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Will the U.S. be involved with negotiating with the Russians to bring peace to Ukraine, as did Kennedy in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis?

On June 12, three Russian ships and a nuclear-powered submarine arrived in Havana, Cuba. Having crossed the Atlantic, the ships performed maneuvers designed to enhance military capability, and have remained in Cuba through June 17.

Recently, President Vladimir Putin made a threat to supply unspecified countries with weapons capable of striking Kiev’s Western allies.

The Kazan nuclear-powered submarine is capable of firing Kalibr cruise missiles, which have a range of up to 2,500 kilometers and can be equipped with nuclear warheads. Along for the ride are the Frigate Admiral Gorshkov, which is carrying new hypersonic Zircon missiles that are nuclear-capable, the Akademik Pashin refueling tanker, and Nikolay Chiker tugboat.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has portrayed Zircon as a potent weapon capable of penetrating any existing antimissile defenses by flying nine times faster than the speed of sound at a range of more than 1,000km (more than 620 miles).
While the visit to Cuba is not seen as a military threat to the U.S., and none of the vessels carry a nuclear war-head, it has brought back memories of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis involving the U.S. and Russia in Cuba.

Cuba is Russia’s most important partner in the Western Hemisphere from a geopolitical point of view, and both are critical of the U.S. sanctions imposed on each other, and the enlargement of NATO. Havana also backed Russia’s right to “self-defense” against NATO following its 2022 military operation in Ukraine.

In 1959, an uprising called the “26th of July Movement” led to the communist rule under the leadership of Fidel Castro in Cuba.

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RAY McGOVERN: Thanks to a Soviet Navy Captain — We Survived 1962

October 30, 2019

RAY McGOVERN: Thanks to a Soviet Navy Captain — We Survived 1962

Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov spared humanity from extinction on what has been called “the most dangerous moment in human history.”

Oct. 27, 1962, is the date on which we humans were spared extinction thanks to Soviet Navy submarine Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov.

Arkhipov insisted on following the book on using nuclear weapons. He overruled his colleagues on Soviet submarine B-59, who were readying a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo to fire at the USS Randolph task force near Cuba without the required authorization from Moscow.

Soviet naval officer Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. (Wikimedia Commons)

Communications links with naval headquarters were down, and Arkhipov’s colleagues were convinced WWIII had already begun. After hours of battering by depth charges from U.S. warships, the captain of B-59, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky, screamed, “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all — we will not disgrace our Navy!” But Captain Arkipov’s permission was also required. He countermanded Savitsky and B-59 came to the surface.

Much of this account of what happened on submarine B-59 is drawn from Daniel Ellsberg’s masterful book, “The Doomsday Machine” — one of the most gripping and important books I have ever read. Dan explains, inter alia, on pages 216-217 the curious circumstance whereby the approval of Arkhipov, chief of staff of the submarine brigade at the time, was also required.

Ellsberg adds that had Arkhipov been stationed on one of the other submarines (for example, B-4, which was never located by the Americans), there is every reason to believe that the carrier USS Randolph and several, perhaps all, of its accompanying destroyers would have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion.

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Russia “Prepared For Another Cuban Missile Crisis”, Putin Warns US

February 21, 2019

Russia “Prepared For Another Cuban Missile Crisis”, Putin Warns US

Russia is militarily ready for a “Cuban Missile-style crisis” President Putin said late on Wednesday, commenting on nuclear first strike capability amidst growing tensions with the US. The remarks were given to Russian media following a prior speech wherein he warned Moscow will match any attempt by the US to station intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe in the wake of the now collapsing INF treaty.

Putin specifically threatened deployment of hypersonic missiles on ships and submarines which could enter US territorial waters without detection if American intermediate-range missiles move into Europe.

“(We’re talking about) naval delivery vehicles: submarines or surface ships. And we can put them, given the speed and range (of our missiles)… in neutral waters. Plus they are not stationary, they move and they will have to find them,” Putin said, according to a Kremlin transcript. “You work it out. Mach nine [the speed of the missiles] and over 1,000 km [their range],” he boasted of the Kremlin’s latest claimed capabilities.

He urged an easing of tensions after last week the Russian Foreign Ministry left the door open for talks to rescue the INF treaty as well as extend the New START nuclear reduction treaty, set to expire in 2021. Speaking of the current stand off and ratcheting tensions with Washington, Putin said, “They [the tensions] are not a reason to ratchet up confrontation to the levels of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s. In any case that’s not what we want.” He said further, “If someone wants that, well OK they are welcome. I have set out today what that would mean. Let them count [the missile flight times].”

