Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.
Neither saw the stakes in Cuba as high enough to justify even a moderately low risk of nuclear war, and both were determined to find a peaceful resolution of the crisis. In fact, as I said earlier, I believe that each leader was—contrary to his public declarations, and in Kennedy’s case, secretly from almost all his advisors—determined, to the extent that he had control over events, not to go to war, not to permit armed conflict to arise between American and Soviet forces under any circumstances. I believe that each of them, from an early stage in the public confrontation (and earlier, for Kennedy), was determined to end the crisis on the other’s terms, if necessary, rather than let events escalate to actual combat. And yet the world came close to nuclear war.
Each was directing his military to carry on provocative activities—on the Soviet side, making the missiles operational on a crash basis in Cuba and sending submarine patrols in the Caribbean; on the American side, pursuing all preparations for an invasion of Cuba and pressing aggressive low-level aerial reconnaissance over Cuba while harassing Soviet submarines. Each of them was prolonging the crisis day by day while they haggled over the resolution of the conflict, each hoping to achieve better terms than he was prepared, at bottom, to accept. If Khrushchev had not, surprisingly, initiated an abrupt, humiliating withdrawal of his missiles Sunday morning—without even waiting for an official American response to his proposal of Saturday morning, which Kennedy had argued to his advisors was “very reasonable”—there was every likelihood of the fuse to all-out war being lit by that afternoon.
How close did that come? As close as the unpredictable decision of one man to overrule two others on a Soviet submarine, or the inaccuracy of Cuban antiaircraft gunners (improving every hour) on their first day of firing at live targets. Far greater than one in a hundred, greater that day than Nitze’s one in ten. And that was for reasons which I didn’t know, and no other Americans knew, for thirty and in some cases forty years. The world has yet to absorb the lessons of this history—the story of how the existence of humanity was placed in great, unjustifiable danger by men who had no intention of doing that, men who recoiled from ending human history, or from taking what they saw as a high or even significant risk of doing so.
A primary lesson I draw from this episode is that the existential danger to humanity of nuclear weapons does not rest solely or even mainly on the possibility of further proliferation of such weapons to “rogue” or “unstable” nations, who would handle and threaten them less “responsibly” than the permanent members of the Security Council, nor does it rest merely on the vagaries of the smaller and more recent nuclear weapons states of Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea (though these do enhance the dangers).
What a true history of the Cuban missile crisis reveals is that the existence of masses of nuclear weapons in the hands of leaders of the superpowers, the United States and Russia—even when those leaders are about as responsible, humane, and cautious as any we have seen—posed then, and still do, intolerable dangers to the survival of civilization.
Just such leaders in both countries—each presiding over nuclear forces much smaller then than at present, despite the reductions of the last two decades—came horrifyingly close to possibly launching those forces, something that neither remotely contemplated at the start of the crisis. For several crucial days, I believe, Kennedy and Khrushchev were each privately prepared to back down, “but not yet,” as they sparred with forces armed with thermonuclear weapons. If their bargaining had gone on one more day, then nearly all then-living humans might have died from it, and few if any now alive would ever have existed. Yet—have we had a president since World War II who would have acted in those circumstances more responsibly, more prudently? Do we have such a president now? Does Russia?
Let me give one last quote from the one who finally did back down, just in time, with the advantage of knowing what the other did not. Khrushchev told Norman Cousins, a few months after the crisis, his reaction at the time:
When I asked the military advisors if they could assure me137 that holding fast would not result in the death of five hundred million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind, or what was worse, a traitor. The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians might accuse us of appeasement or weakness.
So I said to myself, “To hell with these maniacs. If I can get the United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles.” That is what happened, and now I am reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians.…
They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?
That last line, indeed the whole quote, deserves to be studied by all those whose fingers hover over the trigger to a Doomsday Machine.
PART II
THE ROAD TO DOOMSDAY
CHAPTER 14
Bombing Cities
Where did the road to doomsday begin?138
The fission-bomb mechanism that made it possible was first envisioned by theoretical physicists. It was then tested in the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Its potential was finally revealed to the world in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But before that, when and how did it become possible to imagine that setting fire to cities and burning civilians from the sky was not only an acceptable but also a necessary way to wage war? What change in consciousness transformed what had previously been regarded as an unspeakable war crime into the official policy of the world’s leading democracies?
That change preceded the formal dawn of the nuclear era, but it relied on two crucial developments, which happened to converge in World War II: first, the belief by some militarists that airpower was the key to victory; and second, the increasing willingness by civilian leadership and air commanders to regard cities—which is to say, civilian populations—as legitimate military targets. Each of those developments has its own particular history.
