‘Luck is Not a Strategy’: Dodging Nuclear War

“The world really is impossible to manage as long as we have nuclear weapons. It really is a terrible way to have to live in this world.”

President John F. Kennedy to British Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, 21 October 1962

 

Over 200 blood-soaked days into Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, it has become commonplace to claim the world now stands closer to the nuclear brink than any time since the Cuban missile crisis, 60 years ago this month. Indeed, speaking on the BBC’s Today program on April 30, Professor of International Affairs Nina Khruscheva—great-granddaughter of Nikita Khruschev, Soviet leader during the Crisis—claimed the danger may be even more acute:

What really saved the world at the time was that both Khruschev and Kennedy, whatever they thought of each other’s ideology and disagreed with it, and didn’t want to give in and blink first, when the threat appeared of a potential conflict they immediately backed off. … [But] I don’t see today any side, particularly the Russian side, backing off, and that’s what really scares me most.

On the same program, former British MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service) chief Sir Alex Younger likewise lamented that the “discipline of deterrence” had now “in some ways” been “lost.” But in 1962, Apocalypse was averted more by luck than judgment, for while the two leaders may have been ‘disciplined’—and were certainly determined to prevent what Kennedy called “the final failure” of nuclear war—they were not in control.

Most timelines of the famous ‘13 Days’ (October 16-28)—for example, the CBC’s—omit the closest point the Crisis came to catastrophe, for on the evening of Saturday, October 27, as Martin Sherwin writes in Gambling with Armageddon, “the fate of the world is not in the hands of any head of state” but those of three officers aboard a stricken Soviet submarine, seemingly under attack and authorized to fire a torpedo tipped with a 15-kiloton nuclear warhead, the same yield as the Bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Hours earlier, an American US spy plane was shot down over Cuba, killing the pilot, and this is the globally heart-stopping moment ‘Black Saturday’ is best remembered for. Kennedy, though, quickly concluded Khruschev had not ordered the downing, and moved to defuse the Crisis by promising to remove US ‘Jupiter’ nuclear missiles from Turkey, the provocative deployment in April 1962 that he was already (unknown to Moscow) planning to reverse, and which had prompted the Soviets to smuggle comparable missiles to Cuba.

But as each leader began to breathe a little easier, neither knew that WW3 was being narrowly averted by, as a Soviet report concluded, the “mere chance” that one of the officers on the floundering submarine—brigade commander Vasily Arkhipov—showed enough “prudence” to talk its rattled captain, Valentin Savitsky, back from the brink. Out of radio contact with his superiors, and convinced US Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) aircraft were intent on destroying his vessel, Captain Savitsky—“furious” and “totally exhausted,” according to crew member Vadim Orlov—ordered the nuclear torpedo to be “assembled to battle readiness.” But, as Orlov happily stated the obvious, “we did not fire,” as Savitsky:

…was able to rein in his wrath after consulting with Arkhipov and his deputy political officer Ivan Maslennikov. Following their recommendations, he made the decision to come to the surface.

At this point, Arkhipov had not convinced Savitsky—and did not know himself—that the sub would be spared by the American winners of (to quote Sherwin) an “adrenaline” and “testosterone” fueled “cat-and-mouse game;” and Savitsky was still prepared to ‘go nuclear’ if he was indeed under attack. Upon surfacing, that’s exactly what he thought he saw, and only a delay in final preparations to fire the torpedo allowed Arkhipov to realize, as he remembered in 1997, that the planes were firing warning shots, “past and along” the sub.

Sherwin (a junior US Anti-Submarine Warfare officer at the time of the Crisis) suggests one factor in Arkhipov’s ‘prudence’ was his grim experience the previous year aboard a malfunctioning nuclear-powered submarine off the coast of Greenland. The sub, hastily built and badly designed, was known by its crew as the ‘Hiroshima,’ and as its reactor headed toward meltdown it “was in danger of emulating its sobriquet.” All that saved it was the self-sacrifice of volunteer rescue crews, 22 of whom would die (eight in two days, the rest over two years) from radiation sickness. But whatever the effect of that deep-water hell, Sherwin is right to draw the “extraordinary (and surely disconcerting) conclusion that…on October 27, 1962, a nuclear war was averted not because President Kennedy and Premier Khruschev were doing their best to avert war (they were), but because Capt. Vasily Arkhipov had been randomly assigned to submarine B-29.”

 

This was one of the closest calls of the nuclear age, but hardly humanity’s only hair’s-breadth escape. Since 2013 the UN has marked September 26 as International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. September 26 was also the date—in 1983, a time of red hot Cold War tensions—that another Russian, Stanislav Petrov, became ‘The Man Who Saved the World’, to cite the title of a 2014 film, reconstructing the morning he was told by a computer the Soviet Union was under nuclear attack. As Petrov told the BBC in 2013:

The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it… A minute later the siren went off again. The second missile was launched. Then the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Computers changed their alerts from ‘launch’ to ‘missile strike’…

If he had done his job properly, Petrov—senior duty officer in an early-warning center—would have alerted his political superiors: “All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders—but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.” Almost certainly, had the call been placed, a ‘retaliatory’ strike would have been ordered; but in a decision Petrov credited to his civilian education—“My colleagues were all professional soldiers, they were taught to give and obey orders”—he sat tight, and “twenty-three minutes later I realized that nothing had happened. If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief.”

