by Oliver Stone
Although a cobalt bomb has never been built, the possibility that it could be gave shape to the decade’s darkest nightmares. The Lucky Dragon crew members remained hospitalized for more than a year. While recuperating in the hospital, one issued a poignant warning: “Our fate menaces all mankind. Tell that to those who are responsible. God grant that they may listen.”180
Chapter 7
JFK:
“The Most Dangerous Moment in Human History”
In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union girded for war with nuclear missiles pointed at each other’s military installations and population centers. The world would come closer to nuclear obliteration than most people realize. For decades, the public has been told that John F. Kennedy’s statesmanship and resolve, abetted by Nikita Khrushchev’s sober realism, averted a holocaust. The leaders of the planet’s two most powerful nations endeavored to resolve the Cuban missile crisis peacefully, but their power to control events was severely limited as the world careened toward disaster. The lessons the two leaders drew from this harrowing encounter convinced them that life on earth might not survive a continuing Cold War. Their efforts to end that dangerous and wasteful conflict may have spelled doom for both of them, but it may also, in the process, have opened up some breathing space for the rest of a threatened humanity.
Nikita Khrushchev actually had a lot in common with Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower. Both had humble upbringings. Ike’s fifth-grade class photo in Abilene, Kansas, shows him wearing overalls while everyone else wore Sunday clothes. Khrushchev, the grandson of serfs and son of peasants, worked in his youth as a shepherd, coal miner, and machinist. Though brutal as party czar in Ukraine during the 1930s and 1940s and in his harsh suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, he could also be funny, charming, earthy, and ingratiating. He yearned to set a new course for the Soviet Union. At the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, he accused Stalin of having conducted a dictatorial reign of “suspicion, fear, and terror.”1 He decried Stalin’s cult of personality and began a desperately needed process of de-Stalinization. Like Eisenhower, he had seen World War II up close and developed a deep abhorrence of war. But he believed as deeply in the superiority of the Soviet system as Eisenhower did in the capitalist system. To prove socialism’s superiority over capitalism, he set out to sharply reduce military spending so he could devote greater resources to improving the Soviet people’s standard of living, which had long been sacrificed to the exigencies of national defense and self-preservation against seemingly implacable foes.
Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev had much in common. Each came from humble origins, and each believed deeply in the superiority of his own political system.
In August 1957, the Soviet Union successfully tested the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. For the Soviet Union, ICBMs could potentially offset the enormous military advantage the United States derived from bombers housed at NATO bases in Europe. Less than two months later, on October 4, 1957, while the school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, dominated American news and Leave It to Beaver made its television debut, a Soviet R-7 ICBM launched the first artificial satellite into orbit around the earth. Sputnik Zemlya, meaning “companion of Earth” or “fellow traveler,” weighed 184 pounds and was 22.8 inches in diameter. It orbited the earth once every ninety-six minutes and seventeen seconds, transmitting a series of beeps to listeners below. Soviet officials crowed about the triumph of Soviet science and technology, which, they claimed, proved the overall superiority of the Soviet Union’s new socialist society.
The Soviets had indeed punctured the belief that the United States’ technological sophistication and the Soviet Union’s backwardness would guarantee U.S. victory in the Cold War. Writer John Gunther noted, “for a generation it had been part of the American folklore that the Russians were hardly capable of operating a tractor.” Radio Cairo declared that Sputnik would “make countries think twice before tying themselves to the imperialist policy led by the United States.” Khrushchev taunted, “any idiot can see . . . they might as well put bombers and fighters in the museum.”2 Drawing attention to both the Soviet achievement and U.S. racial problems, Radio Moscow pointedly announced every time Sputnik passed over Little Rock.
In August 1957, the Soviet Union successfully tested the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). For the USSR, ICBMs could potentially offset the enormous military advantage the United States derived from bombers housed at NATO bases in Europe. When the Soviets used an ICBM to launch Sputnik in October, some Americans panicked.
Some Americans panicked, speculating that the Soviet Union must now have ICBMs with nuclear warheads poised to attack U.S. targets. That fear was fueled by the Soviet Union’s announcement, three days after Sputnik’s launch, that it had successfully tested a new ballistic-missile-compatible thermonuclear warhead. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson warned that the Soviets would soon “be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.”3 Edward Teller bemoaned the fact that the United States had lost “a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.”4 One satirist cracked, “General LeMay is planning to send a fleet of bombers around the world to impress the Russians; I’m sure it will—if they bother to look down.”5
The Soviets beating the United States into space tore deep cracks in the fragile façade of American confidence—a confidence that had already been shaken by the Korean War and the domestic and foreign policy crises of the first half of the 1950s. Critics decried the shallow materialism and purposelessness of American life and enumerated the shortcomings of the educational system. Republican Senator Styles Bridges urged Americans to “be less concerned with the depth of the pile on the new broadloom rug or the height of the tailfin on the new car and to be more prepared to shed blood, sweat, and tears if this country and the free world are to survive.”6 Esteemed Soviet space scientist Leonid Sedov commented to a German-American counterpart, “You Americans have a better standard of living than we have. But the American loves his car, his refrigerator, his house. He does not, as we Russians do, love his country.”7 Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce described Sputnik’s beep from space as “an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority.”8
The administration deliberately downplayed the threat posed by the Soviet achievement in an effort to reassure the public. “The satellite . . . does not rouse my apprehensions,” Eisenhower said, “not one iota. I can see nothing . . . that is significant . . . they have put one small ball into the air.”9 To drive the point home, Ike played five rounds of golf that week. He could not disclose the reason for his lack of concern. Highly secret U-2 reconnaissance planes, flying above 70,000 feet, had been crossing Soviet airspace for more than a year and taking photos revealing that the Soviets were lagging behind in the arms race. The American people were kept in the dark about those illegal and provocative missions, but the Soviet Union launched a formal protest in July 1957. Allen Dulles later chortled, “I was able to get a look at every blade of grass in the Soviet Union,”10 but it would still be a few years before this was true.
