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cuban missile crisis
The Wisdom of JFK vs. the Recklessness of Joe Biden
Even if you naively believe that the United States is innocent in the crisis in Ukraine, you should still strongly support negotiations, to save Ukraine and Russia from further destruction, and to prevent the very real risk of World War III.
Dec 02, 2024
Sixty-two years ago President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had the wisdom to peacefully resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Kennedy understood that Soviet missiles in Cuba were a response, in part, to US missiles near the USSR, in Türkiye. Kennedy wisely removed the missiles from Türkiye in a secret negotiated settlement, in exchange for the Soviets removing their missiles from Cuba. Kennedy and Khrushchev thereby stepped away from the brink of nuclear war.
Kennedy had to keep the peace settlement secret, because he knew that anti-Communist crusaders in Congress and the security state would regard his actions as treasonous. He was in open conflict with the CIA, whose head, Allen Dulles, he had fired over the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Today the U.S. and Russia are, again, dangerously close to being at total war. In many ways, the crisis in Ukraine is the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, given that Russia, rightly or wrongly, views NATO expansion up to its borders as an unacceptable infringement on its sphere of influence.
NATO and Russia continue to climb the escalatory ladder over the war in Ukraine.The recent launching of ATACM and Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory crosses a red line for President Putin, whose expected reprisal (e.g., with Oreshnik ballistic missiles) may provoke NATO to climb another rung up the ladder.
These tit-for-tat escalations can all too easily spiral out of control, resulting in open warfare between NATO and Russia, as well as the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.
These tit-for-tat escalations can all too easily spiral out of control, resulting in open warfare between NATO and Russia, as well as the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. It is doubtful that a limited nuclear exchange can occur without it escalating to all-out nuclear warfare and the end of human civilization.
Even a one percent chance of such an outcome is an unacceptable risk.
Kennedy and Khrushchev had the wisdom, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to pull back from the brink. Will American, British and Russian leaders have the wisdom now to peacefully resolve the war in Ukraine? The question is urgent.
For perspective and inspiration, we highly recommend that everyone read President Kennedy’s commencement address (also known as Kennnedy’s “peace speech”), delivered at American University on June 10, 1963. In that speech, Kennedy urged that we “conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interests to agree to a genuine peace. And above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world."
Today it is vital that people understand the relevance and urgency of Kennedy’s point about making sure that our actions do not provoke a nuclear war.
It is also vital that lines of communication between the U.S. and Russia be kept open. In the speech, Kennedy announced the establishment of a hotline with Moscow to prevent future misunderstandings and the accidental launching of a nuclear exchange. Kennedy proposed to start negotiations towards a comprehensive test ban treaty. And he announced an end to above ground nuclear weapons testing. Lastly, Kennedy wrote in the speech, “We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded.”
The speech was given at a critical point in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the time, the speech so impressed Khrushchev that he had it reprinted in newspapers throughout the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately nothing like those things is happening now. Rather, in recent years, nearly all high-level contacts between Moscow and D.C. have been shunned, based on the notion that we must not negotiate with a Hitler. Furthermore, the U.S. withdrew from multiple arms deals with Russia: the ABM treaty during the second Bush Administration, and the INF Treaty and Open Skies Treaty during the Trump Administration. The New Start Treaty is now at risk, too, of being abrogated. Lastly, the U.S. government has, effectively, blocked Americans from viewing Russian media outlets such as RT.com.
Kennedy called for Americans to see the Soviet point of view. He warned “the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”
Likewise, today Americans need to see the Russian point of view with respect to NATO expansion towards their borders. However, this is not the place to go into detail about the history of NATO expansion (e.g., U.S. involvement in the 2014 Maidan coup and the arming by the CIA of far-right militias) or about the hypocrisy of the U.S. position, given its many interventions far from U.S. borders (e.g., the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Syria, where the U.S. currently occupies one third of the territory, the parts with oil). The details are voluminous, and we would be accused of repeating Putin’s talking points. When the house is on fire, the urgent need is to save lives.
Therefore, even if you naively believe that the United States is innocent in the crisis in Ukraine, you should still strongly support negotiations, to save Ukraine and Russia from further destruction, and to prevent the very real risk of World War III.
We need Kennedy’s wisdom now, because of the looming threat of nuclear war. Kennedy regarded world peace as "the most important topic on earth.... What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war -- not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace -- the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living."
We believe it is urgent that a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine be reached immediately.
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Presidents Who Gamble With Nuclear Armageddon
Each of the last five presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, have brought us closer to the brink. We desperately need leaders with a knack for peace who can steer the nation, and the world, toward a more secure and less dangerous future.
