Who Rules the World? (26 page)

Another relevant case is South Africa. In 1958, South Africa’s foreign minister informed the U.S. ambassador that although his country was becoming a pariah state, it would not matter as long as Washington’s support continued. His assessment proved fairly accurate; thirty years later, Ronald Reagan was the last significant holdout in supporting the apartheid regime, which was still sustaining itself. Within a few years, Washington joined the world and the regime collapsed—not for that reason alone, of course; one crucial factor was the remarkable Cuban role in the liberation of Africa, generally ignored in the West, though not in Africa.
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Forty years ago, Israel made the fateful decision to choose expansion over security, rejecting a full peace treaty offered by Egypt in return for the evacuation of occupied Egyptian Sinai, where Israel was initiating extensive settlement and development projects. It has adhered to that policy ever since, making essentially the same judgment as South Africa did in 1958.

In the case of Israel, if the United States decided to join the world, the impact would be far greater. Relations of power allow nothing else, as has been demonstrated whenever Washington has seriously demanded that Israel abandon one of its cherished goals. By now, Israel has little recourse, having adopted policies that turned it from a greatly admired country to one feared and despised, a course it continues to pursue with blind determination in its resolute march toward moral deterioration and possible ultimate destruction.

Could U.S. policy change? It’s not impossible. Public opinion has shifted considerably in recent years, particularly among the young, and it cannot be completely ignored. For some years, there has been a good basis for public demands that Washington observe its own laws and cut off military aid to Israel. U.S. law requires that “no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Israel most certainly is guilty of such a consistent pattern. That is why Amnesty International, in the course of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, called for an arms embargo against Israel as well as Hamas.
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Senator Patrick Leahy, author of this provision of the law, has brought up its potential applicability to Israel in specific cases, and with a well-conducted educational, organizational, and activist effort such initiatives might be pursued successfully.
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That could have a very significant impact in itself, while also providing a springboard for further actions not only to punish Israel for its criminal behavior, but also to compel Washington to become part of “the international community” and observe international law and decent moral principles.

Nothing could be more significant for the tragic Palestinian victims of many years of violence and repression.

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How Many Minutes to Midnight?

If some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of
Homo sapiens
, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before nuclear weapons) and NWE (the nuclear weapons era). The latter era, of course, opened on August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but—so the evidence suggests—not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its own worst instincts.

Day one of the NWE was marked by the “success” of Little Boy, a simple atomic bomb. On day four, Nagasaki experienced the technological triumph of Fat Man, a more sophisticated design. Five days later came what the official air force history calls the “grand finale,” a one-thousand-plane raid—no mean logistical achievement—on Japan’s cities, killing many thousands of people, with leaflets falling among the bombs reading “Japan has surrendered.” President Truman announced that surrender before the last B-29 returned to its base.
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Those were the auspicious opening days of the NWE. As we now enter its seventieth year, we should be contemplating with wonder the fact that we have survived. We can only guess how many years remain.

Some reflections on these grim prospects were offered by General Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which controls nuclear weapons and strategy. Twenty years ago, 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 proportion.”
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Reflecting further 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.” 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?”
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Butler termed the U.S. strategic plan of 1960 that called for an automated all-out strike on the Communist world “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I have ever reviewed in my life.”
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Its Soviet counterpart was probably even more insane. But it is important to bear in mind that there are competitors, not least among them the easy acceptance of extraordinary threats to survival.

SURVIVAL IN THE EARLY COLD WAR YEARS

According to received doctrine in scholarship and general intellectual discourse, the prime goal of state policy is “national security.” There is ample evidence, however, that the doctrine of national security does not encompass the security of the population. The record reveals that, for instance, the threat of instant destruction by nuclear weapons has not ranked high among the concerns of planners. That much was demonstrated early on, and remains true to the present moment.

In the early days of the NWE, the United States was overwhelmingly powerful and enjoyed remarkable security: it controlled the hemisphere, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the opposite sides of those oceans as well. Long before World War II, it had already become by far the richest country in the world, with incomparable advantages. Its economy boomed during the war, while other industrial societies were devastated or severely weakened. By the opening of the new era, the United States possessed about half of total world wealth and an even greater percentage of its manufacturing capacity.

There was, however, a potential threat: intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. That threat was discussed in the standard scholarly study of nuclear policies, carried out with access to high-level sources:
Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years
by McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies.
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Bundy wrote that “the timely development of ballistic missiles during the Eisenhower administration is one of the best achievements of those eight years. Yet it is well to begin with a recognition that both the United States and the Soviet Union might be in much less nuclear danger today if [those] missiles had never been developed.” He then added an instructive comment: “I am aware of no serious contemporary proposal, in or out of either government, that ballistic missiles should somehow be banned by agreement.”
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In short, there was apparently no thought of trying to prevent the sole serious threat to the United States, the threat of utter destruction in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Could that threat have been taken off the table? We cannot, of course, be sure, but it was hardly inconceivable. The Russians, far behind in industrial development and technological sophistication, were in a far more threatening environment. Hence, they were significantly more vulnerable to such weapons systems than the United States. There might have been opportunities to explore the possibilities of disarmament, but in the extraordinary hysteria of the day they could hardly have even been perceived. And that hysteria was indeed extraordinary; an examination of the rhetoric of central official documents of that moment like National Security Council Paper NSC-68 remains quite shocking.

