NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION: QUO VADIS?

While the breakup of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 marked the closure of the Cold War, the sudden dissolution of this vast Communist empire brought the greatest nuclear proliferation threat in the nuclear era. In 1991 when the SU had 37,000 nuclear warheads (twice the number of American nukes), they were mostly deployed in four of the 15 republics – Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine.

                    Overnight, the Union’s disintegration critically impinged on the control and command of thousands of strategic nuclear arms. Eventually it was agreed that Russia should take over and take sole charge of all the former-Soviet nuclear arsenals, and subsequently all the nuclear missiles and warheads were withdrawn from service and brought back for dismantling on Russian soil.

                    In Ukraine, for example, where the Soviets had deployed 46 SS-24 missiles (known as the Scalpels, each one of them armed with ten 550 KT warheads), these solid-fueled ICBMs (first deployed in mid-1984) were removed from service by mid-1998, and their last silo was destroyed in 2001.

                    Vladimir Orlov, director of Center for Policy Studies, has written and posted 29 December 2011 online Russia in Global Affairs:

                    “…The main problem after the collapse of the Soviet Union was the presence of strategic nuclear weapons, alongside those in Russia, in three other newly established countries (formerly republics in the Soviet Union): Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

                   “Kazakhstan’s nuclear arsenal was equivalent to the nuclear forces of Britain, France and China combined on the day the Soviet Union collapsed…”

                   It took nearly half a decade for all the nuclear weapons in the three former Soviet republics to be totally withdrawn and safely transferred back to Russia, that is, by the end of 1996.                                                               25.01.2014 03:37

                  With the Russian monopoly and sole control of the world’s largest nuclear stockpile, the threat of a massive nuclear dispossession, dispersion and proliferation was effectively contained.

                  In 1979 Nigel Calder, a widely traveled and highly regarded science writer, recalled in writing his last meeting way back in 1966 with the distinguished Indian physicist Homi Bhabha shortly before his death at the age of 31 in a plane crash. Calder wrote: “He was a close friend of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and in a poverty-stricken country he won public funds and precious foreign exchange for the nuclear palaces that symbolized India’s hopes for the future.

                 “At that last meeting he paid careful lip service to Nehru’s doctrine of the peaceful atom but, following China’s nuclear weapons tests (the first one on October 1964), he had the military option clearly in mind.

                 “Jerking his head with a characteristic tic, Bhabha told me that he could make a bomb within eighteen months, when the government of India gave him the go-ahead. He did not live to do the job himself, but his manner taught me the inevitability of nuclear proliferation…”

                  On May 1974 India exploded a nuclear device, using material from a reactor provided by Canadians. The underground explosion had a yield of 10-15 KT (Hiroshima bomb).

                  “The Indians created a general awareness that nuclear abstinence could not be taken for granted,” Lawrence Freedman, a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, wrote in 1978. “As France and China had argued before them, the Indians wrote of the dangers of being beholden to the superpowers for military protection and of the national independence that could come from a nuclear programme…”

                   Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s former Minister of Disarmament, wrote in 1976: “With its underground test in May 1974 India demonstrated possession of a device which is per se an atomic bomb, whether or not it is so used or intended…”

                  “More nations will follow India’s example, perhaps aiming straight forwardly at the weaponizing of nuclear explosives…”

                   Calder wrote in 1979: “Three countries, India, Israel, and South Africa, have acquired nuclear weapons in the 1970s, and at least one more, Pakistan, is working hard to secure them in the early 1980s…”

                  And, he added: “Israel’s bomb will probably set off a chain reaction of bomb making throughout the Middle East…” In 1974 the CIA reported that Israel had operational nuclear weapons. Israel’s military nuclearization had been an open secret since the late 1960s.

                 The world should remember, however, that on February 1990 South Africa’s President Frederick Willem de Klerk issued written instructions to dismantle the nation’s nuclear arsenal. His successor Nelson Mandella often implored the nuclear powers to follow South Africa’s exemplary lead in relinquishing nuclear weapons. Addressing the UN General Assembly in 1998, he described the nukes as “these terrible and terrifying weapons of mass destruction” and he asked (not rhetorically, but indeed with profound significance) “why do they (the nuclear powers) need them anyway?”   

