{"id":45645,"date":"2014-08-11T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2014-08-11T11:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=45645"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:30:44","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:30:44","slug":"how-many-minutes-to-midnight-hiroshima-day-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/08\/how-many-minutes-to-midnight-hiroshima-day-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"How Many Minutes to Midnight? Hiroshima Day 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Noam<\/a>

Noam Chomsky<\/p><\/div>\n

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).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Day one of the NWE was marked by the \u201csuccess\u201d of Little Boy, a simple atomic bomb.\u00a0 On day four, Nagasaki experienced the technological triumph of Fat Man, a more sophisticated design.\u00a0 Five days later came what the official Air Force history calls the \u201cgrand finale,\u201d a 1,000-plane raid — no mean logistical achievement — attacking Japan\u2019s cities and killing many thousands of people, with leaflets falling among the bombs reading \u201cJapan has surrendered.\u201d Truman announced that surrender before the last B-29 returned to its base.<\/p>\n

Those were the auspicious opening days of the NWE.\u00a0 As we now enter its 70th year, we should be contemplating with wonder that we have survived.\u00a0 We can only guess how many years remain.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Twenty years ago, he wrote that we had so far survived the NWE \u201cby some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201camong the most avid of these keepers of the faith in nuclear weapons.\u201d But, he continued, he had come to realize that it was now his \u201cburden to declare with all of the conviction I can muster that in my judgment they served us extremely ill.\u201d And he asked, \u201cBy 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

He termed the U.S. strategic plan of 1960 that called for an automated all-out strike on the Communist world \u201cthe single most absurd and irresponsible document I have ever reviewed in my life.\u201d Its Soviet counterpart was probably even more insane.\u00a0 But it is important to bear in mind that there are competitors, not least among them the easy acceptance of extraordinary threats to survival.<\/p>\n

Survival in the Early Cold War Years<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to received doctrine in scholarship and general intellectual discourse, the prime goal of state policy is \u201cnational security.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 There is ample evidence, however, that the doctrine of national security does not encompass the security of the population.\u00a0 The record reveals that, for instance, the threat of instant destruction by nuclear weapons has not ranked high among the concerns of planners.\u00a0 That much was demonstrated early on, and remains true to the present moment.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Long before World War II, it had already become by far the richest country in the world, with incomparable advantages.\u00a0 Its economy boomed during the war, while other industrial societies were devastated or severely weakened.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

There was, however, a potential threat: intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.\u00a0 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<\/em> by McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies.<\/p>\n

Bundy wrote that \u201cthe timely development of ballistic missiles during the Eisenhower administration is one of the best achievements of those eight years.\u00a0 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.\u201d He then added an instructive comment: \u201cI am aware of no serious contemporary proposal, in or out of either government, that ballistic missiles should somehow be banned by agreement.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Could that threat have been taken off the table?\u00a0 We cannot, of course, be sure, but it was hardly inconceivable.\u00a0 The Russians, far behind in industrial development and technological sophistication, were in a far more threatening environment.\u00a0 Hence, they were significantly more vulnerable to such weapons systems than the U.S.\u00a0 There might have been opportunities to explore these possibilities, but in the extraordinary hysteria of the day they could hardly have even been perceived.\u00a0 And that hysteria was indeed extraordinary.\u00a0 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\u2019s injunction that it is necessary to be \u201cclearer than truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Stalin\u2019s proposal was taken seriously by the respected political commentator James Warburg, but otherwise mostly ignored or ridiculed at the time.\u00a0 Recent scholarship has begun to take a different view.\u00a0 The bitterly anti-Communist Soviet scholar Adam Ulam has taken the status of Stalin\u2019s proposal to be an \u201cunresolved mystery.\u201d Washington \u201cwasted little effort in flatly rejecting Moscow’s initiative,\u201d he has written, on grounds that \u201cwere embarrassingly unconvincing.\u201d The political, scholarly, and general intellectual failure left open \u201cthe basic question,\u201d Ulam added: \u201cWas Stalin genuinely ready to sacrifice the newly created German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the altar of real democracy,\u201d with consequences for world peace and for American security that could have been enormous?<\/p>\n

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 \u201c[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,\u201d agreeing \u201cto sacrifice the East German communist regime to reduce East-West tensions\u201d and improve internal political and economic conditions in Russia — opportunities that were squandered in favor of securing German participation in NATO.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 But that possibility apparently was not considered, a striking indication of how slight a role authentic security plays in state policy.<\/p>\n

The Cuban Missile Crisis and Beyond<\/strong><\/p>\n

That conclusion was underscored repeatedly in the years that followed.\u00a0 When Nikita Khrushchev took control in Russia in 1953 after Stalin\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, Khrushchev proposed sharp mutual reductions in offensive weapons.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The late Kenneth Waltz, supported by other strategic analysts with close connections to U.S. intelligence, wrote then that the Kennedy administration \u201cundertook 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.\u201d Again, harming national security while enhancing state power.<\/p>\n

