Humanity is playing nuclear roulette
- sciart0
- Jun 26
- 4 min read
Excerpt to first link:
"On October 27, 1962, the 12th day of the Cuban missile crisis, a bellicose and rattled Fidel Castro asked Nikita Khrushchev, his patron, to destroy America.
“I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous,” Castro wrote in a cable to Moscow, “and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba—a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law—then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.”
We exist today because Khrushchev rejected Castro’s demand. It was Khrushchev, of course, who brought the planet to the threshold of extinction by placing missiles in Cuba, but he had underestimated the American response to the threat. Together with his adversary, John F. Kennedy, he lurched his way toward compromise. “In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to carry out a nuclear strike against the enemy’s territory,” Khrushchev responded. “Naturally you understand where that would lead us. It would not be a simple strike, but the start of a thermonuclear world war. Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I find your proposal to be wrong, even though I understand your reasons.”
Castro was 36 years old during the missile crisis. He was 84 when I met him, in Havana, in late summer 2010. He was in semiretirement, though he was still Cuba’s indispensable man. I spent a week with him, discussing, among other things, the Nuclear Age and its diabolical complexities. He still embraced the cruel dogmas of Communist revolution, but he was also somewhat reflective about his mistakes. I was deeply curious about his October 27 cable, and I put this question to him: “At a certain point it seemed logical for you to recommend that the Soviets bomb the U.S. Does what you recommended still seem logical now?” His answer: “After I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn’t worth it.”
The problem with wisdom is that it tends to come slowly, if it comes at all. As a species, we are not particularly skilled at making time-pressured, closely reasoned decisions about matters of life and death. The sociobiologist E. O. Wilson described the central problem of humanity this way: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” The main challenge of the 80 years since the Trinity atomic test has been that we do not possess the cognitive, spiritual, and emotional capabilities necessary to successfully manage nuclear weapons without the risk of catastrophic failure. Khrushchev and Castro both made terrifying mistakes of analysis and interpretation during the missile crisis. So, too, did several of Kennedy’s advisers, including General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, who argued that a naval blockade of Cuba, unaccompanied by the immediate bombing of missile sites, was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”
Today, the Global Operations Center of the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees America’s nuclear forces, is housed in an Offutt Air Force Base building named for LeMay. This decision has always struck me as an indirect endorsement by America’s nuclear establishment of the bias toward action embodied by the sometimes-Strangelovian LeMay. Bias toward actionis an all-purpose phrase, but I first heard it in the context of nuclear warfare many years ago from Bruce Blair, a scholar of nonproliferation and a former Air Force missile-launch officer. It means that the nuclear-decision-making scripts that presidents are meant to follow in a crisis assume that Russia (or other adversaries) will attempt to destroy American missiles while they are still in their silos. The goal of nuclear-war planners has traditionally been to send those missiles on their way before they can be neutralized—in the parlance of nuclear planning, to “launch on warning.”
Many of the men who served as president since 1945 have been shocked to learn about the impossibly telescoped time frame in which they have to decide whether to launch. The issue is not one of authority—presidents are absolute nuclear monarchs, and they can do what they wish with America’s nuclear weapons (please see Tom Nichols’s article “The President’s Weapon”).
The challenge, as George W. Bush memorably put it, is that a president wouldn’t even have time to get off the “crapper” before having to make a launch decision, a decision that could be based on partial, contradictory, or even false information. Ronald Reagan, when he assumed the presidency, was said to have been shocked that he would have as little as six minutes to make a decision to launch. Barack Obama thought that it was madness to expect a president to make such a decision—the most important that would ever be made by a single person in all of human history—in a matter of minutes."