeeding generations of leaders in the nuclear-weapons states usurp the power to dictate the odds of continued life on our planet? Most urgently, why does such breathtaking audacity persist at a moment when we should stand trembling in the face of our folly and united in our commitment to abolish its most deadly manifestations?"
He termed the U.S. strategic plan of 1960 that called for an automated all-out strike on the Communist world "the single most absurd and irresponsible document I have ever reviewed in my life." Its Soviet counterpart was probably even more insane. But it is important to bear in mind that there are competitors, not least among them the easy acceptance of extraordinary threats to survival.
Survival in the Early Cold War Years
According to received doctrine in scholarship and general intellectual discourse, the prime goal of state policy is "national security." There is ample evidence, however, that the doctrine of national security does not encompass the security of the population. The record reveals that, for instance, the threat of instant destruction by nuclear weapons has not ranked high among the concerns of planners. That much was demonstrated early on, and remains true to the present moment.
In the early days of the NWE, the U.S. was overwhelmingly powerful and enjoyed remarkable security: it controlled the hemisphere, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the opposite sides of those oceans as well. Long before World War II, it had already become by far the richest country in the world, with incomparable advantages. Its economy boomed during the war, while other industrial societies were devastated or severely weakened. By the opening of the new era, the U.S. possessed about half of total world wealth and an even greater percentage of its manufacturing capacity.
There was, however, a potential threat: intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. That threat was discussed in the standard scholarly study of nuclear policies, carried out with access to high-level sources -- Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years by McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies.
Bundy wrote that "the timely development of ballistic missiles during the Eisenhower administration is one of the best achievements of those eight years. Yet it is well to begin with a recognition that both the United States and the Soviet Union might be in much less nuclear danger today if [those] missiles had never been developed." He then added an instructive comment: "I am aware of no serious contemporary proposal, in or out of either government, that ballistic missiles should somehow be banned by agreement." In short, there was apparently no thought of trying to prevent the sole serious threat to the U.S., the threat of utter destruction in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Could that threat have been taken off the table? We cannot, of course, be sure, but it was hardly inconceivable. The Russians, far behind in industrial development and technological sophistication, were in a far more threatening environment. Hence, they were significantly more vulnerable to such weapons systems than the U.S. There might have been opportunities to explore these possibilities, but in the extraordinary hysteria of the day they could hardly have even been perceived. And that hysteria was indeed extraordinary. An examination of the rhetoric of central official documents of that moment like National Security Council Paper NSC-68 remains quite shocking, even discounting Secretary of State Dean Acheson's injunction that it is necessary to be "clearer than truth."
One indication of possible opportunities to blunt the threat was a remarkable proposal by Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin in 1952, offering to allow Germany to be unified with free elections on the condition that it would not then join a hostile military alliance. That was hardly an extreme condition in light of the history of the past half-century during which Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia twice, exacting a terrible toll.
Stalin's proposal was taken seriously by the respected political commentator James Warburg, but otherwise mostly ignored or ridiculed at the time. Recent scholarship has begun to take a different view. The bitterly anti-Communist Soviet scholar Adam Ulam has taken the status of Stalin's proposal to be an "unresolved mystery." Washington "wasted little effort in flatly rejecting Moscow's initiative," he has written, on grounds that "were embarrassingly unconvincing." The political, scholarly, and general intellectual failure left open "the basic question," Ulam added: "Was Stalin genuinely ready to sacrifice the newly created German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the altar of real democracy," with consequences for world peace and for American security that could have been enormous?
Reviewing recent research in Soviet archives, one of the most respected Cold War scholars, Melvyn Leffler, has observed that many scholars were surprised to discover "[Lavrenti] Beria -- the sinister, brutal head of the [Russian] secret police -- propos[ed] that the Kremlin offer the West a deal on the unification and neutralization of Germany," agreeing "to sacrifice the East German communist regime to reduce East-West tensions" and improve internal political and economic conditions in Russia -- opportunities that were squandered in favor of securing German participation in NATO.
Under the circumstances, it is not impossible that agreements might then have been reached that would have protected the security of the American population from the gravest threat on the horizon. But that possibility apparently was not considered, a striking indication of how slight a role authentic security plays in state policy.