U.S. intelligence verified that huge cuts had indeed been made in active Soviet military forces, both in terms of aircraft and manpower.\u00a0 In 1963, Khrushchev again called for new reductions.\u00a0 As a gesture, he withdrew troops from East Germany and called on Washington to reciprocate.\u00a0 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, \u201cthe one regret I have.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The move was also motivated in part by Kennedy\u2019s terrorist campaign against Fidel Castro\u2019s Cuba, which was scheduled to lead to invasion that very month, as Russia and Cuba may have known.\u00a0 The ensuing \u201cmissile crisis\u201d was \u201cthe most dangerous moment in history,\u201d in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy\u2019s adviser and confidant.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Kennedy\u2019s subjective estimate at that moment was that if he refused the Soviet premier\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Kennedy nonetheless refused Khrushchev\u2019s 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\u2019s borders or anywhere else it chose.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And the maneuvers were indeed delicate.\u00a0 The U.S. and Russia had jointly imposed a cease-fire, but Kissinger secretly informed the Israelis that they could ignore it.\u00a0 Hence the need for the nuclear alert to frighten the Russians away.\u00a0 The security of Americans had its usual status.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment.\u00a0 Washington was deploying Pershing II strategic missiles in Europe with a five-minute flight time to Moscow.\u00a0 President Reagan had also announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (\u201cStar Wars\u201d) program, which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike weapon, a standard interpretation of missile defense on all sides.\u00a0 And other tensions were rising.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0 Newly released archives reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously assumed.\u00a0 A CIA study entitled \u201cThe War Scare Was for Real\u201d concluded that U.S. intelligence may have underestimated Russian concerns and the threat of a Russian preventative nuclear strike.\u00a0 The exercises \u201calmost became a prelude to a preventative nuclear strike,\u201d according to an account in the Journal of Strategic Studies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the United States, sending its nuclear system onto the highest-level alert.\u00a0 The protocol for the Soviet military was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.\u00a0 Fortunately, the officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, decided to disobey orders and not report the warnings to his superiors.\u00a0 He received an official reprimand.\u00a0 And thanks to his dereliction of duty, we\u2019re still alive to talk about it.<\/p>\n

The security of the population was no more a high priority for Reagan administration planners than for their predecessors.\u00a0 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\u2019s chilling study Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety<\/em>. In other words, it is hard to contest General Butler\u2019s conclusions.<\/p>\n

Survival in the Post-Cold War Era<\/strong><\/p>\n

The record of post-Cold War actions and doctrines is hardly reassuring either.\u00a0\u00a0 Every self-respecting president has to have a doctrine.\u00a0 The Clinton Doctrine was encapsulated in the slogan \u201cmultilateral when we can, unilateral when we must.\u201d In congressional testimony, the phrase \u201cwhen we must\u201d was explained more fully: the U.S. is entitled to resort to \u201cunilateral use of military power\u201d to ensure \u201cuninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.\u201d Meanwhile, STRATCOM in the Clinton era produced an important study entitled \u201cEssentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence,\u201d issued well after the Soviet Union had collapsed and Clinton was extending President George H.W. Bush\u2019s program of expanding NATO to the east in violation of promises to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev — with reverberations to the present.<\/p>\n

That STRATCOM study was concerned with \u201cthe role of nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War era.\u201d A central conclusion: that the U.S. must maintain the right to launch a first strike, even against non-nuclear states.\u00a0 Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be at the ready because they \u201ccast a shadow over any crisis or conflict.\u201d They were, that is, constantly being used, just as you\u2019re using a gun if you aim but don\u2019t fire one while robbing a store (a point that Daniel Ellsberg has repeatedly stressed).\u00a0 STRATCOM went on to advise that \u201cplanners should not be too rational about determining… what the opponent values the most.\u201d\u00a0 Everything should simply be targeted. \u201c[I]t hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed\u2026 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.\u201d It is \u201cbeneficial [for our strategic posture] if some elements may appear to be potentially \u2018out of control,\u2019\u201d thus posing a constant threat of nuclear attack — a severe violation of the U.N. Charter, if anyone cares.<\/p>\n

Not much here about the noble goals constantly proclaimed — or for that matter the obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to make \u201cgood faith\u201d efforts to eliminate this scourge of the earth.\u00a0 What resounds, rather, is an adaptation of Hilaire Belloc\u2019s famous couplet about the Maxim gun (to quote the great African historian Chinweizu):<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever happens, we have got,
\nThe Atom Bomb, and they have not.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Clinton came, of course, George W. Bush, whose broad endorsement of preventative war easily encompassed Japan\u2019s 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 \u201cto burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccomparable to spending for procurement of new strategic systems in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan,\u201d according to a study by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.<\/p>\n

Obama has also not hesitated to play with fire for political gain.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was widely covered, but one crucial paragraph was ignored.<\/p>\n

Obama hailed the operation but added that it could not be the norm.\u00a0 The reason, he said, was that the risks “were immense.” The SEALs might have been “embroiled in an extended firefight.”\u00a0 Even though, by luck, that didn\u2019t happen, “the cost to our relationship with Pakistan and the backlash among the Pakistani public over encroachment on their territory was\u2026 severe.”<\/p>\n

Let us now add a few details. The SEALs were ordered to fight their way out if apprehended.\u00a0 They would not have been left to their fate if \u201cembroiled in an extended firefight.\u201d\u00a0 The full force of the U.S. military would have been used to extricate them.\u00a0 Pakistan has a powerful, well-trained military, highly protective of state sovereignty.\u00a0 It also has nuclear weapons, and Pakistani specialists are concerned about the possible penetration of their nuclear security system by jihadi elements.\u00a0 It is also no secret that the population has been embittered and radicalized by Washington\u2019s drone terror campaign and other policies.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cto confront any unidentified aircraft,\u201d which he assumed would be from India.\u00a0 Meanwhile in Kabul, U.S. war commander General David Petraeus ordered \u201cwarplanes to respond\u201d if the Pakistanis \u201cscrambled their fighter jets.\u201d As Obama said, by luck the worst didn\u2019t happen, though it could have been quite ugly.\u00a0 But the risks were faced without noticeable concern.\u00a0 Or subsequent comment.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his recent books are <\/em>Hegemony or Survival, <\/em>Failed States<\/a>, <\/em>Power Systems<\/a>, <\/em>Occupy, and <\/em>Hopes and Prospects. His latest book, <\/em>Masters of Mankind<\/a>, 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 <\/em>www.chomsky.info<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2014 Noam Chomsky<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latter era 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 not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weapons-of-mass-destruction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}