Talk of nuclear war is everywhere. We desperately need leaders who can steer the world toward a more secure future.
US Presidents Who Gambled With Nuclear Armageddon
Jeffrey D. Sachs / Common Dreams
(May 30, 2024) — The overriding job of any US 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.
US 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. [Russia has warned of “serious consequences” if it is hut with such long-range missiles.]
Blinken and Stoltenberg at NATO meeting.
These leaders neglect at our greatest peril the most basic lesson of the nuclear confrontation between the US 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.
Kennedy with Khrushchev in June 1961.
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.
Harry Truman was president when the Doomsday Clock was unveiled in 1947, at seven minutes to midnight. Truman stoked the nuclear arms race and left office with the clock at just three 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 seven 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 the war in Vietnam and pushed the clock back again to just seven 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.
May 26, 1972: Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sign the ABM Treaty and Interim Agreement on Strategic Arms Limitation in Moscow.
Yet Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter failed to secure SALT II, and Carter fatefully and unwisely gave a green light to the C.I.A. in 1979 to destabilize Afghanistan. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, the clock was at just four 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 US security establishment could not take “Yes” for an answer when Russia said an emphatic yes to peaceful and cooperative relations. The US 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 US-led “rules-based order.”
The post-1992 US 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 US 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 nine 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 arms Israel while recklessly taunting Russia and China.
Biden has led the US 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 US 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 US 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.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