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Tomgram: Susan Southard, Against Forgetting

January 17, 2019

Tomgram: Susan Southard, Against Forgetting

Let me tell you a little story about Hiroshima and me:

As a young man, I was anything but atypical in having the Bomb (we capitalized it then) on my brain, and not just while I was ducking under my school desk as sirens howled their nuclear attack warnings outside. Like many people my age, I dreamed about the bomb, too. I could, in those nightmares, feel its searing heat, watch a mushroom cloud rise on a distant horizon, or find myself in some devastated landscape that I had never come close to experiencing (except in sci-fi novels).

And my dreams were nothing compared to those of America’s top strategists who, in secret National Security Council documents of the early 1950s, descended into the charnel house of future history, writing of the possibility that 100 atomic bombs, landing on targets in the United States, might kill or injure 22 million Americans. And they were pikers compared to the top military brass who, in 1960, in the country’s first Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear strategy, created a scenario for delivering more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities which would, if all went according to plan, cease to exist. Official estimates of possible casualties from such an attack ran to 285 million dead.

An American obsession with global annihilation undoubtedly peaked when President Kennedy came on the air on October 22, 1962, to tell us that Soviet missile sites were being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” Listening to his address, Americans everywhere imagined a nuclear confrontation that might leave parts of the country in ruins. Such fears, however, began to fade when the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused.

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Peace or Armageddon: Take Your Pick

July 20, 2018

Peace or Armageddon: Take Your Pick

Photo by Paul Sableman | CC BY 2.0

I had just turned 15 when the Cuban Missile Crisis suddenly erupted. Like everyone else my age I had been propagandized from early childhood to see the Reds as America’s mortal enemy and to fear their designs to wipe us off the map. So in October of 1962 I was shocked to learn that the Soviets had installed nukes only miles from our shores. It went without saying that we were innocent victims of a deadly plot. How monstrous! But it wasn’t long before I was also frightened, darkly so. The images I had seen as a child of about eight of the desolation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came back to me and I suddenly realized that the same fate could befall us. How had this happened?

Thus for the first time in my life I questioned the world view fed to me since I had reached the age of reason only to discover (albeit gradually) that reason and logic were far from operative in our world. It dawned on me then as never before that if the American response to the crisis was a military one then we were finished. Just how perilous the situation was I would only fully appreciate much later but the fear was real enough at the time. Though I had been a newsboy I had never really read newspapers but began devouring every story on the crisis. My neighbors, like my own family, were inner-city working class people who didn’t pay much attention to politics but suddenly there was a palpable tension among adults. In the local A&P supermarket canned goods disappeared from the shelves. While no one in my neighborhood had summer homes in New Hampshire or Maine the newspapers reported an exodus of the well-to-do to the remote countryside. Here was an existential crisis of the first order.

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The World’s Real Nuclear Menace Isn’t North Korea

December 29, 2017

The World’s Real Nuclear Menace Isn’t North Korea

Photo by Toby Scott | CC BY 2.0

With growing speculation of war with North Korea and familiar apocalyptic rhetoric in recent times, the United States and North Korea have participated in increasingly bellicose exchanges. These recent exchanges range from President Trump calling on other nations to stop financing and trading with North Korea because it’s a “very serious nuclear menace,” redesignating North Korea as an official state sponsor of terrorism, to more North Korean nuclear missile tests and American and South Korean joint war games.

In light of the nuclear brinkmanship with North Korea bringing frequent comparisons to the Cuban Missile Crisis and discussion of hypothetical worst-case scenarios, it’s worth reviewing the United States’ record and examining whether North Korea is really the belligerent nuclear menace the world needs to liberate itself from. As critics of American foreign policy have noticed, the United States’ leaders, its media and its citizens never quite seem to recognize the full consequences of their country’s actions in other regions, or investigate its long history of conflict with North Korea.

To begin in chronological order, touring around the globe, it’s been noted by international relations scholars and historians that the Korean War is partly known as “The Forgotten War” because Americans have largely forgotten “the utter ruin and devastation” the United States inflicted upon North Korea. It’s not widely known that the United States’ own leaders have admitted to have “killed off” approximately 20% of North Korea’s population throughout the war by targeting “everything that moved.” Or that the United States destroyed more cities in North Korea than it did in Germany or Japan during World War II by dropping more bombs than it did throughout the entire Pacific Theatre.

