Nuclear war in the hands of ‘Able Archer’ November 1983

Operation ‘Able Archer’ was a five-day NATO command post

exercise starting on 7 November 1983, that spanned Western Europe, centred on the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) Headquarters at Casteau, north of the Belgian city of Mons. This major NATO war game simulated a period of conflict escalation, culminating in a coordinated nuclear attack.

           According to Cabinet memos and briefing papers recently released in London under the Freedom of Information Act, ‘Able Archer’ involved some 40,000 US and NATO troops moving across western Europe, coordinated by encrypted communications systems, according to a scenario in which Blue Forces (NATO) defended its allies after Orange Forces (Warsaw Pact countries) sent troops into Yugoslavia following political unrest there. The Orange Forces had quickly followed up with invasion of Finland, Norway and eventually Greece. As the conflict had intensified, a conventional war had escalated into one involving chemical and nuclear weapons – since then known as the weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

           The realistic nature of the late 1983 massive exercise, conducted against the grim background of deteriorating relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and the anticipated deployment in Europe of the American strategic Pershing II nuclear missiles (so-labelled “tactical”, but capable of hitting their targets in the most densely populated part of the USSR in a maximum time of 5 minutes), led some members of the Soviet Politburo and military leadership to believe that the Able Archer war game was ostensibly only a cover for a covert disarming nuclear first strike.

           In immediate response, the Soviets readied their nuclear forces and placed air units on alert in East Germany and Poland.

           According to declassified British documents, the Kremlin gave instructions for a dozen aircraft n East Germany and Poland to be fitted with nuclear weapons. In addition, around 70 SS-20missiles (intermediate-range ballistic missiles, IRBMs of the same category as the American Pershing II) were placed on heightened alert, while Soviet submarines armed with nuclear ballistic missiles were sent under the Arctic ice to avoid detection.

           NATO and its allies initially thought that the Soviets were only playing their own war game. But the disclosed papers have shown how close the Russians came to treat ‘Able Archer’ as the prelude to a nuclear strike against them.

           Soon after being sworn in as the 40^th US president on January 1981, Ronald Reagan inaugurated the largest peacetime defense buildup in American history, overdoing even the unprecedented military modernization of his predecessor, to match and exceed the Soviet strategic and global military capabilities. This acceleration of the superpower arms race came with the climatic escalation of rhetoric, propaganda and psychological operations in the peaking period of the Cold War.

           Addressing the British Parliament on 8 June 1982, the conservative Republican president spoke on the threat of nuclear war: “...I don’t have to tell you that in today’s world the existence of nuclear weapons could mean, if not the extinction of mankind, then surely the end of civilization as we know it...”

           Then, he added:”Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain the strength in the hope it will never be used...”

          Reagan also referred rather vaguely to a long-term plan and hope about “the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies...” Forthright and harsh words, spoken by one supposedly on the moral high ground, and calculated to rattle and shake the old and ailing Soviet leaders like General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev (who died five months later on November 1982) and KGB chairman Yuri Andropov (who passed away shortly after on February 1984).

           But, Reagan was no prophet, and certainly no one at that time could have foreseen or predicted the end of the Soviet Union less than a decade away at the close of 1991!

          Addressing the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, on 8 March 1983, Reagan delivered his so-called “Evil Empire” speech when he described the Soviet leadership as “the locus of evil in the modern world” and urged his American detractors not “to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire” (implying the Soviet Union).

          In this rather remarkable but uncouth speech of his, Reagan also curtly reminded the Soviet Union and the world at large of his proposal for a 50% cut in strategic ballistic missiles and the elimination of all intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

           On 23 March 1983, Reagan announced his signature so-called “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI in short, labelled “Star Wars by the media and the legend of critics). SDI was his completely naive and simplistic notion (actually his dream) of an inchoate missile defense system to supplant the standard military doctrine of “the well-named MAD” (Mutual Assured Destruction), which had so far worked quite well under the rubric “nuclear deterrence” since the two nuclear superpowers had not thrown their missiles against each other, knowing that a nuclear war would spell outright mutual suicide. In his very first days as president, the Pentagon has briefed him that at least 150 million Americans would die in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union – “even if we ‘won’.”

          Reagan’s SDI project appeared problematic, if not also dangerous, to the Kremlin. At that time, the new General Secretary Yuri Andropov (who succeeded the late Brezhnev on 10 November 1982) lambasted Reagan for planning to unleash a nuclear war in the best way, “with the hope of winning it...”

          On 1 September 1983, slightly over five months after the out-of-the-blue SDI presentation, the Soviet attack on the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (KAL 007) in prohibited Soviet airspace over the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crew aboard, brought plunging bilateral relations to a new public low.

          About three weeks later, on the night of 26 September 1983, there were false alarms of an ICBM attack. According to the online Wikipedia article, the Soviet orbital missile early warning system (codename Oko) reported a single intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch from the territory of the USA.

          Luckily, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov who was on duty, correctly dismissed the warning as a computer error when the ground early warning radars did not detect any launch. He had also considered that a full-scale attack would involve thousands of simultaneous launches, not just a single strike.

          The Oko later reported four more ICBM launches, which Petrov again rightly dismissed as false. The warning system was then investigated and found to have malfunctioned; false alarms were caused by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellite orbits.

          Col. Petrov’s admirable good sense and steady nerves prevented a possible nuclear war.