The beginning of World War II in Europe provides an available benchmark as to what the conscience of humanity up to that time deemed natural and reasonable when it came to waging war. On September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland—marking the official outbreak of World War II—President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed this appeal to all the belligerent states:
The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians139 in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which have resulted in the maiming and death of thousands of defenseless men, women and children, has sickened the hearts of civilized men and women and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.
If resort is had to this form of human barbarism during the period of the tragic conflagration with which the world is now confronted, hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities which have now broken out, will lose their lives.
I am therefore directing this urgent appeal to every Government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities, upon the understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all of their opponents. I request an immediate reply.
The very next day, Britain (before it had formally declared war on Germany) gave that affirmation, declaring that the British and French would “conduct hostilities w
ith a firm desire140 to spare the civilian population” and had already sent explicit instructions to the commanders of their armed forces prohibiting the bombardment “of any except strictly military objectives in the narrowest sense of the word.”
This was shortly followed by a similar agreement from Germany. In fact, none of these governments, at least at the highest levels, had any plan or intention at this time to pursue the deliberate bombing of cities. That included the government of Adolf Hitler.
Roosevelt’s message was not an appeal to a new standard of conduct in war. Quite the contrary, he was reaffirming the importance of what was regarded as an international norm, part of the common law of international relations, despite recent violations of it by fascist powers that had been widely and strongly condemned.
The British instructions, referenced in their reply to FDR, included the following three principles, “enunciated in Parliament by the Prime Minister in June 1938”: (1) “It is against international law to bomb civilians as such and to make deliberate attacks on the civilian population”; (2) “Targets which are aimed at from the air must be legitimate military objectives and must be capable of identification”; and (3) “reasonable care must be taken in attacking those military objectives so that by carelessness a civilian population in the neighborhood is not bombed.” Britain introduced these three principles141 in a League of Nations Assembly resolution, which was unanimously adopted on September 30, 1938.
Nevertheless, a significant minority of the air services of Britain (Bomber Command) and the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) had for a generation been preparing and hoping for a much broader bombing strategy targeting industry and population, violating these international restrictions. They found FDR’s multilateral agreement constraining and regrettable. But no one, neither the British nor Hitler, wanted to be seen initiating the process of city-bombing that FDR’s appeal had denounced.
FDR’s reference to the “ruthless bombing … during the past few years” pointed to the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities, beginning with an attack on Shanghai in 1937, and the bombing of Spanish cities, Barcelona, Granollers, and Guernica, by Italian and German fascist forces in 1937–38. Actually, five years earlier, in January 1932, Japanese carrier aircraft had bombed the Chinese section of the International Settlement in Shanghai, causing a thousand deaths in what Barbara Tuchman described as “the first terror bombing of a civilian population142 of an era that was to become familiar with it.”
The bombing of the city center of Guernica by German Condor Legion aircraft on April 26, 1937 (the German role being clandestine and denied by the supposedly neutral Nazi government), became and has remained ever since iconic for civilian suffering from such attacks, especially after it inspired the Picasso painting. But nothing has ever expressed the general, gut-felt moral revulsion against city-bombing better than a virtually unknown article, from firsthand experience, by America’s most famous writer at the time, Ernest Hemingway, in July 1938. It’s still little known because he wrote it, by request, for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, which published it in Russian; his manuscript in English didn’t surface143 for forty-four years. It conveys in words the same surreal images that Picasso had rendered on canvas the year before. His lead sentence: “During the last fifteen months I saw murder done in Spain by the Fascist invaders. Murder is different from war.” Hemingway was describing what he had seen of fascist bombing of workers’ housing in Barcelona and shelling of civilian cinemagoers in Madrid.
You see the murdered children with their twisted legs, their arms that bend in wrong directions, and their plaster powdered faces. You see the women, sometimes unmarked when they die from concussion, their faces grey, green matter running out of their mouths from bursted gall bladders. You see them sometimes looking like bloodied bundles of rags. You see them sometimes blown capriciously into fragments as an insane butcher might sever a carcass. And you hate the Italian and German murderers who do this as you hate no other people.
… When they shell the cinema crowds, concentrating on the squares where the people will be coming out at six o’clock, it is murder.
… You see a shell hit a queue of women standing in line to buy soap. There are only four women killed but a part of one woman’s torso is driven against a stone wall so that blood is driven into the stone with such force that sandblasting later fails to clean it. The other dead lie like scattered black bundles and the wounded are moaning or screaming.