May 29, 2024
The overriding job of any U.S. president is to keep the nation safe. In the nuclear age, that mainly means avoiding nuclear Armageddon. Joe Biden’s reckless and incompetent foreign policy is pushing us closer to annihilation. He joins a long and undistinguished list of presidents who have gambled with Armageddon, including his immediate predecessor and rival, Donald Trump.
Talk of nuclear war is currently everywhere. Leaders of NATO countries call for Russia’s defeat and even dismemberment, while telling us not to worry about Russia’s 6,000 nuclear warheads. Ukraine uses NATO-supplied missiles to knock out parts of Russia’s nuclear-attack early-warning system inside Russia. Russia, in the meantime, engages in nuclear drills near its border with Ukraine. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg give the green light to Ukraine to use NATO weapons to hit Russian territory as an increasingly desperate and extremist Ukrainian regime sees fit.
These leaders neglect at our greatest peril the most basic lesson of the nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as told by President John F. Kennedy, one of the few American presidents in the nuclear age to take our survival seriously. In the aftermath of the crisis, Kennedy told us, and his successors:
Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.
Yet this is exactly what Biden is doing today, carrying out a bankrupt and reckless policy.
Nuclear war can easily arise from an escalation of non-nuclear war, or by a hothead leader with access to nuclear arms deciding on a surprise first strike, or by a gross miscalculation. The last of these nearly occurred even after Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev had negotiated an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a disabled Soviet submarine came within a hair’s breadth of launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo.
The Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight when Clinton came to office, but just 9 minutes when he left it. Bush pushed the clock to just 5 minutes, Obama to 3 minutes, and Trump to a mere 100 seconds. Now Biden has taken the clock to 90 seconds.
Most presidents, and most Americans, have little idea how close to the abyss we are. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which was founded in 1947 in part to help the world avoid nuclear annihilation, established the Doomsday Clock to help the public understand the gravity of the risks we face. National security experts adjust the clock depending how far or how close we are to “midnight,” meaning extinction. They put the clock today at just 90 seconds to midnight, the closest that it’s ever been in the nuclear age.
The clock is a useful measure of which presidents have “gotten it” and which have not. The sad fact is that most presidents have recklessly gambled with our survival in the name of national honor, or to prove their personal toughness, or to avoid political attacks from the warmongers, or as the result of sheer incompetence. By a simple and straightforward count, five presidents have gotten it right, moving the clock away from midnight, while nine have moved us closer to Armageddon, including the most recent five.
Truman was president when the Doomsday Clock was unveiled in 1947, at 7 minutes to midnight. Truman stoked the nuclear arms race and left office with the clock at just 3 minutes to midnight. Eisenhower continued the nuclear arms race but also entered into the first-ever negotiations with the Soviet Union regarding nuclear disarmament. By the time he left office, the clock was put back to 7 minutes to midnight.
Kennedy saved the world by coolly reasoning his way through the Cuban Missile Crisis, rather than following the advice of hothead advisors who called for war (for a detailed account, see Martin Sherwin’s magisterial Gambling with Armageddon, 2020). He then negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev in 1963. By the time of his death, which may well have been a government coup resulting from Kennedy’s peace initiative, JFK had pushed the clock back to 12 minutes to midnight, a magnificent and historic achievement.
It was not to last. Lyndon Johnson soon escalated in Vietnam and pushed the clock back again to just 7 minutes to midnight. Richard Nixon eased tensions with both the Soviet Union and China, and concluded the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), pushing the clock again to 12 minutes from midnight. Yet Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter failed to secure SALT II, and Carter fatefully and unwisely gave a green light to the CIA in 1979 to destabilize Afghanistan. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, the clock was at just 4 minutes to midnight.
The next 12 years marked the end of the Cold War. Much of the credit is due to Mikhail Gorbachev, who aimed to reform the Soviet Union politically and economically, and to end the confrontation with the West. Yet credit is also due to Reagan and his successor George Bush, Sr., who successfully worked with Gorbachev to end the Cold War, which in turn was followed by the end of the Soviet Union itself in December 1991. By the time Bush left office, the Doomsday clock was at 17 minutes to midnight, the safest since the start of the nuclear age.
Sadly, the U.S. security establishment could not take “Yes” for an answer when Russia said an emphatic yes to peaceful and cooperative relations. The U.S. needed to “win” the Cold War, not just end it. It needed to declare itself and prove itself to be the sole superpower of the world, the one that would unilaterally write the rules of a new U.S.-led “rules-based order.” The post-1992 U.S. therefore launched wars and expanded its vast network of military bases as it saw fit, steadfastly and ostentatiously ignoring the red lines of other nations, indeed aiming to drive nuclear adversaries into humiliating retreats.