          According to Andrev Mikhailov, writing in Pravda.Ru 28.09.2012, the purported launch involved 5 Minuteman III ICBMs, each armed with 10 nuclear warheads. He wrote: “...Relying on common sense (five missiles is not enough for the first strike in the war), he (Colonel Petrov) declared a false alarm here and was right: there was a failure in the notification system. The third world war did not break out. It is hard to imagine what would have happened if the USSR reciprocated...”

          More than a decade later, January 2006, an international public organization “Association of World Citizens” gratefully and rightly presented the retired Colonel Petrov, with an award for the Prevention of a Nuclear War. It’s a statuette of a hand holding a globe (the world’s fate in one man’s hand).

         

          Even while Soviet intelligence services were then attempting to detect the early signs of a nuclear attack, NATO began to simulate one on 2 November 1983. “Able Archer 83” thus led some frightened Soviet leaders to believe into taking it as a military cover for a pre-emptive nuclear strike.

          On 8 or 9 November 1983, the Moscow Center sent its residencies a flash telegram incorrectly reporting an alarming alert (DEFCON) on American bases and frantically asking for further information regarding an American first strike with nuclear weapons. The alert precisely coincided with the estimated 7-10-day period between NATO’s preliminary decision and an actual strike. This was the peak of the war scare in late 1983 (“The most dangerous year,” said Andrew R. Garland of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas).

          The Soviet Union, believing that its only chance of surviving a NATO strike was to pre-empt it, readied its huge nuclear arsenal. The CIA reported activity in the Baltic Military District, in Czechoslovakia, and the agency determined that nuclear-capable aircraft in Poland and East Germany were placed “on high alert status with readying of nuclear strike forces.”

          According to former CIA analyst Peter Vincent Pry, the Soviet ICBM silos, easily readied and difficult for the US to detect, were also prepared for launch.

            Soviet fears of a nuclear first-strike ended as the Able Archer was game finished on 11 November 1983. So also ended the threat of nuclear war.

         The 1983 war scare is considered by many historians to be the closest the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 when October 27 was recalled as “the most dangerous day”.

         Paul Dibb, a former director of the Australian Joint Intelligence Organization, suggested in October 2013 that Able Archer 83 posed a more substantial threat than even the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

         “Able Archer could have triggered the ultimate unintended catastrophe, and with prompt nuclear strike capabilities on both the US and Soviet sides, orders of magnitude greater than in 1962,” Dibb said.

          In 1962, the US had over 27,000 nuclear warheads and the SU over 3,300.

          In 1983, the American military had 24,000 nuclear warheads and the Soviet counterpart had over 35,000. The Soviets had a numerical advantage, developed post-haste since their complete and utter humiliation in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. 

         In his memoir An American Life, Reagan has written (pp. 588-9):

         “During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the Administration took it for granted that the Russians like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike...”

         And, why not? In 1983 the US had more than 20,000 nuclear weapons. What were they for? And what, and where were their targets?

        The Soviet Union had more than 30,000 then. What if most of those nukes were unleashed against cities and military assets in the US?

         Reagan has also written (ibid., p. 257):

        “We had many contingency plans for responding to a nuclear attack. But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis...

         “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?...”

         On 16 May 1983(about six months before Able Archer) when President Reagan announced that he was deploying the new MX ICBM (designed with 10-12 350KT nuclear warheads and developed during Carter’s presidency to counter the formidable Soviet SS-18 (Satan) ICBM first deployed in 1974 with 10 megaton-warheads), Reagan expressed his fervent hope that, somewhere along the line, the process of making more and more deadly nuclear weapons would be reversed, and that all nuclear weapons would be eliminated.

         Reagan then said: “I can’t believe that this world can go on beyond our generation and on down to succeeding generations with this kind of (nuclear) weapon on both sides poised at each without someday some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us...” 

1973 YOM KIPPUR WAR CAME CLOSE TO A NUCLEAR STRIKE BY ISRAEL

A decade after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the two nuclear

superpowers (both now on par with their overwhelming overkill capability) came close once more to a military showdown in the volatile Middle East – a strategic and oil-rich region of intense and intractable local rivalries and international contention.

             The occasion was the 1973 Yom Kippur War (6-25 October) that had started off with a sudden invasion by a coalition of Arab forces against Israel. Massive incursions by the invading Egyptian and Syrian troops in the first three days of fighting had threatened the leadership in Tel Aviv with imminent defeat. Should Israel go nuclear for self-survival, how would or how could the superpowers react?

            According to online Wikipedia article, the war began when the Arab coalition launched a surprise attack on Israeli positions in Israeli-occupied territories on the day of Tom Kippur, the holiest in Judaism, during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Crossing ceasefire lines, Egyptian forces entered the Sinai Peninsula, and Syrian forces the Golan Heights – both places captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.

             Both the United States and the Soviet Union started to move massive supplies to their respective allies during the war, leading to a near-confrontation between the two nuclear Goliaths.

             Although the American leaders had initially expected the Israelis to turn the tide in three or four days of hard combat, their breakthrough did not come until 14 October after decisively repulsing a strong armoured attack by 800-1,000 Egyptian tanks. The Israelis then quickly followed up with a multidivisional counter-assault on the night of 15 October. They crossed the Suez Canal on 18 October and, by the time of the UN-brokered ceasefire on 22 October (as arranged by American and Soviet diplomats), Israeli troops had come to about 100 km from Egypt’s capital city of Cairo, having cut off the Cairo-Suez road and encircled the Egyptian Third Army.

