How Close Did we Come to Thermonuclear War in the early 1960s?

Three days before the end of his Presidency, on January 17, 1961 President Eisenhower warned us against:

the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex: the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power (which) exists and will persist, (which) we must never let … endanger our liberties or democratic processes…

That farewell address has often been characterized as prophetic. However, it may just as well be characterized as a little too little and too late. James Douglass, in “JFK and the Unspeakable”, says this about it:

Eisenhower himself never used the power of his presidency to challenge this new threat to democracy. He simply identified it in a memorable way when he was about to leave office. He thereby passed on the possibility of resisting it to his successor.

As luck would have it, his successor attempted the most heroic resistance to the Military-Industrial complex of any U.S. President in our history.

In a previous post I discussed John F. Kennedy’s repeated efforts to keep our country out of a nuclear war by refusing under great pressure from his military and CIA to initiate or increase our military involvement in countries that would have inflamed tensions with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Specifically, I spoke about how he worked out a diplomatic rather than a military solution for power sharing in Laos; his promotion of an independent Congo; his four successful attempts to avoid an invasion of Cuba despite the persistent urging of his military to invade, including his refusal to use the U.S. military at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961; his veto of Operation Northwoods, a false flag operation devised by his military to serve as an excuse to invade Cuba; his refusal to invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and his use of his military in the spring of 1963 to combat CIA sponsored attacks on Cuba; his plans for withdrawal from Vietnam prior to his untimely death later in 1963; his refusal to accede to CIA plans to overthrow the leftist government of Indonesia; and his plans for ending the Cold War.

Beyond that, Kennedy also resisted efforts of his military to draw him into a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, which undoubtedly would have proved disastrous for both our countries. Americans should know a lot more about this than they do, if for no other reason than for obtaining a better understanding of just how dangerous our Military-Industrial Complex is, and inspiring them to stand less in awe of it, and focus more on resisting it instead.

Douglass discusses these efforts in his book, beginning with the July 21, 1961 National Security Council (NSC) meeting.

July 21, 1961 NSC meeting

James Galbraith, the son of Kennedy’s friend and ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, discussed the implications of the July 1961 NSC meeting in an article he co-authored, titled “Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963? – Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s”.

At that meeting, General Hickey, Chairman of the “Net Evaluation Subcommittee”, along with General Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA Director Allan Dulles, presented a plan for a first strike nuclear attack again the Soviet Union. In response, Kennedy raised a series of questions, including what would be the likely damage to the USSR and how long U.S. citizens would have to remain in fallout shelters following the attack.

Roswell Gilpatric, Kennedy’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, describes how that meeting ended: “Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it”. Kennedy also remarked to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

Interim between the 1961 and September 1963 NSC meetings

In August, 1961, East Germany began building of the Berlin Wall. In October, Kennedy’s personal representative in Berlin, General Lucius Clay, tried to force a military confrontation over the wall, which eventually resulted in a face off of American and Soviet tanks by October 27th. With both the Soviet and American leaders under intense pressure from their militaries not to back down, Kennedy used back channel negotiations with Khrushchev to secure a compromise agreement (pp 259-60): If Khrushchev would withdraw his tanks, Kennedy would reciprocate a half hour later. Khrushchev agreed, withdrew his tanks, and Kennedy reciprocated as promised (This series of events foreshadowed a similar crisis resolution in the Cuban Missile Crisis about a year later). The intentions of General Clay were shortly revealed in an angry telegram, in which he stated:

Today, we have the nuclear strength to assure victory at awful cost. It no longer suffices to consider our strength as a deterrent only and to plan to use it only in retaliation. No ground probes on the highway which would use force should or could be undertaken unless we are prepared instantly to follow them with a nuclear strike. It is certain that within two or more years retaliatory power will be useless…

Following Kennedy’s successful diplomatic resolution of the Cuban Missile crisis of October 1962, Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger “The Military are mad. They wanted to do this (meaning an invasion of Cuba, possibly accompanied by a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union).

One month after that, the Joint Chiefs were pushing again for first-strike nuclear capability, sending a memo to Defense Secretary McNamara stating “The Joint Chiefs consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable”. McNamara told Kennedy about this, adding that the Air Force was developing specific proposals “based on the objectives of developing a first-strike capability”. He recommended to Kennedy that this “should be rejected as a U.S. policy objective”. More specifically and ominously, McNamara told Kennedy that what was at issue was whether the U.S. military should:

attempt to achieve a capability to start a thermonuclear war in which the resulting damage to ourselves and our Allies could be considered acceptable on some reasonable definition of the term.

