"The Living Would Envy the Dead"

In the fall of 1967, I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room when I noticed a copy of Look, a popular newsmagazine of the day. The headline on the cover read: "THIRTEEN DAYS -- Robert Kennedy's memoir of how the world almost ended." Intrigued, I read as much as I could before being called in for my appointment.

It turned out to be Kennedy's account of the Cuban missile crisis, in which, as his brother's Attorney General and adviser, he had been deeply involved. (His memoir was later published in book form and adapted for a 1999 movie starring Kevin Costner.) For me, this was something completely new -- five years earlier, I had heard adults speaking anxiously of "the Cuban crisis," but was too young to know anything of what it entailed.

Well, now I knew. The headline was accurate: over that period of less than two weeks, the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war -- and as RFK and other historians have emphasized, it was only through a mixture of calculated threats and back-channel diplomacy that the world was saved. (In one crucial instance, President Kennedy chose to ignore a belligerent message from his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khruschchev, and responded instead to a more conciliatory one that came later.) Robert Kennedy himself met three times -- all in secret -- with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, who died recently. The slightest miscalculation, the tiniest misinterpretation, and none of us would be here today.

I thought about this when I watched the video of President Obama and Russian president Medvedev co-signing an agreement to reduce both countries' nuclear arsenals by one-third -- a few days before Obama brought the leaders of 48 countries to the White House to discuss further reductions worldwide.

Obama has repeatedly made it clear that nuclear disarmament is high on his list of priorities. But what about the rest of us? I have no doubt that plenty of people missed these stories, or greeted them with a yawn: Nuclear weapons? That's so 20th Century. Didn't the problem end when Reagan and Gorbachev got together? Sure, I wouldn't want Al Qaeda to get hold of a nuclear device, but other than that...

Not so fast, folks. There are currently 23,000 nuclear weapons out there, 96% of them controlled by the U.S. and Russia. Under the Obama-Medvedev agreement -- which must be ratified by Congress, hardly a given these days -- reductions will take place over seven years; and even after they are completed, the total worldwide will be a "mere" 15,640. And that would include close to 1,000 controlled by other countries, some of them less stable, shall we say, than the two major players. The best we can say is that the possibility of all humanity being vaporized in a nuclear attack has significantly declined since 1962 -- the worst-case scenario now would involve "a second Hiroshima-Nagasaki" where the damage was isolated to one part of the world. But who among us would actually take comfort in this?

It's easy to see why nuclear destruction has moved to the back burner of our consciousness. Numerous other threats to the planet seem more immediate; these days the danger of nuclear assault only comes up in the context of terrorism, as mentioned earlier. And with the end of the Cold War, we've no longer had to contend with the idea of two superpowers having the capability, if not the desire, of annihilating the entire world in a matter of minutes.

Indeed, for most people, nuclear holocaust had stopped being a cause of anxiety long before the fall of the USSR. Ironically, this trend began in the aftermath of the Cuban crisis. Before 1962, plenty of intelligent people on both sides had seriously thought of nuclear war as inevitable... and in some quarters, winnable. (This was the era of underground "fallout shelters" and instructional videos telling kids to "duck and cover" when they heard the warning sirens.) After the crisis, there was an understanding that we had stepped up to the abyss and needed desperately to pull back. Within a year, Kennedy and Khruschchev (who supposedly said that after a nuclear conflict, "the living would envy the dead") had signed a treaty banning above-ground tests of nuclear weapons. Movies like Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe depicted the horror of a nuclear "mistake." It was an unspoken article of faith that what Walter Mondale called "these God-awful weapons" could never actually be used.

Yet no one in power talked about getting rid of them. That's because winnable nuclear war had been replaced by a new concept: deterrence, or Mutually Assured Destruction (yes, MAD indeed). In this scenario, if the U.S. or the Soviets (or the other members of the growing "nuclear club") got into a dispute, neither could use their nukes on the other because if attacked, each would respond in kind, thus starting a full-scale thermonuclear war.

MAD, however, created a new conundrum: Nation A can't use its nukes on Nation B, for fear of an awful retaliation; but neither can it destroy the nukes, because that would leave it helpless against any threat or demand by B. Even talking about disarmament is a no-no, because your adversaries might suspect that you've gone soft and see it as a temptation to attack. In short, what we had was a sophisticated game of chicken -- and if you remember the drag-strip sequence from Rebel Without a Cause, you know that such games don't end happily.

But until the end of the Cold War, this insanity was accepted thinking at the highest levels of government -- perhaps because no one could think of an alternative -- and people learned to live with it. Only when Reagan, in his first term, spoke more belligerently about confronting the Soviets did a serious disarmament movement spring up. And when he shifted gears and signed the pact with Gorbachev, it died down again. Though both sides retained a substantial nuclear arsenal -- old habits of thinking die very hard -- the nuclear threat had clearly diminished, and the world went back to sleep.

So this is where we find ourselves today. We know the nukes are still there, we know they're evil, we don't want people like Bin Laden to get one... but we can't rouse ourselves to take the next step, to say that nothing less than total disarmament is acceptable. We're too busy, or we're more worried about global warming or the Middle East or the economy; and anyway, we don't see the urgency, because we're the only superpower with nukes and of course we'd never use them. But without the U.S. taking the lead, no one else in the club -- not to mention wannabes like Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il -- will have an incentive to disarm. (As an Indian friend said to me years ago, "You have the bomb. Who are you to tell us we can't?") And who's to say that a Fail-Safe scenario could never occur?

Let's face it: if Obama had not chosen to call attention to this issue, it wouldn't be in the news. So let's push our Senators to approve the treaty... but also keep in mind that the threat will not end until the last weapon has been dismantled. We must continue to speak up -- our silence cedes the debate to people like Rudy Giuliani, who recently argued in National Review Online that disarmament is a "radical left" idea.

Einstein famously observed, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our ways of thinking." It's not too late to prove him wrong.