The Cuban Missile Crisis and Beyond
That conclusion was underscored repeatedly in the years that followed. When Nikita Khrushchev took control in Russia in 1953 after Stalin's death, he recognized that the USSR could not compete militarily with the U.S., the richest and most powerful country in history, with incomparable advantages. If it ever hoped to escape its economic backwardness and the devastating effect of the last world war, it would need to reverse the arms race.
Accordingly, Khrushchev proposed sharp mutual reductions in offensive weapons. The incoming Kennedy administration considered the offer and rejected it, instead turning to rapid military expansion, even though it was already far in the lead. The late Kenneth Waltz, supported by other strategic analysts with close connections to U.S. intelligence, wrote then that the Kennedy administration "undertook the largest strategic and conventional peace-time military build-up the world has yet seen... even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in the conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States." Again, harming national security while enhancing state power.
U.S. intelligence verified that huge cuts had indeed been made in active Soviet military forces, both in terms of aircraft and manpower. In 1963, Khrushchev again called for new reductions. As a gesture, he withdrew troops from East Germany and called on Washington to reciprocate. That call, too, was rejected. William Kaufmann, a former top Pentagon aide and leading analyst of security issues, described the U.S. failure to respond to Khrushchev's initiatives as, in career terms, "the one regret I have."
The Soviet reaction to the U.S. build-up of those years was to place nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962 to try to redress the balance at least slightly. The move was also motivated in part by Kennedy's terrorist campaign against Fidel Castro's Cuba, which was scheduled to lead to invasion that very month, as Russia and Cuba may have known. The ensuing "missile crisis" was "the most dangerous moment in history," in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy's adviser and confidant.
As the crisis peaked in late October, Kennedy received a secret letter from Khrushchev offering to end it by simultaneous public withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The latter were obsolete missiles, already ordered withdrawn by the Kennedy administration because they were being replaced by far more lethal Polaris submarines to be stationed in the Mediterranean.
Kennedy's subjective estimate at that moment was that if he refused the Soviet premier's offer, there was a 33% to 50% probability of nuclear war -- a war that, as President Eisenhower had warned, would have destroyed the northern hemisphere. Kennedy nonetheless refused Khrushchev's proposal for public withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba and Turkey; only the withdrawal from Cuba could be public, so as to protect the U.S. right to place missiles on Russia's borders or anywhere else it chose.
It is hard to think of a more horrendous decision in history -- and for this, he is still highly praised for his cool courage and statesmanship.
Ten years later, in the last days of the 1973 Israel-Arab war, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser to President Nixon, called a nuclear alert. The purpose was to warn the Russians not to interfere with his delicate diplomatic maneuvers designed to ensure an Israeli victory, but of a limited sort so that the U.S. would still be in control of the region unilaterally. And the maneuvers were indeed delicate. The U.S. and Russia had jointly imposed a cease-fire, but Kissinger secretly informed the Israelis that they could ignore it. Hence the need for the nuclear alert to frighten the Russians away. The security of Americans had its usual status.
Ten years later, the Reagan administration launched operations to probe Russian air defenses by simulating air and naval attacks and a high-level nuclear alert that the Russians were intended to detect. These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment. Washington was deploying Pershing II strategic missiles in Europe with a five-minute flight time to Moscow. President Reagan had also announced the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") program, which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike weapon, a standard interpretation of missile defense on all sides. And other tensions were rising.
Naturally, these actions caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the U.S., was quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. Newly released archives reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously assumed. A CIA study entitled "The War Scare Was for Real" concluded that U.S. intelligence may have underestimated Russian concerns and the threat of a Russian preventative nuclear strike. The exercises "almost became a prelude to a preventative nuclear strike," according to an account in the Journal of Strategic Studies.
It was even more dangerous than that, as we learned last September, when the BBC reported that right in the midst of these world-threatening developments, Russia's early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the United States, sending its nuclear system onto the highest-level alert. The protocol for the Soviet military was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own. Fortunately, the officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, decided to disobey orders and not report the warnings to his superiors. He received an official reprimand. And thanks to his dereliction of duty, we're still alive to talk about it.