September 12, 1963 NSC meeting

At the September 1963 NSC meeting, Kennedy’s military again tried to push him towards a nuclear first-strike capability against the Soviet Union. But this time, rather than stalking out of the meeting, Kennedy engaged his military in order to get a more exact idea of what they were up to. At least Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was on his side. Here are some of the relevant excerpts from a summary of the meeting (See Summary Record of the 517th Meeting of the NSC):

PRES. KENNEDY: De Gaulle believes even the small nuclear force he is planning will be big enough to cause unacceptable damage to the USSR… Why do we need to have as much defense as we have if, as it appears, the strategy is based on the assumption that even if we strike first we cannot protect the security of the U.S. in nuclear warfare?

GEN JOHNSON: No matter what we do we can't get below 51 million casualties (to the United States) in the event of a nuclear exchange. We can, however, bring down this number by undertaking additional weapons programs.

PRES. KENNEDY: Doesn’t that get us into the overkill business?

GEN. JOHNSON: No, sir. We can cut down U.S. losses if we knock out more Soviet missiles by having more U.S. missiles and more accurate U.S. missiles. The more Soviet missiles we can destroy the less the loss to us…

Each of the strategies (recommended in the report) used against the USSR results in at least 140 million fatalities in the USSR. Our problem is how to catch more of the Soviet missiles before they are launched and how to destroy more of the missiles in the air over the U.S….

SEC. MCNAMARA: There is no way of launching a no-alert attack against the USSR which would be acceptable. No such attack… could be carried out without 30 million U.S. fatalities – an obviously unacceptable number… The President deserves an answer to his question as to why we have to have so large a force….

PRES. KENNEDY: I understand… Preemption is not possible for us. This is a valuable conclusion growing out of an excellent report…

GEN. JOHNSON: I would be very disturbed if the President considered this report indicated that we could reduce our forces and/or not continue to increase those programmed…

I have concluded from the calculations that we could fight a limited war using nuclear weapons without fear that the Soviets would reply by going to all-out war.

PRES. KENNEDY: I have been told that if I ever released a nuclear weapon on the battlefield, I should start a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union as the use of nuclear weapons was bound to escalate and we might as well get the advantage by going first…

The situation facing Kennedy in the fall of 1963

Most of President Kennedy’s presidency was spent resisting pressure from his military and CIA to draw him into military confrontations that could easily have escalated into thermonuclear war.

It began very early in his Presidency, when his military and CIA presented him with plans left over from his predecessor’s administration to sponsor a group of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. Kennedy’s CIA assured him that no direct U.S. military intervention would be required – that in response to the invasion of the Cuban exiles, the Cuban people would rise up and overthrow the Castro government. Kennedy reluctantly went along with the plan, making it clear that there would be no direct U.S. military intervention. The Cuban exiles, with CIA assistance, invaded Cuba on April 15, 1961. The CIA’s predictions or promises did not come to fruition – or more likely they simply lied about them in the first place. The Cuban people did not rise up. The Cuban exiles were quickly defeated and captured or killed. In response, the U.S. military chiefs and CIA strongly urged the President to use his military to rescue the situation. When he refused he earned himself the everlasting hatred of the Cuban exile community and his own military. When he fired his top CIA leaders he earned their hatred as well.

The discussion in this post can be seen in the same light. While not specifically recommending a date for a nuclear first-strike, Kennedy’s military repeatedly pushed for the development of first strike capability for nuclear war, while at the same time repeatedly trying to maneuver the President into military actions that would risk nuclear confrontation. But President Kennedy had learned his lesson from the Bay of Pigs fiasco and never again let his military maneuver him into a similar situation.

The cult of secrecy in the United States

All of this occurred without the knowledge of the American people. The false flag operation, “Operation Northwoods”, though planned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 for the purpose of inciting war against Cuba, was classified as “Top Secret”, and it didn’t come to the attention of the American people until approximately four decades later. Even then it received very little attention from our national news media, and consequently, few Americans have heard of it.

Whenever our government wishes to withhold information from the American people, it simply plays the “national security” card. But it is rarely about national security. Rather, the “national security” excuse has been routinely used by our government to avoid embarrassment or criminal liability. Preemptive war is not only a war crime, it has been defined as the worst war crime of all, in that “It is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. Yet, whenever our government commits itself to war it plays the “national security” card so that its motives for war cannot be evaluated by its own citizens.

