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[NYTr] The possibility of Armageddon

 
[NYTr] The possibility of Armageddon
 
First some gross and glaring errors and outright disinformation in the Irish Times "Armageddon" story regarding events and alleged and supposed events during the Cuban missile crises.
 
First, the article accuses the Soviet Union of "coming very close to using nuclear weapons and claim that it was <sic> not because it was an official decision taken by the Soviet government, but rather because the Soviets had delegated authority to individual naval commanders.
 
First the author offers no proof of these claims other than claiming that "some stories say"!
 
Secondly the article entirely omits the fact the it was U.S who first and openly and publicly threatened a nuclear attack on both Cuba and on the Soviet Union if any Soviet merchant ships attempted to run the U.S.'s illegal blockade of Cuba! This was the official and announced U.S policy!
 
As far as the unconfirmed, unproven story claiming unnamed  Soviet submarine officers supposedly "authorizing the use of a nuclear tipped torpedo because they mistook depth charges on a U.S. ship to enforce a blockade, for an attack" . I don't see how there could be any mistake here - except grossly on the part of the author.
Depth charges are antisubmarine weapons  - intended and used only for *attacking* and *destroying* submarines! Depth charges are not "blockade enforcement" weapons - unless *attacking* and *destroying* Soviet submarines legally protecting Soviet merchant ships attempting to run an illegal U.S blockade, is somehow only "blockade enforcement" and but not an attack!  So if this event actually did take place, and there is no proof or evidence provided that it ever actually did - there would have been absolutely no mistake on the part of the Soviet submarine commander as to the purpose of depth charges, and he would have been entirely and legally justified in defending his ship from a U.S. depth charge attack. Another fact very conveniently omitted too, is that while the Soviet submariness did have nuclear tipped torpedoes available to them (as did U.S subs as well), U.S. navy surfacee ships were also armed with *nuclear depth charges*.
In the author's twisted mind I guess a Soviet submarine in international waters defending itself with a nuclear tipped torpedo from an unprovoked illegal attack by a U.S ship using nuclear depth charges would somehow be a "Soviet provocation", while the U.S's first use of nuclear weapons to enforce an illegal blockade would somehow not be.
 
Seeing as the U.S had already publicly threatened first use of nuclear weapons to enforce it's illegal blockade of Cuba and knowing that the U.S commander had already been officially and publicly authorized to use nuclear weapons and had nuclear depth charges, the Soviet commander would have been totally justified to use any means necessary to protect his ship from an all ready threatened, promised and probable U.S. nuclear attack. Despite the total justification the Soviet commander would have had in this alleged and probably totally mythical confrontation, no torpedo, nuclear tipped or otherwise was fired. 
 
And concerning "Armageddon
 
- The Christian fundamentalist bible thumpers behind the Bush regime don't just consider Armageddon a "possibility" but actually a hoped for and desired outcome and something they are actively and openly working for. Armageddon is the basis of the Christian right's  "Christian Zionism". They hate and detest the Jews as much as they hate all other non-christians, (actually even all non-fundy Christians too for that matter) but totally and unequivocally support Israel - but only because they believe that the Jews and Israel with the U.S's backing and involvement will provoke a nuclear war (the fundies' hoped for and they believe, promised biblical Armageddon).
 
mart
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----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2005 4:23 PM
Subject: [NYTr] The possibility of Armageddon
Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the
News that Doesn't Fit
 
sent by Simon McGuinness
 
 
The possibility of Armageddon
 
The legacy of Hiroshima: There is little, if anything, as complicated as nuclear strategy. Curiously, the peaceful end of the Cold War appears to have given rise to a myth that nuclear deterrence was inevitable, simple and stable. This did not appear to be true early in the Cold War. It may very well not be true at all.
 
When they first appeared on the scene, 60 years ago this week, nuclear weapons overturned millennia of strategic thinking. Previously, one state's military would have to destroy its enemy's forces before it could lay waste to cities and land. Remember, it was only after years of tough fighting that British and American bombers could destroy Japanese and German cities such as Tokyo and Dresden.
 
The advent of nuclear weapons meant that one state could simply ignore an enemy's army, navy, and air force, and lob missiles over all defences, killing millions of people, before the first shot was even fired across the trenches.
 
In the 1940s, as now, nobody had ever participated in a nuclear exchange so nobody knew if such a war could be contained or if it would inevitably spiral out of control. Experience became redundant.
 
Partly for this reason, the Cold War gave pride of place to civilian strategists, from political science, mathematics and economics, rather than the generals and admirals.
 
