Standfirst. After the discovery of fission in late 1938,
the nuclear scientists attained their breakthrough in the crucial process of
initiating and sustaining a chain reaction early December 1942 at the world’s
first nuclear reactor in the University of Chicago. If fission was the original
nuclear seeding, the chain reaction was its conception, and the successful
explosion of the world’s first nuclear device in mid-July 1945 marked the birth
of a new era in human history. At 0529.45 hours, a blinding flash of overwhelming
white light that filled the sky, then a powerful blast wave that sounded like
bouncing thunder, signaled its fateful arrival.
By the early spring of
1941, two young and highly talented scientists working together at Birmingham
University in England had calculated the critical mass of uranium required to
make a bomb. They had also found that it was possible to produce enough uranium
235 to make a truly explosive chain reaction to fire an atomic bomb. Recalling
his work with Rudolf Peierls, Otto Hahn wrote: “…At that point we stared at
each other and realized that an atomic bomb might after all be possible.”
Their findings were
subsequently examined by a committee of scientists, known as the MAUD Committee.
The scientific experts reported on July 1941 their conclusion that “the scheme
for a uranium bomb is practicable and likely to lead to decisive results in the
war (World War II having started in Europe with the Nazi invasion of Poland on
1 September 1939). They also recommended that the highest priority be given to
continue the work “to obtain the weapon in the shortest time possible…”
On 9 October 1941,
Vannevar Bush, director of the newly-established Office of Scientific Research
and Development (OSRD) personally took the MAUD report to President Roosevelt.
“Roosevelt had
instinctively reserved nuclear weapons policy to himself,” historian Richard
Rhodes has commented.
“The United States
was not yet committed to building an atomic bomb. But it was committed to
exploring thoroughly whether or not an atomic bomb could be built. On man,
Franklin Roosevelt, decided that commitment – secretly, without consulting
Congress or courts. It seemed to be a military decision and he was Commander in
Chief.”
The eventual
decision to develop the A-bomb, as well as American participation in World War
II, was triggered shortly after the Japanese bombing of the American naval base
at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on 7 December 1941.
On 19 January 1942,
FDR signed his “OK” in a brief and pointedly crisp note to Bush, handwritten on
White House stationery and penned in black ink with a broad-nibbed instrument.
In mid-1942 the US launched an
all-out programme to develop the
A-bomb. Although further experimental work
was needed to establish the chain reaction process for a very powerful bomb,
the truly formidable task was to build very large plants to separate uranium
and produce plutonium as the active materials for bomb-making. The US Army
Corps, under General Leslie Groves, was in charge of this huge secret
undertaking, codenamed “Manhattan Project.”
Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist
and regarded as a scientific genius, directed the Los Alamos laboratory
responsible for both the experimental work and development of the bomb. The
project involved some of the best scientists and engineers in the world
and a workforce of over 100,000. The
Manhattan project took nearly three years of highly intensive work to complete,
and cost a bomb – US$2 billion.
The experimental
breakthrough came on the afternoon of 2 December 1942 when Enrico Fermi,
Italian theoretical and experimental physicist as well as Nobel laureate,
successfully set the pile of uranium fuel on a self-sustaining chain reaction.
The pile had gone critical for 4.5 minutes before he gave the instruction for
it to be stopped.
Fermi showed
that he could control the nuclear fission and its chain reaction. According to
one report, half of Chicago could be destroyed in a nuclear explosion if this
experiment in the University of Chicago should go wrong.
Arthur Compton,
experimental physicist, Nobel laureate and director of Metallurgical Laboratory
of University of Chicago, was standing next to Fermi when the Italian scientist
raised his hand and said: “The pile has gone critical!”
Slightly over a
year and half earlier on 17 May 1941, Compton had reported that the chain
reaction, if produced and controlled, “may rapidly become a determining factor
in warfare….” And he added: “That nation which first produces and controls the
process will have an advantage which will grow as its applications multiply.”
