The End Is Always Near

by Dan Carlin

  It didn’t take a genius to realize that if controlling nuclear weapons was hard when there were a mere relative handful, and they were all of one sort, it would be exponentially more difficult now.

  By the time the 1960 presidential election rolled around, fifteen years into the atomic age, one might have thought that the only thing American voters should have cared about was getting this sword of Damocles question right. After all, the entire world’s prosperity and perhaps survival depended on it. But that’s not how human beings function in any system in which they’re allowed to have an opinion.*

  The nuclear issue would certainly be one of the factors in the electorate’s decision about whom to elect as someone one could potentially describe as “the most dangerous person in all of human history,” but it wouldn’t be their only consideration. There were still plenty of quotidian issues such as domestic policy and taxes and political party affiliation to contend with. And as superficial as it might sound when deciding who should be vested with the most awesome power in global history, personal charisma and likability would also factor into this decision. From an outsider’s point of view—here comes our Martian again—this could appear to be a very strange reality. In a game of geopolitical multideck atomic poker, with the stakes as high as they were, humans would potentially pick the guy with the best hair?*

  It turns out that in 1960, the more glamorous candidate won,* even though he was less experienced than his adversary, Richard Nixon, and by presidential standards, very young. In fact, at forty-three years of age, John F. Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected to the office.* The outgoing two-term president, seventy-year-old Dwight D. Eisenhower—a five-star general who had commanded the Allied invasion at Normandy and who had been the supreme Allied commander in Europe in the Second World War—turned over the nuclear launch codes to a successor whose detractors considered him merely a millionaire playboy—a guy who hung out with cats like Frank Sinatra, and who was a political and intellectual lightweight—a kid.

  The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, had, in fact, wanted JFK to win over his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, a man who had been Eisenhower’s vice president and was known to be a virulent anti-Communist. But no president takes office with a completely clean slate, and Kennedy inherited projects and plans that had been started by the previous administration.

  One of them was the CIA-backed invasion of Communist Cuba by Cuban exiles. The plan was designed to topple Fidel Castro, but he routed the invasion and killed or captured the US-backed fighters. Kennedy would be deeply affected by what happened in the event known as the Bay of Pigs. Advisers during meetings would catch him staring off into space, saying, “How could I have been so stupid?”

  JFK’s biographer Robert Dallek writes:

  “How could I have been so stupid?” was his way of asking why he had been so gullible. He puzzled over the fact that he had not asked harder questions and had allowed the so-called collective wisdom of all these experienced national security officials to persuade him to go ahead. He had assumed, he later told [adviser Arthur] Schlesinger, that “the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.” The experience taught him “never to rely on the experts.” He told [journalist] Ben Bradlee: “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”

  If this can be called a learning experience, what it taught Kennedy may have prevented a nuclear holocaust, though it greatly enraged the Soviets, who were friendly with Castro and his government. It also further strained relations between the young president and his cabal of august, older (and in some cases legendary) military chiefs and advisers.

  Payback for the attempted coup would be meted out at a 1961 summit in Vienna. There, the savvy sixty-seven-year-old Soviet leader—a man born a peasant who had no formal education, but who had risen to be the longtime underling to Joseph Stalin before assuming Soviet leadership—met the wealthy forty-four-year-old Harvard graduate and Massachusetts socialite. And almost ate him alive. Describing the experience afterward to James Reston of the New York Times, Kennedy said that the summit meeting had been “the roughest thing in my life. He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts. Until we remove those ideas, we won’t get anywhere with him.”

  But according to Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov in their book Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, this face-to-face meeting had changed Khrushchev’s view of the man and what he could get away with and what he might decide to try. The Soviet leader had initially hoped to push for better relations but instead ended up telling advisers after JFK’s weak performance that the favorable situation of a less formidable US leader must be exploited. It was too good of an opportunity to pass up, even in a nuclear world.

  But as Kennedy theorized, when neither side wants war, you’re likely to have one break out only if there’s a significant miscalculation on someone’s part. Khrushchev’s was to believe that Kennedy was weak.

  Tensions rose after the Vienna summit, and both sides resumed testing nuclear weapons.* This is the period when the Soviets set off the largest man-made explosion in world history (the “Tsar Bomba”). The United States made up for its lack of size with numbers, carrying out ninety-eight nuclear tests in a single month in 1962.*

  Sometime that same year, in a breathtaking example of high-stakes* gambling, Khrushchev solved a bunch of his problems in one move by secretly beginning to put nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba. In many ways, it was a brilliant idea, but it all hinged on a single and very slender reed: The Soviets needed to get the missiles and nuclear warheads into Cuba and activate them before the United States knew they were there. If the Americans found out, they would bomb the unfinished missile sites or invade the island, and the entire plan would fall apart. If, however, the missiles became functional before that could happen, any action the United States took would likely prompt the launching of those missiles against the US mainland.* With global thermonuclear war as the stakes, how is it that Khrushchev was comfortable hinging a plan on such a gamble?

