Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Cuban Missile Crisis

The Missile Crisis that Never Went Away

This article was originally published by Truthdig.

Fifty years after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the US and Russian nuclear confrontation continues. Both nations still keep a total of approximately 800 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), armed with more than 1,700 strategic nuclear warheads at launch-ready status, able to be launched with only a few minutes warning.

The US now has 450 land-based Minuteman III missiles that carry 500 strategic nuclear warheads. As their name implies, they require at most several minutes to be launched. The US also has 14 US Trident submarines and normally 12 are operational. Each Trident now carries about 96 independently targetable warheads and 5 Tridents are reportedly kept in position to fire their missiles within 15 minutes. This adds another 120 missiles carrying 480 warheads that qualify as being “launch-ready”.

The missiles and warheads on the Trident subs have been “upgraded” and “modernized” to make them accurate enough for first-strike weapons against Russian ICBM silos. Missiles fired from Trident subs on patrol in the Norwegian Sea can hit Moscow in less than 10 minutes.

Russia is believed to have 322 land-based ICBMs carrying 1,087 strategic nuclear warheads; at any given time, probably 900 of these are capable of being launched within a few minutes warning. Many of the Russian ICBMs are more than 30 years old. According to a former high-ranking Soviet officer, the commanding officers of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces have the ability to launch their ICBMs directly from their headquarters, by-passing all lower levels of command.

The Russians also have nuclear submarines with ballistic missiles kept at launch-ready status, although Russian subs are not always kept in position to launch (unlike the US Tridents). Missiles launched from Russian submarines on patrol off the US East Coast can, however, hit Washington, D.C., in about 10 minutes.

The combined explosive power of US and Russian launch-ready nuclear weapons is roughly equivalent to 250 times the explosive power of all the bombs exploded during the 6 years of World War II. It would require less than one hour for the launch-ready weapons to destroy their targets.

Both the US and Russian presidents are always accompanied by a military officer carrying “the nuclear football” (called cheget in Russia), a communications device resembling a lap-top computer, which allows either president to order the launch of his nation’s nuclear forces in less than one minute. Both nations still have officers stationed in underground ICBM command centers, sitting every moment of every day in front of missile launch-consoles, always waiting for the presidential order to launch.

For decades, hundreds of US and Russian ICBMs have been kept at high-alert primarily for one reason: fear of a surprise attach by ICBMs or SLBMs. Since a massive nuclear attack will surely destroy both the ICBMs and the command and control system required to order their launch, the military “solution” has always been to launch their ICBMs before the arrival of the perceived attack. And once an ICBM is launched, it cannot be recalled.

Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, both the US and Russia developed and deployed highly automated nuclear command and control systems, which work in conjunction with a network of early warning systems and their nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. The possession of this complex integrated network of satellites, radars, computers, underground missile silos, fleets of submarines, and bombers give both nations the capability and option to launch most of their ICBMs upon warning of attack.

This creates the possibility of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false warning of attack. During peacetime, when political tensions are low, conventional wisdom has it that there is essentially no chance that a false warning of nuclear attack could be accepted as true. However, during an extreme political crisis, or after the advent of military hostilities, such a false attack warning could become increasingly likely and vastly more dangerous.

ICBMs remain out of the sight and the minds of most Americans, yet all the necessary military ingredients for Armageddon remain in place. And despite past presidential announcements that another Cuban Missile Crisis is “unthinkable,” it certainly remains possible.

It is naïve to assume that we will never again be in a military confrontation with Russia – particularly when US/NATO forces and US nuclear weapons remain stationed near Russian borders in Europe, and we continue to surround Russia with missile defense facilities in the face of military threats against these facilities from the Russian president and top Russian military leaders.

In March, 2012, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wrote to one of us (in a personal letter), “One cannot help agreeing to the conclusion that the deployment of missile defense system at the very borders of Russia, as well as upbuilding the system’s capabilities increase the chance that any conventional military confrontation might promptly turn into nuclear war.”

What happens if NATO collides with Russia somewhere in Georgia, Kaliningrad or perhaps Ukraine, shots are fired and Russia decides to carry out its threats to take out US/NATO Missile Defense installations? What happens if the US should have a president who considers Russia the US’s number one geopolitical foe?