                        Shortly after India’s resumption of nuclear tests in 1998, Pakistan initiated a short series of nuclear tests of its own. North Korea surprised the world by conducting its maiden nuclear test on October 2006, and a second explosion on 25 May 2009.

                        According to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a public education and lobbying organization, India had 100 nuclear weapons and Pakistan 30-50 in 2009. Israel was said to have 100-200.

                       The new kid on the nuclear block, North Korea has an estimated 8 bombs. And, of all people, President Barack Obama has declared North Korea a “grave threat” to the world. Perhaps so, to go by the North Korea’s wild rhetoric threatening the American superpower and its followers with “a one hundred- or one thousand-fold retaliation with merciless military strike.” Whatever it’s meant.

                        Expressing grave concern over North Korea’s nuclear test on 25 May 2009, Malaysia reiterated its anti-nuclear stand: “Malaysia strongly believes the continued existence of nuclear weapons presents a grave threat to humanity, particularly by increasing the risk of proliferation…” 

                       An Myong Hun, a North Korean diplomat, told the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that moves to acquire a nuclear arsenal were for self-defence.                                                            

                      The North Korean diplomat then restated his country’s policy to achieve nuclear disarmament.

                       Following the UN resolution on 12 June 2009 to impose tougher sanctions, North Korea defiantly declared that “a proud nuclear power will not flinch from them.”

                       North Korea said it had turned to nuclear weapons, forced by US hostility.

                      “It has become an absolutely impossible option for the DPRK (North Korea) to even think about giving up its nuclear weapons,” North Korea stated. And defiantly added that “all plutonium to be extracted (reprocessed from the Yongbyon reactor) will be weaponised...”

                      After its third nuclear test on February 2013 which triggered new United Nations sanctions in March, North Korea’s National Defence Commission issued a statement on 18^th April demanding an end to UN sanctions, following which the North’s top military body stated that the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula would begin – but first with the removal of the US nuclear weapons deployed in the region.

                     “The denuclearization of the Korean peninsula can begin with the removal of the nuclear war tools dragged in by the US and it can lead to global nuclear disarmament,” the Defence Commission boldly stated.            17.01.2014 18:23

                     On November 1987, Nigerian Foreign Minister Bolaji Akinyemi was reported to have said: “Nigeria has a sacred responsibility to challenge the racial monopoly of nuclear weapons.”

                    Ali Mazrui wrote in 1986, suggesting that only when African nations, with “their underdevelopment and instability,” seem about to acquire the nukes would the major powers understand the need to abolish nuclear weapons.

                    Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (signed in 1968 and ratified to come into force in 1970) commits the US, the Soviet Union, and Britain (the first three nuclear powers) “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control..”

                   Alva Myrdal observed in 1976: “First and foremost, the superpowers must cease the nuclear arms race as they solemnly pledged to do in NPT, Article VI. In addition, the Treaty obligations must be balanced. There are several prices that must be exacted in the form of improvements in NPT rules in order to make them more equitable and more effective…”

                   Myrdal added: “The superpowers must be brought to realize that they are losing prestige and credibility, that they can have no leverage against further proliferation if they do not immediately proceed seriously to agree on restraints…”

                  According to Norris and Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, the Soviets increased their nuclear warheads from more than 12,600 in 1970 to over 30,000 in 1980. The Soviet arsenal peaked in 1986 with 45,000 nuclear weapons (the most the US had was over 32,000 in 1966).The US managed to reduce its nuclear stockpile, while improving its quality, from over 26,000 in 1970 to more than 24,000 in 1980.

                 At the second review conference on the NPT in 1980, the final document called for multilateral negotiations on nuclear disarmament. And negotiations were to be conducted in the stated context of “A comprehensive, phased programme with agreed time-frames, whenever feasible, for progressive and balanced deduction of stockpiles of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery, leading to their ultimate and complete elimination at the earliest possible time.”