That is, with the making of more and more nuclear weapons.
On 12 April
1945, President Roosevelt died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at the age of
63. Harry Truman, his successor, had no knowledge of the bomb project before
becoming president.
On 25 April,
Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, briefed Truman and started by reading from a
memorandum: “Within four months we shall
in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human
history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city…”
Then the
distinguished 77-year-old Stimson tried to impress his new boss, saying “The
world in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical
development would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words,
modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”
According
to Truman, he had been also briefed by James Byrnes, who had been quite close
to FDR, and who became the new Secretary of State on 3 July. In his memoirs,
Truman wrote: “Byrnes had already told me that the weapon might be so powerful
as to be capable of wiping out entire cities and killing people on an
unprecedented scale…” Byrnes, described as the politician’s politician,
subsequently influenced and supported the decision of Truman, described as the
man of the people, to use the new weapon of mass destruction on innocent people
in two Japanese cities.
Following
the fall of Berlin on 30 April 1945 and Hitler’s suicide, Germany surrendered
unconditionally on 9 May 1945. World War II had ended in Europe, but not yet in
Asia.
In the
early morning of 16 July 1945, the US tested its first plutonium bomb at a site
called Trinity in the desert near Alamogordo in New Mexico. The “Trinity” bomb exploded
with a force equivalent to 20,000 tons (20 KT) of TNT, all of this violent
energy released in a few millionths of a second. The steel tower which was used
to mount the bomb was completely vapourised.
“We have discovered
the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire
destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous
Ark,” Truman noted in his diary. (About four decades later at the height of the
Cold War, President Reagan believed in the biblical prophecy of Armageddon (the
battlefield of the Old Testament in North Palestine) – a divine message of
future nuclear war, a nuclear Armageddon.)
“This
weapon is to be used against Japan between now (post-Trinity) and August 10th,”
Truman wrote. “I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that
military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and
children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as
the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb
on the old Capital (Kyoto) or the new (Tokyo).
“He
& I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will
issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender (unconditionally) and
save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the
chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or
Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible
thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.”
1279 words 15.6.2009 0927 16.08.2014 03:53
21.08.2014 07:55
HIROSHIMA
AND NAGASAKI NUKED: CITIES OF THE DEAD
Standfirst.
On 6 August 1945, a uranium bomb (“Little Boy”) of about 15 kilotons (15,000
tons) devastated Hiroshima, the port city and industrial centre on the main
Honshu island in SW Japan. On 9 August, a plutonium bomb of about 20 KT
destroyed the shipbuilding city of Nagasaki on Kyushu island to the very south.
On Ground Zero (directly below the centre of nuclear explosion), thousands of
people were instantly killed – vapourised in the blinding flash of heat and
thermal radiation.
After the nuking of Hiroshima,
the Soviet dictator Stalin also wanted to have the atomic bombs urgently. In
1945 only the United States had the A-bombs – only a handful of them. By the
time of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, the US had about 27,000
nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union about 3,000 – each of them many times more
powerful than the first-generation nukes.
The first two shots of
nuclear firepower in World War II unfolded “the opening chapter to the possible
annihilation of mankind” (to quote the Japanese study of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki).
When “Little Boy”
exploded at 8.15:17 on the morning of 6 August 1945 about 1,800 feet directly
over the heart of Hiroshima, the city
had more than 280,000 civilians (about 100,000 having evacuated earlier) and
about 43,000 soldiers. According to official statistics, 70,000 died in August
(most of them on the day of the bombing), not counting those missing. There
were 130,000 wounded, 43,000 of them severely. A total of 140,000 died by the
end of 1945, and the number of the dead rose to 200,000 by the end of the fifth
year.
Of 76,000 buildings in
Hiroshima, 70,000 were damaged or destroyed, 48,000 totally. The official
Japanese study reported that “the whole city was ruined instantaneously.”
On the morning of the
day after the atomic holocaust, a German Jesuit priest recalled:
“The bright day now
reveals the frightful picture which last night’s darkness had partly concealed.
Where the city stood, everything as far as the eye could reach is a waste of
ashes and ruin. Only several skeletons of buildings completely burned out in
the interior remain. The banks of the rivers are covered with dead and wounded,
and the rising waters have here and there covered some of the corpses.
“On the broad street
in the Hakushima district, naked, burned cadavers are particularly numerous.
Among them are the wounded who are still alive. A few have crawled under the
burned-out autos and trams. Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then
collapse…”
Dr Michihiko Hachiya,
director of Hiroshima Communications Hospital, recorded in his diary (published
in 1955):
“The streets were deserted
except for the dead. Some looked as if they had been frozen by death while
still in the full action of flight; others lay sprawled as though some giant
had flung them to their death from a great height…
“Nothing remained except a
few buildings of reinforced concrete… For acres and acres the city was like a
desert except for scattered piles of brick and roof tile. I had to revise my
meaning of the word destruction or choose some other word to describe what I
saw. Devastation may be a better word, but really, I know of no word or words
to describe the view…”
According to the
history professor interviewed by American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, two
decades after the atomic bmbing:
“I climbed Hikiyama
Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared…I was shocked by the
sight… What I felt then and still feel now I
just can’t explain with words. Of course I saw many dreadful scenes
after that -- but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of
Hiroshima – was so shocking that I simply can’t express what I felt…Hiroshima
didn’t exist – that was mainly what I saw – Hiroshima just didn’t exist…”
In Nagasaki, “Fat Man” exploded
with an estimated force of 22 KT about 1,800 feet above the city at 11.02 on 9
August 1945. The surrounding steep hills confined and tempered the impact of
the atomic explosion, and protected the city from the full force of the blast,
radiant heat, and nuclear radiation.
About 40,000 people
died within a month of the bombing, and 70,000 by the end of 1945. A total of
140,000 died in the first five years.
A Japanese news
agency reported:
“Nagasaki is now a
dead city, all areas have been literally razed to the ground. Only a few
buildings are left, standing conspicuously amongst the ashes…”
On 10 August, Strategic Air
Force commander Carl Spaatz proposed targeting America’s third atomic bomb on
Tokyo (what Truman had ruled out about a month earlier after the Trinity test).
Preparations were being made to deliver and drop another plutonium bomb on
Japan by mid-August.
On the morning of 10
August, Truman received Japan’s acknowledged acceptance of the Potsdam
Declaration calling for its surrender. The president then gave orders to halt
further atomic bombing, but not the detonation of conventional explosives.
Henry Wallace, Secretary of Commerce, noted in his diary: “…He (Truman) said
the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t
like the idea of killing, as he said, “all those kids”…”
On 13 August, Truman
ordered the Air Force to resume area incendiary attacks. Six thousand tons (6
KT) of high explosive and incendiary bombs destroyed half of Kumagaya and a
sixth of Isezaki, killing several thousand more Japanese on the eve of Japan’s
unconditional surrender on 15 August.
Henry Stimson, US
Secretary of War, reflected:
“The destruction of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the Japanese war. It stopped the fire
raids, and the strangling blockade; it ended the ghastly spectre of a clash of
great land armies (in an invasion of Japan)…”
“In this last great
action of the Second World War we were given the final proof that war is
death…”
To Winston Churchill.
England’s wartime prime minister, it was “a miracle of deliverance” as well as
“a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions…”
Admiral William Leahy,
Truman’s Chief of Staff at the White House, described the A-bomb as “this
barbarous weapon” and questioned the morality of its use at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki: “My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted
an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages. I was not taught
to make war in that fashion and wars cannot be won (morally) by destroying
women and children…”
On the military
significance of the A-bomb, Carson Mark, Canadian theoretical physicist with
the Los Alamos laboratory (who subsequently led the theoretical work on
America’s first full-fledged hydrogen bomb called Mike I and tested on 1
November 1952) has written:
“The toll of death and
injury at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – appalling as it was – was not the most
meaningful measure of the significance of the new weapon. In the massive
fire-bomb raid on Tokyo on March 8 (9 in Japan), 1945, for example, the
Japanese suffered more fatalities (over 100,000) than at Hiroshima. But the
attack on Tokyo engaged a fleet of many hundreds of bombers (334 B-29s dropping
over 2,000 tons of incendiaries) for many hours (a six-hour orgy of intensive
bombing). The awesome difference was that damage on this scale could be inflicted
by a single bomb carried in a single plane.”
Philip Morrison, a
nuclear physicist who flew with the “Fat Man” mission to Nagasaki and observed
its destructive power from the air, and who subsequently walked through the
ruins of Hiroshima, wrote in 1946:
“The bomb is a weapon;
the most deadly and terrible weapon yet devised. Against any city in the world
from New York and London to the hundreds of large towns like Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the bomb is a threat. In any of man’s cities a strike from a single
atomic bomb will claim some hundred thousand deaths and some square miles of
blackened ruin…”
And, looking ahead (what
could possibly transpire with the development of thousands of nuclear weapons
one and half to two decades after Hiroshima), he wrote:
“And the bombs, if they
come again, will not come in ones or twos, but in hundreds or thousands. Their
coming will wreck not cities, but whole nations…”
‘Joe One’ sparks the nuclear arms race
Standfirst.
Joseph Stalin lost his temper when he was told that the US had dropped an atom
bomb on Hiroshima. He was very angry because he didn’t have the bomb. On 7
August 1945, he appointed Lavrenti Beria, the chief of Soviet secret police and
wartime deputy premier, to head his A-bomb project. This crash programme led to
the explosion of ‘Joe One’ (Stalin’s first A-bomb named after him) in the early
morning of 29 August 1949 (Monday, year of the Ox).
“No one had expected a
Soviet bomb so soon,” said Stanislaw Ulam, Polish émigré mathematician at Los
Alamos. “it was quite a successful shot and it really shocked people.”
Harry Truman, who had
earlier refused to believe that “those asiatics” could build one, now decided
to pursue – “to go to it and fast” – the development of a much more powerful
thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, which his scientists called the
“Super.” One bomb then led to another. Within a decade, the US had more than
10,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union over 1,000 of them
Joe One broke the American
four-year monopoly of atomic firepower. Slightly more than a month later, Mao
Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Peking on 1 October 1949,
sealing the Communist victory in mainland China.
Following the North Korean
invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950, Truman adopted the NSC (National
Security Council) 68 – America’s official statement on its Cold War strategy of
containing Soviet power and the spread of Communism while continuing to
consolidate American military strength – always viewed by the hawks in
Washington to be woefully inadequate. To quote Henry Kissinger, the American
guru on the global balance of power, commenting on the NSC 68 document at the
time of its inception: “…American strength was, for a brief moment,
unprecedentedly supreme, despite the fact that America had convinced itself
that it was relatively weak militarily…”
On 1 November 1952 the
US tested the world’s first thermonuclear bomb, and Mike exploded with a force
of 10.4 megatons, one thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The
explosion vapourised the tiny island of Elugelab, and left behind a crater two
hundred feet deep and more than one mile across.
The staged,
radiation-imploded hydrogen bomb was co-invented by S. Ulam and Edward Teller,
Hungarian-born theoretical physicist as well as a superhawk in the scientific
community.
Nuclear historian Richard
Rhodes has written that the American first staged thermonuclear Mike ”would
change the course of history – but not in the direction of decisive US
advantage that the H-bomb enthusiasts had fantasized.”