For many years it has been standard Russian military procedure to preemptively use nuclear weapons in any conflict where it would be faced with overwhelming military force, for example, against NATO. The Russians oddly call the policy nuclear “de-escalation,” But it would be better described as “limited nuclear escalation. It was developed and implemented after the US broke its promise not to expand NATO eastward (following the reunification of Germany) and NATO bombed Serbian targets.

The Russian “de-escalation” policy presumes that the detonation of nuclear weapons upon the opposing side will cause them to back down; it is essentially a belief that it is possible win a nuclear war through the “limited” use of nuclear weapons. But in the case of NATO, the war would be fought against another nuclear power.

Suppose that NATO responds instead with its US tactical nuclear weapons now based in five European countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey)? Once an exchange of nuclear weapons takes place, what are the chances that the war will remain “limited”?

US and Russian strategic war plans still contain large nuclear strike options with hundreds of preplanned targets, including cities and urban areas in each other’s nation. As long as launch-ready ICBMs exist, these plans can be carried out in less time than it takes to read this article. They are plans that spell disaster for both countries and for civilization.

Cooperation, rather than conflict, still remains possible. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov writes, “Despite the growing hardship we do not close the door either for continuing the dialogue with the US and NATO on missile defense issues or for a practical cooperation in this field. In this respect we find undoubtedly interesting the idea of a freeze on US/NATO deployments of missile defense facilities until the joint Russian-US assessment of the threats is completed.”

This could be an important step towards lowering US-Russian tensions, which continue to revolve around their more than 60-year nuclear confrontation. Ending this confrontation can prevent the next Missile Crisis. Another important step would be the elimination of first-strike ICBMs that continue to threaten the existence of our nation and the human race. This would increase the security of the American people, even if it were done unilaterally.

The US and Russia remain obligated under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue negotiations in good faith on nuclear disarmament in all its aspects. Fifty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, it is well past time to conclude these negotiations. No issue confronting humanity is more urgent than bringing such negotiations to a successful conclusion and moving rapidly to zero nuclear weapons.

October 16, 2012
Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis at Fifty

Fifty years ago this month, the world teetered on the precipice of a nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union during the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis. We were fortunate to have survived that crisis, thanks largely to the restraint shown by President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev.

Now, fifty years later, there is no immediate crisis such as that in 1962 over Soviet nuclear-armed missiles being placed in Cuba. There are, however, still some 19,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of nine nuclear-armed nations: the US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Approximately 95 percent of these weapons are in the arsenals of the US and Russia. Some 2,000 of them are kept in a state of high alert, ready to be immediately launched upon an order to do so at any moment of any day or night.

Although the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago, the possibilities for crisis are still with us. NATO has expanded to the Russian borders, despite US promises not to do so, and has begun placing missile defense installations near the Russian borders. Despite US and NATO assurances to Russia that these installations are to protect against an Iranian missile launch, Russian leaders view these installations as undermining their strategic deterrent force by making them vulnerable to a first-strike attack. They have said that they will target these US missile defense installations.

In another US-Russian confrontation over Georgia, such as occurred in 2008, or some other regional dispute, it is possible that tensions could rise to the point of nuclear crisis between US and Russian military forces. Of course, this would be crazy, but it is far from impossible. What would make the world safer? What might we expect from national leaders who should have learned from how close the world came to nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

First, for the US and NATO to make Russia a partner in any missile defense plans focused on Iranian missiles. Second, for the US to remove its approximately 180 remaining tactical nuclear weapons located in five European countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey). Third, for the US and Russia to take seriously their legal obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue negotiations in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race at an early date, for nuclear disarmament in all its aspects and for a treaty on general and complete disarmament.

We know now that a regional nuclear war would have global consequences. Atmospheric scientists have modeled a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in which each side used 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on the other side’s cities. Such a war would put enough soot from burning cities into the upper stratosphere to reduce warming sunlight for a decade, lowering surface temperatures on earth to the lowest levels in 1,000 years. This would result in shortened growing seasons, crop failures and famine that would kill hundreds of millions of people, perhaps a billion, throughout the world.

The scientific modeling showed that there would be a Nuclear Famine, and it would be triggered by using less than half of one percent of the world’s nuclear explosive power. Such a famine could be initiated not only by India and Pakistan, two countries that have been to war over Kashmir on several occasions, but by any of the Nuclear Nine. The US and Russia could each trigger a far more devastating Nuclear Famine by a nuclear attack on the other side’s cities, an attack which would be suicidal even if the other side did not respond in kind.