            Because of bilateral violations of the ceasefire, President Leonid Brezhnev sent a “very urgent” letter on the late evening of 24 October to President Richard Nixon, blaming Israel and calling for joint action to “compel observance of the cease-fire without delay”. The Soviet leader also threatened to “consider taking appropriate steps unilaterally” to curb Israel.

           Since this crisis occurred at the height of the Watergate scandal in Washington, Nixon was so agitated and indisposed that his closest and most senior advisers, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had to decide what to do and how to respond to Brezhnev, which they judiciously managed to do in a conciliatory manner. They also asked President Anwar Sadat to drop his request for Soviet assistance, threatening that should the Soviet Union intervene, the US would do so as well.

            Luckily, the Soviet leaders remained level-headed and restrained. “It is not reasonable to become engaged in a war with the United States because of Egypt and Syria,” Premier Alexi Kosygin remarked. The KGB chief Yuri Andropov chimed in, saying “We shall not unleash the Third World War...”

           Thus, on the following morning of 25 October when Sadat wisely accepted the American suggestion not to seek Soviet assistance, the crisis passed its darkening climax to come to a peaceful and timely end.

            Then unknown to the outside world, Prime Minister Golda Meir had initially overruled a military pre-emptive strike against Syria only a few hours before the Arab assault. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had also rejected pre-emption.

             Also unknown to the world at large, the nuclear option (Israel’s “Holy of Holies” ) had been invoked at the early critical stage of the Yom Kippur conflict when Tel Aviv had encountered daunting military difficulties and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) had suffered unexpectedly high losses. On 8 October an alarmed Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six-Day War, warned of Israel’s impending total defeat.

             At a cabinet meeting the next day, Dayan warned that the country was approaching a point of “last resort”. That meant pointing to the nuclear trigger.

             That night of 9 October, Golda Meir reportedly authorized the assembly of 13 20KT (84That night of 9 October, Golda Meir reportedly authorized the assembly of 13 20KT (84  TJ) tactical atomic weapons for the Jericho missiles deployed at Sdot Micha Airbase (with three squadrons of Jericho Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles) near Zekharia, and also for the F-4 aircraft stationed at Tel Nof Airbase near Rehovat. Those 13 IRBMs were readied for use against Egyptian and Syrian targets.

              For his 2011 book How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, Ron Rosenbaum interviewed Moshe Halbertal, professor, philosopher and author, Israel’s leading military ethicist and co-author of the IDF code of ethics.

              As Israel is said to be highly vulnerable to a nuclear attack with just one (megaton) or two bombs targeted against its capital city of Tel Aviv and metropolitan area (covering 300 square miles, slightly bigger in land area than Singapore), Rosenbaum wanted to know whether the possible destruction of Israel would represent a second Holocaust, another “Supreme Emergency” which would justify crossing the threshold of nuclear retaliation.

             “Yes. Sure,” Halbertal said without hesitation. Then he referred to the October 1973 Yom Kippur war.  He read somewhere that Moshe Dayan gave the order to be ready with the nukes. And the eminent military ethicist described the nuclear option as a “real dilemma”.

              With Israel on the verge of collapse, Rosenbaum asked, “Can you, at last resort, use a nuclear bomb?”

              Halbertal said: “... Now what we are speaking of here is not really pre-emption of nuclear attack. But pre-emption against loss of independence. Loss of the state. If not loss of existence itself, then a homeless people again, perhaps vulnerable to slaughter again...”

               Israel has been reported to have a nuclear arsenal of 200 or more nuclear warheads, not counting the 200KT nuclear cruise missiles and the nuclear-armed Harpoon missiles on a couple of recently acquired Dolphin-class submarines.

                As a nuclear power, Israel is enviably in the same league as Britain, China and France.        

     

                Israel has been operating a fleet of 5 submarines since the late 2000’s.

                According to a recent note posted online by military sources on October 2009: “Their presence (Israel’s five nuclear-armed subs) outside Israel’s waters is a powerful deterrent to any surprise nuclear or conventional attack, endowing Israel with an instantaneous second-strike nuclear capability...”

CAN WE SURVIVE A NUCLEAR WAR?

According to the 2013 study by the International Physicians for the

Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility, a nuclear war between India and Pakistan (each possessing about a hundred nuclear weapons) would set off a global famine that could kill two billion people (mainly in China with a population of 1.3 billion and in other developing countries) and effectively end human civilization.

            The prognosis of civilizational destruction had once been associated with a full-scale nuclear war between the two nuclear superpowers (each then having some 20-30,000 nuclear warheads) about a generation ago, with the discovery in 1982-83 of nuclear winter in the wake of nuclear Armageddon. Even then it had been found that in a so-called limited nuclear exchange, the detonation of a few hundred of those apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction on a hundred cities would quickly trigger, within a short period of several weeks, unprecedented climatic and atmospheric catastrophes on a global scale.

            According to the 2013 IPPNW study which was made public on 10 December 2013, based upon research published by climate scientists who had assessed the impact of nuclear explosions in the Earth’s atmosphere and other ecosystems, a nuclear war using as few as 100 nukes (of the explosive power of the 15 KT atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima 6 August 1945) anywhere in the world would disrupt the global climate and devastate crop yields so severely that the lives of more than two billion people would be at risk because of global famine.

