Have Americans Lost Their Consciousness Of Nuclear Armageddon?

'Duck and cover' scene above similar to what I had to endure with classmates in 1952.

Trump issuing reckless threats of action against North Korea which have about as much use as teeth on a hen.

Asked by an interviewer from WTMJ - Wisconsin yesterday whether Americans should be concerned about thermonuclear war - with the rising tensions with North Korea- Trump responded:

"Look, you always have to be concerned. You don't know exactly who you're dealing with."

In fact, anyone with an IQ over room temperature  (especially a leader),  would  know  the consequences if WHO he is dealing with is the head of a nuclear-armed state. Thus,  making one wrong move would surely lead to the total obliteration of civilization and its reduction to radioactive ash.  Trump's absurd response shows he has no business with the nuclear codes given his answer conflated the way he's currently dealing with North Korea (arrogant brinksmanship), and the way a tense situation with a nuclear -armed state can quickly get out of control with one wrong move.  Alas, to our great detriment, Trump is no JFK - who had to deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But Trump's off the cuff,  dumbo answer elicits a question that has surfaced with some left pundits (e.g. Lawrence O'Donnell): Do most Americans have any consciousness of what it means to be exterminated in a nuclear war? Do they have a sensible reaction of trepidation when tensions rise between nuclear-armed nations? Given that 90% of Americans alive today never lived in a nuclear standoff era the answer is most Americans don't and hence are likely to reflect Trump's blasé  attitude.

Back in 1952 such nuclear war consciousness was an abiding feature of our lives as first graders at St. Leo's Parochial School in Milwaukee. Then, almost every afternoon we had to be ready for a 'duck and cover' exercise.  Nobody told the nuns - or anyone else evidently - that ducking under a desk and trying to cover with one's hands would be next to useless if an actual A-bomb dropped on your city. As for an H-bomb, you'd be incinerated within microseconds of any air blast. But never mind, these exercises created a kind of "nuclear consciousness" that you didn't want your country recklessly starting a war it wouldn't be able to win.

Flash forward to October, 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis when that nuclear extermination consciousness was embedded in the brains of millions for real.  At that time I was a junior at Monsignor Edward Pace High School in North Miami when the Principal, Brother Leo, arrived in our classroom at about noon, notifying us of suspension of classes:

“Boys, we are dismissing school right now. Please go home and make whatever preparations you need to with your families. Let us hope and pray we have a world to come back to when this is all over.”

On arriving home, my parents got their  five offspring together and had us praying the rosary in front of a grotto to the Virgin Mary in the living room. It was serious stuff, and though I later grew into atheism, I understood that at that time this was the only response possible. Shelters were no use, not for long anyway, and besides in Florida - barely above sea level - they were a lost cause.

We all knew the reality of the nuclear threat as well, because we'd been following it on one of three major stations: ABC, CBS or NBC. There was not a plethora of alternative cable news stations back then, nor the capacity to create fake news like now. So when tens of millions of our fellow citizens tuned into one of the stations they all left with the same consciousness of the threat posed by Russian ships heading for Cuba with a U.S. blockade in their way.  No subset of citizen consciousness diverged from the whole as is the case with our balkanized media now.

None of this is hype or bull, but LIVED history, as opposed to merely read or contrived history. Living in Miami as the 13 days of the crisis unfolded my brothers and I saw the Nike missile carriers being drawn through the streets of Miami. Even the strip joints and peep flicks on NW 79th St had been shuttered.

Subsequent release of the tapes made during that time confirmed the gravity.  For those that want all the details of what went down day by day, get hold of: ‘The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis’, by Ernest R. May and Philip K. Zelikow (1997, President and Fellows of Harvard College). Therein, on p. 347, for ’10:00 A.M. Oct. 24” the diligent reader will read:

“At the same time the quarantine became effective, the Strategic Air Command moved from the general Defense Condition 3 to Defense Condition 2, the level just below general war. In addition to ICBMs and submarine-based ballistic missiles, every available bomber – more than 1,400 aircraft- went on alert. Scores of bombers, each loaded with several nuclear weapons and carrying folders for pre-assigned targets in the Soviet Union, were kept continuously in the air around the clock with shifts- refueled by aerial tankers, taking turns hovering over Northern Canada and the Mediterranean Sea. The Soviet government was presumed to be aware of these developments.”