When thinking about nuclear weapons and their dangers, we would do well to remember the words of General George Lee Butler, former commander-in-chief of the United States Strategic Command, responsible for all US strategic nuclear weapons: “Nuclear weapons give no quarter. Their effects transcend time and space, poisoning the Earth and deforming its inhabitants for generation upon generation. They leave us wholly without defense, expunge all hope for survival. They hold in their sway not just the fate of nations but of civilization.”

Nuclear weapons do not protect us. Rather, they make us vulnerable to annihilation. It is relatively easy to put them out of our minds, but to do so is to evade our responsibility as citizens of the world and of nuclear-armed countries. Nuclear weapons imperil our common future – they imperil our children and their children and all children of the future. They imperil all we hold dear. We must speak out for a world without nuclear weapons. It is a moral and legal imperative and we would be well advised to act now before we are confronted with the equivalent of another Cuban Missile Crisis.

October 1, 2012
Interview with Bruce Blair: 50 Years After Cuban Crisis, New Nuclear Dangers, Dilemmas

On Oct. 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed millions of Americans by television to declare that Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba were unacceptable and tantamount to an act of war. Among those watching was Bruce G. Blair, a high school student in Kankakee, Illinois. Within a few years, the reality of the Cold War would become even more immediate to Blair. In the early 1970s, while in the U.S. Air Force, he volunteered for the job of strategic missile launch control officer, and for three years his vantage point to watch the Cold War unfold was deep underground at a Strategic Air Command center in Montana. As a wing commander, he had general authority to supervise the use of as many as 200 Minuteman ICBM missiles.

In the 1980s, Blair earned a Ph.D. in operations research from Yale, and later served as a senior fellow in foreign policy studies with the Brookings Institution. In 2000, he became president of the World Security Institute, which promoted arms control to policymakers and the media. Now considered one of the foremost experts on nuclear weapons in the world, Blair in 2008 co-founded Global Zero, a world initiative that’s pushing for phased multilateral disarmament. The organization has received encouragement by President Obama, and its basic ideals are endorsed by 300 world leaders. Over 450,000 people have signed on as Global Zero members.

In a wide-ranging interview to mark the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dr. Blair talked exclusively to NAPF about current nuclear perils facing all nations, and how certain risks have receded, grown, or changed over the past half century. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion.

Kazel: In terms of alert status and the speed at which war might break out, it seems remarkable that it took seven days from the time President Kennedy saw the photographs of the missiles in Cuba until SAC actually went to DEFCON 2 [just short of war]. Today we tend to think of presidents having to respond to a potential nuclear threat in about 10 minutes, correct?

Blair: I think that we certainly did have an early-warning apparatus in place in 1962 that was designed to provide immediate warning of any attack that was underway. We had a system in place, though it was cumbersome and slow, and not at all streamlined to insure some major nuclear response to a major nuclear attack against the United States.

We were pretty close to a hair-trigger, launch-ready configuration back in those days, but over the last many decades we streamlined the command-and-control and early-warning network and primed the weapons themselves, and the crews that manage and launch those weapons, for very, very rapid reaction…

What’s really changed is by the 1970s, both the Soviet Union and the United States had adopted a posture that was designed to detect the first signs of preparation of nuclear weapons or their actual use, to allow the leaders of those countries to make immediate decisions on the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons, and to carry out those decisions within minutes. Or, if not preemptive, then at least…to launch [their] weapons on tactical warning of a potential incoming strike…

There’s just been a revolution in surveillance, reconnaissance, mainly from space, and we’ve become the “surveillance country of the world.” Now, the Russian system also evolved in a very sophisticated way, but in the 1990s, as everyone knows, suffered this economic calamity and it has not yet really recovered from the loss of its capabilities in surveillance and many other aspects of nuclear force capability.

So we today could detect a kind of set-piece [carefully premeditated] move by Russia to deploy weapons in some place like Cuba. It’s inconceivable that a country could relocate nuclear weapons to another country without detection.

I would emphasize that certainly the United States and the Soviet Union evolved their postures to a launch-ready configuration that remains in place today despite the end of the Cold War, and that technically the two sides are entwined in a hair-trigger dynamic that is inherently dangerous. If for some reason we find ourselves embroiled in another confrontation with each other, that hair-trigger posture presents a very serious risk to both sides — and to the world — in terms of the possibility of an inadvertent or accidental or mistaken launch based on false warning.

