Noam Chomsky - How Many Minutes to Midnight? Hiroshima Day 2014
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). 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.
Day one of the NWE was marked by the “success” of Little
Boy, a simple atomic bomb. On day four, Nagasaki
experienced the technological triumph of Fat Man, a more sophisticated
design. Five days later came what the official Air Force history calls
the “grand finale,” a 1,000-plane raid -- no mean logistical achievement --
attacking Japan ’s
cities and killing many thousands of people, with leaflets falling among the
bombs reading “Japan
has surrendered.” Truman announced that surrender before the last B-29 returned
to its base.
Those were the auspicious opening days of the NWE. As
we now enter its 70th year, we should be contemplating with wonder that we have
survived. We can only guess how many years remain.
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. Twenty years ago, he wrote that we had so far survived the
NWE “by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect
the latter in greatest proportion.”
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 “among the most avid of these keepers
of the faith in nuclear weapons.”
But, he continued, he had come to realize
that it was now his “burden to declare with all of the conviction I can muster
that in my judgment they served us extremely ill.” And he asked, “By 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?”
He termed the U.S.
strategic plan of 1960 that called for an automated all-out strike on the
Communist world “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I have ever
reviewed in my life.” Its Soviet counterpart was probably even more
insane. But it is important to bear in mind that there are competitors, not
least among them the easy acceptance of extraordinary threats to survival.
Survival in the Early Cold War Years
According to received doctrine in scholarship and general
intellectual discourse, the prime goal of state policy is “national
security.” There is ample evidence, however, that the doctrine of
national security does not encompass the security of the population. The
record reveals that, for instance, the threat of instant destruction by nuclear
weapons has not ranked high among the concerns of planners. That much was
demonstrated early on, and remains true to the present moment.
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. Long before World War II, it had already
become by far the richest country in the world, with incomparable
advantages. Its economy boomed during the war, while other industrial
societies were devastated or severely weakened. 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.
There was, however, a potential threat: intercontinental
ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. 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 by McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser
during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies.
Bundy wrote that “the timely development of ballistic
missiles during the Eisenhower administration is one of the best achievements
of those eight years. 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.” He then added an
instructive comment: “I am aware of no serious contemporary proposal, in or out
of either government, that ballistic missiles should somehow be banned by
agreement.” 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 .
Could that threat have been taken off the table? We
cannot, of course, be sure, but it was hardly inconceivable. The
Russians, far behind in industrial development and technological
sophistication, were in a far more threatening environment. Hence, they
were significantly more vulnerable to such weapons systems than the U.S.
There might have been opportunities to explore these possibilities, but in the
extraordinary hysteria of the day they could hardly have even been
perceived. And that hysteria was indeed extraordinary. 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’s injunction that it is necessary to be
“clearer than truth.”
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. 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.
Stalin’s proposal was taken seriously by the respected
political commentator James Warburg, but otherwise mostly ignored or ridiculed
at the time. Recent scholarship has begun to take a different view.
The bitterly anti-Communist Soviet scholar Adam Ulam has taken the status of
Stalin’s proposal to be an “unresolved mystery.” Washington
“wasted little effort in flatly rejecting Moscow 's
initiative,” he has written, on grounds that “were embarrassingly
unconvincing.” The political, scholarly, and general intellectual failure left
open “the basic question,” Ulam added: “Was Stalin genuinely ready to sacrifice
the newly created German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the altar of real
democracy,” with consequences for world peace and for American security that
could have been enormous?
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 “[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,” agreeing “to
sacrifice the East German communist regime to reduce East-West tensions” and
improve internal political and economic conditions in Russia -- opportunities
that were squandered in favor of securing German participation in NATO.
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. But
that possibility apparently was not considered, a striking indication of how
slight a role authentic security plays in state policy.
The Cuban Missile Crisis and Beyond
That conclusion was underscored repeatedly in the years that
followed. When Nikita Khrushchev took control in Russia
in 1953 after Stalin’s 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. 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.
Accordingly, Khrushchev proposed sharp mutual reductions in
offensive weapons. 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. The late Kenneth Waltz, supported by other
strategic analysts with close connections to U.S. intelligence, wrote then that
the Kennedy administration “undertook 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.” Again, harming
national security while enhancing state power.
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. The move
was also motivated in part by Kennedy’s terrorist campaign against Fidel
Castro’s Cuba ,
which was scheduled to lead to invasion that very month, as Russia
and Cuba may
have known. The ensuing “missile crisis” was “the most dangerous moment
in history,” in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s adviser
and confidant.
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 .
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 .
Kennedy’s subjective estimate at that moment was that if he
refused the Soviet premier’s 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. Kennedy nonetheless refused Khrushchev’s
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 ’s
borders or anywhere else it chose. 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.