The Soviet Union had started work on the
thermonuclear in 1946, even before the scientist spy Klaus Fuchs had passed
information on the concept of the American superbomb to Soviet intelligence. A
member of the British scientific team attached to the Manhattan project in Los
Alamos, Fuchs had attended the secret conference held in mid-April 1946 to
review the wartime work (begun in 1942) on the theoretical development of the
thermonuclear bomb. In May the group of American scientists strongly in favour
of the H-bomb reported that “a super bomb can be constructed and will work…”
They also called for a proof of the pudding “by a test of the completely
assembled super-bomb” (Mike successfully tested on 1 November 1952).
Stalin’s ambition
to have the H-bomb as well had subsequently been rudely aroused by the nuclear
threat in the 1948 Berlin crisis, the first major confrontation between East
and West in the burgeoning Cold War. At that time only the US had atomic
weapons, and in early May 1948 the US Air Force had planned to use 50 A-bombs
(the entire American stockpile that spring) and to drop all of them on 20
Soviet cities. Truman, however, was reported to be extremely wary: “I don’t
think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to…”
Although the
Soviet Union responded promptly by staging its own thermonuclear debut on 12
August 1953 (about ten and half months after Mike 1), Joe 4 had a yield of 400
kilotons – less than half a megaton, and was considered to be a boosted fission
bomb, not quite a fusion bomb in the megaton category – not yet in the top
class of a Super.
Nevertheless,
I.V. Kurchatov, nuclear physicist and scientific director of the Soviet nuclear
project (1943-60) promptly thanked and hailed A.D. Sakharov, theoretical
physicist, as “the saviour of Russia.”
On 22 November
1955, three years after Mike, the SU had finally made it by testing a 1.6 MT
H-bomb – co-invented by Sakharov and fellow theoretical physicist Y.B.
Zeldovich. Their first fully-fledged H-bomb was technologically a younger
cousin of the American Mike.
In 1953 the US
had more than 1,400 nuclear weapons when the Soviets tested their first
thermonuclear device Joe 4 on August. The Soviets had over 100 – only about
one-tenth of the American atomic stockpile.
After touring the
US Strategic Air Command bases in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East,
Mississippi Senator John Stennis of the Senate Armed Services Committee
reported on October 1953 that “we now have tremendous striking power on our
own, which is growing daily, and any nation that commits an atomic attack on
us, in my opinion, is committing a suicidal act unless it should wipe us out at
the first blow. This is, of course, impossible.
“Great as our
problems of defense may be, Russia’s problems are far greater and our own
striking power is far greater than hers. She is bound to recognize our
overwhelming power of retaliation.”
His assessment
of the preponderance of American nuclear might later proved to be right when
the Soviet leader Chairman Khrushchev involuntarily blinked and retreated in
the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. For all his brashness and bravado, he
had the goodness as well as survival instinct to shy away from a nuclear
showdown that could well engulf the whole of humanity in its apocalyptic
flames.
“Must civilization
perish in a hail of fiery atoms?” asked President Ronald Regan when he
addressed the British Parliament at Westminster Palace in London on 8 June
1982. 11.01.2014 17:57
Towards the end
of 1953, a group of top intelligence analysts in Washington came to the
conclusion that the Soviets were also developing an intercontinental ballistic
missile (ICBM). “This proved to be the military intelligence of the greatest
consequence since the end of World War II,” Simon Ramo has written. In 1953 he
was asked by the Eisenhower administration to serve as the chief scientist to
develop the American ICBM.
“It triggered a major shift in the
nation’s national-security plans and brought about a crash effort to develop an
American ICBM, a project that became the largest technical development ever
attempted by the U.S. military, even exceeding in assigned resources the
wartime Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb…”
Towards the end
of 1957, the US tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)
known as the Atlas, two months after the launching of Sputnik I on 4 October.