The author Fred Kaplan has called these civilians the Wizards of
Armageddon. One wizard, the much maligned Herman Kahn, a pear shaped man of 300 pounds and the model for Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, famously chastised the air force for trying to treat nuclear weapons like any other bomb by saying that they did not have war plans but "wargasms".
 
The wizards became preoccupied with how to construct a nuclear doctrine so that nuclear weapons will never have to be used. The answer they came up with is that you must convincingly threaten that you are willing to start one. Only then will the deterrent be credible, a word that was to become central to everything to do with nuclear weapons. Thus was born
the central paradox of the nuclear era: for peace, prepare for war.
 
The problem was that the United States relied upon nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union, which enjoyed a large advantage in conventional forces, from invading Western Europe or the rest of the free world. However, it seemed impossible that Nato would respond to a communist
takeover of South Korea or Berlin by destroying Soviet cities and have western population centres razed to the ground in retaliation. Such a threat lacked credibility, a weakness the wizards were acutely aware of.
 
The result was a series of plans for limited nuclear war, located
between complete annihilation and surrender. These plans required the construction of tens of thousands of warheads (the aim was to be able to target the enemy's forces even after being hit first) and the nuclear arms race. The point was to make nuclear retaliation easy. As a result, at the height of nuclear rivalry the Soviet Union and the United States had over 30,000 nuclear warheads each.
 
To use an oft-used metaphor, in its basic form nuclear deterrence resembled a game of chicken where two cars speed towards each other with the chicken being the first to swerve. In such a game there are advantages to feigning recklessness. Indeed the best way to win a game of chicken is to unscrew the steering wheel and wave it out the window, screaming like a madman, demonstrating that you are not only unwilling but also incapable of swerving. Of course, if both sides do this, things
can get complicated and messy.
 
"Thinking the unthinkable", as it became known, was integral to avoiding war but it outraged many. In a review in Scientific American on Kahn's On Thermonuclear War, the book that introduced many of the basic concepts of deterrence, James R Newman wrote: "Is there really a Herman Kahn? It is hard to believe . . . No one could write like this. No one could think like this . . . This is a moral tract on mass murder: how to
plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it."
 
Newman's distress is understandable and unavoidable not because Kahn was wrong, although a lot of the time he probably was, but because there was and is no right answer to the basic dilemmas posed by nuclear weapons.
 
On the one hand, in the context of a standoff like the Cold War, iit appears that nuclear weapons are less likely to be used the more a state appears to be willing to use them (the converse may also be true). On the other hand, these efforts to avoid nuclear war may dramatically worsen such a conflict if it actually occurs.
 
Despite all these efforts, it now appears as if deterrence was even more flawed than commonly thought. Recently opened Soviet archives suggest that the USSR came very close to using nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis, not because the Kremlin took a decision but because authority had been pre-delegated to officers in the field.
 
One story has two out of the three required officers on board a Soviet submarine authorizing the use of a nuclear torpedo against a US ship because they mistook depth charges to enforce a blockade for an attack. Robert McNamara, the then secretary of defence, has said that deterrence did not work, the world simply lucked out.
 
Since the end of the Cold War nuclear strategy has become neglected as Armageddon receded but the problems posed by the bomb have not gone away.
 
First, the United States is currently struggling with ways to deter and contain rogue states with nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has promised to develop new, smaller nuclear weapons for use against hardened silos in North Korea and Iran. Those who support this decision argue that only the credible prospect that nuclear weapons will be used
will be sufficient to deter proliferation. Those who oppose it worry that this move will break the nuclear taboo and allow others to build their own usable nuclear weapons.
 
Again, the issue revolves around credibility and the consequences of following through.
 
Second, if deterrence between two states as large, experienced and cautious as the USSR and the USA was fraught with difficulty, matters can only be complicated further when more nuclear states are added to the mix. This is particularly true given that many of the new nuclear powers are likely to be poor and may pay less attention to elaborate safety mechanisms.
 
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, nuclear weapons may leak out to terrorist organizations that cannot be deterred because they lack a eturn address and are often willing to give their own life for their ause. This nexus between weapons of mass destruction and non-state actors could provide small organizations with the capacity to inflict mass violence, something that was previously the reserve of the world's ost powerful states.
 
The author Robert Wright has accurately called this the growing
lethality of hatred. Were this nexus to occur, it would have
revolutionary consequences maybe even more profound than the invention of the bomb.
 
[Tom Wright is a research fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.]