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. 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. And the maneuvers
were indeed delicate. The U.S.
and Russia had
jointly imposed a cease-fire, but Kissinger secretly informed the Israelis that
they could ignore it. Hence the need for the nuclear alert to frighten
the Russians away. The security of Americans had its usual status.
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.
These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment. Washington
was deploying Pershing II strategic missiles in Europe
with a five-minute flight time to Moscow .
President Reagan had also announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star
Wars”) program, which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike
weapon, a standard interpretation of missile defense on all sides. And
other tensions were rising.
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. Newly released archives
reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously
assumed. A CIA study entitled “The War Scare Was for Real” concluded that
U.S.
intelligence may have underestimated Russian concerns and the threat of a
Russian preventative nuclear strike. The exercises “almost became a
prelude to a preventative nuclear strike,” according to an account in the Journal
of Strategic Studies.
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’s early-warning systems detected an
incoming missile strike from the United States, sending its nuclear system onto
the highest-level alert. The protocol for the Soviet military was to
retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own. Fortunately, the officer on
duty, Stanislav Petrov, decided to disobey orders and not report the warnings
to his superiors. He received an official reprimand. And thanks to
his dereliction of duty, we’re still alive to talk about it.
The security of the population was no more a high priority
for Reagan administration planners than for their predecessors. 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’s chilling study Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus
Survival in the Post-Cold War Era
The record of post-Cold War actions and doctrines is hardly
reassuring either. Every self-respecting president has to have a
doctrine. The Clinton Doctrine was encapsulated in the slogan
“multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must.” In congressional
testimony, the phrase “when we must” was explained more fully: the U.S.
is entitled to resort to “unilateral use of military power” to ensure
“uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”
Meanwhile, STRATCOM in the Clinton
era produced an important study entitled “Essentials of Post-Cold War
Deterrence,” issued well after the Soviet Union had
collapsed and Clinton was extending
President George H.W. Bush’s program of expanding NATO to the east in violation
of promises to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev -- with reverberations to the
present.
That STRATCOM study was concerned with “the role of nuclear
weapons in the post-Cold War era.” A central conclusion: that the U.S.
must maintain the right to launch a first strike, even against non-nuclear
states. Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be at the ready because
they “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict.” They were, that is,
constantly being used, just as you’re using a gun if you aim but don’t fire one
while robbing a store (a point that Daniel Ellsberg has repeatedly
stressed). STRATCOM went on to advise that “planners should not be too
rational about determining... what the opponent values the most.”
Everything should simply be targeted. “[I]t hurts to portray ourselves as too
fully rational and cool-headed… 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.” It is “beneficial [for our
strategic posture] if some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of
control,’” thus posing a constant threat of nuclear attack -- a severe violation
of the U.N. Charter, if anyone cares.
Not much here about the noble goals constantly proclaimed --
or for that matter the obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to make
“good faith” efforts to eliminate this scourge of the earth. What resounds,
rather, is an adaptation of Hilaire Belloc’s famous couplet about the Maxim gun
(to quote the great African historian Chinweizu):
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Atom Bomb, and they have not.”
After Clinton came, of course, George W. Bush, whose broad
endorsement of preventative war easily encompassed Japan’s 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 “to burn
out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming
bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu.” 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.
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
“comparable to spending for procurement of new strategic systems in the 1980s
under President Ronald Reagan,” according to a study by the James Martin Center
for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International
Studies.
Obama has also not hesitated to play with fire for political
gain. 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. It was widely covered, but one crucial
paragraph was ignored. Obama hailed the operation but added that it could not be
the norm. The reason, he said, was that the risks "were
immense." The SEALs might have been "embroiled in an extended
firefight." Even though, by luck, that didn’t happen, "the cost
to our relationship with Pakistan
and the backlash among the Pakistani public over encroachment on their
territory was… severe."
Let us now add a few details. The SEALs were ordered to
fight their way out if apprehended. They would not have been left to
their fate if “embroiled in an extended firefight.” The full force of the
U.S. military
would have been used to extricate them. Pakistan
has a powerful, well-trained military, highly protective of state
sovereignty. It also has nuclear weapons, and Pakistani specialists are
concerned about the possible penetration of their nuclear security system by
jihadi elements. It is also no secret that the population has been
embittered and radicalized by Washington ’s
drone terror campaign and other policies.
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 “to confront any unidentified aircraft,” which he assumed
would be from India .
Meanwhile in Kabul , U.S.
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.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Among his recent books are Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, Power Systems, Occupy, and Hopes
and Prospects. His latest book, Masters of Mankind, 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 www.chomsky.info.
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