            Only about a week earlier, there was a press report early December 1983 that the Kashmir flashpoint could trigger a fourth war between the two nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent.

            Ira Helfand, the author of the IPPNW report, wrote in an article on the day of its release:

            “There are today more than 17,000 nuclear warheads, an ongoing existential threat to human survival that has largely been ignored since the Cold War ended two decades ago...

           “In fact, the humanitarian consequences of even a limited nuclear war, such as a conflict in South Asia between India and Pakistan, involving just 100 Hiroshima-size bombs (13-20 KT) – less than 0.5% of the world’s nuclear   arsenal – would put 2 billion people’s lives and wellbeing at risk.

            “The local effects would be devastating. More than 20 million people would be dead in a week from the explosions, firestorms and immediate radiation effects. But the global consequences would be far worse.

            “The firestorms caused by this war would loft 5 million tons of soot high into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and dropping temperatures across the planet. This climate disruption would cause a sharp, worldwide decline in food production.

            “The resulting global famine would put at risk 870 million people in the developing world who are already malnourished today, and 300 million people living in countries dependent on food imports.

            “In addition, the huge shortfalls in Chinese food production would threaten another 1.3 billion people within China. At the very least there would be a decade of social and economic chaos in the largest country in the world, home to the world’s second largest and most dynamic economy and a large nuclear arsenal of its own.

            “A nuclear war of comparable size anywhere in the world would produce the same global impact. By way of comparison, each U.S. Trident submarine commonly carries 96 warheads, each of which is 10 to 30 times more powerful than the weapons used in the South Asia scenario. This means a single submarine (SSBN) can cause the devastation of a nuclear famine many times over.”

            On a full-scale nuclear conflict between the two nuclear Goliaths, Ira Helfand was reported to have said: “With a large war between the United States and Russia, we are talking about the possible – not certain, but possible – extinction of the human race.

             “In this kind of war, biologically there are going to be people surviving somewhere on the planet but the chaos that would result from this would dwarf anything we’ve ever seen in human history...”

             Professors Carl Sagan and Richard Turco, two of the leading scientists responsible for the discovery of nuclear winter, have written in their landmark book A PATH WHERE NO MAN THOUGHT (Century, London, 1991, p. 123):

             “...Efim Slavsky, the Minister of Medium Machine Building – the cover agency for the Soviet nuclear weapons program – in July 1968 told Andrei Sakharov (known as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb), “We’ve got to be strong, stronger than the capitalists – then there’ll be peace. If the imperialists use nuclear weapons, we’ll retaliate at once with everything we’ve got and destroy every target necessary to insure victory.”

              “Sakharov concluded from this, “So our response would be an immediate, all-out nuclear attack on enemy cities and industry, as well as on military targets.”...” That is, both countervalue and counterforce attacks at the same time, in the nuclear jargon. The ultimate prescription for the nuclear Apocalypse.

            “...It would be impossible for the United States to maintain the military commitments which it now sustains around the world (without turning into a garrison state) did we not possess atomic weapons and the will to use them when necessary,” Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34^th US president (1953-61) wrote in his memoirs Mandate for Change (Volume One, Doubleday, New York, 1963, p. 180).

              During Ike’s 8-year presidency, the US military increased its nuclear stockpile twenty times to over 24,000 nuclear warheads by the end of 1961.

               “... (The) conflict that exists today is no more than an old-style struugle for power, once again presented to mankind in semireligious trappings. The difference is that, this time, the development of atomic power has imbued the struggle with a ghostly character; for both parties know and admit that, should the quarrel deteriorate into actual war, mankind is doomed,” Einstein wrote in an unfinished address drafted several days before his death in mid-April 1955.

               Einstein’s pronouncement was quite prophetic; in 1955 the US had over 3,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union some 200. Three years after the Americans, the Soviets tested on 22 November 1955their first 1.6 megaton hydrogen bomb which was designed and devised jointly by Sakharov and Zeldovich.

               “The threat of the apocalypse will be with us for a long time; the apocalypse may come,” J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1956. Director of the Los Alamos laboratory which produced the world’s first atomic bomb, Oppenheimer opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb (the “Super”) in 1949. He cogently argued that its extreme danger to mankind “wholly outweighs any military advantage”. He was alleged a security risk in 1953, but subsequently exonerated.

                Speaking on 19 September 1956, President Eisenhower said: “We witness today, in the power of nuclear weapons, a new and deadly dimension to the ancient horror of war. Humanity has now achieved, for the first time in its history, the power to end its history...” That would be the true end of history for homo sapiens.

                 Speaking on 26 September 1961, President John F. Kennedy said that nuclear war and its radioactive fallout and environmental impact “spread by winds and waters and (human) fear, could well engulf the great and the small (nations), the rich and the poor, the committed and uncommitted alike.”

                 Then Kennedy stressed, in these immortal words: “Mankind must put an end to war or (nuclear) war will put an end to mankind...”

          Addressing the Polish Sejm (unicameral legislature) on 21 July 1974, Soviet leader General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev declared that “mankind might be wholly destroyed” in a nuclear war.

          “A very large nuclear war would mean a calamity of indescribable proportions and absolutely unpredictable consequences, with the uncertainties tending toward the worse,” Andrei Sakharov wrote on “The Dangers of Thermonuclear War” in Foreign Affairs, Summer 1983.

