Cuban Missile Crisis – 2nd of 4 parts

How the U.S. played Russian roulette with nuclear war

By Noam Chomsky

From guardian.co.uk

A serious dilemma

The planners therefore faced a serious dilemma: they had in hand two somewhat different proposals from Khrushchev to end the threat of catastrophic war, and each would seem to any “rational man” to be a fair trade. How then to react?

One possibility would have been to breathe a sigh of relief that civilization could survive, to eagerly accept both offers and to announce that the US would adhere to international law and remove any threat to invade Cuba; and to carry forward the withdrawal of the obsolete missiles in Turkey, proceeding as planned to upgrade the nuclear threat against the Soviet Union to a far greater one, of course, only part of the global encirclement of Russia. But that was unthinkable.

The basic reason why no such thought could be contemplated was spelled out by National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, former Harvard Dean and reputedly the brightest star in the Camelot firmament. The world must come to understand that “the current threat to peace is not in Turkey, it is in Cuba,” where missiles are directed against us. A vastly more powerful US missile force trained on the much weaker and more vulnerable Soviet enemy cannot possibly be regarded as a threat to peace, because we are Good, as a great many people in the western hemisphere and beyond could testify – among numerous others, the victims of the ongoing terrorist war that the US was then waging against Cuba, or those swept up in the “campaign of hatred” in the Arab world that so puzzled Eisenhower (though not the National Security Council, which explained it clearly).

And, of course, the idea that the US should be restrained by international law was too ridiculous to merit consideration. As explained recently by the respected liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias, “one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers” – meaning the US – so that it is “amazingly naïve”, indeed quite “silly”, to suggest that the US should obey international law or other conditions that we impose on the powerless: a frank and welcome exposition of operative assumptions, reflexively taken for granted by the ExComm assemblage.

In subsequent colloquy, the president stressed that we would be “in a bad position” if we chose to set off an international conflagration by rejecting proposals that would seem quite reasonable to survivors, if any cared. This “pragmatic” stance was about as far as moral considerations could reach. In a review of recently-released documents on Kennedy-era terror, Harvard University Latin Americanist Jorge Domínguez observes that:

“Only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a US official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to US government-sponsored terrorism.”

A member of the National Security Council staff suggested that raids that are “haphazard and kill innocents … might mean a bad press in some friendly countries.” The same attitudes prevail throughout the internal discussions during the missile crisis, as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would “kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it.” And they prevail to the present with only the rarest of exceptions, as easily documented.

Unbeknownst to the public…

We might have been “in even a worse position” if the world had known more about what the US was doing at the time. It was only recently learned that, six months earlier, the US had secretly deployed in Okinawa missiles virtually identical to those the Russians later sent to Cuba. These were surely aimed at China, at a moment of elevated regional tensions. Okinawa remains a major offensive US military base, over the bitter objections of its inhabitants – who, right now, are less than enthusiastic about the dispatch of accident-prone V-22 Osprey helicopters to the Fukenma military base, located at the heart of a heavily-populated urban center.

In the deliberations that followed, the US pledged to withdraw the obsolete missiles from Turkey, but would not do so publicly or in writing: it was important that Khrushchev be seen to capitulate. An interesting reason was offered, and is accepted as reasonable by scholarship and commentary. As Dobbs puts it:

“If it appeared that the United States was dismantling the missile bases unilaterally, under pressure from the Soviet Union, the [Nato] alliance might crack.”

Or, to rephrase a little more accurately, if the US replaced useless missiles with a far more lethal threat, as already planned, in a trade with Russia that any “rational man” would regard as very fair, then the Nato alliance might crack. To be sure, when Russia withdrew Cuba’s only deterrent against ongoing US attack with a severe threat to proceed to direct invasion and quietly departed from the scene, the Cubans would be infuriated – as they were, understandably. But that is an unfair comparison for the standard reasons: we are human beings who matter, while they are merely “unpeople”, to borrow Orwell’s useful phrase.

Kennedy also made an informal pledge not to invade Cuba, but with conditions: not just withdrawal of the missiles, but also termination, or at least “a great lessening”, of any Russian military presence. (Unlike Turkey, on Russia’s borders, where nothing of the kind could be contemplated.) When Cuba is no longer an “armed camp”, then “we probably wouldn’t invade,” in the president’s words. He added also that if it hoped to be free from the threat of US invasion, Cuba must end its “political subversion” (Stern’s phrase) in Latin America.

Political subversion had been a constant theme for years, invoked, for example, when Eisenhower overthrew the parliamentary government of Guatemala and plunged the tortured country into an abyss from which it has yet to emerge. And the themes remained alive and well right through Reagan’s vicious terror wars in Central America in the 1980s. The “political subversion” consisted of support for those resisting the murderous assaults of the US and its client regimes, and sometimes – horror of horrors – perhaps even providing arms to the victims.

Click here to read Part 1 of the Cuban Missile Crisis.