Re: Washington's unwitting atomic allies

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the shells of nuclear
depth charges were stockpiled at the US base at Guantanamo Bay at the
eastern tip of Cuba at the time of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The
anti-submarine weapons could have been activated at short notice on the
outbreak of a conflict by flying the nuclear cores from Florida. <<

I'm not quite sure WHY such a hubbub is being raised by this publication
about US nuclear deployments in the 1940s and 1950s, and why the effort is
being made to portray the Cold War as "more perilous than previously
thought," and to paint the American government's co-conspirators as innocent
babes who knew nothing about what the U.S. was doing and so forth and so on.

In the Berlin and especially the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 60s, the
U.S. came within a hair's breadth of launching an all-out nuclear war
against the Soviets. In the case of Berlin, the casus beli would have been
the rights of officers from the Western Allies to drive around East Berlin,
in the case of Cuba, it was the Soviets doing exactly the same thing to the
U.S. that the Americans had long been doing to them, demonstratively placing
nuclear strategic forces on their border.

As these examples show, the tremendous danger of the cold war came not so
much from the existence of nuclear weapons, but from the aggressive policy
of one of the sides that had them and used them to threaten and blackmail
everyone else. That side was the American side. And no clearer example of
this exists than the Cuban missile crisis.

By the time Kennedy was in office, U.S. spy technology had become
sufficiently advanced that the Americans figured out that the Soviet
strategic nuclear forces were in reality weak, insofar as their ability to
reach the U.S. was concerned. Hence Nikita's gamble to redress the balance
by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

The true aggressive designs of the Americans are nowhere revealed as clearly
as in Kennedy's decision to go to launch an all-out nuclear attack if the
missiles were not withdrawn. For despite all sorts of fancy "defensive"
formulations, the recollections of McNamara and others on the American side
make clear that the basic decision had already been made, and that the order
to execute the planned attack was only hours away when the crisis was
finally resolved.

It is a curious fact that, although the details of all diplomatic and
political maneuvers and discussions by all sides in that crisis are now well
known, the actual operational military plan that the U.S. stood ready to
implement has never come to light, as far as I know, not even its code-name,
and I suspect it never will. I think there is a reason for this, and it is
that the plan would reveal a carefully thought-out strategy to "win" a
nuclear war, with simultaneous nuclear attacks on Russian ICBM sites, bomber
bases, and the missile site in Cuba, a nuclear pearl harbor on a global
scale. That's why nearly 4 decades have gone by and the plan remains locked
in a military vault, if it still exists at all, and those who were privy to
it have never revealed what it was.

Kennedy and his advisors knew that in such a nuclear war Europe, both East
and West, would be wiped out, and perhaps the Americans planned to devastate
China and North Korea also. But they hoped to knock out the Soviet missiles
in Cuba (and perhaps a fair number of the relatively few operational ICBM
the Soviets had in their territory), and thus maybe only a half dozen or
dozen American cities might be hit. That is the "solution" the Americans
were hours away from implementing if Nikita had not retreated, which,
wisely, he did.

As for the latest "revelations," of course US atomic weapons were forward
deployed! They had to be to be of any use at all, the U.S. created a ring
around the Soviet bloc and  China of bomber and missile bases that would
have been totally senseless without nukes.

But the "revelation" I quote above about Cuba is particularly surprising,
since it makes no sense, none whatsoever. What was the point of siting
such depth charges within Cuba? Gitmo was certainly not the ideal place to
assemble the components at a moment of crisis when the entire garrison would
have been mobilized to defend its perimeter. Nor does it make sense as a
place from which to distribute the assembled depth charges, meant to knock
out Soviet nuclear missile subs. With Soviet intermediate-range
nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, it stands to reason the soviets would have
stationed any submarine capacity they had some distance away, even if Cuba
was used for R&R and to resupply the boats. And it is difficult to imagine a
MORE exposed position than Guantánamo for placing U.S. strategic weapons, as
the Guantanamo base could have been overrun by the Soviets or Cubans and I
don't believe there's any part of it that is out of mortar range. For that
matter, the ports the Soviets have been accused of using for their subs are
closer to Florida than to Guantanamo, as were the bases of the land-based
nuclear missiles the USSR deployed in Cuba in 1962.

There is one additional caveat I would add about such revelations
reconstructed from Pentagon records. And that is to remember this is the
group that invented the acronym SNAFU (Situation Normal -- All Fucked Up).
Apart from deliberate, top-level "strategic" lies, deceptions and coverups,
Pentagon records must be treated with skepticism. There are all kinds of
lies recorded to cover up stupidity, theft, bribes and corruption of all
kinds, to enhance careers, and some records are just plain wrong because,
frankly, we're not dealing with some of the smartest people in the world
here and they routinely mess things up.

In particular, the ordnance records are questionable. In one instance, the
look-up table to the Air Force's munitions got messed up, so that what had
supposedly been, in fact, a CS tear gas cluster bomb got mislabeled in the
key as sarin, i.e., nerve gas. The error took place, allegedly, in the early
70s and came to light in ... 1998, when citing high military sources (who I
suspect may have based their statements on this mistaken key), CNN broadcast
the famous "Operation Tailwind" story accusing the US of having used nerve
gas in Vietnam. (Because of limitations of early computers, each item in the
inventory got assigned a number in the computerized records, and there was a
booklet that told you what number corresponded to what munition. The tear
gas cluster bomb and nerve gas cluster bomb numbers got switched in an early
70s edition of the booklet).