  On the morning of October 16, 1962, Kennedy’s advisers brought him photographs showing the construction of missile sites under way in Cuba. The United States had been watching suspicious activity among Russian handlers off-loading ships already, and Kennedy had asked the Soviets if they were doing anything. The Soviets, in turn, had assured Kennedy nothing was up, but U-2 spy plane photos confirmed everyone’s worst fears. Kennedy’s CIA advisers thought there would be operational nuclear missiles ninety miles or so off the US coast sometime the following week.

  Everything revolved around the operability of the Soviet missiles on Cuba. But there were so many unknowns, and the alarming questions mounted. Were any of the missiles anywhere ready to be fired? Were there other sites on the island that hadn’t been discovered? Were there nuclear warheads on the island? If so, how many? Were more weapons en route?

  Within hours of seeing the photos of the construction sites in Cuba, President Kennedy called a meeting on October 16 of what would become known as the EXCOMM, a group of handpicked national security advisers, along with some other influential voices whom Kennedy wanted to hear from, including the attorney general, his younger brother Robert.

  Unbeknownst to any of the participants at that morning meeting (except his brother), the president taped the meetings.* And at one point, Kennedy reminded everyone there that they were talking about the potential for strikes on American urban centers that could cause eighty to one hundred million deaths.* Has there ever been a more important series of conversations in the history of the world?

  As events unfolded, and with hindsight available to us, it’s hard not to be impressed with President Kennedy’s ability to push back against the most hawkish of his civilian and military advisers.* Since the invention of nuclear we
apons, the US military had had its aggressive advocates for their use.* Had Truman heeded them, he’d have used them during the Berlin Blockade and in the Korean War. Eisenhower had multiple occasions when nuclear hawks counseled using the H-bomb. At the EXCOMM meetings, Kennedy’s decision against launching air strikes targeting installations on Cuba was opposed unanimously by his military advisers.*

  Yet the young American president played things with extreme care, initiating a blockade on Cuba rather than attacking it. It was an imperfect solution, because it did nothing to disrupt the assembly of the missiles on the island, but like Stalin’s play in Berlin in 1948, it threw down a geopolitical card and forced Khrushchev to make a move. Would he push things toward war?

  Up to this point, the world had been unaware of the exact details of what was going on, but it’s pretty much impossible to make a secret of a blockade, so Kennedy went on television to explain the situation.

  Kennedy’s speech to the world did two things almost instantaneously: The first was to confirm what the Soviets were already suspecting, that the United States had found their missiles, so the jig was up. The second thing was to inform the world that there might be a global nuclear war in the very near future.

  There’s never been a public announcement like this in the history of the world. One analogy for the effect this statement had might be that of aliens arriving in a spacecraft over Earth—there’s every chance that the world would witness a not unreasonable mass freak-out. If you thought you might not wake up tomorrow and most other people around you were having the same sort of thought, how does that change things in your life? The first lady, Jackie Kennedy, famously said that she didn’t want to be evacuated from Washington, DC—if nuclear annihilation was going to happen, she wanted to die with her children and her husband. There are many accounts of people thinking similar things.*

  The rest of what history calls the Cuban Missile Crisis played out in real time in front of a global audience. The entire affair lasted about two weeks, and at several points things looked to be tipping toward the abyss. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev had moments of high moral action, and by the later stages of the crisis, both seemed desperate for a way out.

  At one point in a communication to the US president, Khrushchev wrote, “Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.”

  Perhaps against the odds, the situation was resolved without war breaking out. At seemingly the last moment, the Soviets accepted a secret quid pro quo missile deal and agreed to remove the nuclear arms from Cuba.

  But the affair had mortally terrified everyone. It was likely the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war, and the near miss led to many changes—now based on experience, rather than theory—that would lessen the chances of such a thing happening again.*

  By the mid-1960s, while the threat of Armageddon continued, enough lessons had been learned, enough changes made, enough practical experience accrued, and any number of complex systems created that the world didn’t seem quite so much like a toddler playing with a machine gun anymore.