The security of the population was no more a high priority for Reagan administration planners than for their predecessors. And so it continues to the present, even putting aside the numerous near-catastrophic nuclear accidents that occurred over the years, many reviewed in Eric Schlosser's chilling study Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. In other words, it is hard to contest General Butler's conclusions.
Survival in the Post-Cold War Era
The record of post-Cold War actions and doctrines is hardly reassuring either. Every self-respecting president has to have a doctrine. The Clinton Doctrine was encapsulated in the slogan "multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must." In congressional testimony, the phrase "when we must" was explained more fully: the U.S. is entitled to resort to "unilateral use of military power" to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources." Meanwhile, STRATCOM in the Clinton era produced an important study entitled "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence," issued well after the Soviet Union had collapsed and Clinton was extending President George H.W. Bush's program of expanding NATO to the east in violation of promises to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev -- with reverberations to the present.
That STRATCOM study was concerned with "the role of nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War era." A central conclusion: that the U.S. must maintain the right to launch a first strike, even against non-nuclear states. Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be at the ready because they "cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict." They were, that is, constantly being used, just as you're using a gun if you aim but don't fire one while robbing a store (a point that Daniel Ellsberg has repeatedly stressed). STRATCOM went on to advise that "planners should not be too rational about determining... what the opponent values the most." Everything should simply be targeted. "[I]t hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed... That the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project." It is "beneficial [for our strategic posture] if some elements may appear to be potentially 'out of control,'" thus posing a constant threat of nuclear attack -- a severe violation of the U.N. Charter, if anyone cares.
Not much here about the noble goals constantly proclaimed -- or for that matter the obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to make "good faith" efforts to eliminate this scourge of the earth. What resounds, rather, is an adaptation of Hilaire Belloc's famous couplet about the Maxim gun (to quote the great African historian Chinweizu):
"Whatever happens, we have got,
The Atom Bomb, and they have not."
After Clinton came, of course, George W. Bush, whose broad endorsement of preventative war easily encompassed Japan's attack in December 1941 on military bases in two U.S. overseas possessions, at a time when Japanese militarists were well aware that B-17 Flying Fortresses were being rushed off assembly lines and deployed to those bases with the intent "to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu." That was how the prewar plans were described by their architect, Air Force General Claire Chennault, with the enthusiastic approval of President Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall.
Then comes Barack Obama, with pleasant words about working to abolish nuclear weapons -- combined with plans to spend $1 trillion on the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the next 30 years, a percentage of the military budget "comparable to spending for procurement of new strategic systems in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan," according to a study by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Obama has also not hesitated to play with fire for political gain. Take for example the capture and assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs. Obama brought it up with pride in an important speech on national security in May 2013. It was widely covered, but one crucial paragraph was ignored.
Obama hailed the operation but added that it could not be the norm. The reason, he said, was that the risks "were immense." The SEALs might have been "embroiled in an extended firefight." Even though, by luck, that didn't happen, "the cost to our relationship with Pakistan and the backlash among the Pakistani public over encroachment on their territory was... severe."
Let us now add a few details. The SEALs were ordered to fight their way out if apprehended. They would not have been left to their fate if "embroiled in an extended firefight." The full force of the U.S. military would have been used to extricate them. Pakistan has a powerful, well-trained military, highly protective of state sovereignty. It also has nuclear weapons, and Pakistani specialists are concerned about the possible penetration of their nuclear security system by jihadi elements. It is also no secret that the population has been embittered and radicalized by Washington's drone terror campaign and other policies.
While the SEALs were still in the bin Laden compound, Pakistani Chief of Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was informed of the raid and ordered the military "to confront any unidentified aircraft," which he assumed would be from India. Meanwhile in Kabul, U.S. war commander General David Petraeus ordered "warplanes to respond" if the Pakistanis "scrambled their fighter jets." As Obama said, by luck the worst didn't happen, though it could have been quite ugly. But the risks were faced without noticeable concern. Or subsequent comment.
As General Butler observed, it is a near miracle that we have escaped destruction so far, and the longer we tempt fate, the less likely it is that we can hope for divine intervention to perpetuate the miracle.
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