But at the moment, they're being pointed. And they're being pointed by two people who are giving very good imitations of being crazy. That's dangerous. I hope they're pretending. They might be pretending. But to pretend to be crazy with nuclear weapons is not a safe game. It's a game of chicken. Nuclear chicken.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, this is an excerpt of President Kennedy's address to the nation at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, perhaps the closest the United States has ever come to nuclear war.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY: "Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere."
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was President Kennedy. Can you talk about your own experience of the Cuban missile crisis in October of 1962? Talk about what you were doing. This is before you released the Pentagon Papers years later.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah. I listened to the president on October 22nd, I remember, announcing that there were missiles in Cuba, and I called up my friend, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Harry Rowen, later president of RAND, and asked, "Do you need some help out there?" And he said, "Get on the next plane," which I did.
I flew out to Washington, then, the next morning, early, got into the Pentagon, the day, actually, that the blockade was instituted -- no, the day before, actually -- and was given the task, for example, since I was a command-and-control specialist, of -- that's how I got into nuclear planning--what can the Russians do with 30-some missiles on Cuba? Well, they can hit Moscow -- I'm sorry, they can hit Washington. They can hit Washington, which is what our joint chiefs would do. And they could hit various other places. And that, I knew, would not paralyze our response. It would only make it quickly carried out against all the cities in Russia and China and so forth. It would do them no good, but that's probably what they would do, and so forth.
I worked during that week. Some nights I slept in the office of president -- of, sorry, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, and on a couch in his office, while we were -- I was on several task forces, working for the Executive Committee, EXCOMM, of the National Security Council. Now, the next year I spent studying a great deal on that crisis, with higher than top-secret access, on the whole. And yet, I didn't learn many of the things that are most important about that crisis, which have taken decades and decades to come out of secrecy.
For one thing, I've concluded, contrary to what I thought at the time, that both President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were determined not to carry out the threats they were making of armed conflict -- compared to the North Korean crisis right now. Imagine that both sides have decided they are absolutely not going to armed conflict, they're only gesturing and breast-beating and trying to get the other side to back down. That's what was happening in the Cuban missile crisis. And yet, to make the threats credible, Khrushchev was maneuvering submarines within the range of our forces, armed with nuclear torpedoes we didn't know they had at all. And they were subject to mock depth charges to bring them to the surface, with our Navy not knowing that they were facing submarines that could blow them all out of the water. Kennedy, on the other hand, was moving troops, exactly like those exercises. As a matter of fact, we had done exercises, just before the crisis broke, of invading Cuba -- not named Cuba. The enemy they were against was announced in the papers as Ortsac, which, as Khrushchev inferred, cleverly, was Castro spelled backwards, said, "Yes, that was a game we used to play when I was a kid," said Khrushchev.
So, here we were threatening to invade Cuba. It was not a way to keep the Cubans from acquiring a deterrent force, just as our exercises of invading North Korea, going on right now, essentially, don't seem a very well-chosen way to get Kim Jong-un to give up his deterrent capability in the -- in North Korea. But that's what we were doing.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But you say in the book also --
DANIEL ELLSBERG: The other thing I learned was that in the course of these maneuvers, we came within a hair's breadth of blowing the world up, of having the plans I've just described go into action. A nuclear submarine -- I should say, a submarine that was armed with nuclear torpedoes had the two top commanders, who thought they were being -- going to go down, actually, as a result of these mock depth charges that were actually meant to force them to the surface. The commander, Savitsky, ordered the nuclear torpedo armed and ready for action against the destroyers or the cruiser. The second-in-command, whose assent was needed, agreed with him. And they were ready to go.
It happened that a commodore of several submarines in the area was on that sub rather than some other one. It could have been one of the others, but he was there. And since he was the commodore, his assent was also needed. And he said no. And thanks to that man, Vasili Arkhipov, we didn't blow a cruiser out of the water and cause the nuclear explosion that Kennedy had already announced would cause an all-out attack on the Soviet Union. That's why we're still here.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And you said that you only learned years later that Khrushchev himself had, again, delegated authority to these folks to start a war?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Some of the things we learned relatively recently, in the '90s, and confirmed just in this century, were that Khrushchev had not only managed to get nuclear warheads to the medium-range missiles that he had put in Cuba -- which, by the way, were the exact counterpart of what Kim Jong-un is trying to do now. Khrushchev had decided that his ability to destroy our allies directly, with his medium-range missiles in Europe, which we could not find and destroy, MEL mobile [inaudible] -- he could kill a hundred million and more in Europe. That didn't seem to be fazing us in Berlin. It wasn't getting us out of Berlin. It wasn't getting us determined to keep access to Berlin, even though doing that would force us to go to tactical nuclear war. So he said, "I have to have missiles in range of the U.S." And so he moved missiles to Cuba, medium-range missiles that would be in range of the U.S.
Kim does not have a Cuba now to put -- and probably couldn't anyway, in the case of Cuba -- so he's building ICBMs that can reach the U.S., even though he can already destroy entirely our ally in South Korea and in Japan. So he's doing what Khrushchev did in -- and it's dangerous, as it was for Cuba for Khrushchev at that time.
OK, moreover, we had no idea at that time, though it was the most surveilled island in the history of the world -- U-2s and satellites were flying over it, and even low-level reconnaissance planes, that managed not to discover that he had put tactical nuclear weapons, short-range weapons, in Cuba. We didn't know they were there. And moreover, he had done what we thought was unthinkable for a Russian dictator who wanted central control of everything: He and his presidium had delegated the use of those weapons against our invasion fleet to the local commanders. Now, that's almost necessary tactically. You can't wait on Moscow if an invasion fleet is coming at you. But we didn't think he would ever do that.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