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End Games: the Apocalyptic Trope That Swallowed the World

September 6, 2017

End Games: the Apocalyptic Trope That Swallowed the World

Photo by Mikey | CC BY 2.0

Everywhere you look these days, you see the trope: the “end of the world” is nigh from a nuclear war. You see it in somber headlines, in weighty punditry, even in throwaway jokes in the middle of, say, a TV review: “Looks like the BBC finally has a comedy hit — just as the world is about to blow up!” Ha ha. The current situation with North Korea is being portrayed as if it’s a reboot of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with two massively armed superpowers on the brink of all-out global conflagration.

But putting aside the entirely context-less hype and fear-mongering of our media and political elites, even if there were some kind of war between the US and North Korea, it would not remotely lead to anything like the “end of the world.” The US has thousands of immediately launchable nuclear weapons; North Korea has, er, none. And even if you believe Pyongyang’s propaganda (and if you swallow it about their nuclear weapons program, why not believe their BS about the happy workers’ paradise they have there?), you’re still left with the fact that North Korea might be able to put a weapon on a missile at some point in the future. OK, then they could possibly lob this missile (or heck, two or three of them, maybe) in the direction of the United States – which, we assume, would just stand back and watch this happen, despite having North Korea absolutely blanketed with surveillance and having the ability to destroy any launcher the instant it reared skyward. And then North Korea would be obliterated by a US retaliation.

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Ticking Closer to Nuclear Midnight

May 29, 2016

Ticking Closer to Nuclear Midnight

Exclusive: President Obama embraced Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima bomb, but his policies, such as heightening tensions with Russia, have raised the potential for a far worse nuclear catastrophe, explains Jonathan Marshall.

Even if you’ve never won an office raffle, a sports pool or a lottery, consider yourself supremely lucky. Unlike the atomic bomb victims who were recognized by President Barack Obama’s visit to Hiroshima, you’ve never experienced the horrors of nuclear war.

That’s nothing any of us should take for granted, says former Defense Secretary William Perry. On at least three occasions, he noted recently, the U.S. military received false alarms of a Soviet nuclear attack. At least twice the Soviet military went on high alert from similar alarms. And anyone who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 survived “as much by good luck as by good management,” he added.

A scene from “Dr. Strangelove,” in which the bomber pilot (played by actor Slim Pickens) rides a nuclear bomb to its target in the Soviet Union.

The consequences of an accidental nuclear war would be staggering. Thousands of U.S. and Russian warheads, some of them orders of magnitude larger than the one that wiped out Hiroshima, are primed for launch on warning. Besides wiping out tens or hundreds of millions of people in urban centers, they would put a large fraction of the world’s population at risk from starvation.

A 2013 report by Physicians for Social Responsibility concluded that even a limited regional nuclear exchange — say between India and Pakistan — could “cause significant climate disruption worldwide” and jeopardize food supplies to as many as two billion people.

Many authorities believe the threat of accidental war is even greater today than during most of the Cold War.

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When They Killed JFK They Killed America

May 8, 2016

When They Killed JFK They Killed America

In the JFK administration I was a White House Fellow. In those days it was a much larger program than the small insider program it later became. President Kennedy’s intention was to involve many young Americans in government in order to keep idealism alive as a counter to the material interests of lobby groups. I don’t know if the program still exists. If it does, the idealism that was its purpose is long gone.

President John F. Kennedy was a classy president. In my lifetime there has not been another like him. Indeed, today he would be impossible.

Conservatives and Republicans did not like him, because he was thoughtful. Their favorite weapon against him was their account of his love life, which according to them involved Mafia molls and Marilyn Monroe. They must have worked themselves into fits of envy over Marilyn Monroe, the hottest woman of her time.

Unlike most presidents, Kennedy was able to break with the conventional thinking of the time.

From his experience with the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Joint Chiefs’ “Operaton Northwoods,” Kennedy concluded that CIA Director Allen Dulles and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lemnitzer were both crazed by anti-communism and were a danger to Americans and the world.

Kennedy removed Dulles as CIA director, and he removed Lemnitzer as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, thus setting in motion his own assassination. The CIA, the Joint Chiefs, and the Secret Service concluded that JFK was “soft on communism.” So did the Bill Buckley conservatives.

JFK was assassinated because of anti-communist hysteria in the military and security agencies.
The Warren Commission was well aware of this. The coverup was necessary because America was locked into a Cold War with the Soviet Union.

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