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cuban missile crisis
Maybe Doom Isn’t Scary Enough
I interviewed three anti-nuke activists to understand the Doomsday Clock and how our society thinks about the very real threat of nuclear war.
Jan 27, 2025
“Dear young people who have never experienced war, ‘Wars begin covertly. If you sense it coming, it may be too late.’”—Takato Michishita, survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki.
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in the Catskill Mountains where New Yorkers went for the summer to escape the city heat, Alice Slater’s mother took her to go see a movie in town. It was late summer in 1945, and the second World War had just ended. Alice remembers parading around the Catskills town a few weeks earlier as everyone celebrated the end of the war. When I asked her when she first became aware of nuclear weapons, the first thing she thought to tell me was about her trip to the theater with her mom. Instead of trailers before the movies, they used to show news reels. The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima projected across the screen, and Alice asked her mom, “What is that?”
“That’s a wonderful new weapon, and now all the boys would come home,” her mom answered.
Between what they showed on the screen and what her mom had told her, at that moment Alice had no real idea what a nuclear bomb was, or what it did to the people it was used on. It was only a mushroom cloud, and the mushroom cloud meant the war was over.
The Doomsday Clock was created as a warning—a warning that the most powerful people in the world are playing God.
Seventeen years later, Alice was a young mom who had moved to the suburbs of New York City. Her husband was working for CBS, and one day he didn’t come home—he had to stay at work to deal with breaking news for a handful of days. The world had just found out that the Soviet Union, bringing us to the height of the Cold War between Washinton and Moscow, put nukes just 90 miles off the coast of the United States in Cuba. Alice, even with close proximity to someone who worked in the news, had no idea what was happening. Americans didn’t know the U.S. had nukes near the Russian border in Turkey, too. All they knew was that the communists were threatening them with nuclear bombs. We are far removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis now, but Alice said it was probably the most afraid she’s ever been. People really thought we were about to enter another war and send the entire world into a nuclear winter. Later people found out former U.S. President John F. Kennedy had negotiated to move U.S. nukes out of Turkey. But now they’re back, and scattered all over Europe.
Carol Gilbert, around the same week Alice’s husband didn’t come home from CBS, was at her aunt’s house in Michigan. She was around 15 years old at the time, and she remembered that it must have been during the school year—it was special that she got to go stay there that day, she loved spending time with her cousin. “I remember my mom calling my aunt and saying she was going to come pick us up because they were worried about the bomb,” Carole continued, “At some point I think we knew something bad was happening, but I don’t think I fully understood what was going on.”
On the other side of Lake Michigan from Carol, Kathy Kelly was in her home in Garfield Ridge, Chicago when her mother started putting stuff down in the basement on the day the news broke. Kathy’s parents lived in London during World War II, and tried every way they could to keep her sheltered from the trauma of war, but in the face of nuclear war—what are parents to do?
All three women recall the Cuban Missile Crisis as a time of uncertainty. Where people were freaked out and didn’t know what to do. Alice was afraid for her kids, and Carol’s and Kathy’s moms were clearly afraid for their children too. Then the missiles were taken out of Cuba, and the panic disappeared.
I chose Alice, Kathy, and Carol to interview on this topic because they are anti-war activists I deeply admire. I figured the concern over nuclear weapons amongst my peers may be less than that of older generations because of things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, or even becoming conscious in the years right after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the more elders I talked to, the more I realized how little it may have impacted their trajectory as activists. Alice didn’t become an anti-nuke activist after the missile crisis, and neither Carol nor Kathy mentioned it as a moment they remembered in the awakening of their conscience. Kathy was radicalized on the issue of nukes by the women who worked at the bookshop in downtown Chicago that she would stop into on her way to work as a teenager. Alice was pulled into the movement by the war in Vietnam.
On January 28, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the Doomsday Clock in 1947, will reveal how close we are to midnight, or “doom.” Since the clock was made, nukes have proliferated all over the world. First it was the U.S., and then U.S. and Russia—now nine countries have a nuclear weapons stockpile. It would only take a fraction of that firepower to send us into a nuclear winter, wiping out all life as we know it. The Doomsday Clock was created as a warning—a warning that the most powerful people in the world are playing God. It’s not an exaggeration in the slightest; because of a handful of people, one political misstep or accident and our whole planet is destroyed along with every precious life on it. Governments continue to pour trillions of dollars into developing these weapons while people they are supposed to care about sleep out on the street.