          “All-out nuclear war would mean the destruction of contemporary civilization, throw man back centuries, cause the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of people, and, with a certain degree of probability, would cause man to be destroyed as a biological species...”

          Speaking on the consequences of nuclear war on 11 July 1984, Senator William Proxmire said: “One of the shocking implications of nuclear winter is that we can destroy ourselves (commit mass suicide) by attacking our enemy (committing genocide). Some experts have long maintained that there is no military usefulness to nuclear weapons, or to some types of nuclear weapons.

          “Now we learn that, by employing the nuclear option, we may be shooting ourselves in the head. If the nuclear winter study is correct, we have thousands of weapons in our own arsenal that are pointed at ourselves.

          “Of course, the same situation exists for the Soviet Union.

          “The dilemma we face is that the strategic option we have adopted to assure deterrence could also assure our self-destruction...”

          What’s the solution? Total nuclear disarmament (TND).

          In 2011, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement called for its national societies to educate the public about the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war, and called for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

         The Mayors for Peace campaign, representing the world’s urban population (half of humanity), is working towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020. 

Countdown to a global nuclear conflict?

“The United States is baiting China and Russia, and the final nail in the coffin will be Iran, which is, of course, the main target of Israel,” 88-year-old Henry Kissinger, the 56^th US Secretary of State (1973-77), said in an extraordinary interview with Alfred Heinz of the The Daily Squib (published November 27, 2011).

    “We have allowed China to increase their military strength and Russia to recover from Sovietization, to give them a false sense of bravado, this will create an all-together faster demise for them.

     “We’re like the sharp shooter daring the noob to pick up the gun, and when they try, it’s bang bang.”

     Continued the former top American diplomat and world-renowned statesman: “The coming war will be so severe that only one superpower can win, and that’s us folks...”

     That hopeful prognosis of total victory appears to be the answer to the question posed by Kissinger himself at a press conference in Moscow early July 1974, a month before Nixon was forced out of his presidency, when the then secretary of state asked: “What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What do you do with it?” Yes; to conquer the world.

      On the imminent big showdown (“wargasm” in the terminology of the late Herman Kahn, a leading nuclear theorist), Kissinger, despite his advanced age, enthused with a hint of demoniac glee: “O how I have dreamed of this delightful moment.”

     Then he described his dream, saying: “Out of the ashes we shall build a new society, a new world order; there will be only one superpower left, and that one will be the global government that wins.”

       World-conqueror wannabes like Adolf Hitler (German chancellor 1933-45) and Baron Tanaka (Japanese premier 1927-29) pale in comparison – in the apocalyptic light of Kissinger’s envisioned global conquest and domination in the nuclear era.

       Alexander the Great, who conquered Greece (336 BC), Egypt (331 BC) and the Persian Empire (328 BC), would look like a minor, with all his chariots and crossbows.

      “Don’t forget, the United States has the best weapons, we have stuff that no other nation has, and we will introduce those weapons to the world when the time is right,” Kissinger reminded the world, shortly before he ended his dictation and the reporter Alfred Heinz was ushered out of the room in the luxurious Manhattan apartment.

      “We cannot go around threatening to blow up a major portion of the world, or attempt to get our way by looking insane and dauntless. These strategies might be available to a totalitarian nation. They are not available to us, a democratic nation in a democratic alliance,” wrote an American contemporary of Kissinger’s half a century earlier, Herman Kahn (1922-83), in his 1962 book Thinking About the Unthinkable (p. 132), when the US had overwhelming nuclear power and military superiority vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

     “A world armed with nuclear weapons would provide a fertile field for paranoiacs, megalomaniacs, and indeed all kinds of fanatics,” Kahn warned (p. 223).

      Reflecting on the hard lessons of the Vietnam War that exacted a heavy death toll of three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans, and describing war as “terribly wrong”, Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense for seven years (1961-68), said poignantly: “You can’t change human nature...”

     He also recalled that 160 million people were killed in human conflicts during the 20^th century. He added: “We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image.”

     At the crucial period of the Cuban missile crisis in late October 1962, President Kennedy wisely tried to prevent going into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, although the US then had a very substantial strategic nuclear superiority as well as a hugely superior conventional force in the Caribbean region.

     He had two main options: to quarantine or to invade Cuba where the Soviets had secretly deployed both medium-range and intermediate range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads, capable of hitting the major cities on the American east coast and killing over 90 million Americans.

      When Kennedy asked General Walter Sweeney who was chief of the US Air Force if he was confident that his bombers could destroy all the Soviet missiles in Cuba, Sweeney said there was a chance that one or two missiles and nuclear warheads would remain operational after the attack. McNamara said he could have kissed Sweeney for his reply.

      McNamara said: “What responsible president would have accepted the risk of even one nuclear warhead exploding over a U.S. city, killing unprecedented numbers of American citizens?”

      In the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary film Fog of War, then 85-year-old McNamara also commented on the Vietnam war. He said: “...People did not understand at that time there were recommendations and pressures that would carry the risk of war with China and carry the risk of nuclear war. And he (President Johnson) was determined to prevent it...”

      A week before both the US and Russian presidents signed their agreement for further reductions of their deployed nuclear arms (known as the new START) in Prague on 8 April 2010, the Defense Department in Washington released its new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) with its plan to relegate (not replace) its nuclear sword and shield with new-fangled conventional counterparts for a devastating first strike.