Had President Kennedy allowed his military to dictate policy during the window of time during which they felt that they had the nuclear superiority to conduct a “successful” nuclear war against the Soviet Union, it is very possible that the worst crime in the history of the world would have been perpetrated upon humanity. We’re talking about the deaths of at least 140 million innocent Soviet citizens and 30 million innocent Americans. But it’s a lot worse than it sounds on the surface. Life likely would have been a living hell for many or most of the survivors, with much of our agricultural lands ruined, much of our food, water and air contaminated with nuclear fallout and our economy in shambles. But undoubtedly the perpetrators would have made arrangements for some sort of golden parachute before they went ahead with their scheme.

As citizens of a democracy we should know about these things. One could counter that statement by noting that if a preemptive strike against a foreign nation is made public knowledge, then that would destroy our strategic military advantage. But why should we have to wait several decades to hear about it? And in any event, this would have been an atrocity of the first magnitude and resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Americans. We the American people have a right to weigh in on such matters.

Lessons for today

The Neoconservative elites of today are the equivalent of the military/CIA cabal in the Kennedy administration that repeatedly tried to maneuver him into war. What if Seymour Hersh hadn’t exposed the Bush/Cheney administration’s plans to start a war with Iran? That exposure angered large portions of the American public, and in so doing may have prevented another catastrophic war. Certainly Bush or Cheney weren’t about to tell us about their plans until they had their ducks lined up and ready to go.

The American people need to know about the policies and actions of their government – past and present. Without such knowledge we lack that ability to assess or have meaningful input into what our government does in our name, and we lack the ability to learn from past mistakes. James Galbraith and Heather Purcell sum up their article with:

In any event, the fact that first-strike planning got as far as it did raises grave questions about the history of the Cold War. Much more needs to be known: about nuclear decision-making… about the events of late 1963, about later technical developments… Surely it is now time to declassify all records on this and related history.

If that recommendation is valid with regard to the events of 1960 – and it is – then it is all the more relevant to later events, and especially to current events of great national and international importance.

The “national security” excuse for withholding crucial information from the American public on the sole decision of the President of the United States is a recipe for tyranny. Furthermore, historically it has cost us far more than it has helped us – resulting in the creation of enemies around the world through the assassination of leaders considered unfriendly to corporate interests, the overthrow of foreign governments, and the invasion of sovereign nations under false pretenses. If not for a multitude of illegal and immoral acts performed by the U.S. government in secrecy or hidden under cover of secret machinations, we would by now have much less need for wasting nearly a trillion dollars annually on military expenditures, having progressed much further towards the goals of the United Nations:

To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war… to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life…

That's a 25 year old. :wow:

my Jr Hi social studies teacher, on the Bay of Pigs day...
asked how it felt to know you have only a few hours to live.

Needless to say, he was later fired for unethical teaching practices.
but I will never forget how scared I felt.

I had just turned 11 a few days before it. I was terrified, thinking we were all going to die. I remember thinking how unfair it was...why were adults doing this when we kids were going to die before we even had a chance to grow up.

Thanks so much for bringing me the kind of stuff I can't get anywhere else.
Your in my DU rotation of "I wonder what so and so has posted lately"
And your in the top 5 too.

:hi:

the Soviet Union, very possibly as an excuse for starting a war.

LBJ apparently vetoed that idea. He had no intention of getting into a nuclear war -- though he did go along with their plans for Vietnam, cancelling Kennedy's plans for withdrawal.

GEN JOHNSON: No matter what we do we can't get below 51 million casualties (to the United States) in the event of a nuclear exchange. We can, however, bring down this number by undertaking additional weapons programs.

PRES. KENNEDY: Doesn’t that get us into the overkill business?

GEN. JOHNSON: No, sir. We can cut down U.S. losses if we knock out more Soviet missiles by having more U.S. missiles and more accurate U.S. missiles. The more Soviet missiles we can destroy the less the loss to us…

Each of the strategies (recommended in the report) used against the USSR results in at least 140 million fatalities in the USSR. Our problem is how to catch more of the Soviet missiles before they are launched and how to destroy more of the missiles in the air over the U.S….

SEC. MCNAMARA: There is no way of launching a no-alert attack against the USSR which would be acceptable. No such attack… could be carried out without 30 million U.S. fatalities – an obviously unacceptable number… The President deserves an answer to his question as to why we have to have so large a force….

"...But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops!"

Anyone with half a brain-cell-left that went though the Cuban Missile Crisis will set you straight....