CNN's "Operation Tailwind" report got shot down, not because the mix-up got
discovered, but initially because the report made little sense on its face.
The described use of nerve gas would have exposed U.S. troops and pilots,
and the requisite precautions hadn't been taken. Similarly in this case the
positioning in Guantanamo of nuclear weapon components doesn't really add
up.

Similarly, the deployment of nukes in French Morocco in 1954 is odd. Had the
U.S. gotten an air base there? I don't see any logic to the deployment,
unless, of course, we're talking about aircraft carriers.

Jose

-----Original Message-----
From: KDean75206@xxxxxxx <KDean75206@xxxxxxx>
To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, October 21, 1999 8:45 PM
Subject: Washington's unwitting atomic allies


>Originally posted to SocialistsUnmoderated@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Washington's unwitting atomic allies
>
>Pentagon papers reveal extent of US deployment during cold war
>
>Julian Borger, The Guardian
>Thursday October 21, 1999
>
>At the height of the cold war the United States secretly sited thousands
>of nuclear weapons in 15 countries around the world, sometimes without
>the knowledge of the governments concerned, according to a report based
>on declassified Pentagon documents.
>
>The revelation was made yesterday in the US Bulletin of the Atomic
>Scientists.
>
>It generated a political storm in Iceland, where nuclear bombs were
>reportedly stored in a US air base from 1956 to 1959.
>Reykjavik's fiercely anti-nuclear government was never informed, the
>report said. The Icelandic cabinet insisted that it had received renewed
>assurances from the US yesterday that the country had not been exploited
>as an unwitting nuclear depot.
>
>One of the article's three authors, Robert Norris, said that there was
>strong evidence based on the defence papers that atomic weapons were
>stored at the US base at Keflavik in Iceland.
>
>He said that France was also deliberately kept in the dark when nuclear
>weapons were placed in French Morocco in 1954. Mr Norris, a senior
>research analyst at the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington,
>said he had come across a US official document stipulating that Paris
>"should not be informed".
>
>It is unclear whether the governments of the Philippines, South Korea and
>Taiwan were told when nuclear bombs were sited on their territory in the
>1950s in an attempt to confront China in the Pacific.
>
>The chief spokesman for the Pentagon, Kenneth Bacon, said that it was US
>policy neither to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons on
>foreign soil. But he said that at least one of the report's deductions
>based on the government documents was incorrect.
>
>Nevertheless, the newly-released documents reveal the extent to which the
>US was ready to disregard the sensibilities of its supposed allies in its
>anxiety not to be outflanked by its communist nuclear rivals.
>They also show that the cold war was even more perilous than previously
>assumed.
>"Even I was surprised by the scale of the thing - that these weapons were
>all over the place," Mr Norris said. "It was pretty serious."
>
>The worldwide dispersal of the US atomic arsenal inevitably increased the
>risk of accidents and misuse. During the Eisenhower administration, for
>example, West German fighter-bomber pilots had virtually complete control
>over the atomic weapons in periods of heightened alert.
>
>Soon after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, the US ordered the
>despatch of nuclear bomb components to the Pacific island of Guam, so
>that they would be ready for rapid assembly and arming with a plutonium
>or uranium "core" if the conflict escalated into an atomic exchange.
>On August 5 that year, a B-29 bomber carrying components to Guam crashed
>in California, causing a huge blast that was felt 30 miles away. The US
>air force put out a false cover story claiming that 10 conventional bombs
>had all exploded at the same time.
>
>According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the shells of nuclear
>depth charges were stockpiled at the US base at Guantanamo Bay at the
>eastern tip of Cuba at the time of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The
>anti-submarine weapons could have been activated at short notice on the
>outbreak of a conflict by flying the nuclear cores from Florida.
>
>The central Pentagon document quoted in the report - the History of the
>Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons (1945-1977) - was released
>under the freedom of information act after a request by the Bulletin.
>
>The document lists a total of 27 locations (15 of them foreign sovereign
>states) where nuclear weapons were stored or deployed.
>
>They include obvious Nato allies such as Britain and West Germany as well
>as American territories abroad, including Puerto Rico, Guam, Johnston
>Island and Midway. But the names of 18 locations had been blacked out by
>the military censor.
>
>But the locations were listed alphabetically, so by a process of
>elimination, and with the help of information from other sources, Mr
>Norris said, it was possible to identify 17 of the missing locations.
>He said that in the case of Iceland: "We knew that between Hawaii and
>Johnston Island, there were two countries in there, and one of them was
>Japan."
>
>US strategic air command bombers were diverted to the Keflavik base at
>the height of the cold war in the 1950s. This provides corroborating
>evidence that Iceland was one of the unnamed locations used for storing
>bombs.
>
>The 18th nuclear deployment site remains a mystery. Alphabetically it
>lies between Canada and Cuba, but Mr Norris said neither he nor his
>co-authors had been able to narrow down the search any further.
>
>




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