                   Frank Blackaby, director of SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) wrote in March 1985: “In signing the NPT the parties agreed that the treaty was only a step in the larger process of disarmament, in which the self-imposed denial of non-nuclear weapon states was to be matched, ultimately, by corresponding acts of the nuclear weapon powers. The non-fulfilment by the latter of their disarmament obligations contributes to sapping the legitimacy of the non-proliferation regime, particularly in Third World countries, where the regime may begin to be seen as an imposition by the great powers…”

                   To quote Lawrence Freedman: “Furthermore, as drunkards (the nukoholics) insisting on the abstinence of others (that is, do as they say, not as what they do), the superpowers have been warning others to stay clear of nuclear weapons while building up and improving their capabilities at an intensive rate.

                  “If they take these weapons to be so essential to national security or as a symbol of national virility, why should not others?”

                  Why not? And if the two nuclear superpowers can have thousands of nuclear weapons, why can’t the have-nots have only one or even a handful of the nukes? Mao Tse-tung once said that a handful was enough for a nation.                   

                  “One single nuclear weapon is enough to level the larger part of almost any major city in the world,” stated Anders Thunborg, Sweden’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and chairman of the group of experts for the 1980 UN study on nuclear weapons.

                   “A small number of nuclear weapons aimed at important targets could cause tremendous destruction…”

                   A Swedish foreign minister told the UN General Assembly: “Nuclear weapons continue to be the greatest threat to mankind. The appalling spectre of their possible use haunts the minds of people everywhere. The nuclear weapons of a few States affect the security of all States…”

                  Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and presently chancellor of the Australian National University, has recently written (as published in the New Straits Times, Kuala Lumpur, April 30, 2013):

                 “With Russia and the US holding 18,000 of the world’s current stockpile of 19,000 nuclear weapons, it is proving impossible to persuade any of the other nuclear-armed states to reduce their own (much smaller) arsenals…

                 “None of the nuclear-armed States, inside or outside the NPT, pay anything more than lip service to the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons.

                “The continued seductive power of the Cold War logic and language of nuclear deterrence is the primary reason, though for some states it is clear that the testosterone factor – perceived status and prestige – also plays a role…”

                 One of the leading figures in the global nuclear disarmament campaign, Evans has persuasively and strongly addressed the need for the world’s leaders to reconsider  and resolve the problem of nuclear weapons, more than two decades after the end of the Cold War. To quote him, as he has put it so cogently and succinctly:

                “Progress toward achieving a safer and saner world requires all of the nuclear-armed states to break out of their Cold War mindset, rethink the strategic utility of nuclear deterrence in current conditions, and recalibrate the huge risks implied by retaining their arsenals. In today’s world nuclear weapons are the problem, not the solution.”                 

                 Therefore, the only answer to the apocalyptic threat of a nuclear war as well as the solution to the persistent and protracted problem of nuclear proliferation, is to be found in total nuclear disarmament.

                 “The arsenals of nuclear weapons states set a bad example for the world, encouraging proliferation. And they could kill us all,” Distinguished Professor Alan Robock of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Professor Owen Brian Toon of Colorado University in Boulder jointly posted in the Strategic Security Blog of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) on 3 February 2014.

                After reviewing the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and other incidents which had close to a nuclear conflict, Robock and Toon concluded: “The only way to be sure we do not annihilate the human population is to destroy the (nuclear) weapons…”

               While the overwhelming majority of nations (184 of them) do not have nuclear weapons, nine nations have these “doomsday” weapons, with the two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the US in blatant and immoral possession of more than 90% of the world’s present total stock of over 17,000 nuclear warheads.  14.03.2014 06:10

 

               To quote from the February 2010 report by Global Zero Commission:

                “…The world is nearing a “proliferation tipping point” when nuclear weapons spread beyond the capacity of any effort to rein them in and the danger increases that they will be used by a country in conflict or by accident, or by a terrorist group.

