Phillip Knightley (One Man’s View) / 16 April 2013
courtesy: Khaleej Times
The 50th anniversary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s first march is coming up and the air is heavy with learned articles in the newspapers and magazines trying to decide what it all meant and whether is made any difference.
I was at that first protest march myself so I found myself the other day trying to answer some of the crunch questions. Well no one has dropped an atomic bomb since Hiroshima, so that’s a good start but whether that has been the result of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s work is unprovable.
So I looked back on what I had written about atomic matters over those 50 years to see if anything stood out. One fact did. Throughout the Cold War nuclear confrontation, we were constantly reassured by our leaders that there was absolutely no danger of nuclear war by accident. Politically, they said if things hot there were safeguards in place to make sure that a decision to use the bomb would be taken only at the highest level. The man with his finger on the button would be the leader of the Western world advised by the finest political and military minds of the day. All wrong or misleading nonsense!
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, military leaders of both the old Soviet Union and the West thought it would be interesting and instructive to get together and discuss the Cuban Missile crisis. They hoped to learn what their opposite numbers were thinking in response to moves by the West or the old Soviet Union, as the case might be. “Why did you do so-and-so? Who took the decision to do such-and such?”
It may have been an instructive conference for those taking part but for those reading about it was terrifying. No one seemed to be able to agree on what had happened during those days in October 1962 when a Soviet force was steaming towards Cuba in spite of an American warning that if it continued it would mean war.
General Anatoly Gribkov, who had been in Cuba during the crisis told the conference that the Soviet force already in Cuba had nuclear warheads (the CIA was never sure whether the warheads had actually arrived) and not only for strategic but for tactical missiles as well: six tactical missile launchers with nine nuclear warheads.
Further, Gribkov said, the Soviet field commanders in Cuba had authority to use these tactical nuclear warheads against American invading forces without clearance from Moscow.
The American delegates at the conference were appalled. Such an act would have quickly led to nuclear retaliation and if true would alter our whole understanding of the crisis. But Gribkov’s account was contradicted by General Dimitry Volkogonov, the military historian and biographer of Stalin. Gribkov responded simply that Volkogonov was wrong. Rather alarming that top Soviet military men could not agree on what the orders in Cuba were.
But the West was no better. I interviewed Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defence, throughout a lot of the Cold War and he told me that before the president had an electronic device that gave him ultimate power of pressing the doomsday button, it would have been possible for say, a Sergeant in the US Army, to have started a nuclear war. Western troops facing the Red Army in Germany and in danger of defeat in a conventional battle, had secret orders authorising them to use their tactical nuclear weapons if in danger of being overrun.
McNamara said it was theoretical possible, therefore, if all his superior officers had been killed, for a sergeant to take the decision, without reference to the president because there was no time, to fire tactical nuclear weapons at the Soviet forces, an act which would surely sparked a nuclear conflagration. The development of the electronic device that put control of nuclear weapons in the president’s power 24 hours a day ended this scenario. Those were dangerous times, indeed. Much more dangerous than our leaders let us know.