Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: JFK

  • Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis at Fifty

    David KriegerFifty 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.

  • 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.

  • What Would J.F.K. Have Done?

    What did we not hear from President Bush when he spoke last week at the United States Naval Academy about his strategy for victory in Iraq?

    We did not hear that the war in Iraq, already one of the costliest wars in American history, is a running sore. We did not hear that it has taken more than 2,000 precious American lives and countless – because we do not count them – Iraqi civilian lives. We did not hear that the struggle has dragged on longer than our involvement in either World War I or the Spanish-American War, or that by next spring it will be even longer than the Korean War.

    And we did not hear how or when the president plans to bring our forces back home – no facts, no numbers on America troop withdrawals, no dates, no reference to our dwindling coalition, no reversal of his disdain for the United Nations, whose help he still expects.

    Neither our military, our economy nor our nation can take that kind of endless and remorseless drain for an only vaguely defined military and political mission. If we leave early, the president said, catastrophe might follow. But what of the catastrophe that we are prolonging and worsening by our continued presence, including our continued, unforgivable mistreatment of detainees?

    Each month that America continues its occupation facilitates Al Qaeda’s recruitment of young Islamic men and women as suicide bombers, the one weapon against which our open society has no sure defense. The president says we should support our troops by staying the course; but who is truly willing to support our troops by bringing them safely home?

    The responsibility for devising an exit plan rests primarily not with the war’s opponents, but with the president who hastily launched a pre-emptive invasion without enough troops to secure Iraq’s borders and arsenals, without enough armor to protect our forces, without enough allied support and without adequate plans for either a secure occupation or a timely exit.

    As we listened to Mr. Bush’s speech, our thoughts raced back four decades to another president, John F. Kennedy. In 1963, the last year of his life, we watched from front-row seats as Kennedy tried to figure out how best to extricate American military advisers and instructors from Vietnam.

    Although neither of us had direct responsibility on Vietnam decision-making, we each saw enough of the president to sense his growing frustration. In typical Kennedy fashion, he would lean back, in his Oval Office rocker, tick off all his options and then critique them:

    Renege on the previous Eisenhower commitment, which Kennedy had initially reinforced, to help the beleaguered government of South Vietnam with American military instructors and advisers?

    No, he knew that the American people would not permit him to do that.

    Americanize the Vietnam civil war, as the military recommended and as his successor Lyndon Johnson sought ultimately to do, by sending in American combat units?

    No, having learned from his experiences with Cuba and elsewhere that conflicts essentially political in nature did not lend themselves to a military solution, Kennedy knew that the United States could not prevail in a struggle against a Vietnamese people determined to oust, at last, all foreign troops from their country.

    Moreover, he knew firsthand from his World War II service in the South Pacific the horrors of war and had declared at American University in June 1963: “This generation of Americans has had enough – more than enough – of war.”

    Declare “victory and get out,” as George Aiken, the Republican senator from Vermont, would famously suggest years later?

    No, in 1963 in Vietnam, despite assurances from field commanders, there was no more semblance of “victory” than there was in 2004 in Iraq when the president gave his “mission accomplished” speech on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

    Explore, as was always his preference, a negotiated solution?

    No, he was unable to identify in the ranks of the disorganized Vietcong a leader capable of negotiating enforceable and mutually agreeable terms of withdrawal.

    Insist that the South Vietnamese government improve its chances of survival by genuinely adopting the array of political, economic, land and administrative reforms necessary to win popular support?

    No, Kennedy increasingly realized that the corrupt family and landlords propping up the dictatorship in South Vietnam would never accept or enforce such reforms.

    Eventually he began to understand that withdrawal was the viable option. From the spring of 1963 on, he began to articulate the elements of a three-part exit strategy, one that his assassination would prevent him from pursuing. The three components of Kennedy’s exit strategy – well-suited for Iraq after the passage of a new constitution and the coming election – can be summarized as follows:

    Make clear that we’re going to get out. At a press conference on Nov. 14, 1963, the president did just that, stating, “That is our object, to bring Americans home.”

    Request an invitation to leave. Arrange for the host government to request the phased withdrawal of all American military personnel – surely not a difficult step in Iraq, especially after the clan statement last month calling for foreign forces to leave. In a May 1963 press conference, Kennedy declared that if the South Vietnamese government suggested it, “we would have some troops on their way home” the next day.

    Bring the troops home gradually. Initiate a phased American withdrawal over an unannounced period, beginning immediately, while intensifying the training of local security personnel, bearing in mind that with our increased troop mobility and airlift capacity, American forces are available without being stationed in hazardous areas. In September 1963, Kennedy said of the South Vietnamese: “In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” A month later, he said, “It would be our hope to lessen the number of Americans” in Vietnam by the end of the year.

    President Kennedy had no guarantee that any of these three components would succeed. In the “fog of war,” there are no guarantees; but an exit plan without guarantees is better than none at all.

    If we leave Iraq at its own government’s request, our withdrawal will be neither abandonment nor retreat. Law-abiding Iraqis may face more clan violence, Balkanization and foreign incursions if we leave; but they may face more clan violence, Balkanization and foreign incursions if we stay. The president has said we will not leave Iraq to the terrorists. Let us leave Iraq to the Iraqis, who have survived centuries of civil war, tyranny and attempted foreign domination.

    Once American troops are out of Iraq, people around the world will rejoice that we have recovered our senses. What’s more, the killing of Americans and the global loss of American credibility will diminish. As Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican and Vietnam veteran, said, “The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have.” Defeatist? The real defeatists are those who say we are stuck there for the next decade of death and destruction.

    In a memorandum to President Kennedy, roughly three months after his inauguration, one of us wrote with respect to Vietnam, “There is no clearer example of a country that cannot be saved unless it saves itself.” Today, Iraq is an even clearer example.

    Theodore C. Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were, respectively, special counsel and special assistant to President John F. Kennedy.

    Originally published by the New York Times.