Who Rules the World? (15 page)

A torture that has always been planned at the highest level, and should be recognized as such. At the end of World War II, the United States held a position of unprecedented global power. Not surprisingly, careful and sophisticated plans were developed for organizing the world. Each region was assigned its “function” by State Department planners, headed by the distinguished diplomat George Kennan. He determined that the United States had no special interest in Africa, so it should be handed over to Europe to “exploit”—his word—for its reconstruction.
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In the light of history, one might have imagined a different relationship between Europe and Africa, but there is no indication that that was ever considered.

More recently, the United States has recognized that it, too, must join the game of exploiting Africa, alongside new entrants like China, which is busily at work compiling one of the worst records in destruction of the environment and oppression of hapless victims.

It should be unnecessary to dwell on the extreme dangers posed by one central element of the predatory obsessions that are producing calamities all over the world: the reliance on fossil fuels, which courts global disaster, perhaps in the not-too-distant future. Details may be debated, but there is little doubt that the problem is serious, if not awesome, and that the longer we delay in addressing it, the more awful will be the legacy left to generations to come. There are some efforts afoot to face reality, but they are far too minimal.

Meanwhile, power concentrations are charging in the opposite direction, led by the richest and most powerful country in world history. Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today’s political scene.
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The major business lobbies openly announce their propaganda campaigns to convince the public that there is no need for undue concern—with some effect, as polls show.
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The media cooperate by barely reporting the increasingly dire climate change forecasts of international agencies and even the U.S. Department of Energy. The standard presentation is a debate between alarmists and skeptics: on one side virtually all qualified scientists, on the other a few holdouts. Not part of the debate are a very large number of experts, including those in the climate change program at MIT, among others, who criticize the scientific consensus because it is too conservative and cautious, arguing that the truth when it comes to climate change is far more dire. Not surprisingly, the public is confused.

In his 2012 State of the Union speech, President Obama hailed the bright prospects of a century of energy self-sufficiency, thanks to new technologies that permit extraction of hydrocarbons from Canadian tar sands, shale, and other previously inaccessible sources.
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Others agree; the
Financial Times
forecasts a century of energy independence for the US.
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Unasked in these optimistic forecasts is the question of what kind of a world will survive the rapacious onslaught.

In the lead in confronting the crisis throughout the world are indigenous communities, those who have always upheld the Charter of the Forests. The strongest stand has been taken by the one country they govern, Bolivia, the poorest country in South America and for centuries a victim of Western destruction of the rich resources of one of the most advanced of the developed societies in the hemisphere, pre-Columbus.

After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organized a World People’s Conference on Climate Change with thirty-five thousand participants from 140 countries—not just representatives of governments but also members of civil society and activists. It produced a People’s Agreement, which called for very sharp reductions in emissions, and a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.
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Establishing the rights of the planet is a key demand of indigenous communities all over the world. It is ridiculed by sophisticated Westerners, but unless we can acquire some of the indigenous sensibility, they are likely to have the last laugh—a laugh of grim despair.

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The Week the World Stood Still

The world stood still some fifty years ago during the last week of October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended—though, unknown to the public, only officially.

The image of the world standing still is the turn of phrase of Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) in which Kennedy and a close circle of advisers debated how to respond to the crisis. Those meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate compared to those of other participants, who were unaware that they were speaking to history.

Stern has now published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important documentary record, finally declassified in the late 1990s. I will keep to that version here. “Never before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,” culminating in “the week the world stood still.”
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There was good reason for the global concern. A nuclear war was all too imminent, a war that might “destroy the Northern Hemisphere,” as President Dwight Eisenhower had warned.
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Kennedy’s own judgment was that the probability of war might have been as high as 50 percent.
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Estimates became higher as the confrontation reached its peak and the “secret doomsday plan to ensure the survival of the government was put into effect” in Washington, as described by journalist Michael Dobbs in his well-researched best seller on the crisis (though he doesn’t explain why there would be much point in doing so, given the likely nature of nuclear war).
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Dobbs quotes Dino Brugioni, “a key member of the CIA team monitoring the Soviet missile buildup,” who saw no way out except “war and complete destruction” as the clock moved to “one minute to midnight,” the title of Dobbs’s book.
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Kennedy’s close associate the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. described the events as “the most dangerous moment in human history.”
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Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wondered aloud whether he “would live to see another Saturday night,” and later recognized that “we lucked out”—barely.
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“THE MOST DANGEROUS MOMENT”

A closer look at what took place adds grim overtones to these judgments, with reverberations to the present moment.

There are several candidates for “the most dangerous moment.” One is October 27, 1962, when U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine around Cuba were dropping depth charges on Soviet submarines. According to Soviet accounts, reported by the National Security Archive, submarine commanders were “rattled enough to talk about firing nuclear torpedoes, whose 15 kiloton explosive yields approximated the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in August 1945.”
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In one case, a reported decision to assemble a nuclear torpedo for battle readiness was aborted at the last minute by Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov, who may have saved the world from nuclear disaster.
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There is little doubt what the U.S. reaction would have been had the torpedo been fired, or how the Russians would have responded as their country was going up in smoke.

