The Week The World Stood Still
By Noam Chomsky
The Cuban Missile Crisis and Ownership of the World
The world stood still 50 years ago during the last week of
October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed
nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended -- though
unknown to the public, only officially.
The image of the world standing still is the turn of phrase
of Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library,
who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings
where Kennedy and a close circle of advisers debated how to respond to the
crisis. Those meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear
on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively
temperate compared to other participants, who were unaware that they were
speaking to history.
Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review
of this critically important documentary record, finally declassified in the
late 1990s. I will keep to that here. “Never before or since,” he concludes,
“has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of
dangerous deliberations,” culminating in “the week the world stood still.”
There was good reason for the global concern. A nuclear war
was all too imminent, a war that might “destroy the Northern Hemisphere,”
President Dwight Eisenhower had warned. Kennedy’s own judgment was that the
probability of war might have been as high as 50%. Estimates became higher as
the confrontation reached its peak and the “secret doomsday plan to ensure the
survival of the government was put into effect” in Washington, as described by
journalist Michael Dobbs in his well-researched bestseller on the crisis
(though he doesn’t explain why there would be much point in doing so, given the
likely nature of nuclear war).
Dobbs quotes Dino Brugioni, “a key member of the CIA team
monitoring the Soviet missile buildup,” who saw no way out except “war and complete
destruction” as the clock moved to “one minute to midnight,” the title of his
book. Kennedy’s close associate, historian Arthur Schlesinger, described the
events as “the most dangerous moment in human history.” Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara wondered aloud whether he “would live to see another Saturday
night,” and later recognized that “we lucked out” -- barely.
A closer look at what took place adds grim overtones to
these judgments, with reverberations to the present moment.
There are several candidates for “the most dangerous
moment.” One is October 27th, when U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine
around Cuba were dropping depth charges on Soviet submarines. According to
Soviet accounts, reported by the National Security Archive, submarine
commanders were “rattled enough to talk about firing nuclear torpedoes, whose
15 kiloton explosive yields approximated the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in
August 1945.”
In one case, a reported decision to assemble a nuclear torpedo
for battle readiness was aborted at the last minute by Second Captain Vasili
Arkhipov, who may have saved the world from nuclear disaster. There is little
doubt what the U.S. reaction would have been had the torpedo been fired, or how
the Russians would have responded as their country was going up in smoke.
Kennedy had already declared the highest nuclear alert short
of launch (DEFCON 2), which authorized “NATO aircraft with Turkish pilots ...
[or others] ... to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb,” according to the
well-informed Harvard University strategic analyst Graham Allison, writing in
the major establishment journal Foreign Affairs.
Another candidate is October 26th. That day has been
selected as “the most dangerous moment” by B-52 pilot Major Don Clawson, who
piloted one of those NATO aircraft and provides a hair-raising description of
details of the Chrome Dome (CD) missions during the crisis -- “B-52s on
airborne alert” with nuclear weapons “on board and ready to use.”
October 26th was the day when “the nation was closest to
nuclear war,” he writes in his “irreverent anecdotes of an Air Force pilot,” Is
That Something the Crew Should Know? On that day, Clawson himself was in a good
position to set off a likely terminal cataclysm. He concludes, “We were damned
lucky we didn’t blow up the world -- and no thanks to the political or military
leadership of this country.”
The errors, confusions, near-accidents, and miscomprehension
of the leadership that Clawson reports are startling enough, but nothing like
the operative command-and-control rules -- or lack of them. As Clawson recounts
his experiences during the 15 24-hour CD missions he flew, the maximum
possible, the official commanders “did not possess the capability to prevent a
rogue-crew or crew-member from arming and releasing their thermonuclear
weapons,” or even from broadcasting a mission that would have sent off “the
entire Airborne Alert force without possibility of recall.” Once the crew was
airborne carrying thermonuclear weapons, he writes, “it would have been
possible to arm and drop them all with no further input from the ground. There
was no inhibitor on any of the systems.”
About one-third of the total force was in the air, according
to General David Burchinal, director of plans on the Air Staff at Air Force
Headquarters. The Strategic Air Command (SAC), technically in charge, appears
to have had little control. And according to Clawson’s account, the civilian
National Command Authority was kept in the dark by SAC, which means that the
ExComm “deciders” pondering the fate of the world knew even less. General
Burchinal’s oral history is no less hair-raising, and reveals even greater
contempt for the civilian command. According to him, Russian capitulation was
never in doubt. The CD operations were designed to make it crystal clear to the
Russians that they were hardly even competing in the military confrontation,
and could quickly have been destroyed.
There has been no shortage of severe dangers since the
missile crisis. Ten years later, during the 1973 Israel-Arab war, National
Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert (DEFCON 3)
to warn the Russians to keep their hands off while he was secretly authorizing
Israel to violate the cease-fire imposed by the U.S. and Russia. When Reagan
came into office a few years later, the U.S. launched operations probing
Russian defenses and simulating air and naval attacks, while placing Pershing
missiles in Germany with a five-minute flight time to Russian targets, providing
what the CIA called a “super-sudden first strike” capability. Naturally this
caused great alarm in Russia, which unlike the U.S. has repeatedly been invaded
and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. There have been
hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first strike minutes before
launch, after automated systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian
records, but there’s no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone.
Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war
several times, and the sources of the conflict remain. Both have refused to
sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, along with Israel, and have received U.S.
support for development of their nuclear weapons programs -- until today in the
case of India, now a U.S. ally. War threats in the Middle East, which might
become reality very soon, once again escalate the dangers.
In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to
accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands. But we can hardly count on such sanity
forever. It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided. There is
more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert
Einstein, almost 60 years ago, that we must face a choice that is “stark and
dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall
mankind renounce war?”
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