“All of the codes matched.” Oct. 28, 1962, attempted rogue nuclear attack on China

According to Masakatsu Ota , regarding the 1962 Cuban missile crisis

“Oh, my God!,” Bordne recalled his colleagues as saying as they turned white with shock and surprise when they received a launch order before dawn on Oct. 28. The order was issued from Kadena to all four Mace B sites in Okinawa including Bolo Point, he said.

According to him, the three-level confirmation process was taken step-by-step in accordance with a manual by comparing codes in the launch order and codes given to his crew team in advance. All of the codes matched.

“So, we read the targets out loud. Out of the four missiles, we had only one headed toward Russia. The other three were not going to Russia. That, right away, gave us a start to wonder. Because the launch directive said you launch all the missiles,” Bordne said. His crew team was in charge of four out of eight missiles deployed at the site.

“And we figured, ‘Why hit these other countries?’ They’ve got nothing to do with this. That doesn’t make any sense,” Bordne said. “So, our captain, the launch officer, said to us ‘We’ve got to think this through in a logical, rational manner’.”

When the launch order was issued, the five-level “DEFCON” scale, or defense condition, remained at level 2, one step from starting a war. Theoretically, a launch order should not be issued unless DEFCON is raised to 1, which means initiating a military counterattack against enemy forces.

The order under DEFCON 2 made the crew team, especially the launch officer, so dubious about its authenticity that the officer ordered suspension of the ongoing launch procedures which Bordne was engaged in.

Finally, the launch officer figured out that the order had been mistakenly issued, Bordne said, but added he has no idea why such an order was issued. Even though Bordne did not specify which country had been targeted besides Russia under the order, it is believed to be China considering the Mace B missile range of 2,200-2,300 kilometers.

It is not clear what caused such a wrong launch order to be issued, but a U.S. U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba just a few hours before the order was conveyed to the Mace B sites in Okinawa.

“A nation that … spends more … on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Brad Pierce's Blog

According to Martin Luther King on April 4, 1967 (exactly a year before he was martyred in Memphis on April 4, 1968)

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

and

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars…

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“A nation that … spends more … on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

According to Martin Luther King on April 4, 1967 (exactly a year before he was martyred in Memphis on April 4, 1968)

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

and

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

According to Clayborne Carson, as interviewed in “Clayborne Carson: King’s Chronicler”

He always put the immediate issue into greater context. In all of his great speeches, what he does is say we’re here, engaged in this immediate struggle, but the broader struggle is global and historical. The movement for human rights is taking place on a global level. And it has deep historical roots. It’s been going on since the time of slavery and after the passage of civil rights legislation, and if he were alive today he would say it’s still going on. That’s why he was an inspiring, visionary figure. He understood the larger context.

MLK on true compassion and a revolution of values

Brad Pierce's Blog

According to Martin Luther King on April 4, 1967 (exactly a year before he was martyred in Memphis on April 4, 1968)

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

and

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars…

View original post 209 more words

Thanks again, Stanislav Petrov!

In 2009, I blogged about the common-sense hero Stanislav Petrov, “a retired Soviet military officer, [who] is credited with preventing the start of World War III and the nuclear devastation of much of the Earth”.

I’m sad to report that Petrov died in May 2017 at the age of 77, as reported by the Smithsonian in “Man Who Saved the World From Nuclear Annihilation Dies at 77“.

He decided to go with his gut, and reported the incident as a false alarm to his superiors.

Aldous Huxley: War is mass murder organized in cold blood

For peace, against war: literary selections

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Aldous Huxley: Selections on war

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Aldous Huxley
From Ends and Means (1937)

Every road toward a better state of society is blocked, sooner or later, by war, by threats of war, by preparations for war. That is the truth, the odious and inescapable truth, that emerges, plain for all to see…

Let us briefly consider the nature of war, the causes of war and the possible alternatives to war, the methods of curing the mania of militarism afflicting the world at the present time.

(i) War is a purely human phenomenon. The lower animals fight duels in the heat of sexual excitement and kill for food and occasionally for sport. But the activities of a wolf eating a sheep or a cat playing with a mouse are no more war-like than the activities of butchers or fox-hunters. Similarly, fights between…

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The world-saving cool of Vasili Arkhipov

According to Robert Krulwich in “You (and Almost Everyone You Know) Owe Your Life to This Man” about Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov

The debate between the captain and Arkhipov took place in an old, diesel-powered submarine designed for Arctic travel but stuck in a climate that was close to unendurable. And yet, Arkhipov kept his cool. After their confrontation, the missile was not readied for firing.