Hemingway’s moral and emotional reaction that what he was witnessing was criminal, murder, even in wartime, reflected the general values of that period that underlay the appeal by President Roosevelt a year later, and that were in fact proclaimed by the American and British governments (increasingly disingenuously) to their publics consistently throughout the war that followed.
In any case, the agreement of September 1939 did not hold. Hitler’s bombing of London in 1940, the Blitz, was an obvious breach. But a full year after the Blitz, largely for operational reasons, the civilian and military leaders of Britain officially and deliberately, though secretly from their public, adopted and expanded the tactics of Hitler’s attack on London as their primary basis for attacks in Germany from early 1942 on. In time, likewise for operational reasons (not because of a newly discovered effectiveness of these tactics nor because USAAF commanders had rejected their initial antipathy to such “terror” attacks, but because they found it difficult to do anything else in bad weather or at night), the United States also joined in. Particularly in Japan, from early 1945, the targeting of cities with the aim of causing maximum civilian casualties—what FDR had termed a “form of human barbarism”—became really the only form of attack waged by the bomber forces under General Curtis LeMay.
This policy was kept secret throughout the war from the citizens of Britain and the United States because the public posture of Churchill, Roosevelt, and then Truman was that they were observing, as well as could be done under the circumstances, the very old principles of the immunity of noncombatants, civilians, from deliberate attack. That was a lie.
Instead, midway in World War II, these two democratic liberal governments secretly adopted Hitler’s tactics of terror bombing civilians and obliterated the distinction between combatants and noncombatants in their bombing operations. They were thereby rejecting the principles of “just war” doctrine, which they and their successors have continued to this day to publicly endorse. How this came to be, and why, is crucial to understanding nuclear war planning today.
* * *
The principles of “just war,” codified by international jurists starting with Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century, reflected a “civilizing” response to the more destructive religious wars of the past, particularly the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. The restrictions on war—above all, against deliberate killing of noncombatants—were contrasted to the wars of the barbarians, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and others, who had regularly put cities to the sword, killing all males, killing or enslaving all women and children, sometimes even constructing pyramids of the skulls of their victims.
The seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries saw the adoption of notions first articulated by Augustine for the Catholic Church and later elaborated by Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. The so-called just-war doctrine established conditions under which war could be legitimately undertaken (jus ad bellum). This called for a just cause, usually national defense or a declaration by competent authority. But there were also conditions regarding the just means of waging war (jus in bello)—in other words, restrictions on the kinds of violence that even a Christian monarch could order or a Christian soldier could obey. These Catholic doctrines were taken up by most of the Reformation churches and later by secularized international law.
Even a legitimate authority acting in self-defense could not do simply anything in the way of violence to an enemy. Such forces were obliged to respect an absolute distinction between combatants and noncombatants, with noncombatants—essentially, civilian
s—to be absolutely immune from deliberate attack.
By and large, these principles continued to be observed up to the outset of World War II. In his 1939 appeal, Roosevelt was really doing nothing more than reminding the various belligerents of the clear-cut principles of civilized behavior in warfare at that time: norms of international law. Thus it was not surprising that the various belligerents, even Nazi Germany, would give formal acceptance to this appeal, though the Japanese in China and the Germans in Spain had already clearly violated its principles.
But long before World War II, something had been happening in the nature of warfare to erode elite commitment to those norms. A century after Grotius, the French Revolution led for the first time to conscription on a mass basis. Earlier wars since the Middle Ages—except religious wars which were particularly barbaric—had been fought by small numbers of mercenaries, often foreigners, working for a prince, a warlord of some sort, or a small state. The French Revolution introduced a spirit of patriotism, a feeling of widespread enthusiasm and support for a cause, which made it possible to mobilize a whole nation in a way that had not been possible in the previous several hundred years.
This coincided more or less with the dawn of industrialization, affording the possibility of arming these masses, transporting them, and supplying them with cannons, and later Gatling guns and machine guns. In particular, the use of railroads, for the first time in our Civil War, made possible an enormous increase in the range, extent, and destructiveness of war. These developments worked together to make the whole nation become a participant in a war between states.
All this helped plant the deadly seeds that later flowered in the doctrine of strategic bombing: the notion that nearly every citizen of the opponent’s country was a legitimate target, since many of them could be said to be contributing in some way or another to military operations. That began most obviously with those in war industries, making munitions, but it also applied to those in basic industries that fed into the war machinery: steel, energy, coal and oil, transportation, and communications. This blurred the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, but the implications of this change were not immediately expressed.
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