This first man-made satellite signaled the capability of Soviet rocketry to
deliver nuclear-armed missiles thousands of miles across the oceans to targets
deep in the American heartland. Inevitably, it also triggered a space race
between the two superpowers, and marked the start of the militarization of the high
ground in the ‘coastal seas’ of near-Earth space. 11.01.2014 18:07
In 1960 the US
started to deploy its first ICBM – the Atlas with a single warhead (2-5 MT), as
well as its first SLBM (sea-launched ballistic missile) – the Polaris A-1 with
a warhead of one megaton. The very same year, the Soviet Union also started
deploying its first ICBM – the SS-6 with a single warhead (4 MT), and its first
SLBM as well – the SS-N-4 with a single warhead (1 MT).
Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs published in the summer
of 1953, Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist and wartime director of Los
Alamos Laboratory which designed and made the world’s first atomic bombs,
lambasted the hawks for demanding ever-larger and more powerful arsenals. He
wrote: “The very least we can conclude
(looking ten years ahead) is that our twenty-thousandth bomb, useful as
it may be in filling the munitions pipelines of a great war, will not in any
deep strategic sense offset their
(Soviet) two-thousandth.”
At the time of
the Cuban missile crisis on October 1962, the US had more than 27,000 nuclear
warheads, and the Soviet Union had over 3,000.
John Wheeler,
another American theoretical physicist and a hawk to boot, didn’t agree with
Oppenheimer. Wheeler had in 1939 developed and elucidated fission theory with
Niels Bohr, Danish theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, and then directed
thermonuclear research at Princeton in 1950-51. Wheeler wrote: “Anybody who
says 20,000 weapons are no better than 2,000 ought to read the history of
wars.”
Was Wheeler
right? Don’t forget that Oppenheimer was writing about atomic weapons with
their awesome power of mass destruction. Director of the Manhattan project
which produced the world’s first atomic bomb, he had opposed the development of
the far more powerful and destructive hydrogen bomb – the thermonuclear,
Teller’s so-called ‘Super’. 11.01.2014 18:25
“But nuclear
weapons are not cannonballs; how many times could either country be destroyed?”
Richard Rhodes has cogently commented. “And who would venture war in the face
of total and redundant destruction?”
9.7.2009 2002 2018 11.01.2014
18:27
According to
nuclear historians Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen, more than 128,000 nuclear
warheads have been built since 1945, about 98 percent of the total built by the
two nuclear superpowers. The US has built about 55 percent of them (over 70,000
nuclear warheads), and the Soviet Union/Russia about 43 percent of the total
number (some 50,000 nuclear warheads).
“Was that arms
race necessary? By one estimate that properly counts delivery systems as well
as weapons, it cost the United States $4 trillion – roughly the US national
debt (government debt) in 1994 (about US$10 trillion in 2009). Soviet costs
were comparable and were decisive in the decline of the Soviet economy that
triggered the USSR’s collapse,” nuclear historian extraordinary Richard Rhodes
wrote in January 1995.
“Cold warriors
have argued from that fact that spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy itself
justifies the arms race. Their argument overlooks the inconvenient reality that
the expense of the arms race contributed to US decline as well, decline evident
in an oppressive national debt, in decaying infrastructure and social and
educational neglect.
“The potlatch
theory of the arms race also overlooks the unconscionable risk both superpowers
took of omnicidal war…”
In a warning
message written in 1981 calling for a new sense of responsibility for global
survival, Aurelio Peccei, the eminent president of the Club of Rome, wrote with
philosophical calm and hard-headed acuity:
“In the military
sphere, we have the power to unleash apocalyptic forces, but we must only hope
that we are never forced to start using them, because we would not be able to
stop.
“Indeed, while
we have acquired the ultimate power to destroy ourselves with weapons of
ultramodern technology, we still reason with a pre-technological mentality. We
have remained at a tribal and barbaric level in many of our concepts.
“Face to face
with new realities, we find ourselves in such a frightening state of mental
confusion that we run the risk, before we know it, of being crushed beneath the
weight of our stockpiled weapons, or annihilated in a nuclear holocaust
launched by accident, outside of all projected scenarios…”
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 80th
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…”
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