:nuke:

In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at least in that case, if we would have started a nuclear war there would have been an element of self-defense to it. We were very fortunate that JFK was able to settle the matter through diplomatic channels, against the advice of his military.

But initiating a first strike that would have resulted in the deaths of at least 140 million innocent Soviets and 50 million Americans for no other reason than to "win" the Cold War would have been unconscionable.

Some of these senior officers sound as if they're clinically insane.

I have concluded from the calculations that we could fight a limited war using nuclear weapons without fear that the Soviets would reply by going to all-out war.

Curtis LeMay had asked for at least 2400 Minutemen; Thomas Powers of the Strategic Air Command had asked for 10,000.

Jesus, 10,000 ICBMs. Every time I read something about Power he sounds like a complete lunatic. And it's Power not Powers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S._Power

When RAND proposed a counterforce strategy which required SAC to restrain itself from striking Soviet cities in the beginning of a war, Power exclaimed "Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!"

Film: Power, a confirmed and unapologetic proponent of the LeMay school of staunch and successful militaristic Anti-Communism, was cartooned to create the "General Ripper" character in the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

So yes, I'd say we came pretty close to thermonuclear war. Good post, thanks.

There always were and there always will be people like that around. And we haven't yet learned how to keep those bastards away from the levers of power. Can you imagine what would have happened had Bush or Cheney been President then?

Another terrific post,TFC. Deeply thoughtful and full of valuable information.

Many of the offenses committed during the Cold War have obviously been attributed to the high-level friction between the United States and the Soviet Union. The implication being that now that the United States has "won" the Cold War and is the "sole superpower" the dangers have drastically diminished. We can all relax and go shopping.

But I wonder whether that doesn't point to a fundamentally mistaken framing of the Cold War mentality. Rather than fighting against something -- presumably Communism -- the Cold Warriors in the United States (and elsewhere) were actually fighting for something, namely economic and military domination of much of the world.

Thus, as your epilogue suggests, the downfall of the Soviet Union hasn't really dampened the dangers. On the contrary, it has emboldened those fanatics who think of themselves as the war's winners.

I discussed some of those issues in a previous post a long time ago. I think that there were a lot of cynical motives on our part (our elites, that is) involved in the Cold War:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

I also wonder what sort of role Reinhard Gehlen and the Project Paperclip acquisitions may have played in fanning these particular flames.

My understanding directly from the men who manned the forward sites in W. Germany is that the first strike tacticals were assembled, powered, on the erector launchers, coded for targets, and only an order and a couple of button pushes from launch.

It was understood that punching the button to "erect" the missles (going from horizontal to vertical) would be considered as the first act of war by both sides. They were held at just that step for the week during the Israeli war.

How close did we come? Roughly 3 minutes to "all she wrote".

BTW - this was not the only occasion.

I know a guy about 20 years older than me who was a navigator on a B-52 during the CMC. Based in Turkey. He told me they were flying those bombers with ARMED bombs. Armed in the cradles. They were ready to drop on a moment's notice.

I'm not sure your example is any closer than that.
GAC

or that they were one step short of that?

I deserve to be a smartass................. or sumthin.................. I survived Reaganism!!! :think:

http://supak.com/store/videos/dr_strangelove.htm

When working on a recent OP honoring Walter Cronkite, reviewing the history, viewing a video interview by Conkrite of Kennedy 20 days before the assassination (arguably the beginning of the end for the nation), it was striking What A Man Kennedy was. Not because he was good looking or articulate or privileged or smart. Because of the Real Human Being that was present. Because of the dignity of his age -- in both senses. A "young" man to be president and a very mature and level headed 42 year old. Has the like of him been seen (or videoed) before or sense (I meant "since" but the typo is apt)?

The man was the perfect embodiment at that point of youth and age, as a person and personification of the nation. He was deliberative and spoke with an old fashioned eloquence with foot firmly placed in the present/future. He was handsome as hell and it didn't matter a whit. There was great integrity there.

Thank you for your work. TFC. :hug:

I would put him right up there with Lincoln and FDR as our three greatest presidents. Of the three, two were assassinated and one survived an attempted coup. That's what you get for being a great president. :hug:

Oliver Stone made a comment on the last Real Time with Bill Maher that if Reagan or either Bush were president instead of JFK the world would have suffered a major nuclear war. Based on my reading I agree 100% with him. For this (and several other) reason(s), JFK gets my vote for #1 for all time.

A friend of my Dad's was in the Air Force and was stationed in Germany. He had an unusual job that would have qualified him to appear on the "What's My Line?" TV gameshow. His job was to annihilate Prague. Daily.

