No no, not the present POTUS. There is commentary by the bushel about that, you
don’t need more from me.
Rather, this is simply another noticing of historical
precedents and parallels, for the benefit of those who were born yesterday.
~
There is no high-ranking military officer serving the
current administration, remotely as scary General Curtis E. LeMay, a proponent
of pre-emptive all-out nuclear war, and commander of the SAC (which was in a
position to carry out his dream at a nod from their commander). JFK didn’t like him, but didn’t fire him; rather, he promoted him to the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. (Partly
along the lines of the old maxim, “Better to have him inside the tent pissing
out, than outside the tent pissing in.” But that's a risky strategy. ) It would be anachronistic to call LeMay “a character
out of Dr Strangelove”; rather,
that movie classic partly based its characters on him.
As McGeorge Bundy phrased it in July of 1961:
The only plan the United States had
for the use of strategic weapons
was a massive, total, comprehensive obliterating attack upon the Soviet Union -- an attack on the
Warsaw Pact countries and Red China, [with] no provision for separating them
out. … An attack on everything Red.”
Quite different from using a bunker buster on Pyongyang’s
missile sites.
As indicated, JFK was not as hawkish as LeMay, nor even as
his hot-headed brother RFK.
But he too could be provocative.
Re a June 3, 1961 head-to-head meeting with Khrushchev, which Kennedy
prefaced by saying “This is the nut-cutter”:
“Force would be met by force,”
Khrushchev warned Kennedy …
“The President concluded the
conversation,” noted the transcript, “by observing that it would be a cold
winter.”
-- Richard Reeves, President
Kennedy: Profile of Power
(1993), p. 171
What -- switching the subject to something less
controversial, like the weather, to avoid confrontation? No; then as now, there was a problem with self-censured news.
What Kennedy actually said was
stronger: “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war. It will be a cold winter.”
-- id.
And, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 18 Oct 1962:
Acheson was appalled when he met
alone with the President, and heard him use the same phrase, “Pearl Harbor in
reverse” -- as if the United States were planning a sneak attack without
provocation.
“I don’t know where you got that,” Acheson
said to John Kennedy. “It is unworthy of you to talk that way.”
-- id, p. 378
-- id, p. 378
Similarly,
Stevenson was shaken by the
President’s casual manner, as two years before Kennedy had been shocked by Eisenhower’s casual talk of
nuclear weapons.
-- id, p. 275
~
As always, our purpose is neither to trash JFK, nor to excuse the present fellow, but simply to provide a spot of perspective.
For the full roster of posts on this theme, click here.
For the post that launched the series:
The problem with a USA/DPRK war (if it happens) is that a country with nuclear defences is going to �������� and have its government deposed. Such a war cannot be allowed to start because it would be bad for nuclear-arms sales, which apparently matter more than anything else.
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