Nuclear Deterrence

The image below is a screenshot from footage of President John F. Kennedy announcing Robert McNamara as his choice for U.S. Secretary of Defense. You’ll notice the concerned look on McNamara’s face. With this announcement, he was about to leave his job as President of the Ford Motor Company. He was preparing to take a substantial cut in pay, uproot his family, and begin a new career that, in his own words he was “completely unqualified for” ¹.

And on top of it all, Jack Kennedy made the announcement before McNamara could even let his wife know… She heard the news on TV like everybody else.

 (Jack Kennedy and Robert S. McNamara, 1960) [1]

And it was not long before Kennedy, McNamara, and the entire country was met with a diplomatic crisis the likes of which the world had never seen: The Cuban Missile Crisis. A time when, according to McNamara, “we literally looked down the barrel into nuclear war.” The tension peaked on October 27 1962, a date now known as “Black Friday,” when 100,000 were poised to go to invade Cuba².  This incident is perhaps the closest the world has come to witnessing a nuclear holocaust.

There has been a lot of the news concerning the nuclear reactors in Japan over the past few weeks. At one point, they had gotten so overheated, so dangerously close to destroying civilization in the country, that the decision was made to pump salt water inside of them. This will forever destroy the reactors and make future use of them impossible. A last ditch effort, certainly, but it was a last ditch effort that would spare the immediate lives of thousands and, in the future, the lives of millions suffering from radioactive poisoning.

                                                       

It was this incident, the extraordinary power of nuclear energy, that reminded me of Robert McNamara and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a YouTube video I located, McNamara describes how nuclear deterrence was a primary reason the US Air Force did not attack the known missile sites³. The threat of just five, or even one missile remaining after an attack was too frightening to imagine! A somewhat silly notion, but that is how it is today.

Why do we not attack countries like North Korea, which we know for a fact have nuclear weapons? Why do they not attack us? For the same reason Robert McNamara and John F. Kennedy decided not to attack. Because of nuclear deterrence. We are afraid of them, and they are afraid of us.

It is frightening to be living on almost constant nuclear awareness, on the precipice of destruction and global war.  If any country with nuclear weapons decided to attack there would be no way to stop them. And I suppose that nuclear deterrence is certainly a good thing. If McNamara had thrown his hat into the ring and agreed to attack, if Kennedy had not been told there was a chance some warheads would be left, and if the President had made that fateful decision to attack, chances are things would be very different today. Our country, and McNamara, were lucky that day. Nuclear disaster came very close, and the men who were deciding our fate couldn't just pump salt water into the problem.

Notes

1. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, directed by Errol MorrisSony Pictures Classics, 2003. DVD.
2. Dobbs, Michael. 2010. "THE END WAS NEAR. (cover story)." Military History 27, no. 4: 26. MasterFILE Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 21, 2011).
3. “Robert McNamara on the Effectiveness of Nuclear Deterrence.” July 7, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwb2wU-5aJQ&feature=fvst