So the world is no safer today, certainly, than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In fact [it’s more dangerous] from the standpoint of this hair-trigger dynamic.

What’s really dramatically deteriorated in terms of nuclear danger to the world has been the proliferation of nuclear weapons: the emergence of new states with significant nuclear arsenals, in particular Pakistan but also North Korea and growing arsenals in South Asia and Northeast Asia and potentially in the Middle East, with the prospect of these materials for the weapons, or the weapons themselves, falling into the hands of bad actors – including, possibly, terrorists.

The set piece, the major nuclear state-to-state scenario that is of concern to me, would be between the United States and China.

Kazel: Could you elaborate on that?

Blair: It used to be a bipolar world of U.S.-Soviet bloc confrontation that involved large nuclear arsenals on the two sides, and the whole question for many decades during the Cold War was how stable was that bipolar relationship. It clearly turned out to be dangerous, but we survived it. Unfortunately after the end of the Cold War, we saw the Soviet Union collapse and Russia become kind of a country that was not in complete control of its nuclear arsenal. We saw China emerge as a rising power that began throwing its weight around.

So now the United States views China as a potential replacement of Russia in the nuclear equation. There are [confrontation] scenarios between the United States and China that you can imagine, that you can’t imagine in the U.S.- Russia case — for example, conflict over Taiwan being the clearest tinderbox in Asia between the United States and China.

Kazel: And yet China has far fewer nuclear weapons, and the ones they do have are not on hair-trigger alert?

Blair: Right, Chinese nuclear weapons, at least to the best of my knowledge, have not involved mating up warheads to delivery vehicles, to missiles and submarines and bombers, on a daily basis. But that would happen in a crisis, and in a crisis there are hundreds of Chinese nuclear weapons and there are plenty of scenarios in which the United States and China could be at loggerheads.

China clearly is emerging in the Pentagon as the next designated enemy, with a great deal of planning and targeting work going on oriented to China, while the [diminished] focus on Russia has led to a fairly dramatic decrease in the number of Russian targets in our war plan compared to China.

Kazel: How has the ascendance of China affected the willingness of U.S. military and nuclear planners to even consider de-alerting our weapons or further deep cuts in our arsenal to the point that Global Zero advocates?

Blair: The problem with China, and frankly all the other countries that are acquiring nuclear weapons – Pakistan, India, Israel, potentially Iran, North Korea – is that we have no history of a nuclear relationship with those countries. We have no history of negotiating nuclear arms reduction agreements with them. We don’t even have any dialog with China on this question, to speak of. We have very little transparency.

The rules of the road have not been set in the nuclear arena except with Russia, and so we are back in kind of a Cuban Missile Crisis phase in our nuclear relationships with countries like China. We have to figure out how to stabilize those relationships and engage with those countries in ways that allow us to go forward with arms reductions…

So Global Zero, as its next highest priority in the next couple of years, calls for the United States and Russia to continue their bilateral reductions but also calls for China and the other nuclear countries to be brought into this process, so that we can begin – if President Obama is re-elected – the first-in-history multilateral negotiations to cap, freeze, proportionally reduce, and otherwise constrain the nuclear arsenals of all the countries.

Kazel: You mentioned the possibility of future multilateral talks but you tempered it by saying “if President Obama is reelected.” I know your organization has a great ideological friend in him, although he hasn’t endorsed your specific timetable for disarmament. Mitt Romney is perceived as trying to be tougher towards Russia and has called it our “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” Does the success of the disarmament movement hinge on having a friend in the White House?

Blair: The history of nuclear arms reduction agreements has been a history spearheaded by Republicans. The SALT agreement was a result of Nixon’s détente with the Soviet Union, the START agreement was begun by Reagan and finished by [George H.W.] Bush, then we got the Moscow agreement under Bush 2. So there is a legacy here for Republican support.

Now it sort of fell apart during the New START treaty deliberations in the U.S. Senate, and there has been sort of a breakdown in that legacy. Romney does seem to fall outside this tradition and seems to be under the misimpression that Russia is our No. 1 foe. He came out strongly against the New START treaty in a very flawed analysis that he published back then, and he seems to be under the influence of very hard-line figures in his orbit of consultants who have almost an innate problem in cooperating with Russia.