               “The only way to eliminate the nuclear threat is to achieve the phased, verified, multilateral elimination of all nuclear weapons – global zero (by 2030)…”   13.03.2014 09:13

                Yes; get rid of all the nuclear weapons. And the earlier, the better, for the peace, security and wellbeing of humankind.

             

MAKE THIS WORLD NUCLEAR-FREE:SCRAP ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS - DEFENCE VERSUS OFFENCE IN THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE

One thing has quickly led to another in what former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has termed “the action-reaction phenomenon in the technology of weapons.” The development of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in the early 1950s led shortly to the development of a defence system against missiles (known as the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system) in the mid- and late 1950s, and the ABM though in its infancy in turn led to the development of the MIRV to put multiple warheads on individual missiles in the mid-1960s.

                    During the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69), the Sentinel defence system was proposed in 1967 in an election year to close another so-called “missile gap” (a leaf taken from Kennedy’s campaign in 1960). Sentinel was expressly conceived and designed to counter a non-existing Chinese missile threat.

                   Sentinel was to present a thin shield to thwart an imaginary Chinese missile attack in the 1970s. The Chinese were later to deploy their first ICBM (the DF-5) in late 1981 when they had more than 300 nuclear weapons as compared with over 23,000 nukes in the American arsenal.

                  Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense (1961-68), said Sentinel had a threefold mission: (1) to provide a thin “area defense” of the entire United States against a missile attack by China, (2) to protect against an accidental launch of a Soviet missile, and (3) to provide “as a concurrent benefit,” a limited defence of US land-based Minuteman ICBMs against a Soviet strike.

                 Scientists opposed to the urban-based Sentinel system brought the issue to the American public. The leading lights among them included the distinguished pair of Hans Bethe, a Nobel laureate and wartime director of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, and Richard Garwin, another theoretical physicist and protégé of Enrico Fermi, who like Bethe had done work on the thermonuclear bomb.

                Citizen protests began promptly in Chicago where a few scientists from the Argonne National Laboratory spearheaded the public campaign against the ABM.

               On 14 March 1969 Richard Nixon, newly sworn in as the US president (1969-74), announced that the ABM sites and radars would be removed from the cities to more remote locations. Renamed “Safeguard”, its primary purpose was to defend the Minutemen ICBMs (the first of which were deployed in 1963) against a preemptive Soviet strike.

                     Herbert York, former director of the Livermore Laboratory (a major centre for designing and developing nuclear weaponry), wrote in August 1969 that “Safeguard will safeguard nothing” in the field of US national security.

                       York pinpointed “the futility of searching for technical solutions to what is essentially a political problem, namely, the problem of national security…”

                      In condemning the Sentinel and justifying the rechristened Safeguard, the new Defense Secretary Melvin Laird stated in March 1969 that “the original Sentinel was potentially provocative. As such, it appeared to us (in the Nixon Administration) to be a step toward, rather than away from, an escalation of the arms race…”

                    According to the statistics compiled by Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, the Soviets nearly doubled their nuclear warheads from over 8,000 in 1967 to over 14,000 in 1972 when the two superpowers signed the ABM Treaty. Bethe and Garwin had foreseen that Sentinel “would inevitably stimulate a large increase in the Russian strategic offensive forces…” The US, however,  had nearly twice as many nuclear weapons as the Soviet Union in 1972.

                  Following Chairman Khrushchev’s abject humiliation in the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis which exposed the vulnerability of Moscow and other Soviet key targets to a devastating nuclear assault, and also in response to Sentinel’s predecessor Nike X (1962-67) which was never deployed, the Soviets developed and deployed the Galosh defence system around Moscow. And although the Soviet ABM was known to be rather rudimentary with fewer than 100 interceptors, the US responded by developing the MIRV to arm their new ICBMs with multiple warheads.

                The introduction of MIRV technology starting with the initial deployment in 1970 of the Minuteman III with three independently targetable warheads brought “the single most destabilizing element in the history of the nuclear arms competition.”