One indication of possible opportunities to blunt the threat was a remarkable proposal by Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin in 1952 offering to allow Germany to be unified with free elections on the condition that it would not then join a hostile military alliance. That was hardly an extreme condition in light of the history of the past half century, during which Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia twice, exacting a terrible toll.

Stalin’s proposal was taken seriously by the respected political commentator James Warburg, but otherwise mostly ignored or ridiculed at the time. Recent scholarship has begun to take a different view. The bitterly anti-Communist Soviet scholar Adam Ulam has taken the status of Stalin’s proposal to be an “unresolved mystery.” Washington “wasted little effort in flatly rejecting Moscow’s initiative,” he wrote, on grounds that “were embarrassingly unconvincing.” The political, scholarly, and general intellectual failure left open “the basic question,” Ulam added: “Was Stalin genuinely ready to sacrifice the newly created German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the altar of real democracy,” with consequences for world peace and for American security that could have been enormous?
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Reviewing recent research in Soviet archives, one of the most respected Cold War scholars, Melvyn Leffler, observed that many scholars were surprised to discover “[Lavrenti] Beria—the sinister, brutal head of the [Russian] secret police—propos[ed] that the Kremlin offer the West a deal on the unification and neutralization of Germany,” agreeing “to sacrifice the East German communist regime to reduce East-West tensions” and improve internal political and economic conditions in Russia—opportunities that were squandered in favor of securing German participation in NATO.
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Under the circumstances, it is not impossible that agreements might have been reached that would have protected the security of the American population from the gravest threat on the horizon. But that possibility apparently was not considered, a striking indication of how slight a role authentic security plays in state policy.

THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS AND BEYOND

That conclusion was underscored repeatedly in the years that followed. When Nikita Khrushchev took control in Russia in the years after Stalin’s death, he recognized that the USSR could not compete militarily with the United States, the richest and most powerful country in history, with incomparable advantages. If it ever hoped to escape its economic backwardness and the devastating effects of the last world war, the Soviet Union would need to reverse the arms race.

Accordingly, Khrushchev proposed sharp mutual reductions in offensive weapons. The incoming Kennedy administration considered the offer and rejected it, instead turning to rapid military expansion, even though it was already far in the lead. The late Kenneth Waltz, supported by other strategic analysts with close connections to U.S. intelligence, wrote then that the Kennedy administration “undertook the largest strategic and conventional peace-time military build-up the world has yet seen … even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in the conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States.” Again, the government opted for harming national security while enhancing state power.

The Soviet reaction to the U.S. buildup of those years was to place nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962 to try to redress the balance at least slightly. The move was also motivated in part by Kennedy’s terrorist campaign against Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which was scheduled to lead to invasion that very month, as Russia and Cuba may have known. The ensuing “missile crisis” was “the most dangerous moment in history,” in the words of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s adviser and confidant. Of no slight significance is the fact that Kennedy is highly praised for his cool courage and statesmanship in the decisions made at the peak of the crisis, even though he had needlessly placed the population at enormous risk for reasons of state and of personal image.

Ten years later, in the last days of the 1973 Israeli-Arab war, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser to President Nixon, called a nuclear alert. The purpose was to warn the Russians not to interfere with his delicate diplomatic maneuvers designed to ensure an Israeli victory (of a limited sort, so that the United States would still be in control of the region unilaterally). And the maneuvers were indeed delicate: the United States and Russia had jointly imposed a cease-fire, but Kissinger secretly informed the Israelis that they could ignore it. Hence the need for the nuclear alert to frighten the Russians away. The security of Americans retained its usual status.
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Ten years after that, the Reagan administration launched operations to probe Russian air defenses by simulating air and naval attacks and a high-level nuclear alert that the Russians were intended to detect. These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment: Washington was deploying Pershing II strategic missiles in Europe with a ten-minute flight time to Moscow. President Reagan had also announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) program, which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike weapon, a standard interpretation of missile defense on all sides. And other tensions were rising.

Naturally, these actions caused great alarm in Russia, which unlike the United States was quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. Newly released archives reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously assumed. A high-level U.S. intelligence study entitled “The War Scare Was for Real” concluded that U.S. intelligence may have underestimated Russian concerns and the threat of a Russian preventative nuclear strike. The exercises “almost became a prelude to a preventative nuclear strike,” according to an account in the
Journal of Strategic Studies.
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