On November 3, the Soviets launched Sputnik II—a massive six-ton satellite carrying a live dog named Laika. The Soviets reveled in their victory. But Khrushchev used the occasion to reach out to U.S. leaders by calling for peaceful space competition and an end to the Cold War:
Our satellites are . . . waiting for the American and other satellites to join them and to form a commonwealth of satellites. A commonwealth of this kind . . . would be much better than competition in the race to manufacture lethal weapons. . . . We would like a high-level meeting of representatives of capitalist and Socialist countries . . . so as to reach an agreement based on . . . the exclusion of war as a method of settling international problems, to stop the cold war and the armaments race a
nd to establish relations among states on the basis of coexistence, to settle disputes . . . by means of peaceful competition in the culture and in the best satisfaction of human requirements and needs.11
Now on the defensive, Eisenhower ignored Khrushchev’s overture, instead highlighting the United States’ vast military superiority and its intention to stay far ahead in the arms race:
Our nation has . . . enough power in its strategic retaliatory forces to bring near annihilation to the war-making capabilities of any other country. Atomic submarines have been developed. . . . A number of huge naval carriers are in operation, supplied with the most powerful nuclear weapons and bombers of great range to deliver them. Construction has started which will produce a carrier to be driven by atomic power. . . . In numbers, our stock of nuclear weapons is so large and so rapidly growing that . . . we are well ahead of the Soviets . . . both in quantity and in quality. We intend to stay ahead.12
Eisenhower knew that words would not suffice. Determined to beat the Soviets at their own game on December 6, the United States attempted to launch a satellite with a Vanguard rocket. It stayed aloft for only two seconds, reaching a height of four feet. Newspapers scornfully dubbed the grapefruit-sized sphere “Kaputnik,” “Flopnik,” and “Stayputnik.” Eisenhower finally unleashed the former Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun and his army Redstone team to put something up in the air. By January 31, they successfully orbited a thirty-one-pound Explorer satellite.
The United States even contemplated detonating a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb on the moon to restore its prestige. The resulting dust cloud would have been widely visible from Earth. The study was conducted from May 1958 to January 1959 by a ten-person staff that included the young astronomer Carl Sagan, who worked for the Air Force Special Weapons Center in Albuquerque. Finally, the scientists joined with others in convincing authorities that “there was no point in ruining the pristine environment of the moon.”13
Later in the decade, the air force devised even more grandiose schemes. Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee in February 1958, Lieutenant General Donald Putt disclosed plans for missile bases on the moon. Putt explained, “Warheads could be catapulted from shafts sunk deep into the moon’s surface,” providing “a retaliation base of considerable advantage over earthbound nations” if the United States were militarily destroyed. An enemy wanting to take out those bases prior to attacking on earth would “have to launch an overwhelming nuclear attack against those bases one to two days prior to attacking the continental United States,” clearly signaling that such an attack was coming. Air Force Assistant Secretary Richard Horner later testified that such bases could break a nuclear stalemate on earth and restore the United States’ first-strike capability. Putt added that if the Soviets established their own moon bases to neutralize the United States’ advantage, the United States could erect bases on more distant planets from which it could retaliate against both the Soviet Union and its moon bases. In assessing those plans, the independent journalist I. F. Stone astutely noted that the Latin word for “moon” is luna and suggested that the military establish a fourth branch for space warfare and call it the Department of Lunacy.14
Propelled by irrational fear of being overtaken by the Soviets, intelligence officials advanced preposterous estimates of Soviet military strength. In December 1957, a National Intelligence Estimate projected a potential Soviet arsenal of a hundred operational ICBMs in the next two years and projected a worst-case scenario of five hundred Soviet ICBMs in 1960.15
Eisenhower commissioned a top secret security review headed by H. Rowan Gaither of the Ford Foundation. The report predicted that by 1959 the “USSR may be able to launch an attack with ICBMs carrying megaton warheads, against which SAC will be almost completely vulnerable under present programs.”16 It recommended commencing a massive U.S. military buildup to counter the growing missile gap, increasing the number of Titan and Atlas ICBMs to be deployed in 1959 from 80 to 600, and increasing the number of Thor and Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles to be placed in Europe from 60 to 240. It also called for a $25 billion national fallout shelter program. When the report was leaked to the press, the Washington Post painted a dire picture:
The still top-secret Gaither Report portrays a United States in the gravest danger in its history. It pictures the Nation moving in frightening course to the status of a second-class power. It shows an America exposed to an almost immediate threat from the missile-bristling Soviet Union. It finds America’s long-term prospect one of cataclysmic peril in the face of rocketing Soviet military might and of a powerful, growing Soviet economy and technology. . . . To prevent what otherwise appears to be an inevitable catastrophe, the Gaither Report urgently calls for an enormous increase in military spending—from now through 1970.17
Sputnik provided Democrats a tremendous political opening. A legislative aide informed Lyndon Johnson that “the issue . . . if properly handled, would blast the Republicans out of the water, . . . and elect you President.”18 Taking the cue, the Senate launched an inquiry into Eisenhower’s defense programs.
Among those who jumped enthusiastically on this “missile gap” bandwagon was the junior senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. By late 1957, Kennedy was warning that the United States might be several years behind the Soviets in intermediate- and long-range ballistic missiles. Egged on by his friend the columnist Joseph Alsop, he adopted an even more alarmist tone the following year. Alsop had accused the Eisenhower administration of “gross untruth” regarding U.S. national defense. He detailed the scope of the projected missile gap. In 1959, the United States would have 0 ICBMs, the Soviets 100. In succeeding years the ratio would be 30 U.S. to 500 Soviet in 1960, 70 to 1,000 in 1961, 130 to 1,500 in 1962, and 130 to 2,000 in 1963.19
Relying largely on Alsop’s information, Kennedy rose up in the Senate to decry the U.S. “missile-lag,” which would soon produce “a peril more deadly than any wartime danger we have ever known,” increasing the possibility of a Soviet attack and making nuclear disarmament more urgent than ever.20 Eisenhower, whose U-2 surveillance planes had failed to identify a single deployed ICBM, had little patience for Washington insiders who tried to exploit the missile gap to advance their own careers. He dismissed them as “sanctimonious hypocritical bastards.”21
U.S. interests and prestige were dealt another devastating blow when revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, toppled Cuba’s U.S.-friendly dictator, Fulgencio Batista, on New Year’s Day 1959. American corporations had dominated the island since 1898. In 1959, they controlled more than 80 percent of Cuba’s mines, cattle ranches, utilities, and oil refineries, 50 percent of the railroads, and 40 percent of the sugar industry. The United States still retained its naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Castro quickly set about reforming the education system and redistributing land. The government seized more than a million acres from United Fruit and two other American companies. When the United States tried to strangle the new regime economically, Castro turned to the Soviet Union for aid. On March 17, 1960, Eisenhower instructed the CIA to organize a “paramilitary force” of Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro.
During the coming months, the United States, with Eisenhower’s authorization, would also be involved in an effort to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected prime minister of the resource-rich Congo, whom Allen Dulles characterized as an African Fidel Castro. Lumumba was indeed assassinated the following January, but the Congo’s former colonial rulers—the Belgians—deserve the lion’s share of the blame. The CIA backed Joseph Mobutu to succeed Lumumba. After several years of struggle, Mobutu managed to consolidate his control. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner assessed Mobutu’s reign: “He ruled for three decades as one of the world’s most brutal and corrupt dictators, stealing billions of dollars in revenues from the nation’s enormous deposits of diamonds, minerals, and strategic metals, slaughtering multitudes to preserve his power.”
During that time, he was the CIA’s most trusted ally in Africa.22
Eisenhower’s embrace of third-world dictators, indefensible as it was, paled in comparison to the most disturbing and potentially lethal aspect of his presidency, his buildup of nuclear weapons and dangerous reliance upon nuclear blackmail to gain advantage in the Cold War. He had deliberately blurred the line between conventional and nuclear weapons and was in the process of adding terrifyingly powerful thermonuclear weapons to the arsenal.
Fidel Castro at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in September 1960. Castro led the revolution that overthrew Fulgencio Batista’s U.S.-friendly dictatorship on New Year’s Day 1959. When the United States tried to strangle the new regime economically, Castro turned to the Soviet Union for aid.
No document condemned this policy more powerfully than the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955. Initiated by philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell and enthusiastically supported by Albert Einstein, whose signature arrived in the last letter he wrote before his death, the manifesto was signed by eleven of the world’s most prominent scientists, nine of whom were Nobel laureates. Drafted by future Nobel Peace Prize winner Joseph Rotblat, it pleaded with passion and urgency, “We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent or creed but as human beings, members of the species man, whose continued existence is in doubt.” The signers urged readers to think of themselves “only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.” They explained, “All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.” They expressed concern that most people still thought in terms of the “obliteration of cities.” Demolition of cities in an H-bomb war, they warned, “is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced. If everybody in London, New York, and Moscow were exterminated the world might, in the course of a few centuries, recover from the blow.” But now, with the capability of building bombs 2,500 times as powerful as the one used on Hiroshima and the new knowledge of the widespread dispersal of “lethal radioactive particles,” “the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might quite possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death—sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.” The signers asked, “Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” They concluded with the words “We appeal, as human beings, to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”23