                In 1985 Henry Kissinger (US Secretary of State, 1973-77) told Micheal Charlton of BBC London in an interview: “Secretary McNamara did not want to build an anti-ballistic missile defence. He therefore developed the idea of a MIRV, arguing that with MIRV we could saturate any Soviet defence and that therefore there would be no strategic inequality if the Soviets had a defensive system and we did not…”

               The Soviets also developed their own MIRV and started deploying their super-monster Hydras with the SS-18 ICBM with 10 warheads in 1974 and the SS-19 with 6 warheads in 1975.

              “MIRV and its fratricidal counterpart ABM, the anti-ballistic missile, were respectively offence and defence, sword and shield,” Charlton has written. “Superficially they had transported this classical antithesis into the nuclear era. But given the enormous power of even a single nuclear weapon, the ancient discord of sword and shield were  adjudged unconvincing by Robert McNamara. It fell to Henry Kissinger to search for some common understanding of the proposition that, in the nuclear age, the adversary becomes in a sense partner in the avoidance of nuclear war as a political and moral necessity…”

                       Before the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, the Americans had to persuade the Soviet side that ABM development had destabilizing consequences. Both rivals then agreed that nation-wide deployment of the ABM system was futile, destabilizing, and costly.

                     As explained in Arms Control Today, July/August 1984: “Futile: because in a competition between defense system and offensive missiles with nuclear warheads, the offense would win, especially against populations and urban areas.

                    “Destabilising: because the arms race would be accelerated as both sides developed and deployed not only competing ABM systems, but also offsetting systems to overpower, evade, or attack and disable the opposing ABM system. Furthermore, each side would fear the purpose or the capability of the other’s ABMs (especially against a weakened retaliatory strike), and in a crisis these fears could bring mounting pressures for striking first. What strategic theorists refer to as arms race instability and crisis instability could both result.

                    “Costly: because both ABM development and deployment, and the buildup, modernization and diversification of offsetting offensive forces, must be purchased…”

                     On 23 March 1983, a decade after the signing of the ABM treaty, President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) called on American scientists to develop his so-called SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” McNamara called the envisioned leak-proof defence system to replace offensive weapons by defensive weapons as “Star Wars I” which, he said, would not be technically feasible within the next several decades.

                     The combination of a partial defence system with offensive systems, he called “Star Wars II” which would appear to be aggressive to the Soviets and, he stressed, “that is a very great danger.”

                         Reagan’s SDI has since morphed into regular BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense) during the presidency of his avatar George W. Bush (2001-2009). Influenced much by neoconservative hawks in Washington, Bush scuppered the ABM treaty in 2002 to further develop the BMD.

                 Early June 2009, Lt-Gen Patrick O’Reilly, head of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, proudly told a missile defence conference in Washington that the US has fine-tuned its capability to shoot down long-range missiles launched by North Korea which had about a week earlier conducted its second nuclear test on May 25 after its debut in October 2006 (and its nuclear test on February 2013). That recalls what the old Sentinel had been supposedly tasked to do against a hypothetical attack by primitive Chinese missiles in the 1970s.

                The far-seeing physicist Herbert York tried vainly to drive home the point four decades ago that the solution of security is not technological, but essentially political.

                What Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan also vainly tried to achieve in the mid-and late-1980s, the answer is to be found in the political decision for total nuclear disarmament, without any defence system whether the SDI in Reagan’s time or currently the BMD inherited from Bush.

              “What is SDI for?” Gorbachev asked Reagan at their meeting in Moscow on 29 May 1988.

              “What missiles is it supposed to bring down if we eliminate all nuclear weapons?”

               Since the 1983 “Star Wars” speech of Reagan, the Pentagon has spent more than $200 billion in developing missile defense over the first two decades and about another $100 billion in the third decade to 2013. Just as the US military will most probably keep their nuclear weapons until the end of history, they will also keep on developing their missile defense to its ultimate realization – whatever it means.