How close did we come to perdition? Very! But the degree of proximity to nuclear holocaust was mostly learned only decades later with FOIA released files. For example, we learned Kennedy was under enormous pressure from the Joint Chiefs and especially Air Force Gen, Curtis Lemay to launch a bomber strike against Castro and an invasion.

On p. 183 of the 'Kennedy Tapes' book, one sees Lemay saying that "we have got to do more than take out the missiles" and he demands a massive air strike as well. By Oct. 1992, when Robert McNamara was interviewed on 'Today' he observed that only ex post facto did the Kennedy situation room and Pentagon learn that all 93 odd IRBMs in Cuba were already armed with single megaton warheads, and had JFK followed Lemay's directives all hell would have broken loose.

McNamara learned of this while on a conference visit to Havana in 1992, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the crisis. McNamara had asked Fidel what he would have done had the U.S. invaded Cuba. Castro didn't hesitate, informing him that over 100 armed (with single megaton warhead) missiles would have been sent flying.

Flabbergasted, McNamara pressed him: "You really would have destroyed your country?" and Fidel replied, "Yes, and you would have too in a similar situation!"

Here's how that would have played out: At the first hint of U.S. attack planes picked up on Cuban radar most or all of the 93 IRBMs would have been launched. The targets would mainly have been U.S. east coast cities: Miami, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, but a number of the missiles would have struck interior cities including Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Chicago and possibly Milwaukee.

Even as those missiles were in flight, the Kennedy White House would have been forced to go to Defcon 1, or full war condition, even as the Soviets - also now acknowledging what was happening (realizing Cuba's missile launch would make them a target), launched their own missiles. In the space of about 30 minutes, as McNamara pointed out, some 500-odd missiles would have been in the air headed for targets in the USA and USSR. 

Since most warheads at that time were in the 5-10 megaton range, the full nuclear exchange - lasting maybe an hour would have resulted in possibly 300 million dead and massive clouds of radiation polluting the rest of the planet via the trades and other winds. Within a year, plausibly most humans would be dead or dying - if not of radiation sickness then from lack of food crops due to nuclear winter - with billions of tons of dust in the atmosphere blotting out sunlight.

Those of us who lived those days retain the consciousness of how a nuclear holocaust can and might occur on a hair trigger decision, or lack of one. Fortunately for us all, we had JFK at the helm then and his abundant intelligence, excelling comprehension of facts and history enabled him to surmount the pressures of his generals. However, many of us are uncertain the hollow shadow of a man at the helm now also has those properties. By all recent evidence he doesn't, he lacks the fundaments of sound judgement and is the very type of incandescent idiot who might well trigger the incident that gets us into a thermonuclear war.

The fact this nitwit didn't even know where his naval attack "armada"  (the Carl Vinson carrier strike  group)  was when he blurted it was "on its way" to the Korean peninsula  shows he is a clueless buffoon with no accountability or leadership mettle. Worse, his illustrious staff (including NSC honcho H.R. McMaster and defense secretary James Mattis), supposedly the "adults in the room",  echoed the same nonsense. So either they were outright lying when they claimed the Carl Vinson carrier group was "approaching the Korean peninsula" - when it was three thousand miles south near Australia  - or they didn't know. Either one is cause for alarm, almost as much as the brinksmanship with North Korea.

These are the goobers now in charge of managing a real, ongoing nuclear crisis with North Korea, who don't even know where their carrier strike group is.  Conversely, JFK - unlike this Trump clown car- always insisted during the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis that he know where every ship and plane was as well as troop movements. Under no circumstance did he want to send an accidental message to the Russians causing them to believe the U.S. was planning a first strike.

Ask me why I am as worried now as I was during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and I will ask that you re-read this post again, and then get hold of the Kennedy Tapes book. As long as Trump is fouling the White House no one should "breathe easier", or sleep the sleep of the just.