Yep, every morning he'd sip his coffee and climb into his F-100 Super Saber fighter-bomber with an H-bomb strapped underneath. He'd go screaming for the Czechoslovakian border, with orders to drop the bomb on Prague. And every day, as he approached the border, he'd receive orders to abort the mission. If he had ever failed to receive that message, it would have been on to Armageddon.

In his middle age, when I knew him, he was quite a thoughtful and compassionate man. But he told me that in his younger days he had been thoroughly propagandized, and had wanted to kill commies more than he wanted anything else on earth. He chuckled to think how he'd been trained to immediately initiate a hard diving turn after releasing the bomb, in order to escape the blast. It was only years later that he realized that the training was just to fool him into thinking he'd survive. To the military planners, he and his little plane were as expendable as the population of Prague.

I wonder what would have happened if due to some bureaucratic screw-up the message to abort the mission never came one day?

It's also amazing to me that compassionate people could be so propagandized to hate that they would want to kill people on a massive scale. Clearly, that is something that has given even the worst of our wars enough political cover as to keep them going.

For example, I once read somewhere that the same "launch by default" rules applied to our ballistic nuclear subs. They would poke their antennae up out of the water once daily and listen for a signal from headquarters. If they didn't hear a signal, their standing orders were to launch their pre-targeted nuclear missiles.

It seems astonishing, in retrospect, that a communications glitch didn't trigger WWIII at some point.

Maybe there were some safeguards built into the system that most people weren't aware of?

What a strange time. An underground bomb shelter in the middle of an Ohio subdivision.

I think that you’re failing to look at the bright side of; had our psychopathic hero warmongers succeeded in starting a nuclear war, the world might now be a much more peaceful place without the human race, but chances are that the survivors would have genetically evolved to a point where large amounts of radiation was actually good for them, and then we wouldn’t have to worry about all that nuclear waste that nobody wants too buy, and maybe it would have become a valuable commodity and their probably wouldn’t even be a need for it on the black market. And marijuana plants would grow to the size of trees...

And let’s not forget what effect it would have had on our energy problems, as glow in the dark everything would greatly reduce our dependency on foreign oil, and we could simply put our fingers in the cigarette lighter compartment of our green technology glow in the dark hybrid cars, and off we go…

But hay, there is reason for great optimism and we shouldn’t worry too much about it because, as sure as you are reading this, our political leaders are hard at work trying to correct the mistakes of the past…

:nuke:

K&R

Larry

But make that big “greeeen” glowing globs of goo!

You're beginning to sound like Ann Coulter

I have to admit, it's pretty funny though :rofl:

As a child it was obvious, she was everything a boy shouldn’t be, so when he grew and had the sex change operation and discovered that she was everything a girl shouldn’t be either; she decide that, “maybe I could become someone everyone loves.” and that’s when she decided to become like Rush Limbaugh, the El Puerco Granda of Repug Exilentia (that translates as big clueless republican pig talk show host), too bad - even food doesn’t even like her skinny ass; anyhow back to the story; and believing in that little empty flat place in and on her chest - that someday scum sucking gutter pigs will inherit the earth, and maybe she could be the object of some lowly defunct dictators lust for spanking, but instead she turned out being everything a human being shouldn’t be, Ann Coulter…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_For...

Bush / Cheney sending a not so subtle message to Ahmadinejad?

Or

Bush / Cheney caught red handed about to preemptively nuke Iran?

But if they were really just about to nuke Iran, one has to consider why they didn't eventually go through with it.

Maybe it was knowledge that they were intending to do it, and the resulting public backlash that stopped them.

Because they are about a part of history that is not fought in schools and only those of us old enough to remember know what happened
And even then cannot easily put it all together.
You help us do that and help those younger ones to understand just what happened then and how it effects events now.

Keep it up My friend....knoledge is power.

Knowledge is indeed power, and I'm hoping that some day Americans will have enough of it that they will take back their country.

Thanks for another great post.

And that is exactly why Bush was so dangerous. In fact, why almost any Republican or conservative is dangerous. The military has been treated like a house guest. When in fact, they are a deadly force to never be used. Our goal should be to eliminate them. And by "our" I mean the human race.

Thanks for this thread. I realize now that I know very little. But I learned something this morning from your post. I'm grateful.

Americans stand too much in awe of their military.

If Bush or Cheney had been President in the 1960s, an atrocity would have been committed that would make the war crimes that they did commit pale in comparison.