              For an update, we take the liberty of quoting from the brief introduction in U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense co-authored by Jonathan Masters and Greg Bruno, and published on 1 May 2013:

             “U.S. missile defense systems are designed to protect the U.S. homeland, deployed military forces, and allies from limited ballistic missile attacks. The Pentagon originally sought development of ballistic missile defense (BMD) technology to counter the Soviet nuclear threat during the Cold War, but focus in the twenty-first century has shifted to defending and deterring potential strikes from regional actors, particularly Iran and North Korea.

            “In March 2013, the Pentagon announced it would shore up missile defenses on the U.S. west coast to guard against a growing North Korean threat, while effectively cancelling the final phase of plans to deploy missile interceptors in Europe over the next decade.

            “Proponents of BMD stress its role (essentially defense) in the projection of U.S. power abroad and its value as a deterrent (the prime attribute and virtue of nuclear weapons), while critics highlight BMD’s largely unproven technology and high costs.”

16-17.7.2009 0333 11.01.2014 19:12 12.01.2014 00:02 16.08.2014 03:57 21.08.2014 08:10  

                       

           Whatever Reagan had said about making SDI to make nukes “impotent and obsolete”, the reality from the moment of its conception in his mind is apparently much more sinister and hostile to the fate of humankind.

           The presently-developing BMD is regarded as one of the essentials of the American military’s Vision 2020 for attaining the Holy Grail – total and overwhelming  military superiority, labeled as Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD).

           As envisioned, the nuclear spear is to provide a first-strike counterforce war-fighting capability while the nuclear shield will empower the Pentagon to strike any adversary with impunity, without any fear of retaliation from the other side.

          According to the US Space Command, the “emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea and air superiority” will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance – to control, dominate and prevail “across the full range of military operations”, including nuclear war-fighting.

         With the National Missile Defense (NMD) using space systems for both defense and offense/precision strike, global surveillance/information dominance/superiority will be harnessed and synchronized to deliver a spaced-based global precision strike (GPS) capability. An American Dream, it’s quintessentially Reagan’s of 1983!

        Not everyone is convinced, however. American primacy or supremacy is not acceptable to either Russia or China. Nor is it relevant to the world of the 21^st century.

        Putin has said that Russia will continue to build up its military (having restored its nuclear parity with the US) – “not to threaten anyone” but “to feel safe…”

       Xi of China has said that a Sino-American war will be disastrous for the whole world. The message is clear enough.

October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: On the brink of World War III

                On 14 October 1962, the United States government found that the Soviet military was installing offensive ballistic missiles on the island of Cuba, less than 100 miles from the shores of Florida. Secret U-2 flights by the CIA revealed the covert introduction of nuclear weapons within striking distance of many of the major cities in the US.

                                             

                When interviewed by Michael Charlton of BBC London in 1985, and asked `why Chairman Khrushchev had challenged President Kennedy with nuclear weapons on America’s doorstep in Cuba, Dean Rusk (US Secretary of State 1961-69) said:

                “I don’t believe that we ever knew with precision just why Mr Khruschev decided to put the missiles in Cuba, or why he thought that he could do so without a very strong American reaction. It may be that he made the judgment that, since President Kennedy had not followed up the Bay of Pigs (the failed invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro in April 1961) with American forces, we would not attach much importance to Cuba. It may be that the advantages to him of getting a hundred of these missiles in Cuba would be so great that it would be worth taking a chance if there were only a twenty per cent chance of success.

                 “Whatever the reasons, we felt that the missiles in Cuba from a military point of view would make it possible for them to knock out our Strategic Air Command bases with almost no advance warning.

                  “From a political point of view, the effects in the Western hemisphere and in NATO would be devastating. So that produced an extraordinarily dangerous crisis.”