See also:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/mike-whitney/72261/the-u-s-pushed-north-korea-to-build-nukes-yes-or-no

Excerpt:

"we have to understand that situation has changed in a fundamental way. North Korea now has nuclear weapons, which means that North Korea is a nuclear weapons state. US policy-makers need to repeat that to themselves and let it sink in. It changes the calculus entirely. When one realizes that the North now has the power to reduce Osaka, Tokyo or Seoul to smoldering rubble with one flip of the switch, that has to be taken seriously. In practical terms, it means the so called “military option” is off the table, "

HONORING JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS (Part One)

In this 50^th year following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, it is incumbent on those of us who actually lived during the ‘Camelot” era to remind people living now – most of whom weren’t born until much later- of his mammoth accomplishments despite serving only 3 years. This is also needed to fend off the ever present Kennedy haters,  political detractors, mud slingers -including latter-day “journalist” opportunists,  and racist filth and sewer scum who even today attempt to blight his presidency – as they have Obama’s- by their disgusting misrepresentations and trash. Even among the more sane and rational (or “liberal”) authors, it is easy to give short shrift to Kennedy if one isn’t paying attention, or one if deficient in the historical substance of his presidency - or one is viewing it through the prism of a preconceived bias.

 

Among the latter (I refuse to  dignify the racist vermin’s trash) is “historian” Robert Dallek who in a piece several years ago dismissed nearly all JFK’s accomplishments as overblown and exaggerated.  One of the provocative questions he threw out was:

 'Why do we admire a president who did so little?’

 

Why indeed? But what of the definition of “did so little”? Does Dallek regard the federalization of a Southern state’s National Guard  to preserve civil rights as doing “so little”? (As I described two blogs ago). Is he not cognizant of the political risk Kennedy took at the time- including for the Democratic Party which lost the South as a result? Does he not care? Does he seriously believe any president in this modern era would do the same today- say if a Governor of Georgia again prevented African-American students from attending schools?  If so, he's into stuff that's not even legalized yet here in Colorado!

Dallek begins his article by writing:

"True, his brilliant handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis resolved the greatest Soviet-American confrontation threatening a nuclear disaster in the 45-year history of the Cold War".

Yet despite acknowledging JFK's brilliant handling,  Dallek can't or won't admit its import to us all! And that in so choosing a non-aggressive path (naval blockade as opposed to invasion, bombing) JFK ALREADY had effectively done more than any ten presidents combined by the singular choice of NON-aggression! Because, had Kennedy not used his brain and willpower,  resisting the Joint Chiefs (particularly Gen. Curtis LeMay) , none of those other presidents would have been around to even be elected! We’d all have ended up in piles of radioactive dust and debris.

One wonders if Dallek or his equally historically deficient (and dismissive) contemporary media cohort even knows any of the background and how close we came to actual obliteration. Do they know that 90-odd IRBMs (intermediate range ballistic missiles) were actually ARMED and ready to be fired at U.S. east coast cities had Kennedy tried to invade or bomb Cuba ? (This according to a 1993 NBC Today interview with Robert McNamara that I still have on tape.) 

 

As per the article, 'Bomb Cuba! Le May Urged JFK', The Baltimore Sun, Oct. 26, 1996, p. 2A) Kennedy's Joint Chiefs, especially Air Force General Curtis LeMay and Lyman Lemnitzer, insisted Kennedy invade Cuba and take out the Soviet nuclear missile batteries and installations with bombs.

Kennedy was suspicious, and at some deep level, understood a serious and monumental danger if he acted precipitously. He chose instead to initiate a naval blockade, even as LeMay then compared JFK to Neville Chamberlain, and referred to his actions as “appeasement”.  Any other president might not have been so merciful, and might have had LeMay taken out and shot for treason.