With tensions between the U.S., Russia, China, and Iran at a high, we should all be putting things in the basement, picking our kids up from their playdates, and preparing for disaster. Instead, we walk around like a bomb was never dropped. Like hundreds of thousands of Japanese people didn’t have their lives taken or destroyed. With no reason to believe so, we act like our government would never do it again. While our leaders have bombed a dozen countries to oblivion since World War II ended, we still act like we are the civilians the world ought to care about, like we are untouchable. We aren’t. Mutually assured destruction might be useful if the people with their fingers on the buttons cared for the people they governed, but oftentimes they don’t.
On the other side of doom is just life as we’ve been living it, which isn’t that great for a lot of people.
I asked Carol why she thinks no one is really freaked out about nuclear weapons like they ought to be, whether they be my age or hers. She said, “We have too much.” She was talking specifically about Americans, whose lives are inherently made more comfortable because of the conquest and wars of our past and present. Whether we would like to admit it or not, the United States and the entire modern life it provides is built on war. When I asked Alice, specifically in relation to the Cuban Missile Crisis, if people were scared into becoming anti-nuke activists she said, “You’re asking me if I was scared… I just kept hoping that democracy would prevail in some way, I guess.”
Carol, a Roman Catholic sister, and two other Dominican nuns were convicted of sabotage after pouring their blood into a Minuteman III missile loaded with a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb in Colorado. She spent two and a half years in federal prison for drawing attention to the real weapons of mass destruction while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney made up fake ones in Iraq. In the 1980s, Kathy was greeted by four armed soldiers riding in a large military vehicle after she planted corn on top of a nuclear missile silo in Missouri. A soldier was left behind with Kathy while she was handcuffed, kneeling on the ground. “Do you think the corn will grow?” she asked him. “I don’t know ma’am,” he responded, “but I sure hope so.” Following a trial, Kathy spent nine months in maximum security prison.
Whether or not the Doomsday Clock reveals we are inching closer to midnight or staying where we are, the fear around nuclear Armageddon seems to freeze most of us in our tracks. If the whole world is going to be annihilated and suffering is imminent anyway, why think about it at all? We can cross that bridge to hell when we get there. If there weren’t a nuclear stockpile that could end life at any moment, maybe people would feel more inspired. Afterall, preventing doom isn’t a particularly motivating notion. On the other side of doom is just life as we’ve been living it, which isn’t that great for a lot of people.
Alice, Carol, and Kathy are all inspired activists. When you talk to them you don’t really ever get the sense that they will stop pushing ahead for what they believe in. I met Carol in the halls of Congress last February, despite being over 50 years older than me she was leaving me in the dust. After 12,000 steps on Capitol Hill, she walked with me to a vigil for Aaron Bushnell, an active duty airman who self-immolated over the genocide in Gaza. Never once in any of my conversations with them did I ever get the sense they did what they did out of fear—whether it be fear of war, nuclear winter, or overall doom. They all talk about a world that gives people what they need to survive and thrive. Kathy talked to me about international cooperation and laughed at the idea of borders: “When there’s a nuclear energy accident like Chernobyl or Fukushima, the poison that floats around in the air doesn’t care about your borders.” And she made note of the brilliant atomic scientists, and how quickly they’d figure out how to address the climate catastrophe if only we were to change our priorities. They talk at length about how the world ought to be, and their vision for a better future is what propels them ahead, not doom. Doom isn’t good enough to get us to where we need to go.
Planting corn over a nuclear silo, disrupting a weapons manufacturer, and creating a community of war resisters are steps we can take toward something much more impactful. A world that is mindful about nuclear weapons can push toward their elimination, and we absolutely must. If you’re not moved away from doom, be moved toward peace. At CODEPINK, we’ve created a Peace Clock to give us ways not to just move away from doom, but to bring us closer to the kind of world we want to see. It’s something that’s been within our sight a thousand times. We have to sprint toward it.
“Dear young people who have never experienced the horrors of war—I fear that some of you may be taking this hard-earned peace for granted.”—Takato Michishita
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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 Kennedy’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
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