July 31, 2023
The Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer” is all over the headlines this summer (along with the film “Barbie,” directed by Greta Gerwig). Having just watched it, as a professional scenario planner and “futurist” (whatever that might mean), I have thoughts.
The main thought is my amazement that we have somehow survived as a species without immolating ourselves via atomic weapons in almost eight decades of their existence.
In several scenes of the film, those involved in the Manhattan Project discuss the possibility that a sustained nuclear fission reaction might cause the entire atmosphere of the earth to incinerate, eliminating all oxygen-based life on earth. They use a predictive model to conclude that the chance of such an outcome would be “near zero.”
Obviously, the pressures of total war against the Nazi regime made such a not-entirely-certain probabilistic conclusion more palatable to those involved. But use of similar predictive algorithms once both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed stockpiles of hundreds of nuclear warheads of even greater power, in the 1950s, and hundreds of missiles with which to deliver them at moments’ notice, in the 1960s, made reliance upon probabilistic estimates of survivability far more dangerous.
Even the scenarios that were developed to examine possible Soviet responses to U.S. actions with respect to nuclear war – and with respect to conventional warfare between Russians and Americans, which could lead to escalation to nuclear war – were often highly flawed. The Cuban Missile Crisis was presented to us Government majors at Harvard as the great example of successful “crisis management” with respect to national security in general and nuclear weapons policy in particular. Yet some two decades after the collapse of the USSR, at the Cuban Missile Crisis Havana conference, in October 2002, after Soviet and U.S. archives had been opened and examined, it became clear that the supposedly deft management by the Kennedy brothers had come far closer to “mutually assured destruction” than we had been taught.
The moment when the U.S. Navy quarantine line around Cuba supposedly turned back Soviet ships had never occurred: Khrushchev had ordered all his ships to turn around as soon as Kennedy made his initial speech on the crisis. The famous “The other fellow blinked” line turns out to have described a fictional event.
The immediate aerial bombardment of the nuclear sites advocated forcefully by the U.S. military, which they described as a “surgical strike,” was rightly dismissed by JFK. But the danger was far greater even than he might have realized. No one in Washington was aware that the Soviets had up to 80 Medium Range Ballistic Missiles already armed, fueled, and ready to launch. If the U.S. Air Force had tried its “surgical strike,” Soviet crews were under orders to launch these missiles. The result would have been the destruction of major cities across the eastern third of the United States. Luck and instinct alone kept us from this fate.
The most fraught moment of the entire affair was completely unknown to both the public (and to us credulous Harvard students of the 1980s) until 2002. A U.S. Navy convoy in the Caribbean forced a Soviet sub to the surface. The Soviet sub commander gave the order to arm his vessel’s lone atomic torpedo, of about the magnitude of the Hiroshima weapon. Fortunately, another officer, Vasily Arkhipov, somehow persuaded the captain of the B-59 to surface instead, without firing. He may have saved the world.
Of most interest to me, however, is the narrative we were given (which is replicated in the RFK-authored book and subsequent movie Thirteen Days, in which the American side received two cables from Khrushchev. The first was conciliatory and very seemingly anxious to avoid war. The second was a harsh, demanding cable that seemed more threatening. This caused some on the American side to believe that a coup had taken place, and hard-line elements of the Politburo were now dictating events.
RFK suggested that the second cable be simply ignored, and the U.S. should respond only to the more forthcoming first cable. This was seen for some four decades as a master stroke. But it was based upon a fiction. Khrushchev had dictated both cables. After his first cable, which seemed to him to open American minds, he had simply decided that a harder line might extract more concessions. He was correct in a sense: JFK ultimately secretly offered the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey if the Soviets removed the missiles in Cuba.
The striking thing from the 2002 revelations was the absolutely abysmal level of understanding by each side of what was going on in the minds of the other side’s leaders. Each had “scenarios” of what the other side was thinking; both, at critical times, were wrong.
Even more striking is that, six decades since the Cuban crisis, flawed, misapprehending human beings on both sides (and among the other new nuclear powers that have arisen since) have not, through anger, misapprehension, accident, or sheer madness, launched a nuclear attack. We have been almost incredibly – one might say “improbably” – lucky to date that we have avoided nuclear annihilation. Going forward, we should not rely on mere luck – or even a “near zero” probabilistic estimates of risk – to preserve us. We should bring rigorous imagination to bear on this question, and try to make sure that we understand the full ramifications if our assumptions about what others are thinking are incorrect.
