History teaches us that catastrophe can happen, even if leaders don’t want it
At the most dangerous moment in global relations since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the US and the USSR stood at the brink of nuclear war and the US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara left the White House one day literally “thinking that might be the last sunset I saw,” most of us are going through our days as if nothing has changed. On Google Search, people’s top concern in the past two days has been where to find their nearest St. Patrick’s Day parade, followed by queries about Von Miller, the Buffalo Bill’s new defensive end, Liverpool’s victory over Arsenal, an earthquake in Japan, and the latest on Warriors star Stephen Curry’s injured knee. On Trendsmap, which shows what hashtags are trending locally, #StPatricksDay is competing with #MarchMadness for most Twitter users’ attention.
Even the editors of The New York Times, who still set the elite news agenda for most of the rest of mainstream media, seem fairly unconcerned by what is plainly before us, burying a story on the risk of nuclear war on page A12 in the print edition that arrived on my doorstep this morning, and showing it nowhere on its online homepage. According to the Times, a gamble by the Russians to use a single nuclear strike to force Ukraine to surrender could lead to a tit-for-tat exchange that could kill 34 million people within a few hours. But, please turn the page to our next story.
I don’t think this is because we’re numb to the danger. A Harris Poll of 3,012 adults done March 1–3 in association with the American Psychological Association found that Americans are feeling significant stress not just from the constant stream of crises they’ve had to face without a break in the past two years, but from the danger presented by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A whopping 84% said the invasion is “terrifying to watch,” and 69% said they are worried it “is going to lead to nuclear war.”
So far, however, our inchoate fear of Armageddon hasn’t crystallized into any kind of meaningful action that might keep us away from the brink. To the extent that Americans are mobilizing in response to Russia’s invasion, the vast majority are searching for ways to help Ukraine defend itself and to help Ukrainians survive the onslaught. Given how worried people are, I keep expecting some organization to step up with a clear call for prudence, but other than vague references to relying on diplomacy to solve the conflict, traditional antiwar groups like MoveOn.org have been quiet.
At the elite level, though, there’s far more pressure for a more muscular military response than there is for restraint, another echo of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Democrat in the White House, President John F. Kennedy, was accused of being weak not just on Cuba but also the divided city of Berlin. Many Republicans in Congress are now calling for President Biden to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, knowing full well that urging such risky action has no political downside for them. A plurality of 40% of Americans think enforcing a no-fly zone is a good idea, versus 30% who don’t (the rest are unsure), but that number drops ten percent when people are asked if the US military should shoot down Russian military planes flying over Ukraine.
Even sober-minded analysts like Evelyn Farkas, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia under President Obama, underplay the risk of a military confrontation spinning out of control. Writing in the Washington Post’s Outlook section in favor of setting up a humanitarian no-fly zone to support corridors for civilians to leave battle zones, she claimed, “there is no automatic escalation from one Russian aircraft downed by a NATO fighter to full-blown war — let alone to the use of tactical or strategic nuclear weapons.”
No, escalation would not be automatic, but it could very well be accidental. That’s because both the US and Russia have long treated nuclear weapons as usable parts of their arsenals because both believe that effective deterrence requires them to assert that they would use them defensively and because once events are set in motion, local commanders on the ground are capable of using them in error, even if Moscow or Washington doesn’t want that to happen.
That is the central lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which historians and military analysts on both sides have been unpacking and ruminating on for decades. In a nutshell, over the first half of 1962, Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev secretly moved nuclear missiles to Communist Cuba in order to protect it from a potential American attack in the wake of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. In late October, presented with American spy plane photos showing the missiles’ deployment, President Kennedy responded by publicly announcing a quarantine and naval blockade of the island and warning that any single missile launch from Cuba would lead to “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” (It’s worth remembering now that many, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Congressional leaders, felt Kennedy took the weakest option and pushed instead for a full-scale invasion of the island.) Though Khrushchev quickly realized he had blundered and decided that he had to pull the missiles out, it took several days for a face-saving solution to be found. This involved secret backchannel contacts between JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy and Russian diplomats, and a quiet agreement by Kennedy to remove American nuclear missiles based in Turkey once the Soviets took theirs out of Cuba. In the meantime, neither leader could publicly blink while American and Soviet forces faced off in the waters around Cuba.
That’s when the fog of war nearly ended the world. As part of the American blockade of Cuba, US Navy ships patrolling in international waters were dropping relatively harmless depth charges to force Soviet submarines to surface. American generals had told their Soviet counterparts that they would be using this tactic, but that message never made it to the submarine commanders, who then believed they were under full-scale attack. One Soviet submarine commander ordered a nuclear missile into a firing tube but said later he did so only to fool the Communist party political officer onboard into thinking he was behaving according to orders. On a second sub, which was also being besieged by the US Navy above and where the internal temperature hovered at an intolerable 120 degrees Fahrenheit, two exhausted commanding officers were convinced that their country was already at war and prepared to launch their nuke, only to be stopped because a third top officer who happened to be on their ship disagreed. Had this nuke been fired, the US — which didn’t know Soviet subs had such weapons — would have assumed it was a Cuban missile whose launch they had not detected, and this could well have triggered JFK’s threat of full-scale retaliation.
As Daniel Ellsberg, who was a Pentagon nuclear analyst then (years before he became a whistleblower), writes in his essential book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, while both leaders, Khrushchev and Kennedy, were determined to avoid armed conflict and even prepared to settle on the other’s terms, if necessary, rather than go to war, “they each hoped, by threatening war, to achieve a better bargain. For the sake of a better deal, they were both willing to postpone by hours or days the settlement that each was willing to make. And meanwhile, during those hours, their subordinates (unaware that they were supporting a pure bluff in a game of bargaining) were taking military actions that could unleash an unstoppable train of events, ultimately pulling the trigger on a Doomsday Machine.”
Ellsberg ends his chapter on the Cuban Missile Crisis with this warning. “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?” This is why the only prudent action we can take in the short run is to avoid any escalation like introducing American troops into the war or risky scenarios like a NATO-imposed no-fly zone. The risks of miscommunication or confusion on the battlefield are too high.