But had JFK carried out the Joint Chief plans, all our then civilization would have been reduced to ashes. The U.S. bombing would have triggered the firing of 90-odd intermediate nuclear missiles on U.S. east coast cities, whereupon the U.S. would have rendered a nuclear retaliation on the Soviets, and vice versa. Given some 27,000 nuclear delivery systems- it is plausible that everything on Earth would have been reduced to cinders within a few hours.  So how the living hell is this not the most momentous accomplishment in all of human history, if human history would have essentially ended had he not chosen to act as he did?

 

Indeed, in the tape transcripts:  The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis’, by Ernest R. May and Philip K. Zelikow (1997, President and Fellows of Harvard College), the authors document how the country reached DEFCON 2 status (p. 347) on ’10:00 A.M. Oct. 24”. This is the stage directly before all out nuclear war! How could anyone – other than an imbecile – minimize the import of avoiding DEFCON 1?  Well, perhaps the passage of time has addled too many brains, but it hasn’t addled mine. The memories of those parlous days are as fresh and clear as ever!

 

As the referenced tapes note (I also have the actual tapes – as well as the book)ibid. :

 

”In addition to ICBMs and submarine-based ballistic missiles, every available bomber – more than 1,400 aircraft- went on alert. Scores of bombers, each loaded with several nuclear weapons and carrying folders for pre-assigned targets in the Soviet Union, were kept continuously in the air around the clock with shifts- refueled by aerial tankers, taking turns hovering over Northern Canada and the Mediterranean Sea. The Soviet government was presumed to be aware of these developments.”

At the time, I was a junior at Monsignor Edward Pace High School in North Miami, and in the middle of a Math class.  The principal (Brother Leo), entered to notify us of suspension of all classes:

 
“Boys, we are dismissing school. Please go home and make whatever preparations you need to with your families. Let us hope and pray we have a world to come back to when this is all over.”

At that I had to leave with books in tow, hoping I’d get to read them again, and trudge back home  (10 blocks away)where I found  my youngest brother – then age  9-  in near hysterics, crying and nearly wetting his pants, screaming about “The Russians gonna bomb us!” I had to calm the little idiot down, saying: “Mike, cool it! Kennedy is in charge and won’t allow that to happen! Now, go get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and stop your yelping”.

 

Make no freakin’ mistake that it took uncommon courage for Kennedy to stand up to his military whacko Joint Chiefs who were all charged and ready to bomb Cuba  “into the Stone Age”.  The worst piece of vermin demanding aggressive action was Air Force General Curtis LeMay , who actually compared JFK to Neville Chamberlain, and referred to his actions as “appeasement”.  Interestingly, we learned about a year and a half ago, that Lemay's whereabouts on the day of the assassination has always been a mystery. In a released  public audio,


http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505266_162-57368696/chilling-tape-from-air-force-one-on-day-jfk-shot/?tag=cbsContent;cbsCarousel

we learned that LeMay was airborne, even as JFK's body was being flown back to Washington. And an aide to LeMay tried urgently to reach his boss, to no avail.  Something rotten in Denmark? How about something rotten in Dallas and with the military jagoffs that wanted Kennedy dead after he punked them (6 months after the Missile crisis, removing all Jupiter missile from Turkey in a secret deal)

So, it is reasonable to conclude Kennedy actually paid with his life, for preserving our own - by opposing the military nuts.

 
For this alone, it is idiocy to claim "JFK did little".  Quite the contrary, it is self-evident except to morons that he literally saved our entire freaking civilization which – had tools like LeMay and Lemnitzer had their way, would have been reduced to nuclear ash.  

 

These things need to be known! Today, 50 years later, our news and journalism machinery is much worse, putrefied and weakened (by corporate ownership) and not up to the task of exposing truth, or even historical facts. Instead they distort history as they pervert its significance. Their noxious profit  mandate has created a faux objectivity which seeks to give two sides equal credence and space - never mind there is really only one side to the story.

 

Next: Kennedy’s other achievements

 

 

Thanks to JFK We Still Have a Civilization!

John Fitzgerald Kennedy: Faced down his  belligerent, bellicose Joint Chiefs of Staff 50 years ago over the Cuban Missile Crisis. Had he not done so, had less spine and intestinal fortitude, the world today would have been mostly smoke and ashes.