Looking back, it all came down to Arkhipov. Everyone agrees that he’s the guy who stopped the captain. He’s the one who stood in the way.

Nuclear weapons are inherently dangerous. […] the world is very, very lucky that at one critical moment, someone calm enough, careful enough, and cool enough was there to say no.

See also “USA plans to spend at least $1,000,000,000,000 on preparations for nuclear war over the next 30 years“.

If life were always a battlefield

According to Winston Churchill (Nobel Prize winner for literature and culprit for the Bengal famine of 1943) about the first days of the European War

Of all the millions who marched to war in August 1914, only a small proportion went unwillingly away. The thrill of excitement ran through the world, and the hearts of even the simplest masses lifted to the trumpet-call. A prodigious event had happened. The monotony of toil and of the daily round was suddenly broken. Everything was strange and new. War aroused the primordial instincts of races born of strife. Adventure beckoned to her children. A larger, nobler life seemed to be about to open upon the world. But it was, in fact, only Death.

A glorious few resisted, yet it does sometime seem that war is a basic essential to human life, like CO2 is to plants. (“We follow politicians into wars to slaughter millions of people in faraway lands, and yet when one person commits a horrible deed, we brand him as a psychotic malcontent. Our society is psychotic.”) Maybe there’s more to it than that.

According to Isaiah Berlin

There are those who, inhibited by furniture of the ordinary world, come to life only when they feel themselves actors upon a stage, and, thus emancipated, speak out for the first time, and are then found to have much to say. There are those who can function freely only in uniform or armor or court dress, see only through certain kinds of spectacles, act fearlessly only in situations which in some way are formalized for them, see life as a kind of play in which they and others are assigned certain lines which they must speak. So it happens—the last war afforded plenty of instances of this—that people of a shrinking disposition perform miracles of courage when life has been dramatized for them, when they are on the battlefield; and might continue to do so if they were constantly in uniform and life were always a battlefield.

According to Chris Hedges in “War is a force that gives us meaning”

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives […] are all susceptible to war’s appeal.

“If anyone strikes you on the right cheek”: The day Martin Luther King was punched twice by a Nazi

According to Ron Rosenbaum interviewing MLK biographer Taylor Branch about his “battle to prevent Dr. King’s profoundly considered theory of nonviolence from being relegated to history, and not recognized for its relevance to the issues America and the world faces today”

King’s practice, Branch says, was complex and radical and has been often misunderstood. Some of his closest supporters had their doubts about King’s own commitment to nonviolence—whether it was “personal” or just an abstraction for him.

…

During a meeting of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a man rose up from the audience, leapt onto the stage and smashed King in the face. Punched him hard. And then punched him again.

After the first punch, Branch recounts, King just dropped his hands and stood there, allowed the assailant (who turned out to be a member of the American Nazi Party) to punch him again. And when King’s associates tried to step in King stopped them:

“Don’t touch him!” King shouted. “Don’t touch him. We have to pray for him.”

…

When the assailant started slugging King, most people thought, Branch says, that “it was a surprise part of the program. He walked up and slugged him and people still thought that this might be some sort of nonviolent demonstration or something. And then he hit him again!”

“Hit him hard?”

“Hit him hard! In fact, he couldn’t continue the rest of the convention. Knocked him around and finally people realized this was not a demonstration, that this was an emergency and went and dragged him out…and swarmed around this Nazi, and King is already saying, “‘Don’t touch him, don’t hurt him.’”

It was an important revelation, even for some of those who had been close to him for years. Even for Rosa Parks, the heroine of King’s first struggle, the Montgomery bus boycott. “Rosa Parks was quite taken by that,” Branch says, “because she always thought that nonviolence was an abstraction to King. She told him that she had never really seen it in him until that moment. And a number of other people did too.”

People still don’t quite believe in nonviolence in the radical way King did, though Branch thinks it’s the most important aspect of his legacy.

“You call nonviolence ‘an orphan,’” I say to him. “What do you mean by that?”

