…Cuban Missile Crisis replay

As explained in the Oct. 2015 and Nov. 2016 EWRs, the person in the oval office isn’t just president of the US, he is emperor of the world. He has his fingers in every country, under the guise of protecting them.

This means the whole world is intensely interested in how the emperor thinks.

DEFENSE NEWS points out that usually, a few months after an inauguration, one or more of the federal government’s foreign enemies will test the new president with some kind of military event, to reveal the new emperor’s mettle, intelligence and judgment.

If such a test occurs, it will tell us a lot more about the new emperor than all the speeches and interviews of the past two years.

The test will also likely help give a boost to defense stocks. If so, the new wave of profits will be nice, but there is more to the story than that.

To a greater extent than ever before…

…America’s future depends on the quality of its generals and admirals. Here’s why.

I don’t know the new emperor, but those who do have referred to him in terms that can be encapsulated as “notoriously thin-skinned, short-fused and hardassed.”

There are no constitutional constraints on his use of nuclear weapons. Even if all his handlers, advisors and congress counsel against it, he can, by himself, give the order to launch his missiles.7

Trump is so emotional I can easily imagine him sooner or later becoming angry at someone, throwing a tantrum and, under the doctrine of whatever-appears-necessary, ordering a nuclear strike.

If it happens, will the generals and admirals obey orders and go through with it?

I hope they have learned the lessons of…

… the Cuban Missile Crisis, when their predecessors did follow orders.

In 1961, US leaders began placing nuclear-tipped missiles in Turkey, which bordered the USSR.

In 1962, the Kremlin responded by preparing to place missiles in Cuba.

President Kennedy decided that Russian officials had no right to do what US officials had done.

For the first time in history, the president put the Strategic Air Command at defcon 2, which was one step from nuclear war. He also ordered a blockade of Cuba, an act of war.

He then called for confrontations between US and Russian warships.

Following his orders, US captains attacked Russian submarines, dropping small depth charges.

Three subs capitulated, but a fourth, the B-59, did not.

The B-59 was too deep to receive radio messages, and did not know if war had broken out. All they could tell was that explosions of unknown size and distance were happening all around them. They were afraid to surface.

Sound carries clearly through water. The crew became increasingly terrified.

Finally the sub was running out of air. Captain Valentin Savitsky became furious and decided to go nuclear.

But he needed the compliance of two other officers.

His second-in-command, Vasili Arkhipov refused to go along. They argued, but Arkhipov stood fast.

The tenacity of that one man saved the world.8

This was the era of super-large H-bombs. Ten megatons was not unusual, and the Soviets had demonstrated one that was 50-megatons.

A megaton means equal to a million tons of TNT. A 1-megaton bomb is 67 times as powerful as the one used on Hiroshima.

A 1976 article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN showed that on a windy day, the fallout from just two 1–megaton bombs could ruin an area the size of Montana. 9

I remember one newscaster reporting that US and Soviet politicians together had amassed enough bombs to kill every human 150 times, should it become necessary.

Yet US military commanders followed Kennedy’s orders.

Why did Kennedy do it?

As I have said many times, the federal government has so much power these days that the humans who can handle it and stay sane have not been born.

We are not mind readers, but Kennedy’s medical records have been released. We know now that he was a druggie. He had the most high-pressure job in the world, and in times of stress, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, he consumed a cocktail of prescription medicines: painkillers, anti-spasmodics, antibiotics, antihistamines and steroids.10

I remember that on TV he appeared normal. But with all those chemicals in him, it seems likely he was certifiably psychotic. Indeed, his entire hyper-stressed team of advisors may have been, too.

Why did military officers follow his orders?

It’s a mystery. Kennedy’s commanders were all World War II vets. Their still-living mentors were men such as Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Omar Bradley, who knew how stupid politics and politicians could be.

The only explanation I can see is that political power doesn’t just corrupt the morals and judgment of the people who have it, it corrupts those in orbit around them, too.

Political power is the legalized privilege of using brute force on persons who have not harmed anyone. Only governments have this privilege.

It is inherently evil. It rots the soul. This is why the American founders tried to create a government so small and impotent that no matter who got control of it, he or she could not do much damage.

So, political power doesn’t make only politicians nutty as fruitcakes, it also infects everyone who does their bidding.

Presidents now are under far more stress than Kennedy was. These days, the nuclear threat has diminished somewhat,11 but Washington has abandoned the gold standard, and plunged deeply into the fast spreading wars in the Mideast. The complications from just these two self-inflicted wounds alone make the Cold War period look like a game of checkers compared to today’s three-dimensional chess.

To me it is entirely plausible that since 9-11, the US emperors and their close advisors, if they had been tested by psychologists, would all have been found outside normal parameters of sanity.

We should all hope that US military officers know what happened in 1962 and are willing to follow Vasili Arkhipov’s example.