Other theatres of the nuclear absurd include a false alarm in 1995—a time of greatly reduced East-West tensions, but one in which, to quote the Washington Post’s David Hoffman, “Cold War doctrines refused to die”—when the launch of a Norwegian science rocket was misread by Russian radar operators as an incoming ballistic missile. “Within minutes,” Hoffman wrote, “President Boris Yeltsin” (hopefully sober) “was brought his black nuclear-command suitcase. For several tense minutes, while Yeltsin spoke with his defense minister by telephone, confusion reigned. Little is known about what Yeltsin said, but these may have been some of the most dangerous moments of the nuclear age. … If a Russian president wants to retaliate before enemy missiles reach his soil, he has about eight minutes to decide what to do.” And that is doubtless still the case in 2022, a time not only of acute nuclear anxiety but growing threats of cyber-terror attacks on nuclear command-and-control systems.

No wonder that on August 1, addressing the opening of the Tenth Review Conference of the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), UN Secretary General António Guterres declared “we have been extraordinarily lucky so far” in avoiding “the suicidal mistake of nuclear conflict.” “But luck,” he added acidly, “is not a strategy. Nor is it a shield from geopolitical tensions boiling over into nuclear conflict. Today, humanity” remains “just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

 

While the genesis of the NPT lay in a General Assembly resolution tabled by Ireland in 1958, negotiations for an accord that would replace ‘luck’ with ‘strategy’ accelerated in the wake of the Missile Crisis. The resulting ‘grand bargain’ was one the US and USSR had previously been reluctant to strike, for under the terms of the treaty, their cherished goal of non-proliferation was to be purchased at the price of their own disarmament: first, stopping the rot of the arms race, then concluding “good faith negotiations” (to quote the NPT’s famous Article VI) on establishing a Nuclear-Weapon-Free-World.

Though abolition had been the stated goal of the UN General Assembly since its inaugural resolution of January 1946, the new treaty rekindled the non-nuclear flame. As Canadian analyst Michael E. Sherman wrote in 1968:

In the more than twenty years since Hiroshima, the phrase ‘ban the bomb’ has recurred often in propaganda campaigns and in more serious arms control discussions. In general, however, it has been regarded by Western governments as left-wing and vaguely disreputable. … Moreover, the West has generally sought to maintain rather than to foreclose the option of introducing nuclear weapons into conflict. Recently, however, the concept…has won new popularity in the context of the NPT.

Not only, Sherman continued, was Bomb-banning back on the agenda, but a “recent Conference of Non-Nuclear-Weapon States in Geneva has led some observers to suggest that the old concept of a non-nuclear-club might be experiencing a revival,” an early indication of the intensity of “reactions of the non-nuclear-states to the treaty and to the world it may create.”

Sherman is referring to a fascinating, now largely-forgotten gathering of 88 Non-Nuclear-Weapon States (NNWS) in August-September 1968, two months after the NPT was opened for signature. In recognition of their special responsibility for advancing the treaty’s goals, the first three states to sign were nuclear-armed: the US, USSR and UK. Many doubted they would take their duties, at least with regard to disarmament, seriously, a suspicion deepened by the fact that in 1967—as the French scholar B. Goldschmidt wrote in a history of NPT talks—“these three countries…had succeeded in delaying the convocation of a conference of non-nuclear States” in order to prevent it demanding “concessions from the nuclear powers both at the disarmament level and in terms of assistance to less advanced countries.”

Unsurprisingly, when the conference “finally opened”—with nuclear-armed America, Britain, China, France and Russia in mute attendance as observers—it was held, Goldschmidt wrote, “in an atmosphere of bitterness, disappointment and resentment, reflecting the need of the countries in question to vent their feelings, if not to rebel, against the Great Powers, which had been exerting constant pressure on them all through the latter stages of the negotiations.” For while the NPT ‘grand bargain’ was a political risk for the Superpowers, and “showed,” as Goldschmidt noted, “the extent of their political rapprochement since the Cuban crisis,” it did not betoken a new era of trust and respect between the world’s most and least powerful states. Indeed, the ‘bitterness’ in Geneva was expressed most vehemently by ‘Third World’ delegations, with greater optimism about the new NPT era expressed by the eight delegations from NATO (including Canada) and three from NATO’s Soviet bloc counterpart, the Warsaw Pact.

