Newly leaked documents show that US officials in 1958 cavalierly planned a nuclear strike on China over a handful of disputed islands. As Washington once more stokes tensions with China, it’s a reminder of the callous recklessness at the heart of US foreign policy.
by Branko Marcetic
Part 1
Since nuclear bombs were first dropped on civilians seventy-six years ago, the world has come close to nuclear war nearly a dozen times that we know of. At various times, sometimes at the height of tension, sometimes at entirely innocuous moments, mistakes, malfunctions, and misunderstandings have nearly brought us past the brink, were it not for last-minute realizations or a few courageous, clear-thinking individuals who refused to sign on to the unthinkable.
In many ways, things right now are more perilous than they were even during the Cold War. A series of nuclear arms control agreements have been shredded, and the United States and Russia are both adding new, more dangerous weapons to their nuclear arsenals. The “mechanisms and the safeguards to manage the risks of escalation that existed in the past,” in the words of the UN secretary-general, are no longer in place. Meanwhile, US tensions with the nuclear powers of Russia and, particularly, China are only getting worse, with the Pentagon embarking on a massive military buildup against the latter and talk of US-China war over Taiwan restarting.
It’s in the middle of all this that Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers fifty years ago in an effort to end the Vietnam War, has released dozens of pages from a 1966 study revealing just how close the world came to nuclear war while conflict over Taiwan was brewing in 1958. The pages show that the US government’s top brass made concerted plans to drop nuclear bombs on China should it try to take not just Taiwan — the headquarters of the anti-communist Chinese nationalists backed by Washington — but several of the offshore islands administered by it.
Officials today would be “asking themselves the same questions that these folks were asking in 1958,” Harvard historian Michael Szonyi told the New York Times, which broke the news of the disclosure last week. Ellsberg similarly told the Times that he didn’t believe the US officials who engaged in such “reckless” talk then were “more stupid or thoughtless than those in between or in the current cabinet.”
It’s important to keep those points in mind while reading the documents themselves, which give a startling view into foreign policy decision-making at the highest levels of the US government, and the warped mindset that underlies it.
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