If you put them all in a pdf and offered them for download so that we could pass them around! Or, if you publish them in a book and sell it on Amazon that would be excellent too. :hi:

Maybe when I retire in 5 years I'll start thinking seriously about doing something like that. :hi:

with those nukes stuck on a plane "by accident" a couple years ago and flown over the South....

Our planes had been junked and we were heading for Japan. The rest of the squadrons were deployed to less obvious sites. Having no planes, and fearing we might come to our senses and get the hell out of Dodge, they padlocked the barrack doors and stationed MPs around the place. We were expendable.

MCAS El Toro, October, 1962

What was the purpose of deploying you to Japan?

Which was usually how it was done at that time. Our planes, F4D Skyrays, were being phased out. The ones that we had were already junked and sent to rust away in Arizona. We inherited F4D's from the squadron we replaced in Japan.

because the me part of "we" wasn't even around in the 1960s.

and made us kneel for hours and say the rosary during the Bay of Pigs.
we were all scared to death.
thats all I remember.

Not so much about nuclear war, but how it appears that President Obama seems to be being challenged in similar ways that was JFK was challenged by the MIC.

Godspeed, President Obama.

Outstanding post, Time for change. :thumbsup:

And written about it:
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Time%20for%20...

I have no idea what the truth of the matter is. But it's hard to believe that it's improved much since JFK was assassinated in 1963

that Kennedy was weak and inexperienced. That is why they decided to push the envelope.

If they did, then why would they withdraw their missiles from Cuba after taking all the trouble and risk to insert them there?

But it has been interesting to watch you...

scare us about it all the time. No countries at that time had viable nukes except for the USA and Russia, which they had pointed at each other. Common sense told me that neither country was willing to push the button. It seems ironic that Russia getting the bomb made us safer back then.

I also believe that a weaker president would have allowed his military to pressure him into doing it.

independence for French Somaliland. The French made sure the referendum failed. Their tactics were quite brutal, including the rounding up and exile of thousands of potential independence voters.

We came very close to nuclear war over that little French colony. If the referendum had passed, the shit would have hit the fan. Everybody wanted that strategic port, including the Russians who controlled the rest of the Somali territories. I was stationed north north west of Djbouti at the time. Thinking of that time still scares and depresses me. It would do the same to you if you knew the details of what went on that March.

Three months later was the six day war and the USS Liberty murders. (a false flag attack on an unarmed American ship.) Those few months changed me in profound ways.

There are so many examples of "our government" acting contrary to the best interests of the citizens of the US. Conspiracies of the powerful and connected carrying out criminal acts with our money, our military, our reputation in order to benefit a tiny, variable cabal of crazy, wealthy people and families.

Kennedy, like Roosevelt before him, was born into this circle of power and wealth and understood the motivations and behavior of these parasites. It is to his credit that he resisted them so strongly, and is unfortunate that he, also like Roosevelt, expended so much energy preserving their base so that they could continually return for another bite. In their typically inconsiderate way, they hated both of these men for it and the citizens of the nation never knew what they did.

Unlike dogs, the parasites will always bite the hand that feeds them.
:kick:

& R

http://www2.austincc.edu/lpatrick/his2341/fdr36acceptan...

Here's some excerpts:

Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital … the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service…

The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man…

President Obama, like President Kennedy, surrounds himself with a variety of ranging viewpoints, to good and bad effect. Good because it allows others to challenge his point of view so that he doesn't fall victim to insular logic, bad because it allows certain players who don't share our aversion to tyranny inside the inner workings of the administration. Now I'm not so sure if the parallels are so direct that Obama has to deal with certain members of the JCS that are anything comparable to LeMay or Lemnitzer. But there are two aspects that concern me.

It concerns Cheney's inside guys that Seymour Hersh has reported on.http://www.minnpost.com/ericblackblog/2009/04/01/7800/s...

Who are these moles? Who do they get their intel from before reporting it to Cheney? Some might say Gates, since he is a holdover from Dubya. They might be right. But I think there is the possibility it could be Panetta after reading Michael Ledeen's ringing endorsement:

I always liked Panetta. He served in the Army and is openly proud of it. He seems to be a good lawyer (oxymoronic though it may seem). He's a good manager. And he's going to watch Obama's back at a place that's full of stilettos and a track record for attempted presidential assassination second to none. But Italians know all about political assassination; you may remember Julius Caesar. Or Aldo Moro. The self-proclaimed cognoscenti will deride his lack of "spycraft," and he's never worked in the intel bureaucracy or, for that matter, in foreign policy or national security. But he's been chief of staff, which involved all that stuff.

