Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Kennedy

  • 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.

  • The Obama-Kennedy Nuclear Policy

    This article was originally published by the Huffington Post

    The death of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, still unfairly blamed even in his obituaries for Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam, ironically removes from the current national dialogue on President Obama’s nuclear weapons policy a champion of John F. Kennedy’s original dream of a nuclear weapons-free world.

    Let us “bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations,” said Kennedy in his Inaugural Address in January 1961. “Weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us,” he told the United Nations General Assembly later that year. “…No longer is the quest for disarmament a sign of weakness, (nor) the destruction of arms a dream — it is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race.”

    McNamara supported President Kennedy’s decision not to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Crisis or on any other occasion; and JFK’s success in ending those crises without initiating a nuclear exchange or even firing a shot convinced all of us who served with him never to rely on nuclear weapons in the future, never, as he put it, “to risk a nuclear war in which the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.”

    The old Eisenhower-Dulles policy of threatening massive retaliation, he told Congress in January 1963, reflecting upon the Cuban Missile Crisis, “may not deter piecemeal aggression; but a line of destroyers in a quarantine (like that around Cuba) or a division of well-equipped men on a border (like that around West Berlin) may be more useful to our real security than the multiplication of awesome weapons beyond all rational need.”

    In the single best speech of his presidency, delivered at American University’s 1963 Commencement, he declared that “the acquisition of idle stockpiles which can only destroy and never create is not the most efficient means of assuring peace.”

    President Barack Obama made clear in his Prague speech in April of this year that he too has a “commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons… as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it.” Decades earlier, Obama had specified this same goal in a college student essay. He was not talking at Prague, nor was Kennedy at American University, about unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament, but about an enforceable global nuclear pact, covering Russia as well as China, Israel as well as Iran, both India and Pakistan, and all other present and potential nuclear powers. Achievable not quickly, easily or automatically, but achievable, this pact would depend on comprehensive, invasive and effective inspections, backed by the credible threat of swift, multilateral enforcement.

    The same kind of “mad bombers” critical of what they called Kennedy’s “no-win policy,” who believed that a nuclear exchange in which millions of American dead totaling less than tens of millions of enemy dead would be a proud victory for the United States, are still with us. Richard Perle and Senator Jon Kyl, in a June 30 Wall Street Journal article, urged the United States to keep a nuclear arsenal “for the foreseeable future.” President George W. Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to build even more powerful nuclear “bunker buster” and outer space weapons, contrary to Obama’s view and Kennedy’s vow. The same crowd opposes ratification of a global treaty to ban nuclear testing, which would be a crucial first step toward realizing the goal of global nuclear disarmament. Even a universal ban, these pessimists and skeptics argue, would be dangerous to U.S. national security, if some day some hostile nation sought an advantage by suddenly secretly testing and preparing for a surprise launch and treaty repudiation. But no nation, large or small, as JFK pointed out, would want to violate and thus terminate a treaty essential to the security of all; and the United States has even greater ability now to detect such tests and preparations. Nor would a potential violator fail to realize that any temporary advantage it might gain by such secret tests or preparations would clearly be far outweighed by the global sanctions, obloquy and isolation it would suffer for such illegal misconduct.

    As for America’s own military strategy, Kennedy — a World War II hero, no pacifist — declared that we have “deliberately chosen to concentrate on more mobile and efficient weapons with lower but entirely sufficient yield,” and thus “(our) security would not be diminished by a reduction of our nuclear stockpile.”

    All Americans gratefully respect the nuclear laboratories and production plants that have contributed so much to our security for so long; but their concern about their future funding must not be allowed to override the long-held convictions of their best scientists that all nations of the world, including our own, would be safer when all nations of the world cease the testing, production and possession of all weapons of mass destruction; and while this is being achieved, a fully adequate U.S. deterrent could be maintained with a sharply reduced number of nuclear weapons in the stockpiles of both the United States and Russia. That step in turn would facilitate the initial items on Obama’s nuclear agenda: (a) to safeguard and secure all vulnerable nuclear weapons and material anywhere in the world from falling into the hands of terrorists or failed states; (b) speed the termination of the North Korea and Iran nuclear weapons programs; and (c) enhance and encourage the long-neglected enforcement of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as well as the proposed new ban on making fuel for nuclear arms; all this while the United States ratifies and works to bring into force the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Such a reduced U.S. arsenal would also be easier and cheaper for us to maintain, to modernize and to make certain of its security and stability.

    The critics of the Kennedy-Obama goal of a nuclear weapons-free world like to cite Ronald Reagan. But not his 1984 State of the Union message in which he spoke directly to the people of the Soviet Union: “A nuclear war cannot be won… it must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” His wife said he “had many hopes…to create a world free of nuclear weapons.” Those critics should also be careful about citing Reagan’s last two Chiefs of Staff, Howard Baker and Ken Duberstein, his Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, his Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, his National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, his Secretary of State George Schultz and his Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead, all of whom joined in a statement this year by the bipartisan Partnership For a Secure America calling for a “verifiable, irreversible and non-discriminatory fissile material cut-off treaty, a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing, and a reduction of all nuclear arsenals, including our own, to the minimum achievable level.”

    Other steps on the Obama nuclear agenda include increased U.S. support for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency at the Treaty Review Conference next year; and the elimination of unnecessary irritants between the United States and Russia to facilitate the aforementioned mutual reduction of their respective nuclear stockpiles.

    This is a formidable number of steps facing Obama to reach the Kennedy dream, involving a host of controversial issues. But the worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons is not only a diplomatic issue, although it will require masterful diplomacy; not only a military security issue, although we must keep our conventional weapons ready; and not only a political issue (although the nay-sayers will try to make political hay out of it). It is a moral issue — indeed, a moral imperative.

    Ted Sorensen is former Special Council and Advisor to President John F. Kennedy.