For the Symposium on Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (Knopf, 2020).
Martin Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon is a gripping, nail-biting account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and so much more. It would be hard to overstate how quickly the book grabs your attention and provides a frightening account of how close the world came to nuclear obliteration in October 1962. But, if it is even possible, the book’s larger account of what the author calls “nuclear roulette” is even more frightening.
Those of us who teach and write about the separation
of powers in the context of war spill barrels of ink debating such questions as
whether Congress has given away too much of its authority to the executive;
whether the courts have correctly stayed their hands with respect to a host of
questions surrounding war prosecution, including enforcement of the War Powers
Resolution; and more recently, whether Congress needs to bring up to date its
Authorization for Use of Military Force to address new enemies and new fronts
in the war on terrorism. Sherwin’s book
suggests that in the nuclear context, such debates may be, if my colleagues in
this symposium will forgive me, largely “academic.” Indeed, as Sherwin’s work lays bare, we have
built a nuclear infrastructure that can bring us to the brink of destruction
based on a handful of miscues and/or failures of diplomacy, and from which we
may only be saved by sheer luck and the good judgment of a single individual who
happens to be in the right place at the right time.
That, in any event, is one of the key points that
Sherwin makes in the book. In his words,
the Cuban Missile Crisis “was the ultimate reality check: Nuclear threats could
lead to conflicts regardless of intentions.”
Quoting political scientist Scott Sagan, Sherwin goes further to suggest
that the crisis revealed the all-too real potential for “‘accidental nuclear
war.’” To make his point, Sherwin sets
forth in detail here the miscues and misunderstandings that caused the standoff
between Kennedy and Krushchev to escalate to the brink. Continuing, he walks the reader through how,
in the end, despite the desire of those leaders to “untie the knot” and reach a
diplomatic resolution (to borrow from Krushchev’s language in a letter to
Kennedy), it all came down to the sound judgment of a young Soviet naval
officer who happened by chance to be on a particular Soviet B-59 submarine approaching
the waters off of Cuba. In recounting
the events of the standoff, Sherwin tells us that he began a skeptic but emerged
in agreement with Dean Acheson’s earlier account of the crisis, concluding that
the world was saved only because of “plain dumb luck.”
Now in this contribution, I do not want to spoil a
good story, and Sherwin is a master storyteller. Thus, I will refer the reader to his book so
that he can walk you through how the tale unfolds. What I can say is that it is hard to emerge
from reading Sherwin’s account of the crisis and his explication more generally
of the proliferation of nuclear weapons of war without coming to the belief
that the notion of stockpiling the same as a “deterrent” to war (so-called
“nuclear diplomacy”) is madness.
This is, to be sure, the main contribution of the
book, and it is a deeply important one at that.
All the same, I wish here to draw out another one of
the book’s contributions. Gambling with Armageddon underscores
that as much as we may wish to theorize as to how the separation of powers were
designed to work and/or how they should work, when it comes to nuclear
standoffs, none of that matters nearly as much as the character and judgment of
the relevant actors in the equation.
This lesson, moreover, applies not only to high-level political actors,
but extends all the way down the line to the naval officer far from home tasked
with making a split second decision about whether to unleash a weapon with the potential
for catastrophic consequences.
In this respect, Sherwin adds to a body of
literature in the war context that has made this point before. But given the context in which he is writing
and the narrative he weaves, the point extends much further than prior
accounts. To flesh out what I mean,
consider a counterfactual. (As Sherwin
notes here, he loves counterfactuals. So
do I.) What if it had not been President
Lincoln at the helm in 1861 charged with maintaining the Union? And what if it had not been Lincoln at the
helm in 1863? Would another president
have issued the Emancipation Proclamation and begun then and there to address
the stain on our nation’s constitutional and moral fabric that slavery wrought? As the Supreme Court wrote in the immediate
wake of the war in Ex Parte Milligan,
“[w]icked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law,
may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln; and if this right
is conceded, and the calamities of war again befall us, the dangers to human
liberty are frightful to contemplate. . . .” Lincoln had been dead but a year and the
Court was already ready to put him on Mount Rushmore, while also recognizing
his exceptionalness.
In my own work, I have drawn comparisons between
President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill during World War II. For his part, Roosevelt set in motion the
events that led to the mass incarceration during the war of some 120,000
Japanese Americans (over 70,000 of whom were United States citizens), disregarding
what he had been told by his closest advisers–namely, that doing so would
violate the Constitution. Roosevelt only
reluctantly agreed to closing the camps once he won reelection in 1944 and was
tipped off that the government would lose an important Supreme Court case that challenged
the legality of the camps, Ex parte Endo. By contrast, Churchill is most responsible
for winding down Britain’s domestic internment program under what was known as Regulation
18B. Invoking British constitutional
tradition, Churchill declared that “such
powers . . . are contrary to the whole spirit of British public life and
British history.” To be sure, there were
important differences that may account for the two executives’ contrasting
approaches, not the least of which were the ethnic make-up of those detained in
each program and the fact that Churchill did not have to stand in a general
election during the war. But the point
remains that Churchill took a leadership role in shutting down a wildly popular
program, while Roosevelt had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do so (and
despite being told repeatedly that the Japanese American incarceration would
and did violate the Suspension Clause).
Here is what Sherwin’s account adds. It is not just the leaders in the oval office
whose character, judgment, and values matter when it comes to waging war. In an age when the push of a button can
unleash massive destruction, it is also the character, judgment, and values of
the individual on the front lines who staffs that button that matters. (Indeed, the story Sherwin tells is one that
history has witnessed happen more than once,
and underscores the dangers of taking humans out of the equation, as countless
viewers, including President Reagan, came to appreciate from watching the movie
War Games.) To borrow from Milligan, we may not always have a Washington or Lincoln, or in the
case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Captain Vasily Alexandrovich Arkhipov, to
save us. And, if this point “is
conceded, and the calamities of war again befall us, the dangers to human
liberty [and life as we know it] are frightful to contemplate. . . .”
Amanda L. Tyler is the Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. You can reach her by e-mail at atyler at berkeley.edu