I think it's a smart move.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjZhOTc2MDM1OW...

I shudder at the possibilities. :scared:

I believe that Cheney is far from powerless -- and that may be one thing that's keeping him out of prison.

I'm pretty sure that Allan Dulles was involved in the JFK assassination after he was fired as CIA Director. He probably had some of the same people reporting to him. So does Cheney. The older I get and the more I read, the more I believe that we have a shadow government with a lot of power. It operated in JFK's day, and I don't think that it's any less dangerous today than it was then.

This is one of the very best essays that I've read on this forum. Thank you very much for it.

Nominated.

If you haven't, I would highly recommend it.

According to the Brookings Institution:

US nuclear tab at $5.8 trillion

And that's a conservative number, not counting the off-the-books and behind-the-swinging-bookcase stuff.

Thank you for another outstanding article, Time for change.

Sorry to bring in a violent image: The truth is a real kick to the pants of the War Party.

JFK the Unspeakable... GREAT BOOK!	mirrera	Jul-01-09 09:35 PM	#1
One of the best I've ever read	Time for change	Jul-02-09 04:34 PM	#39
It goes a long way in proving that JFK was the best President of all time. n/t	ControlledDemolition	Jul-03-09 12:27 AM	#71
How close? A lot closer than will ever be reported by history. n/t	jody	Jul-01-09 09:37 PM	#2
Army CAPTAINS were authorized to fire nuclear weapons.	billyoc	Jul-01-09 09:38 PM	#3
Indeed... how "coincidental" he "happened" to be killed by a "lone" nut...	villager	Jul-01-09 09:48 PM	#4
I remember....	gblady	Jul-01-09 09:48 PM	#5
Me too....the Cuban missile crisis..	pipi_k	Jul-03-09 01:10 PM	#78
TFC	givemebackmycountry	Jul-01-09 09:51 PM	#6
Thank you so much	Time for change	Jul-02-09 05:02 PM	#40
I learned about this in Russian history	Kievan Rus	Jul-01-09 10:04 PM	#7
Outstanding post...it brought this to mind.....	RagAss	Jul-01-09 10:07 PM	#8
Thank you -- Yes, there were well developed plans to blame it on	Time for change	Jul-02-09 07:09 PM	#47
"i'm not saying that we wouldn't get our hair mussed..."	dysfunctional press	Jul-01-09 10:10 PM	#9
Thought of that exact same thing when I read that	htuttle	Jul-02-09 10:25 AM	#24
IBTD	omega minimo	Jul-01-09 10:15 PM	#10
What a terrific read. Frustrating but interesting. ....n/t	Just-plain-Kathy	Jul-01-09 10:32 PM	#11
k and r	Hassin Bin Sober	Jul-01-09 10:44 PM	#12
How close? Too fucking close	jpak	Jul-01-09 10:49 PM	#13
This was a lot more cynical than the Cuban Missile Crisis	Time for change	Jul-02-09 07:44 PM	#48
I'm not certain, but you appear to have completely missed the point. n/t	Greyhound	Jul-03-09 12:48 AM	#75
Damn....	MicaelS	Jul-01-09 10:57 PM	#14
Absolutely	Time for change	Jul-02-09 02:41 AM	#19
That was then. This is now?	RufusTFirefly	Jul-01-09 11:02 PM	#15
Thank you Rufus -- I think you're right about that	Time for change	Jul-02-09 08:10 PM	#49
Thanks TFC. I missed that post but will read it with great interest	RufusTFirefly	Jul-02-09 08:26 PM	#50
Actually we were closer in 1967	quaker bill	Jul-01-09 11:28 PM	#16
You Sure About That?	ProfessorGAC	Jul-02-09 03:42 PM	#38
Do you mean that the missiles were actually erected -- as an act of war	Time for change	Jul-02-09 09:04 PM	#52
What?! No 9-11geon? Hey, I survived Duck and Cover	omega minimo	Jul-01-09 11:32 PM	#17
Are the kiddies familiar with Dr. Strangelove?	omega minimo	Jul-01-09 11:49 PM	#18
"Has the like of him ever been seen before or since?"	Time for change	Jul-02-09 10:10 AM	#22
Definitely none since...	ControlledDemolition	Jul-03-09 12:34 AM	#72