In October, 1962 the world came the closest ever to all out nuclear war, but few living today have any remote familiarity with the events.

But a blog on the topic, commemorating the Cuban Missile Crisis of 50 years ago, when the U.S. came within a hair’s breadth of a nuclear war and our whole civilization stood on a precipice - is well worth the investment of time. Especially for the benefit of all those tens of millions who didn't live through it.

Though dimwit Joe Scarborough this morning insisted to guest Caroline Kennedy that : “Those guys (generals) never would have started a war”, Caroline reminded him otherwise. And, btw, for those that want all the details of what went down day by day, get hold of: ‘The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis’, by Ernest R. May and Philip K. Zelikow (1997, President and Fellows of Harvard College).

Therein, on p. 347, for ’10:00 A.M. Oct. 24” the diligent reader (not necessarily Dumbo Scarborough) will read:

“At the same time the quarantine became effective, the Strategic Air Command moved from the general Defense Condition 3 to Defense Condition 2, the level just below general war. In addition to ICBMs and submarine-based ballistic missiles, every available bomber – more than 1,400 aircraft- went on alert. Scores of bombers, each loaded with several nuclear weapons and carrying folders for pre-assigned targets in the Soviet Union, were kept continuously in the air around the clock with shifts- refueled by aerial tankers, taking turns hovering over Northern Canada and the Mediterranean Sea. The Soviet government was presumed to be aware of these developments.”


Meanwhile, in North Miami, where I was a junior at Monsignor Edward Pace High School, the Principal, Brother Leo, arrived in our classroom at about the same time, notifying us of suspension of classes:

“Boys, we are dismissing school right now. Please go home and make whatever preparations you need to with your families. Let us hope and pray we have a world to come back to when this is all over.”


This was stunning because Bro. Leo was usually never at a loss for words. His terse dismissal and measured, grave tone emphasized the seriousness of the situation. We packed our books, not knowing when or if we’d return, and began to file quietly out of the classroom. At home, my mom was already there, arranging for us all to go to nearby St. Monica’s Church for the stations of the Rosary. At least, if we were all to be blown to smithereens, we’d all hopefully end up in the same place – in her mind.


None of this is hype or bull, but LIVED history, as opposed to read history. Living in Miami as the 13 days of the crisis unfolded my brothers and I saw the Nike missile carriers being drawn through the streets of Miami. Even the strip joints and peep flicks on NW 79th St had been shuttered.


Yet today, many – especially on the detached from reality Right – refuse to ‘give Jack his jacket’ and acknowledge an eternal debt to Jack Kennedy for basically saving us from a nuclear holocaust. But this is a basic defect and quirk of the human brain, which appears to easily process positive accomplishment but misses or fails to appreciate ‘negative accomplishment’ i.e. in doing something, making a CHOICE which averts a certain catastrophe.


Thus, Barack Obama gets no credit from the Right’s ditto heads for saving us from a second Great Depression by injecting hundreds of billions into a financial system that had suffered the equivalent of a cardiac arrest. Had he not acted to get that $800+ billion stimulus we’d likely see breadlines blocks long in every city and a 19% unemployment as opposed to 7.8%. Similarly, JFK gets no credit for saving us from a nuclear war.


WHY, you may ask, does JFK merit such credit? Even before the full book of the released tapes documenting JFK's War Room response to the Cuban Missile Crisis was published, at least a number of major newspapers provided a heads up.  We learned, for example, that Kennedy refused to bomb or invade Cuba as he was urged to do by his Joint Chiefs, especially Air Force General Curtis LeMay , who actually compared JFK to Neville Chamberlain, and referred to his actions as “appeasement”. According to one of the first major mainstream news releases after the tapes in the WH situation room were released (The Baltimore Sun, Oct. 26, 1996, 'Bomb Cuba!Le May Urged JFK', p. 2A):

"Tapes of secretly recorded White House conversations released this week show that President John F. Kennedy's military advisers strongly pressured him to bomb and invade Cuba during the missile crisis 34 years ago this month. Indeed, they forecast that war would occur whether he invaded Cuba or not.

