Underwood Archives/Getty ImagesA kindergarten teacher coaches a group of children to duck and cover during a national air raid drill in Chicago in 1954.
A nuclear Armageddon was very much
on our minds at Harvard in the early 1960s. At the time, I was
attending the university as a Frank Knox Fellow. It was a time to think
the unthinkable, in lecture halls and even at the movies. The young
Henry Kissinger, one of my professors, taught us a popular course in
nuclear realpolitik. Based on his book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign
Policy, his lectures assessed the feasibility of a “limited” nuclear
war. Future conflicts would have a nuclear dimension, he concluded, so
why not wage them on our own terms? (His thesis may soon apply to Iran
and North Korea.)
For Kissinger’s course, we read On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn
(who was soon to open the Hudson Institute), arguing that a nation could
“win” such a conflict — if it was prepared to sustain “megadeaths.” In
Kahn’s view, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was not inevitable;
there could be a winner, of sorts. Compared with the hawkish Kahn,
Kissinger was a dove in the world of nuclear politics.
Our favourite movie was On The Beach, based on the Nevil Shute
best-seller, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire in his
only non song-and-dance role. It depicted the last days of our species
in a nuclear doomsday. In the fadeout, surely one of the greatest film
endings, a sign above a lifeless street in Melbourne proclaims that
“There is still time … brother,” to the haunting theme of Waltzing
Matilda.
Fifty years ago this month, reality caught up with academic theory
and fiction. The 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis confronted us with the very
real possibility of a nuclear war. It was only the wisdom and patience
of U.S. President John F. Kennedy that served to avoid the “megadeaths.”
He rejected the hawkish counsel of his advisors, including brother
Bobby Kennedy, to escalate the confrontation beyond his arms blockade —
as we now know from White House tape recordings. The crisis ended when
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made a secret deal with JFK to remove
his missiles from Cuba if Kennedy removed America’s missiles from Turkey
at a later date. In Churchill’s words, jaw, jaw proved to be a better
solution than war, war.
“We went eyeball to eyeball with Russia — and they blinked,” was the
false boast of an unidentified Kennedy aide. The confrontation, which
began Oct. 14 when a U.S. spy plane photographed Soviet missile sites in
Cuba, some 80 miles from Florida, ended on Oct. 28. Surely this is a
date that deserves to be remembered through the ages. These were JFK’s
finest hours.
If Kennedy’s hawkish successor, Lyndon Johnson, who took office just
over a year later, had been President in 1962, a more dangerous form of
nuclear brinkmanship likely would have taken place. LBJ was soon led
into the Vietnam quagmire by the same advisers — Robert McNamara and
Dean Rusk, among them — who had insisted on the hard-line military
response to the Soviet threat in Cuba.
I remember that period in late October well. Many people did not go
to work. In their living rooms, families clustered around
black-and-white TV sets for news about whether they might live or
perish. One of my best friends simply repaired to bed for the duration
of the crisis with the new-found love of his life. I was reminded of
T.S. Eliot’s lines: This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a
whimper. My future father-in-law quickly converted his basement into a
bomb shelter. People with deep basements or jerry-built nuclear shelters
like him were suddenly popular. Some wondered whether it would be
morally defensible to shoot a neighbour if he tried to break into their
basement shelter. But I felt no huge sense of panic. After all, we were
all in this together. And this was a great story, perhaps the last great
story.
Adult fear can be infectious to children. My wife remembers being
terrified when told by her teacher that nuclear fallout was invisible
and odourless. As a 25-year-old Montreal Star reporter, I had watched a
class of 10-year-olds in the Town of Mount Royal being taught how to
seek cover under their desks. Some kids told me they were watching the
sky for Russian bombers or missiles. In a Catholic school, children were
told to recite the rosary under their desks. To children, the necessary
tests of air raid sirens seemed to be the real thing. I heard of a
five-year-old who built a trap of sticks and stones in the garden to
catch Castro and Khrushchev.
Some families were advised to pack the car and get out of town — but
to where? I figured the safest place would be Washington, because, if
the nukes were fired, the capital cities would be spared so there was
someone left to negotiate with.
Looking back 50 years later, my most vivid memory is of “the circles”
— circles drawn on maps to depict how far north missiles of different
sizes could travel from communist Cuba. Montreal seemed to be out of
“the circles” — for missiles, that is, but not for radiation, as we all
knew from On the Beach.
In 1962, the prescient novel Seven Days in May, co-written by Charles
Bailey, one of my mentors when I covered the LBJ White House, told the
story of how rogue generals had plotted a coup to seize the presidency
during a Cold War crisis. As a movie, it did not do to well at the box
office in 1964, possibly because people wanted to forget the missile
crisis. But we should always remember what happened 50 years ago — as a
sobering reminder of how easily humankind can stumble into apocalypse,
if there are not wise leaders to stop at the brink.
National Post
Raymond Heard covered the White House for the Montreal Star and London Observer, 1964-74.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario