BY NOAM CHOMSKY | AUGUST 5, 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.
Noam Chomsky
is Institute Professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his recent books are Hegemony
or Survival, Failed States, Power Systems, Occupy, andHopes and Prospects. His
latest book, Masters of Mankind, will be published soon by Haymarket Books,
which is also reissuing twelve of his classic books in new editions over the
coming year. His website is www.chomsky.info.
This piece
has been reprinted from TomDispatch.com.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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