“The force behind the idea of nonviolence was given its most powerful run in the civil rights era. [Which showed] that it could have an effect in the world. But it became passé pretty quickly toward the end of Dr. King’s career.”

Passé?

“Everybody was jettisoning nonviolence, black and white. White radicals sneered at it. Black Power people sneered at it. ‘Power comes out of the mouth of a gun,’ so on and so forth. And so it became passé pretty quickly even as a matter of intellectual investigation.”

Ironically, Branch says, “The only place I found that studied it in classrooms was in our war colleges, the Naval War College and West Point.”

According to Marcus Borg on the true meaning of “turn the other cheek”

According to Matthew 5:39-41, Jesus says:

If any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.

…

For much of Christian history, people have heard these verses as affirming political acquiescence, not active resistance. Yet King and Gandhi interpreted Jesus as justifying political action. Which interpretation was right? Recent Jesus scholarship suggests these verses are creative non-violent strategies of protesting oppression.

…

The key … is rigorous attention to the social customs of the Jewish homeland in the first century and what these sayings would have meant in that context.

To illustrate with the saying about turning the other cheek: it specifies that the person has been struck on the right cheek. How can you be struck on the right cheek? … You have to act this out in order to get the point: you can be struck on the right cheek only by an overhand blow with the left hand, or with a backhand blow from the right hand. (Try it).

But in that world, people did not use the left hand to strike people. It was reserved for “unseemly” uses. Thus, being struck on the right cheek meant that one had been backhanded with the right hand. Given the social customs of the day, a backhand blow was the way a superior hit an inferior, whereas one fought social equals with fists.

This means the saying presupposes a setting in which a superior is beating a peasant. What should the peasant do? “Turn the other cheek.” What would be the effect? The only way the superior could continue the beating would be with an overhand blow with the fist–which would have meant treating the peasant as an equal.

Perhaps the beating would not have been stopped by this. But for the superior, it would at the very least have been disconcerting: he could continue the beating only by treating the peasant as a social peer. … The peasant was in effect saying, “I am your equal. I refuse to be humiliated anymore.”

See also “MLK on true compassion and a revolution of values” and “No such thing as an unjust peace“.

USA plans to spend at least $1,000,000,000,000 on preparations for nuclear war over the next 30 years

According to Jon B. Wolfsthal, Jeffrey Lewis and Marc Quint in “The trillion dollar nuclear triad: US strategic nuclear modernization over the next thirty years”

The United States maintains a robust nuclear arsenal deployed on a triad of strategic delivery systems, including land- and submarine-based long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable bombers. In addition, it also has a significant number of nonstrategic and nondeployed warheads not constrained by US-Russian arms control treaties. Over the next thirty years, the United States plans to spend approximately $1 trillion maintaining the current arsenal, buying replacement systems, and upgrading existing nuclear bombs and warheads.

and

The United States is on course to spend approximately $1 trillion dollars over the next thirty years to maintain its current nuclear arsenal and procure a new generation of nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable bombers, submarines, SLBMs, and ICBMs. While to some these costs may seem large, previous efforts to build the triad have been similarly expensive. In almost all cases, we have chosen to leave out categories of costs that could not be accurately identified, but that clearly exist and are part of the nuclear deterrent. In addition, the estimates above do not include the cost increases over the current projections provided by the DOD or DOE, Congressional Budget Office, or Government Accountability Office, even though military procurement programs often experience budget increases — sometimes significant increases over 50 percent of the original estimated cost. Most significantly, the estimate omits “legacy” costs associated with dismantling retired weapon systems and supporting retired workers and veterans — including long-term pension and healthcare costs — because these costs are not readily identifiable in budget documents.

According to USA President Dwight D. Eisenhower half a century ago

What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road?

The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.

The worst is atomic war.

The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point to the hope that comes with this spring of 1953.

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the questions that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?

At best it’s a grotesque waste of “the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children”. At worst it’s a “ton of graveyard earth”.

According to Bright Star Sound

Few people know of him … yet conceivably hundreds of millions of people are alive because of him. Stanislav Petrov, a retired Soviet military officer, is credited with preventing the start of World War III and the nuclear devastation of much of the Earth.

That’s why in 1984 the Soviet Union built a doomsday machine called Perimeter, to prevent launch on false warning.