                   In a short reflective note on averting the Apocalypse on the afternoon of 27 October (published in the 80^th anniversary issue of TIME, March 31, 2003), Robert McNamara (US Secretary of Defense 1961-68) recalls: “…Fidel Castro had already recommended to Nikita Khrushchev that nuclear weapons be used if the U.S. invaded (Cuba). That’s how close we came. Events were slipping out of control (at 4 p.m. that afternoon the Joint Chiefs recommended to President Kennedy that the US attack within 36 hours and destroy the Soviet missiles for which according to the CIA, the nuclear warheads had not been delivered)…”

                    McNamara wrote that the US did not learn until 30 years later (30 years after the confrontation that had brought the US and the Soviet Union to the edge of a nuclear conflict, and the world to the brink of World War III) that “the Soviets already had 162 (nuclear) warheads in Cuba…” The SS-4 missiles each carried a 1 MT (one megaton) warhead, and Washington was within their deadly range.

                    Why then did Khrushchev blink?

                     McNamara told Charlton in 1985: “It was our tremendous conventional power in the region (backed up by “tremendous US strategic nuclear superiority”) which forced the Soviets to take those missiles out (of Cuba)…”

                      According to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a presidential aide and policy adviser, President Kennedy prepared for all options to counter the Soviet attempt to alter the balance of power and to test the will of the United States. American military forces were fully mobilized. A worldwide alert was ordered and aircraft readied to attack Cuba.  Troops were deployed for an invasion if necessary, while an amphibious landing force of 40,000 marines and 180 ships moved into positions in the Caribbean. Nuclear weapons were loaded in strategic bombers, kept constantly in the air ready to head for Moscow and other key targets in the Soviet Union.

                                                    

                       According to nuclear historian Richard Rhodes, the Strategic Air Command put 7,000 megatons aloft and tried to provoke a Soviet alert that would justify a US preemptive first strike.

                       Curtis Le May, USAF Chief of Staff, challenged Kennedy to invade Cuba. Kennedy cautiously, and wisely, refused. “Not until 1989 did the Soviets reveal that there were two dozen nuclear warheads on hand in Cuba during the crisis; invasion would have started nuclear war,” Rhodes has recorded.

                         “For some dramatic weeks the world feared an imminent nuclear war between the two superpowers,” Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s former Minister of Disarmament wrote in 1976. “Khrushchev backed down, the missiles were withdrawn (from Cuba)…”

                         In 1985 Rusk elaborated for Charlton: “I think he (Khrushchev) recognized that the United States had overwhelming conventional superiority in the vicinity of Cuba (our state of Florida was about to sink under the sea with the weight of military power we assembled there), and that his only response would almost have to be in the nuclear field. We did not believe that Chairman Khrushchev would launch a nuclear strike because of Cuba, but we could not know it for certain. So we had to take that into account . But, fortunately, Mr Khrushchev kept his wits about him and did not allow that matter to escalate into general war…”

                         When asked by Charlton whether Rusk subsequently came to the view that the Soviets had attributed their failure in Cuba not just to the reality of America’s conventional superiority, but, also, in the end, to their own nuclear inferiority, Rusk answered: “We had some reason to believe, afterwards, that the Soviets thought we had counted missiles at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. In fact, we had not. Apparently they thought so, because shortly after that crisis a high Russian official (Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetzov) said to Mr John J. McCloy (an American negotiator) in New York, ‘Well, Mr McCloy, you got away with it this time. You’ll never get away with it again!’

                 “If you take into account the lead time required for making decisions and doing all the preparatory work and so forth, much of their further deployment of nuclear weapons in later years undoubtedly came from decisions made shortly after the Cuban missile crisis.”

                   The Soviets were to increase tenfold their nuclear weapons within the next couple of decades. The Soviet Union reached nuclear parity with the US by 1978, and shortly afterwards forged further ahead.

                   Harold Brown (US Defense Secretary 1977-81) said: “When we build, they build – and when we don’t build, they build…”

                  Jimmy Carter (US President 1977-81) said to Charlton in 1985: “One interpretation to be placed on it is that the Soviets were so far behind in nuclear weaponry, and they were deeply embarrassed by the Cuban missile crisis when they were branded as inferior to us in nuclear capability… So I think they proceeded aggressively to make sure that they were at least equal to us…”