      The US is developing what it has termed a Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS) capacity, to deploy conventional warheads on ballistic missiles capable of striking any target in the world within 60 minutes.

     “The Prompt Global Strike concept envisages a concentrated strike using several thousand precision conventional weapons in 2-4 hours that would completely destroy the critical infrastructures of the target country and then force it to capitulate,” former Joint Chief of Russian Armed Forces General Leonid Ivashov has commented in an editorial entitled “Obama’s Nuclear Surprise”.

     “...Combined with the deployment of missile defense supposed to keep the US immune to retaliatory strikes from Russia and China, the Prompt Global Strike initiative (first announced in 2006) is going to turn Washington into a modern era global dictator...

     “At the same time, Washington (Obama) is talking about a completely nuclear-free world...”

     On the latest US Nuclear War Plan (the 18^th), the eminent nuclear archivist Hans M. Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) blogged on 4 April 2013 that the new guidelines reaffirm the Cold War practice of nuclear counterforce (to destroy enemy missile silos, bomber bases and other military targets), officially designated “preemptive or offensively reactive”.

     Moreover, the US military has long-term plans to deploy nuclear weapons well beyond 2040, up to 2080 or indefinitely.

     In a letter attached to the new defense strategy guidance on 5 January 2012, President Obama stated that the US will maintain American global leadership as well as its military superiority in the world.

     At a press briefing on the same day, Obama said that “the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats...”

   Less than one human generation earlier, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan had signed a landmark joint communiqué at the end of their first summit meeting in Geneva on 18-21 November 1985.

      “In this truly historic document the leaders of the two superpowers declared that ‘nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’. Admitting this and implementing it in practice made meaningless the arms race and the stockpiling and modernizing of nuclear weapons,” Gorbachev wrote in his Memoirs (Bantam, 1997, pp. 529-530).

     “’The (two) parties will not seek military superiority.’ This fundamental statement was not just a general phrase to soothe the public. The American President and I have already committed ourselves to giving the necessary instructions to the negotiating teams at the nuclear arms talks in Geneva...”

       In Professor Michel Chossudovsky’s timely and highly significant book TOWARDS A WORLD WAR III SCENARIO: The Dangers of Nuclear War, many salient points are highlighted, of which several are cited as follows:

·        The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace.

·        The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously.

·        Breaking the “big lie”, which upholds war as a humanitarian undertaking, means a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.

·         of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful lobby groups which support them.

To quote Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law, University of

Illinois College of Law: “Professor Chossudovsky’s hard-hitting and compelling book explains why and how we must immediately undertake a concerted and committed campaign to head off this impending cataclysmic demise of the human race and planet earth...”

  

     To quote excerpts from the late Khrushchev’s remarkable letter to Kennedy, received late evening of Friday 26 October 1962, on the eve of “the most dangerous day” of the Cuban missile crisis:

     “Everyone needs peace; both capitalists, if they have not lost their reason, and still more, communists.

     “War is our enemy and a calamity for all people.

     “If indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars (World War I and World War II) and I know that war ends only when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.

     “I should like you to agree that one cannot give way to pressures; it is necessary to control them.

     “If people do not show wisdom, then in the final analysis they will come to a clash, like blind moles, and the reciprocal extermination will begin...”

      

    To quote Albert Einstein, generally recognized as the greatest scientist of the 20^th century: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former...”

     And, to quote again McNamara, once known as the super hawk of the US: “All the evidence of history suggests that man (homo sapiens) is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly...”

    According to a recent opinion poll conducted by Win/Gallup International and released on New Year’s Day 2014, 24% of about 68,000 respondents in 65 countries said that the US is the biggest threat to world peace. 54% in Russia and 49% in China said the US is the greatest threat to peace.

    In late 1968, three American astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders became the first humans to orbit the moon in the Apollo 8 spacecraft. On the fourth of 10 orbits, just as the earth was coming over the moon’s horizon, Anders took colour photographs of Earth.

     A few days later, after their return home, NASA published the iconic photo of a blue planet.

     “...It became a symbol of the fragility of earth, as well as reminding us how pitifully small and insignificant our place in the universe really is,” Rick Moran wrote in American Thinker, December 26, 2013.

     Millions tuned in on Christmas Eve 1968 when the American trio circled the moon. On the tenth and last orbit, they began reading from the Book of Genesis, the Bible verses describing the creation of Earth.

     In a Christmas eve address 2013 at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Pope Francis called on the people in the world to cast aside hatred. He said: “If we love God and our brothers and sisters, we walk in the light. But if our heart is closed, if we are dominated by pride, deceit, self-seeking, then darkness falls within us, and around us...”

     In his first Christmas Urbi et Orbi message before an estimated 150,000 people in St. Peter’s Square, the 77-year-old pontiff asked Jesus to inspire peace among the warring factions around the world: “Prince of Peace, in every place turn hearts aside from violence and inspire them to lay down arms and undertake the path of dialogue...”

     At the 2014 New Year mass in St. Peter’s Bsailica, Pope Francis prayed in his homily for people “who hunger and thirst for justice and peace” in the world. Then in his first New Year blessing in St. Peter’s Square, he called for greater human solidarity in the world. Not global conflict with nukes.

A World Without Nuclear Weapons

In the surrealistic atmosphere within the haunted Hovde House at Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, Presidents Ronald Reagan of the US and Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union had come incredibly close on the late Sunday afternoon of 11 October 1986 to an epic agreement, to  destroy all their thousands of nuclear weapons within a decade. This recap gives the background on the boldest and most momentous move to denuclearize the global military at the height of the Cold War.

        President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) has been described as “an extraordinarily complex character” by Henry Kissinger. This could mean that no one was quite able to read his mind. Nevertheless, he was like another other American, who wanted his country to be the best and the strongest in the world. That was exactly he did during his two eventful terms at the White House.

        After President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) had raised the ceiling on military spending to its highest level in peacetime militarization, Reagan came in to double the defense budget from US$140.7 billion in 1980 to $281.4 billion in 1986.

        Reagan brought back the strategic B-1 bomber (dropped by Carter), started deploying the long-range cruise missiles in 1982, and planned to start deploying the highly controversial MX (America’s most accurate and powerful ICBM with up to ten 310 KT warheads) in 1986, the advanced cruise missiles in 1988, and the Trident II (the most advanced submarine-launched missiles) in1989. However, both the MX and the Trident II had started their development under Carter.

        Paradoxically enough, Reagan was known to abhor nuclear war all his conscious life and he was even described as a dyed-in-the wool nuclear abolitionist. A staunch believer in the biblical prophecy of Armageddon, he also feared an apocalyptical nuclear conflict.

        At the high point of the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement in the US, Reagan spoke of “dismantling the nuclear menace” (while he was building up his nuclear arsenal) when he delivered his commencement address at Eureka College (his alma mater) in Illinois on 9 May 1982. Under pressure by public clamor for nuclear restraint/disarmament, he also called for substantial and verifiable reductions of nuclear arms (in his so-called ‘build-down’ modernization strategy) to enhance security and reduce the risks of war.

        In 1983 he made known his wish to see the Soviet leader Yury Andropov, Chairman and General Secretary (1982-84), to propose eliminating all nuclear weapons.

        When he announced on 16 May 1983 his planned deployment of the MX  missiles to counter the Soviet SS-18s (with ten 550 KT warheads) and SS-19s (with six 550 KT warheads), he expressed the hope that the nuclear arms race would be reversed, and that all nuclear weapons would be eliminated.

         He said: “I can’t believe that this world can go on beyond our generation and on down to succeeding generations with this kind of weapon on both sides poised (to strike) at each other without someday some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us…”

         Earlier on 23 March1983, Reagan had called on American scientists to build a new defense system against ballistic missiles (in his ‘dream’ project known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, the SDI) to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete”.

         He did not say (though the thought of military superiority could be subliminally present in his mind) that if such a technically perfect or near-perfect defense system could be developed and deployed, American would regain its original nuclear predominance which it had had for three golden decades from the beginning of the nuclear era in 1945 to 1975 when the Soviet military achieved nuclear parity following its unprecedented nuclear expansion in the wake of utter humiliation from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

        “If Reagan’s claim of a 100 percent effective defense came even close to reality,” Kissinger wrote, “American strategic superiority would become (once again) a reality…” What American presidents have always in mind – the ‘Holy Grail’ in the military field.

        

        Gorbachev described SDI development as “the creation of a shield which would allow a first strike (with nuclear weapons) without fear of retaliation.” It was also his fear that the SDI would extend the arms race into space, an untoward venture that could bust the treasury in Moscow.

         On 15 January1986, Gorbachev proposed abolishing all nuclear weapons. Then in late February, delegates at the 27^th Party Congress in Moscow called for making progress towards a nuclear-free world.

          At their two summit meetings in Geneva (November 1985) and Reykjavik (October 1986), Reagan and Gorbachev discussed and negotiated what the US side called going to zero – the zero option, the total elimination of all nuclear weapons, total nuclear disarmament.

          According to Donald Regan, Chief of Staff in the White House who was present at both summits, Reagan and Gorbachev spent a total of nine hours and forty-eight minutes over two days of face-to-face discussions on October 10-11, 1986. On the final session in the late Sunday afternoon from 5.32 p.m. to 6.30 p.m., Regan has written in his memoirs:

          “What, Reagan asked Gorbachev, had he meant by the reference in his letter (to Reagan) to “the eliminating of all nuclear forces”?

           “I meant I would favor eliminating all nuclear weapons,” Gorbachev replied.

           “All nuclear weapons?” Reagan said. “Well, Mikhail, that’s exactly what I’ve been talking about all along. That’s what we have long wanted to do – get rid of all nuclear weapons. That’s always been my goal.”

            “Then why don’t we agree on it?” Gorbachev asked.

.

            “We should,” Reagan said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

            “It was a historic moment. The two leaders had brought the world to one of its great turning points. Both understood this very clearly.

            “Then came the impasse: Mikhail Gorbachev said, “I agree. But this (referring to their agreement on total nuclear disarmament over a 10-year period, 1986-1996) must be done in conjunction with a ten-year extension of the ABM treaty and a ban on the development and testing of SDI outside the laboratory.”

             “Outside the laboratory. Those words negated (for the US) all that had  been agreed upon. As soon as they were uttered, Reagan and Gorbachev were down from the mountaintop and right back where they had started.

            “Reagan, astonished by this sudden reversal, said, “Absolutely not. I am willing to discuss all details, including the timing of a plan to eliminate all nuclear weapons in conjunction with a plan to reduce conventional forces to a state of balance. But I will not discuss anything that gives you the upper hand by eliminating SDI.”