Since 1992, every president has left the U.S. and the world closer to nuclear annihilation than his predecessor. The Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight when Clinton came to office, but just 9 minutes when he left it. Bush pushed the clock to just 5 minutes, Obama to 3 minutes, and Trump to a mere 100 seconds. Now Biden has taken the clock to 90 seconds.
Biden has led the U.S. into three fulminant crises, any one of which could end up in Armageddon. By insisting on NATO enlargement to Ukraine, against Russia’s bright red line, Biden has repeatedly pushed for Russia’s humiliating retreat. By siding with a genocidal Israel, he has stoked a new Middle East arms race and a dangerously expanding Middle East conflict. By taunting China over Taiwan, which the U.S. ostensibly recognizes as part of one China, he is inviting a war with China. Trump similarly stirred the nuclear pot on several fronts, most flagrantly with China and Iran.
Washington seems of a single mind these days: more funding for wars in Ukraine and Gaza, more armaments for Taiwan. We slouch ever closer to Armageddon. Polls show the American people overwhelmingly disapprove of U.S. foreign policy, but their opinion counts for very little. We need to shout for peace from every hilltop. The survival of our children and grandchildren depends on it.Keep ReadingShow Less
The Legacy of JFK’s ‘Strategy for Peace’
I have always thought that the global peace movement began in the wake of the escalation of the Vietnam War, but reading Kennedy’s speech has made me realize otherwise.
Jun 15, 2023
Was he kidding? Are these words for real?
“I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived—yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.”
This was 60 years ago: June 10, 1963. John F. Kennedy—less than six months before his assassination—delivered a commencement address at American University. He spoke like a renegade, defying the certainties of state, the old Cross of Iron, that war is inevitable and always (when we wage it) necessary. At the time, the United States was ankle-deep in the Vietnam War and, at least according to some accounts, Kennedy wanted out. He was also in direct communication with Nikita Khrushchev; the two, working in sync, had averted a nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis less than a year earlier, and were in the process of establishing a nuclear disarmament treaty.
You mean peace actually had political traction then, at least for a brief moment in time? It wasn’t just a cry of protest from the social margins, aka, a fantasy?
My takeaway, after reading Kennedy’s speech—“A Strategy of Peace”—all these decades later, is stunned wonderment. You mean peace actually had political traction then, at least for a brief moment in time? It wasn’t just a cry of protest from the social margins, aka, a fantasy? The creation of a global political structure based on cooperation rather than domination (or mutually assured destruction), was truly in the works?
“Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles—which can only destroy and never create—is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.”
Kennedy’s words dig deeper into basic sanity than the generic political blather I’ve gotten used to in my lifetime, which would never, ever, ever challenge U.S. militarism or fail to glorify it, much less suggest that the creation of peace requires the participation of everyone on the planet, including our declared enemies.
“So, let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
This is an American president, acknowledging that the commies breathe the same air that we do, and cherish their children as much as we do? He didn’t simply want “them” to disarm. His own country also needed to disarm. Yeah, he was a renegade. He had come to realize that the generals who surrounded him, some of whom were pushing for the use of nukes in Vietnam, were a far greater threat to global peace and sanity than Khrushchev.
And, oh yeah, as Al Jazeera noted: “After Kennedy’s assassination, instead of an end to American involvement in Vietnam, the U.S. deployed 100,000 troops in 1965—with more than 530,000 in country by 1968—and a decade of carnage was under way.”
That’s the country I live in. How many stupid and horrific wars have we waged in my lifetime? How many politicians have defended, and voted for, these wars? When it comes to peace, when it comes to disarmament, are we not a democracy in name only? “Democracy”—oh, what a useful public-relations cliché! But when it comes to countering militarism, it means absolutely nothing, because that’s not allowed. The U.S. has one role only: to destroy evil, and that requires a trillion-dollar annual military budget.
So digging 60 years into the past, reading the words of a president who—my God—declared that this nation must look inward, at its own wrongs and shortcomings, rather than merely condemn its enemies, opens up the peace movement, links it, oh so tentatively, to the highest levels of government.
“What kind of peace do I mean?” he asked. “What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
A president transcending nationalism, envisioning a world beyond “USA! USA!”? Was Kennedy daring to look beyond his own interests—his own re-election—and the interests of his party? Apparently so. He understood that “the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war” but decided to pursue it anyway, because “we have no more urgent task.”
But Kennedy was killed and the pursuit of peace ground to a halt. Soon enough, the war in Vietnam “escalated.” I have always thought that the global peace movement began in the wake of this escalation, but reading Kennedy’s speech has made me realize otherwise. The peace movement—the peace process, to be more precise—was already under way. Then it was interrupted by one magic bullet.
It’s been in the political margins ever since.
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