There were other ‘camps’ within the non-nuclear-weapon club, too, perhaps explaining why vague plans for a follow-on conference were never realized. The vast majority of the 88 states had no intention of ever ‘going nuclear’ and were fully dedicated to banning the Bomb; a small group were undecided about their own nuclear futures (e.g. Argentina, Brazil, India, South Africa, South Korea, Pakistan), and were thus unhappy at the NPT’s arbitrary definition of a ‘nuclear-weapon-state’ as one which had conducted a nuclear test before 1 January 1967, namely the five Permanent Members (P5) of the UN Security Council; while one state, Israel, may already have begun to build its still-unacknowledged arsenal.

And what is NATO but a club including both nuclear and non-nuclear members, basing their common defense on, as Sherman wrote, “the option of introducing nuclear weapons” into conflict? “In the forties and fifties,” he noted, “the very suggestion” of even “restraining the West’s ‘quality’ weapons was regarded as not only unnecessary but dangerous,” and “after 1954, official NATO doctrine explicitly allowed SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe)”—a position always held by an American General—“to base his plans on the use of nuclear weapons from the outset of hostilities.”

 

Through the draining decades of the Cold War, this ghastly game of nuclear dice was justified as ‘balancing’ the Warsaw Pact’s conventional superiority. Yet over 30 years after the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, allowed East Berliners to ‘tear down that Wall,’ a greatly-expanded NATO, massively outspending and outgunning Russia, still refuses to adopt a No-First-Use policy or review its Cold War policy of ‘nuclear sharing,’ basing American bombs on the territory, and with the armed forces, of ‘non-nuclear’ allies (currently Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey). Indeed, Russia’s own first-use posture—demonized in the West as ‘escalate to de-escalate’—is essentially identical to the Alliance’s, with both sides prepared, as Sherman stated bluntly, to use their ‘quality weapons’ to “turn the war nuclear.”

The P5’s abject failure to honor their NPT obligations not only guaranteed the steady growth of a parallel, non-NPT nuclear club (Israel, India, North Korea, Pakistan) but recently resuscitated the ‘non-nuclear club’ in the form of the 122 states that chose finally to ‘rebel against the Great Powers’ and negotiate the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the ‘Ban Treaty’ they see as honoring and embodying the abolitionist spirit and letter of the NPT.

Predictably, the recent NPT Review Conference—the first since the birth of the Ban Treaty—was plagued by division, suspicion, and acrimony. Failure to agree a Final Document was ostensibly due to the objections of one state, Russia, to references to the perilous situation at the Zaporizhya nuclear power plant, and other nuclear sites, in Ukraine. Although the ‘offending’ five paragraphs made no mention of Russia’s military occupation of the Zaporizhya complex, simply supporting international efforts “to restore the safety and security of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities and materials,” exception was taken to the next five words, “within its internationally recognized borders”—the map Russia is currently attempting, emboldened by its nuclear firepower, to forcefully redraw.

But when US President Joe Biden, addressing the General Assembly on September 21 (UN International Day of Peace) stated that “Russia shunned the Non-Proliferation ideals embraced by every other nation at the 10th NPT Review Conference,” he was conveniently masking profound differences of opinion and perspective, issues largely dodged in the anemic Final Document blocked by Moscow. As Ray Acheson, director of the Reaching Critical Will program of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, insisted in a scathing editorial:

Russia was not alone in derailing this Conference. Despite all the divergences among those playing at geopolitics, Russia was fully aligned with the nuclear-armed states in actively preventing any meaningful commitment to advance nuclear disarmament, stop nuclear threats, or reduce nuclear risks being included in the outcome document. While the five nuclear-armed states may not be a monolith, they can certainly agree on a few things: they want to continue to possess and modernize their nuclear arsenals, they do not believe they are legally obligated to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, and they really, really hate the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Of course they do: but so, as Acheson adds, do their enablers, “the nuclear allies, including those of NATO, Australia, Japan, and the Republic of Korea,” which “support the perpetuation of nuclear weapons and the dangerous doctrine of nuclear deterrence,” and which made their position “very clear by refusing to allow even an acknowledgement that some states that include nuclear weapons in their security doctrines have a responsibility to reduce the roles of those weapons.”

On August 22, Costa Rica delivered a ‘Joint Humanitarian Statement’ to the Conference on behalf of 145 states, declaring that because “it is in the interests of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, under any circumstances…all efforts must be exerted to eliminate the threat of these weapons.” The P5 and their allies refused to sign. Why? Because of the apparently radioactive words “under any circumstances.”

In an indignant article in the Hill Times on September 5, a former Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament, Douglas Roche, exclaimed that “it degrades the moral standards of Canada that the government believes there are circumstances when a nuclear weapon could be legitimately used.” But if you belong to a nuclear-armed alliance, and have made the tragic choice to prioritize nuclear-dependency over nuclear disarmament, then your legitimacy and that of the weapons becomes fused.

You force yourself into a box you cannot allow yourself to think outside of. And delude yourself it’s an umbrella.

Featured image: Nuclear Warhead Bunker Under Construction San Cristobal Site 1, Cuba, October 1962 (Source: John F Kennedy Library via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University and member of Peace Quest Cape Breton and the Canadian Pugwash Group. He may be reached here.