Thermonuclear war was the default. It's amazing it never happened.	Mister Ed	Jul-02-09 06:16 AM	#20
That's scary	Time for change	Jul-02-09 09:09 PM	#53
What's really scary is that it was standard procedure	Mister Ed	Jul-02-09 09:37 PM	#56
It really does seem astonishing -- and terribly reckless as well	Time for change	Jul-02-09 09:47 PM	#57
Just had a flashback of the neighbor's newly-constructed bomb shelter.	Vinca	Jul-02-09 08:47 AM	#21
Hi Dr. Dale, great OP but…	Larry Ogg	Jul-02-09 10:18 AM	#23
Big green globs of goo can roll around, no need for cars.... or clothing.... or houses.....	omega minimo	Jul-02-09 01:40 PM	#30
Yes, it’s a win win!	Larry Ogg	Jul-02-09 03:33 PM	#36
Ok Larry. It's generally good to look on the bright side, but	Time for change	Jul-02-09 09:30 PM	#55
Oh yes; poor Ann Coulter, it’s such a sad story…	Larry Ogg	Jul-03-09 12:25 AM	#70
2007 Minot / Barksdale Nuclear Cruise Missiles on B52	paparush	Jul-02-09 10:47 AM	#25
It's hard to say	Time for change	Jul-02-09 09:51 PM	#58
Your posts here are more important than you know TFC	zeemike	Jul-02-09 10:47 AM	#26
Thank you very much zeemake	Time for change	Jul-02-09 09:54 PM	#59
K&R !!	Overseas	Jul-02-09 10:52 AM	#27
The Military are mad.	Gregorian	Jul-02-09 11:34 AM	#28
Thank you -- That's very nice to know	Time for change	Jul-02-09 09:57 PM	#60
You know what would be even greater than your posts?	glitch	Jul-02-09 12:56 PM	#29
Thank you -- That sounds like an interesting and fun idea	Time for change	Jul-02-09 09:59 PM	#61
Right Now I'd Rather Know How Close Cheney Came to Terrorizing the US	Demeter	Jul-02-09 02:44 PM	#31
Well... there was 911! n/t	ControlledDemolition	Jul-03-09 12:38 AM	#73
Like 7, I think.	Iggo	Jul-02-09 02:53 PM	#32
Well, we were (literally) locked in our barracks on a possible target site.	Tierra_y_Libertad	Jul-02-09 03:00 PM	#33
Having no planes? I don't understand.	Time for change	Jul-02-09 10:03 PM	#62
We were inheriting the planes of the squadron we were replacing.	Tierra_y_Libertad	Jul-03-09 12:50 AM	#76
Not very close	Johonny	Jul-02-09 03:25 PM	#34
I was in 5th grade the nuns dragged us all into church	Mari333	Jul-02-09 03:29 PM	#35
I've thought about this several times in the past few weeks	me b zola	Jul-02-09 03:36 PM	#37
I've thought a lot about that too	Time for change	Jul-02-09 10:06 PM	#64
After their summit Kruschev and the soviet delegation summarized	deaniac21	Jul-02-09 05:14 PM	#41
By 1963 the Soviets did not think that Kennedy was weak	Time for change	Jul-02-09 05:34 PM	#43
they did by the end of the year.	deaniac21	Jul-03-09 12:46 AM	#74
Your argument doesn't make any sense	me b zola	Jul-02-09 11:42 PM	#69
I never thought we were even close back then even though they tried to	Cleita	Jul-02-09 05:28 PM	#42
I believe that our military was quite willing to press the button	Time for change	Jul-02-09 10:07 PM	#65
In March of 1967 The French ran a referendum in Djbouti. The question was	alfredo	Jul-02-09 05:58 PM	#44
Auto K&R	Greyhound	Jul-02-09 06:22 PM	#45
Yes -- I love the way that FDR gave it to them in his 1936 Democratic Convention speech:	Time for change	Jul-02-09 10:13 PM	#66
We were very close in 1961 during the Brlin Crisis.	Synicus Maximus	Jul-02-09 06:38 PM	#46
Recommended. You have a gift for putting history in its appropriate context.	robertpaulsen	Jul-02-09 08:36 PM	#51
Yes, it concerns me a great deal too	Time for change	Jul-02-09 10:18 PM	#67
Outstanding.	H2O Man	Jul-02-09 09:16 PM	#54
Thank you very much H2O Man -- I assume you've read "JFK and the Unspeakable"	Time for change	Jul-02-09 10:21 PM	#68
Bravo. N/T	DerekJ	Jul-02-09 10:05 PM	#63
Nuclear War Is Big Business	Octafish	Jul-03-09 12:54 PM	#77