WW - I want to write a book about the dangers of deterrence because I think that people imagine that deterrence is the thing that has kept us safe and made us prosperous for 70 years. Mostly we didn't have a nuclear war because of luck and that's really clear. Do we have enough time to tell the luck story? Or are we almost done?
RK - Yeah, we have seven minutes.
WW - In order to show that nuclear deterrence relies on luck, not that it works like magic, all you have to do is think about the Cuban Missile Crisis. People talk all the time about how the Cuban Missile Crisis proves that deterrence works. After all, the Russians put missiles into Cuba, there was a risk of nuclear war, and then they took them out. So that's pretty obvious. They don't think about the fact that when Kennedy decided to blockade Cuba, he knew that if he blockaded Cuba the resulting crisis could end up as a nuclear war. And his estimate of the risk was so right. Saturday, the height of the crisis, there is a U2 spy plane pilot on a routine air sampling mission over the North Pole and his equipment malfunctions, his directional equipment. And he's flying along over tundra, ice, and snow there's stars overhead and there's snow down below. How do you know where you are? You follow the instruments. He's flying along and flying along and eventually he looks up at the starts and he figures out he really probably isn't where he should be. There must be something wrong with the instruments. He's right, he has flown 300 miles into the Soviet Union at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets scramble MiG fighters to find him and shoot him down. He's calling, "Mayday, mayday," back to the base in Alaska. They scramble F102's to go find him and protect him and bring him back. Except, some midlevel official in the Air Force has decided that because it's the Cuban Missile Crisis all of the conventional air-to-air missiles on the F102's have been taken off and replaced with Falcon nuclear air-to-air missiles. So the only weapons that the US fighters have, the only armaments they are carrying are nuclear weapons. If they had to run into the Soviet fighters, there would have been nuclear explosion over Russia, and probably a nuclear war. The only reason there wasn't was because we were lucky. Not because nuclear deterrence works like magic. But because we got lucky. They couldn't find each other in that era before GPS. Its stories like that, that make you think about and realize that deterrence is a dangerous strategy and if you we continue to rely on it - there's a video online, on You Tube somewhere, of the Karl Wallenda who was a tightrope walker, and he walked on tightropes every day of his life from when he was young until he was 72. At 72--you can watch the video--he's walking across, he's 800 feet off the ground on this wire with a pole. He loses his balance, he totters back and forth, he grabs the wire and falls to his death. It's horrifying to watch. The point is: just because you've walked a tightrope every day for 50 years doesn't make it safe. The exact same thing applies to nuclear deterrence. Just because we have walked the deterrence tightrope and survived for 50 years doesn't mean that what we're doing is safe and reliable.
RK - It's so crazy. Just the idea that jets would be armed with nuclear missiles to fire.
WW - Well, I guess the rationale was if you've got a squadron of Soviet bombers coming at you, you might as well use nuclear missiles because it will take out more bombers. It makes a kind of convoluted sense but, if all the conventional air-to-air missiles have been replaced and there are no fighters that don't have nuclear air-to-air missiles then what do you use if need fighters to protect someone or to fight other fighters? A lot of the nuclear armaments were crazy anyway. There was a nuclear bazooka that the explosion was so large that it would kill the guy that fired it because he couldn't run away fast enough before the explosion blew him to smithereens. They're crazy weapons.
RK - It sure is. We've got two minutes you want to wrap up?
WW - Well, it's really great to talk to you and it was a terrific lunch.
RK - Same here.
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