Between October 14 and October 28, 1962, the world stood on the edge of a nuclear abyss. Through its surveillance, the US had established that the Soviet Union was stealthily constructing nuclear missiles and infrastructure in Cuba, only 150 kilometres away from its coastline. These Soviet medium and intermediate-range missiles were capable of striking American territory.
This was totally unacceptable for the US and president John F. Kennedy warned that his country would respond militarily but, at the same time, took all the necessary steps not to rush into a nuclear confrontation, as advised by some of his military people, but to keep all formal and informal channels of communication open with different levels of the top Soviet leadership.
Both superpowers managed to keep open the door to diplomacy. At the last moment, attorney general Robert Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin met privately to discuss how to resolve the crisis. Fortunately, they struck a deal.
The Soviets agreed to remove their offensive missiles from Cuba if the US promised to remove its missiles from Turkey and not to invade Cuba. The next day, Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev and the American president announced the agreement separately, ending the crisis.
Reflecting on this crisis in a speech he gave on June 10, 1963, Kennedy disagreed with those who believed that, in the Cold War, peace with the Soviet Union was impossible, “that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed –that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made – therefore, they can be solved by man”.
Kennedy said we must not “see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side.” We must not “see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats”.
Instead of dehumanising them, Kennedy, paid tribute to the Russian people “for their many achievements – in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage”.
He also said that “no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland...”
In his speech, Kennedy mentioned the main lesson from the Cuban missile crisis: “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.”
Escalation ladder
This lesson has sadly been lost in the last 30 years. Hubris took over the Washington security establishment after the collapse of the Soviet Union, allowing the US military industrial elite to believe it could run the world as it pleases as the only remaining superpower.
The West has enabled Israel to become the only nuclear power in the Middle East which it uses to impose its supremacy in the region- Evarist Bartolo
Also lost was the strong belief, expressed by former US defence secretary Robert McNamara in The lessons of Vietnam that: “We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image and as we choose.”
American diplomats with strategic foresight like Jack Matlock, who was the US ambassador to the Soviet Union when the Cold War ended, warned that NATO expansion to Russia’s frontiers would lead to war. Writing in ‘Statecraft’ on February 15, 2022, Matlock said that the crisis over Ukraine was “both avoidable and predictable”.
According to Matlock: “NATO expansion was the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War… The decision to expand NATO piecemeal was a reversal of American policies that produced the end of the Cold War.”
President George H.W. Bush had proclaimed a goal of a “Europe whole and free”. Mikhail Gorbachev had spoken of “our common European home” and declared that, for one country to be secure, there must be security for all.
Bush also assured Gorbachev during their meeting in Malta in December 1989 that if the countries of Eastern Europe were allowed to choose their future orientation by democratic processes, the US would not “take advantage” of that process. (Obviously, bringing countries into NATO that were then in the Warsaw Pact would be “taking advantage”).
The following year, Gorbachev was assured, though not in a formal treaty, that if a unified Germany was allowed to remain in NATO, there would be no movement of NATO jurisdiction to the east, “not one inch”.
NATO has expanded more than one inch since then. It is busy developing a kind of global Monroe’s doctrine where all the world is its backyard and everyone must submit to its hegemony.
Taiwan could be turned into another Cuba and another Cuban missile crisis if the US persists in using it against China, the same way the Soviet Union had wanted to use Cuba against the US.
Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon and its agenda to also go to war with Iran can also lead to nuclear war as the West has enabled Israel to become the only nuclear power in the Middle East which it uses to impose its supremacy in the region. Israel’s nuclear doctrine includes the ‘Samson’ option against a country which is perceived as an existential threat. Other nuclear powers have moved towards nuclear pre-emption.
On January 3, 2022, the five original nuclear-weapon states, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the US, pledged that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” in a rare joint statement intended to reduce tensions and avoid nuclear conflict.
Since then, the enemies confronting each other in different wars are going up the escalation ladder including nuclear retaliation. Where is it all going to end?
Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.