But a lot of this is politics and a lot of it will have to yield to reality — and reality is that the United States and Russia have reset their relationship after it reached its low ebb in 2008. We have had growing cooperation across the board with Russia and that cooperation, that common ground, is not something that any president of the United States, Republican or Democrat, would set aside. So I would expect that if there is a President Romney that he will moderate his views, he will recognize the potential benefits of cooperation with Russia across the board, including in the nuclear arena.

Also keep in mind the grass-roots arms control movement flourished during Republican administrations. I mean, the largest demonstration against nuclear arms occurred in the 1980s when President Reagan was running the show. There’s also the potential that Global Zero would actually gain some support and momentum in the event of a Romney presidency that ramped up nuclear tensions with Russia.

Kazel: In your 1993 book, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, you focused largely on the danger that missiles could be armed quickly and launched quickly and how that didn’t match the political reality of the post-Cold War era. But the book didn’t really advocate or even envision a time when all nuclear forces would be abolished. How did you evolve from supporting technical changes in command-and-control structures to being an outright supporter of nuclear abolition?

Blair: That’s a good question. I believed through the end of the Cold War that the United States would continue to maintain a nuclear arsenal in the name of strategic stability and mutual deterrence, and that the Soviet Union would do the same thing…

The United States and Russia…had a very good relationship in the early ‘90s. I mean we were almost allies. The euphoria, particularly on the Russian side over the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the optimism of a new relationship between the two countries, was just extraordinary and very upbeat. And so I, at the end of the Cold War, came to believe that it was possible to eliminate nuclear weapons.

But at the same time we had a long way to go and I thought we should focus on the problems of the hair-trigger posture and the continuing dangers that existed in the command-and-control system and the deficiencies of nuclear safeguards against unauthorized launch. So I worked on those issues very hard during the 1990s. But I really didn’t know how you would get to zero. No one had taken it seriously to have worked up any kind of a technical roadmap for how you would get it to zero. There’s still not a mountain of good, solid research on how you get to zero from where we are today.

So I thought one of the ways of getting to zero was to get weapons off alert and to put them increasingly into reserve status and to relegate nuclear weapons to the back burner of military capabilities. And when you do that, the military planners discount them in an age of growing, non-nuclear, conventional weapons sophistication. During the 1990s, I could even imagine conventional weapons would replace nuclear weapons in many of the missions. So I was sort of approaching it through the back door: Let’s downplay the importance of nuclear weapons, get them off alert, and then they will just sort of drop out of the war plans.

[Then came] the proliferation of nuclear weapons during the ‘90s with India and Pakistan coming out of the closet, and then North Korea, and 9/11 with the obvious danger of proliferation, and “loose nukes” in Russia in the ‘90s. You know, all of that added up in my mind to a case for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. So you just had to ask the question in the 1990s and into the 2000s, certainly after 9/11, do you feel the United States would be better or worse off living in a world without any nuclear weapons?

I think the obvious answer to that question is that yes, we would be safer. As I go around the world for Global Zero, [meeting] supporters around the world, including very senior people from governments with nuclear weapons, I find increasingly that they also answer the question with that answer – that their country would be safer without any nuclear weapons on the planet. That includes countries like India now.

Kazel: Having taken the position that abolition is the best way to go, have you been disappointed over the past four years over the lack of progress under the Obama administration? An analysis by Jonathan Pearl of the Strategic Studies Institute [in the U.S. Army War College] said: “Contrary to popular belief, the general approach being advanced today by the Obama administration is strikingly similar to mainstream proposals of the past 65 years: arms control and nonproliferation now, disarmament at an undetermined point in the future. Meanwhile, numerous factors continue to militate against abolition, including a growing Pakistani arsenal and new sources of instability in the Middle East. Indeed, just as the perceived need for abolition may be growing, so may the difficulty of achieving it.”

Blair: Well, no one ever expected this to be easy, and we’re pushing this agenda at a time when there are just overwhelming problems in the world. I think that President Obama has been seriously sidetracked over the last couple of years by world events. I think in the first two years of his administration, he made step-by-step progress…moving us concretely toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. In the last two years, we’ve been sidetracked, and of course we have the political season that’s further sidetracked any bold moves in this arena.

But I would expect that if he is reelected, that he will revive this agenda, that [he could even] convene the first-in-history multilateral negotiations involving all the nuclear weapons countries to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons. Just getting that process started would be an amazing legacy for the president.

I think where President Obama sort of dropped the ball a bit was he really didn’t organize the government to develop a plan for the elimination of nuclear weapons. And so it remains a goal that is more rhetorical than it is concrete.

Kazel: Even if he’s sympathetic to your goals, how can something like the Global Zero agenda coexist with the long-range plan for modernizing our warheads and delivery systems, which the government seems to be locking into place for the next 10 years? The Stimson Center says modernization will cost $352 billion or more over the next decade, including B61 nuclear bombs. How can your goals happen at the same time the administration is committing to this kind of long-term upgrade?

Blair: (long pause) Well, I think he is going to have to come to terms with this question, because these are really 50-year decisions that are coming down the pike here for all three legs of the nuclear Triad. So we don’t want to be investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons systems that we want to scrap in the next 10 to 20 years, or whenever the time frame that the President might imagine nuclear abolition may be possible…Global Zero has called for the elimination of the land-based leg of the nuclear Triad on the U.S. side [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles], and so it’s a question that has to be confronted. If it’s not, then we will sort of drift along with business as usual.

Kazel: Can it be argued that modernization is necessary because the command and control systems, as well as the weapons themselves, are sort of crumbling — that if we don’t modernize them, your worst fear will be realized, that these systems will be vulnerable to seizure by terrorists or that somehow they’ll break down and malfunction?

Blair: Well, there’s obviously a certain minimum amount of investment that you have to make in maintenance and security…You identify deficiencies that need to be fixed. One area that is of profound concern to me is deficiencies in protections against cyber warfare that may leave some of our weapons and our command-and-control system vulnerable to exploitation by unauthorized people. That’s a whole brave new world that needs to be addressed, and as long as we have nuclear weapons we need to find deficiencies in their control and safety. And that takes money, obviously.

But Global Zero supports a time frame for the elimination of nuclear weapons. We can debate how long that should be, but it’s not 100 years, OK? And, it’s not really 50 years. We think that the time frame ought to be realistically on the order of 20 years. Maybe it’s 25. But it’s not taking us out to 2080. And 2080 is the year in which the next generation of U.S. strategic submarines is supposed to last.

So in other words, what the next administration needs to do is say to itself, let’s say it’s President Obama, “If we were to think about eliminating nuclear weapons in the next 20 to 50 years, or 20 to 30 years…what would be the implications – for our nuclear complex, for the modernization or investment in things like the plutonium factory at Los Alamos? What would be the implications for our forces, our submarines, our bombers, our land-based rockets and their modernization, and what would be the implications for arms control? Give me a plan that allows me to pursue zero [nuclear weapons] over the next 20 or 30 years with plenty of flexibility. In case we’re not able to achieve it through the arms control process and it take us longer, I need to have a plan that insures that we still have a viable nuclear arsenal during this period.”

These are choices and trade-offs that can’t just be managed by business as usual.

Kazel: It seems many nuclear weapons opponents think the answer to that is the U.S. and Russia participating in a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a set of agreements that would officially outlaw nuclear bombs and create an agenda for how that can be achieved. Is that a dream, or something that can happen someday?

Blair: A Nuclear Weapons Convention would be a phase of the Global Zero [plan]. The first step is to get all the relevant countries into a dialog and negotiation. So the first goal would be to have multiple countries decide the size of their arsenals, and other characteristics of their arsenals, let’s say five years from now. They negotiate where they would be five years after that. And then at some final stage they would agree to a Nuclear Weapons Convention that would have a requirement to go to zero. It would be a universal agreement applying to all countries, and would have mechanisms of verification and enforcement built into it that really have teeth. So I see a Convention as being essential at some stage.

Kazel: Have you heard of any officials, any politicians on any side, who support a Convention?

Blair: None that come to mind. But we do hear politicians – [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin, [Prime Minister Dmitry] Medvedev, and the Obama Administration have all talked about how the next phase of nuclear arms reduction should be multilateral. So that’s the first big step into that arena.

Kazel: On another point, how quickly and how effectively can the superpowers communicate with each other during a crisis? You make the point in your writings that all bets are off during a crisis, that the usual logic and expectations of what any side might do can’t be predicated accurately then. The “Hotline” was established during the Cuban Missile Crisis and then it was expanded during the Reagan years, but other proposals to really ramp up communications mechanisms between the U.S. and Russia seem to have fallen by the wayside.

Blair: This isn’t the area that needs our primary attention. This issue, of miscommunication, of lack of adequate emergency mechanisms [for] communications and consultations – these are problems that largely are huge problems in other parts of the world. For example, India and Pakistan have a long way to go. The United States and China have a long way to go because we don’t have any tradition of transparency in arms control.

There’s big opportunities for misunderstanding between the United States and China, and all these other countries that are acquiring nuclear weapons are in the very early stage of evolving these kinds of mechanisms between themselves and their primary adversaries, whether it’s in the Middle East or South Asia or Northeast Asia…I think that Israel and Iran, for example, could easily get into a nuclear war if Iran got nuclear weapons, because of this [communication] problem.

Kazel: What represents a greater danger, Iran getting nuclear weapons or Israel attacking those weapons?

Blair: Well, if Israel attacks those weapons it will be a conventional attack. If Iran gets those weapons, the possibility of actual use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East grows exponentially. I think [that is] just an unacceptable outcome.

But I also believe that Iran is committed to getting nuclear weapons, because as long as regime change is its most serious worry, it feels it needs nuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent. So there’s a long way to go with diplomacy with Iran to reach a stage where Iran feels it doesn’t need nuclear weapons.

It’s a very complex picture in all of these regions that are [acquiring nuclear weapons]: how to come to terms with their security concerns without nuclear weapons. So that’s the agenda of Global Zero. We think that the universal elimination of nuclear weapons is really the only solution. So that if Iran has to give them up, Israel gives them up, as well. And if Israel gives them up, then by gosh, Iran also has to give them up, in the context of a broader disarmament process.

September 27, 2012
John F. Kennedy Speaks of Peace

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated. Nearly every American who is old enough can remember where he was when he heard the news of Kennedy’s death. In my case, I was on a train platform in Japan when I was told of the assassination. A Japanese man came up to me and said, “I’m very sorry to tell you, but your president has been shot and killed.” I remember being stunned by the news and by a sense of loss.

On June 10, 1963, just six months before his life was cut short, Kennedy gave the Commencement Address at American University. His topic was peace. He called it “the most important topic on earth.” As a decorated officer who served in combat during World War II, he knew about war.

Kennedy spoke of a generous and broad peace: “What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek?” he asked. “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons or 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.”

He recognized that nuclear weapons had created “a new face of war.” He argued, “Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”

Just eight months before giving this speech, Kennedy had been face to face with the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He knew that it was possible for powerful, nuclear-armed nations to come to the brink of nuclear war, and he knew what nuclear war would mean for the future of humanity. “I speak of peace,” he said, “as the necessary rational end of rational men.”

Kennedy asked us to examine our attitudes toward peace. “Too many of us think it is impossible,” he said. “Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed – that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.”

He understood that there was no “magic formula” to achieve peace. “Genuine peace,” he argued, “must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process – a way of solving problems.” He also recognized that peace requires perseverance.

Kennedy gave wise counsel in his speech. In the midst of the Cold War, he called for reexamining our attitude toward the Soviet Union. “Among the traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war.” He pointed out the achievements of the Soviet people and the suffering they endured during World War II.

In the speech, Kennedy announced two important decisions. First, he pledged to begin negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Second, he initiated a moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing. The Partial Test Ban Treaty would be signed that August, ratified by the Senate in September and would go into effect on October 10, 1963. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was not reached until 1996, and the United States Senate rejected ratification of this treaty in 1999. The treaty still has not entered into force.

In his insightful and inspiring speech, Kennedy did get one thing wrong. He said that “[t]he United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.” One can only imagine Kennedy’s severe disappointment had he lived to see the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War and many other costly and illegal wars the U.S. has started and engaged in since his death.

Every American should read Kennedy’s Commencement Address at American University and be reminded that peace is a possibility that is worth the struggle. As Kennedy understood, war does not bring peace. Peace itself is the only path to peace. Kennedy believed, “No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable – and we believe they can do it again.” Peace is attainable. It is within our reach, if only we will learn from the past, stretch ourselves and believe that this is our destiny.

November 22, 2010