We’ve got a nuclear problem, folks
by digby
I know we’re all reeling from the terrorist attacks and hate crimes of the past week and the necessity to pull ourselves together and make sure that people get out to vote. But there’s something else going on right now that we have to be aware of. Its, uh, about nuclear war.
This piece by Jonathan Schwarz gives some important background on how John Bolton is a malignant horror who’s making Donald Trump worse.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S announcement on October 20 that he intends to pull the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was, if nothing else, appropriately timed. On that date exactly 56 years before, President John F. Kennedy abruptly cut short a midterm campaign trip to Illinois because, the White House said, he had a cold. In fact, Kennedy was returning to Washington to address the Cuban missile crisis — the closest humanity has ever come to obliterating itself with a nuclear war.
The INF treaty was signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. It required both countries to forgo any land-based missiles, nuclear or otherwise, with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
In concrete terms, the treaty was a huge success. The U.S. destroyed almost 1,000 of its own missiles, and the Soviets destroyed almost 2,000 of theirs.
But arms control treaties are never about weapons and numbers alone. They can help enemy nations create virtuous circles, both between them and within themselves. Verification requires constant communication and the establishment of trust; it creates constituencies for peace inside governments and in the general public; this reduces on both sides the power of the paranoid, reactionary wing that exists in every country; this creates space for further progress; and so on.
The long negotiation of the INF treaty, and the post-signing environment it helped create, was part of an extraordinary collapse of tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the 1980s. When Reagan took office, the Soviets genuinely believed that the U.S. might engage in a nuclear first strike against them. This, in turn, led to two separate moments in 1983 in which the two countries came terrifyingly close to accidental nuclear war — closer than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.
Instead, the INF treaty was part of an era of good feelings that contributed to one of the most remarkable events of the past 100 years: the largely peaceful implosion of the Soviet Empire. Empires generally do not go quietly, and the dynamics of imperial collapse often contribute to huge conflagrations. Think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and World War I; or the British Empire and World War II. The Soviet fall was an incredible piece of good fortune for the world; if it had happened in the early 1980s, instead of a few years later, it plausibly would have been catastrophic.
It is almost certainly these more diffuse effects that concern the smarter members of the Trump administration, such as national security adviser John Bolton, who’s yearned for decades to decommission the treaty. Russians may be cheating on the treaty in a modest way, while China is not bound by it at all and is developing intermediate-range missiles. But it’s hard to see how this will affect legitimate U.S. security interests.
On the other hand, exiting the treaty will do more than just lead to an arms race in which all three countries throw themselves into building new weapons. It will also create an atmosphere in which any rational modus vivendi between the U.S. and Russia, or the U.S. and China, will be far more difficult. This is the prize for Bolton and his allies, who can imagine only one world order: One in which they give orders, and everyone else submits.
Bolton has the standard self-perception of his genre of human: In his memoir, “Surrender Is Not an Option,” he explains that he cares about “hard reality,” in contrast to the “dreamy and academic” fools who support arms control.
But in fact, it is Bolton who is living inside of a dream. The hard reality is that our species almost committed suicide on October 27, the most dangerous moment of the Cuban missile crisis, later dubbed Black Saturday by the Kennedy administration. Even with comparative doves in charge of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, we came close to ending human civilization, thanks to mutual incomprehension. And we avoided it, as then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later said, not by talent or wisdom, but pure luck. Then, we created a false history of what happened, one which allows terrifying fantasists like Bolton to reach, and thrive within, the highest levels of power.
Please read the rest of it. I know you don’t want to be terrified anymore right now but it’s necessary to keep your eyes open. This is very, very important.
Trump is tearing the country apart. We’ve seen that for two years and never so clearly as last week. He’s doing it because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. He’s completely over his head in all aspects of the job but the demagoguery. I don’t know where that’s going to go. I do think the next two years of non-stop campaigning are going to be extremely turbulent and possibly in ways we don’t anticipate.
He has some silly ideas he got back in the 1980s on trade and NATO and his puerile schoolyard bully approach is leading him to needless confrontation with allies and excusing of adversaries. He’s very simpleminded and apparently unable to learn. This is bad but it’s recently gotten dangerous. When it comes to foreign policy he now seems to be in the thrall of the right-wing extremist John Bolton who is determined to start an arms race and likely a war with Iran.
The nuclear threat is greater than it’s been in decades because of these two men. As Schwarz points out, it was luck that saved us before. But even so, the man in charge wasn’t an imbecile. And he wasn’t deeply under the influence of the John Bolton of his day, Curtis LeMay.
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