Kennedy had already declared the highest nuclear alert short of launch, DEFCON 2, which authorized “NATO aircraft with Turkish pilots … [or others] … to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb,” according to the well-informed Harvard University strategic analyst Graham Allison, writing in
Foreign Affairs
.
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Another candidate is October 26. That day has been selected as “the most dangerous moment” by B-52 pilot Major Don Clawson, who piloted one of those NATO aircraft and provides a hair-raising description of details of the Chrome Dome (CD) missions during the crisis—“B-52s on airborne alert” with nuclear weapons “on board and ready to use.”

October 26 was the day when “the nation was closest to nuclear war,” he writes in his “irreverent anecdotes of an air force pilot.” On that day, Clawson himself was in a good position to set off a likely terminal cataclysm. He concludes, “We were damned lucky we didn’t blow up the world—and no thanks to the political or military leadership of this country.”

The errors, confusions, near accidents, and miscomprehension of the leadership that Clawson reports are startling enough, but nothing like the operative command-and-control rules—or lack of them. As Clawson recounts his experiences during the fifteen twenty-four-hour CD missions he flew, the maximum possible, the official commanders “did not possess the capability to prevent a rogue crew or crew-member from arming and releasing their thermonuclear weapons,” or even from broadcasting a mission that would have sent off “the entire Airborne Alert force without possibility of recall.” Once the crew was airborne carrying thermonuclear weapons, he writes, “it would have been possible to arm and drop them all with no further input from the ground. There was no inhibitor on any of the systems.”
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About one-third of the total force was in the air, according to General David Burchinal, director of plans on the air staff at air force headquarters. The Strategic Air Command (SAC), technically in charge, appears to have had little control. And according to Clawson’s account, the civilian National Command Authority was kept in the dark by SAC, which means that the ExComm “deciders” pondering the fate of the world knew even less. General Burchinal’s oral history is no less hair-raising, and reveals even greater contempt for the civilian command. According to him, Russian capitulation was never in doubt. The CD operations were designed to make it crystal clear to the Russians that they were hardly even competing in the military confrontation, and could quickly have been destroyed.
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From the ExComm records, Sheldon Stern concludes that, on October 26, President Kennedy was “leaning towards military action to eliminate the missiles” in Cuba, to be followed by invasion, according to Pentagon plans.
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It was evident then that the act might have led to terminal war, a conclusion fortified by much later revelations that tactical nuclear weapons had been deployed and that Russian forces were far greater than U.S. intelligence had reported.

As the ExComm meetings were drawing to a close at 6:00 p.m. on the 26th, a letter arrived from Soviet prime minister Nikita Khrushchev, sent directly to President Kennedy. His “message seemed clear,” Stern writes. “The missiles would be removed if the US promised not to invade Cuba.”
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The next day, at 10:00 a.m., the president again turned on the secret tape recorder. He read aloud a wire service report that had just been handed to him: “Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy in a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey”—Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads.
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The report was soon authenticated.

Though received by the committee as an unexpected bolt from the blue, it had actually been anticipated: “We’ve known this might be coming for a week,” Kennedy informed them. To refuse public acquiescence would be difficult, he realized: these were obsolete missiles, already slated for withdrawal, soon to be replaced by far more lethal and effectively invulnerable submarine-based Polaris missiles. Kennedy recognized that he would be in an “
insupportable
position if this becomes [Khrushchev’s] proposal,” both because the Turkish missiles were useless and were being withdrawn anyway, and because to any man at the United Nations or any other
rational
man, it will look like a very fair trade.”
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KEEPING U.S. POWER UNRESTRAINED

The planners therefore faced a serious dilemma. They had in hand two somewhat different proposals from Khrushchev to end the threat of catastrophic war, and each would seem to any “rational man” to be a fair trade. How then to react?

One possibility would have been to breathe a sigh of relief that civilization could survive and to eagerly accept both offers; to announce that the United States would adhere to international law and remove any threat to invade Cuba; and to carry forward the withdrawal of the obsolete missiles in Turkey, proceeding as planned to upgrade the nuclear threat against the Soviet Union to a far greater one—only part, of course, of the global encirclement of Russia. But that was unthinkable.

The basic reason why no such thought could be contemplated was spelled out by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, a former Harvard dean and reputedly the brightest star in the Camelot firmament. The world, he insisted, must come to understand that “the current threat to peace is
not
in Turkey, it is in
Cuba
,” where missiles were directed against the United States.
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A vastly more powerful U.S. missile force trained on the much weaker and more vulnerable Soviet enemy could not possibly be regarded as a threat to peace, because we are Good, as a great many people in the western hemisphere and beyond could testify—among numerous others, the victims of the ongoing terrorist war that the United States was then waging against Cuba, or those swept up in the “campaign of hatred” in the Arab world that so puzzled Eisenhower, though not the National Security Council, which explained it clearly.

In subsequent colloquy, the president stressed that we would be “in a bad position” if we chose to set off an international conflagration by rejecting proposals that would seem quite reasonable to survivors (if any cared). This “pragmatic” stance was about as far as moral considerations could reach.
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