            “Gorbachev did not reply. After a long silence, Reagan assumed that the Soviet leader had nothing more to say. Thereupon he closed his briefing book and stood up. Gorbachev seemed startled by the President’s action and remained in his chair for a moment in puzzlement. Then he rose to his feet also. The summit at Reykjavik was over…”

            Kissinger has written:”Years later when I asked a senior Gorbachev

adviser who had been present at Reykjavik why the Soviets had not settled for what the United States had already accepted, he replied: “We had thought of everything except that Reagan might leave the room.”

           “Shortly afterward, George Shultz (Secretary of State) gave a thoughtful speech describing why Reagan’s vision of eliminating nuclear weapons was actually to the West’s advantage. But the language of his speech, artfully phrased in support of a “less nuclear world” showed that the State Department – painfully conscious of allied concerns – had not yet signed onto Reagan’s vision of the total abolition of nuclear weapons…”

           When Michael Charlton of BBC London interviewed Edward Heath in 1985, the former British prime minister suggested that the two superpowers and America’s allies in Europe had agreed “about the non-establishment of SDI forces…” In Charlton’s interview with Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor sounded much more in favour of military integration in Europe than in  “all this bloody nonsense about ‘Star Wars’ (the more popular label for Reagan’s dream SDI)…”

           Through one man’s obsession and another ’s dread, the highly delusive SDI had very strangely zapped their last-minute breakthrough to a world without nuclear weapons.

WHITE DOVE OR BLACK SWAN: NUCLEAR DETERRENCE, OR GLOBAL DEVASTATION?

     “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 (atomic bombing of Hiroshima), 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 the worst instincts,” world-renowned American linguist and philosopher, social critic and political activist, Noam Chomsky posted on the eve of Hiroshima Day 2014.

     “As we now enter its 70^th year, we should be contemplating with wonder that we have survived. We can only guess how many more years remain…”

    Chomsky then quoted General Lee Butler, the last commander in chief of the US Strategic Air Command (in charge of nuclear weapons and strategy) before its disestablishment on June 1992.

     “Twenty years ago, he (Lee Butler) 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 proportions.”

     “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?””

     Concluding his timely piece with the same penetrative insight as the good general’s, Chomsky gladly quoted the military authority again:

     “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.”

     On 5 December 1996, an unprecedented statement calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons was released by 61 former Generals and Admirals from 17 countries, including 18 Russians and 17 from the US. They described nuclear weapons as constituting “a peril to global peace and security and to the safety and survival of the people we are dedicated to protect.”

     Introducing on 2 February 1998 the landmark statement by 120 civilian leaders calling for abolition of nuclear weapons, General Lee Butler took the opportunity to explain why he had “made the long and arduous journey from staunch advocate of nuclear deterrence to public proponent of nuclear abolition.” And he warned that nuclear deterrence could lead to Mutual Assured Destruction (the two sides of the coin of nuclear force). Butler noted that nuclear deterrence was “a Western design, a self-delusion” that a nuclear war could be deterred.

     Former national leaders including Jimmy Carter (US), Lord Callaghan (UK), Helmut Schmidt (Germany), and Pierre Trudeau (Canada) concluded their historic statement:

     “The world is not condemned to live forever with threats of nuclear conflict, or the anxious, fragile peace imposed by nuclear deterrence. Such threats are intolerable and such a peace unworthy. The sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons invokes a moral imperative for their elimination. That is our mandate. Let us begin.”

     (Ironically, that’s a restatement of the very first resolution of the United Nations, adopted way back in 1946. Speaking at the UN in September 2015, Pope Francis called for banning all nuclear weapons, describing the nuclear threat of destruction as “an affront to the entire framework” of the United Nations.

          “…Nuclear war is the black swan (which is said to be impossible, but does exist) we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us (in massive numbers). We delay eliminating the risk at our own peril,” Seth Baum of Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI) wrote in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 21, 2014.

          “Now is the time to address the threat, because we are still alive…”

          According to Alan Robock, American climatologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and co-author of a 2014 study on the impact on Earth’s climate

following detonation of 50 “Hiroshima-size” (13-15 kiloton) nuclear weapons in a war between India and Pakistan, the ensuing fires would loft 5 million tons of soot to heat up the stratosphere around while surface temperatures plunge, inducing a noxious nuclear winter. With atmospheric ozone consequently depleted and UV radiation enhanced, the destruction of crops would lead to global famine and death of about 2 billion people (slightly over a quarter of the world’s population).

          On the climatic and overall impact of a global nuclear conflict, Brian Gallagher posted on nauti.us 27 June 2015:

           “It’s almost impossible to fathom the awesome amount of charred remains that would be floating around the planet after nuclear annihilation.

          “Robock estimates that 150 million tons of smoke would envelope Earth, plummeting temperatures to those of the last ice age 18,000 years ago. It would be around 30 years for smoke-filled air to clear. It would take decades for the planet to warm up to pre-war levels.

           “But global warming would be over,” says Robock. “Why? Because CO2 (carbon dioxide) production would stop with the destruction of civilization…””

           To further quote William Perry, former defense secretary and author of “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” (1995):

         “My special experience has kept me acutely aware of nuclear dangers and contemplating the almost unthinkable consequences of a nuclear war. A lifetime in which I had firsthand experiences and special access to top-secret knowledge of strategic nuclear options has given me a unique, and chilling, vantage point from which to conclude that nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security – they now endanger it…”