Sleepwalking With the Bomb by John C. Wohlstetter Read Free Book Online Page B

that over Cuba Kennedy “would make a fuss, make more of a fuss, then agree.”
    That the subsequent 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis ended with neither an all-out war nor a city-trade was dismissed as a lucky accident by many observers. Luck was indeed involved, but so were the two sober leaders Kennedy and Khrushchev, both wounded on wartime battlefields and bereft of family members killed in combat. It was Cuban dictator Fidel Castro who asked Moscow to launch an all-out nuclear strike. Moscow warned Fidel that Cuba would be made to disappear—American B-47 bombers based in Florida during the crisis carried 20-megaton H-bombs, a single one of which would have erased Havana. Castro was not moved. Seething with hatred of the United States as his main tormentor, he wanted the strike launched anyway. In 2010, wiser at age 84, Castro admitted that he had made a mistake in urging that contingent course of action in 1962.
    In reality, while accidental war was chillingly possible during the Cold War, the superpower leaders were too sober to deliberately launch a nuclear strike. During the Cuban Missile crisis a Russian submarine commander almost launched a nuclear torpedo to sink a U.S. destroyer that was trying to force his diesel sub to surface, using depth charges. Had he done do, does anyone really think that Kennedy would have launched an all-out nuclear strike at the Soviet Union, in the act dooming more than 100 million Americans to incineration? However, fifty years later, as newer powers join the nuclear club, with some possibly led by hotheads like the young Castro, the risk of what Herman Kahn called “spasm war” will grow.
Cold War, Cool Heads, a “Mad” Freeze
    A FTER THE close shave of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States turned towards arms control. But Kennedy’s assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam War delayed any action until June 1967, when, in Glassboro, New Jersey, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin laid the final political groundwork for negotiating superpower arms limitation agreements. The Soviet Union’s August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, however, again derailed such efforts, and for the remainder of LBJ’s administration. Tanks rumbling through Prague provided poor political video to accompany simultaneous arms talks.
    The 1967 U.S.-Soviet summit, in the midst of the Vietnam War, coincided with a remarkable decision made by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: freezing the U.S. nuclear arsenal at 1967 numerical levels. In a speech in San Francisco in September of that year, McNamara presented his “assured destruction” doctrine. The McNamara view assumed that each side would deliberately hold its own civilian population hostage to the other side’s offensive forces. Deterring a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies was “the cornerstone of our strategic policy,” he explained:
We do this by maintaining a highly reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage upon any single aggressor or combination of aggressors at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange, even after absorbing a surprise first strike. This can be defined as our assured-destruction capability.
     
    McNamara had helped General Curtis LeMay plan his firebombing campaign of 1945 against Japanese cities and was in the midst of rethinking the course of the Vietnam War. He decided that America’s 1967 arsenal—able to destroy roughly a quarter of the Russian population and half of Russian industry—was powerful enough as it stood.
    Strategist Donald Brennan appended “mutual” to McNamara’s phrase “assured destruction” to create an acronym indicating how mad the policy seemed to him and other critics. In its grisly logic of deterrence by mutual suicide pact, MAD meant that each side would deliberately keep its own civilian populace without protection—in effect, hostage to the other side’s nuclear striking forces—while protecting commanders and