  The end of our world was almost televised.*

  At the moment of highest tension and drama during the Cuban Missile Crisis—with Soviet ships approaching the US naval quarantine line—enormous crowds stood in Times Square, reading the electronic news crawl flashing on the side of the buildings. All three US broadcast networks gave the crisis the equivalent of wall-to-wall-coverage. Primitive hand-drawn little maps behind the news broadcaster Walter Cronkite, with little paper ship counters occasionally being moved closer and closer to that line of quarantine, provided a countdown to catastrophe. The president and his people were watching this coverage, too, and the nation was holding its collective breath.

  This was quite a bit different from Edward R. Murrow’s groundbreaking live radio broadcast from London as the bombs were dropping on the city during the 1940 Blitz, because unless you lived in London, this didn’t have a direct effect on your life. The audience for this live event in 1962—regardless of where they lived—was watching to find out whether or not they would wake up the next morning, and whether or not their children would get to grow up.

  The historian H. W. Brands pointed out how this changed the entire equation from anything we human beings had experienced in our previous history:

  When people had labored toward distant goals in the pre-nuclear era, they could console themselves with the knowledge that though they might not live to see their objectives realized, their children or grandchildren might. If the goals were beyond human grasp, each succeeding generation could at least approach a bit closer than the one before. The invention of nuclear weapons changed the situation entirely.

  Now, there existed a real possibility that the whole human experiment would be cancelled midway. In that event, not even future generations—because there wouldn’t be any—would know how things turned out. Under the nuclear cloud, the meaning of human existence grew murkier than ever.

  Samuel Johnson is supposed to have said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” For that two-week period, when all seemed near lost, humankind treated the threat with the level of gravity it had always deserved. In a perfect world, we would be able to do this continuously, but history has shown that the lesser aspects and banalities of life have a way of intruding.

  It’s very human, isn’t it? Perhaps even a form of survival skill acquired over the ages. How ironic if it turned out to be the reason we took our focus off Bertrand Russell’s tightrope long enough to lose our collective balance.

  Chapter 8

  The Road to Hell

  How did it come to this? That’s the question that would be on everyone’s mind had a nuclear war occurred and hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons been used. Had a full-scale nuclear war broken out, especially after about the late 1960s,* we would still be trying to recover today. Hundreds of the world’s most important cities would have been hit and transformed instantly into vast, corpse-strewn ruins. The radiation would still be in everything.

  A descendant of ours reading a history in the future would be justified in thinking us to be the functional equivalent of the stereotypical reckless and childish “barbarians” that the Romans wrote of, although in possession of absurdly strong weapons they couldn’t hope to control. It would be unfair, though, if they thought us evil. The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions, and if a nuclear holocaust had happened, or ever eventually occurs, evil was never why people poured their lives and reputations into such endeavors. So many who helped pave the way to this reality, rather than being murderous Adolf Eichmann–type monsters, were instead hoping their efforts would lead to better outcomes.*

  Start with the famous arms merchant and inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel,* who did as much as anyone to create the modern growth in weapons power since Napoleon’s day. Yet he famously told countess Bertha von Suttner, “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your (peace) congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” His sentiment that modern war would be so terrible it might make war impossible is also how many viewed what the new technologies and weapons might do. Such a rationale helps explain why good, ethical people could find themselves part of such a potentially catastrophic outcome. It can also make all sorts of horrible things sound like good ideas.

  How much would it affect your feelings about a murderous event from history if you found out that you were alive today only because of it?
How many strangers’ lives from the past is your life today worth? There is no answer to this question, but feeling uneasy about it might not be a bad thing.*

  Many veterans and others who lived through the Second World War believed that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan saved their lives. The feeling at the time was that those two detonations over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945—which cost more than two hundred thousand Japanese lives, including women and children—potentially saved the lives of a million Allied soldiers who might have perished had a land invasion of Japan been necessary. Those veterans might also point out that using the atomic bombs was not wrong under the rules of engagement at the time. But might we also ask how it ever got to the point where those were the rules of the game? How did we seemingly modern, ethical people decide that dropping atomic bombs on civilians in cities was okay?

  The rules of the game when it comes to modern* warfare are complicated, often contradictory, and, during wartime, usually in flux.* If you had been an American or British general in the Second World War, for example, and had continually ordered your ground forces to destroy the structures and rip up the infrastructure of enemy cities while deliberately yet indiscriminately killing large numbers of the civilian noncombatants, you would have been removed from command. The Allied armies did not engage in this sort of deliberate conduct,* but aerial bombing, which accomplished the same thing, was considered acceptable, even routine. In fact, if an air commander could get such results reliably, he very well might have been promoted.