Blasting Kennedy's cautious approach, the Air Force Chief, Gen. Curtis LeMay, told the President at a White House meeting on Oct. 19, 1962, "This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich......

Through those days Kennedy was fending off strong pressure for an attack on Cuba from congressional and military leaders such as LeMay, who told him, 'We don't have any choice but direct military action...I see no other solution...'"

On p. 183 of the 'Kennedy Tapes' book, one sees LeMay saying that "we have got to do more than take out the missiles" and he demands a massive air strike as well. By Oct. 1992, when Robert McNamara was interviewed on 'Today' he observes that only ex post facto did the Kennedy situation room and Pentagon learn that all 93 odd IRBMs in Cuba were already armed with single megaton warheads, and had JFK followed LeMay's directives all hell would have broken loose.

Here's how that would have played out: At the first hint of U.S. attack planes picked up on Cuban radar most or all of the 93 IRBMs would have been launched. The targets would mainly have been U.S. east coast cities: Miami, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, but a number of the missiles would have struck interior cities including Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Chicago and possibly Milwaukee.

Even as those missiles were in flight, the Kennedy White House would have been forced to go to Defcon 1, or full war condition, even as the Soviets - also now acknowledging what was happening (realizing Cuba's missile luanch would make them a target), launched their own missiles. In the space of about 30 minutes, as McNamara pointed out, some 7,500 missiles would have been in the air headed for targets in the USA and USSR.  Since most warheads at that time were in the 5-10 megaton range, the full nuclear exchange - lasting maybe an hour would have resulted in possibly 300 million dead and massive clouds of radiation polluting the rest of the planet via the trades and other winds. Within a year, plausibly most humans would be dead or dying - if not of radiation sickness then from lack of food crops due to nuclear winter - with billions of tons of dust in the atmosphere blotting out sunlight.

THIS is the alternative world that never occurred, but which would have, had Kennedy knuckled under to Le May and his fellow Joint Chiefs. That some blow dried moron pundits today still have the nerve to say Kennedy "never accomplished anything" boggles my mind, and makes me want to smack them all upside the head.

To put all this in even bolder context and perspective, let's bear in mind the character of the man JFK had to face down. A guy who already had a major boner for war with Cuba and Castro and had for at least three years.  Thus, LeMay and fellow Joint Chief Lyman Lemnitzer were also behind the odious plans for "Operation Northwoods", as revealed in James Bamford's 2001 book, Body of Secrets, Doubleday Books, p. 82. This was described by Bamford as (ibid):

“maybe the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government"

This treacherous campaign of terror was to include the sinking of refugee boats (carrying Cuban refugees) on the high seas, as well as the killing of innocent citizens on American cities’ streets, plus random bombings carried out in Washington, DC, Miami and other places. The objective? To deliberately incite a war with Castro's Cuba. One can easily see from both the October, 1962 exchanges and also the Northwoods information, that the JCS and especially LeMay - had a major 'Jones' for starting a war.

These things need to be known! Today, 50 years later, our news and journalism machinery is much worse, more putrefied and weakened (by corporate ownership) and not up to the task of exposing truth, facts. Its mandate instead is a faux objectivity which seeks to give two sides equal credence and space - never mind there is really only one side to the story.

What needs to stand out, above all the din of the blow dried bimbos and himbos, is that one man - one president- stood tall and faced down monumental pressure from his military chiefs 50 years ago. In doing so, he provided a courageous template for all true leaders to act and think! I wonder how many voters are processing all this as they actually consider Mitt Romney who's all but promised a new war with Iran, as well as Syria - which I suppose is one reason he insists on $2 trillion more for the Pentagon.

Another aspect that ought to give pro-Romney voters pause, is the fact he's hired on as an advisor Gen. Tommy Franks. Yes, the spitting image clone of Curtis LeMay who once loudly proclaimed: "My God can beat your God!" to the Muslim world.

What would Romney have done in a situation similar to the one JFK faced and similar pressure from military chiefs? I shudder to think!