by Jim Healton
On Veteran’s day this year (2021) I suddenly recalled that my father, a navy veteran of WWII, had marched in the Sacramento Veteran’s Day parade of 1962. He was not with the official participants in the parade. He took up the rear and carried a home-made sign that read, “After the next war, who will fight?” Instead of applause, he was called names, such as “Pinko!” and “Commie!” But he marched on to the end of the parade route. What did his sign mean and why were people calling him a communist?
Just a short time before, our country, and indeed the world, passed through one of the most frightening times in human history. On October 14th, a U.S. spy plane, flying over Cuba, revealed that the Russians were installing nuclear missiles aimed at our country. Cuba is only 90 miles off the US coast so this vastly reduced the time people could use to find shelter to survive, if possible, the immediate effects of a nuclear detonation. We had been tipped off concerning this possibility by Oleg Penkovsky, a very brave man inside Soviet military intelligence, but the pictures taken that day confirmed it.
President Kennedy, along with his military and civilian advisors, huddled together to decide what to do. The generals urged Kennedy to launch an invasion of Cuba. Indeed, a failed invasion, sponsored by the CIA, had taken place soon after Kennedy assumed office and this was a major reason why Castro wanted the Russians to place these terrible weapons in Cuba. Kennedy decided not to invade. Then, on October 22nd, the president went on television to tell the American public that he had ordered a naval blockade of Cuba to prevent Russian ships, sailing toward Cuba, from landing and reinforcing the missiles already there.
A tense stand-off ensued which lasted for several days. Today, we know that during this time a Russian submarine was cornered and refused to surface. Its captain was about to attack with a nuclear torpedo the US warship that had it cornered. But it required that all the three highest ranking officers on board agree. The captain and another of them agreed to launch but the one remaining, Vasili Arkhipov, would not agree. Instead, they surfaced. Had the torpedo been launched, war would have begun, with the real possibility of a nuclear holocaust. When the submarine arrived back in Russia, Vasili was punished for holding out, while the captain and the other officer were rewarded. Of course this did not come out until years afterward.
I was eight years old at the time and remember watching these events unfold on the nightly news with my parents. They tried to allay my fears but I knew they were anxious. Practicing “duck and cover” at school as well as hearing people talk about building bomb shelters also made me, and other children, sense the seriousness of the nuclear threat.
Finally, the Russian ships turned back and headed home. Then, through conversations on the phone, Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, worked out a deal. The Russians would remove their missiles in Cuba and we would remove ours in Turkey. By October 28th the crisis was over. The world had teetered on the brink of nuclear war and survived. That is why my father marched in the Veterans Day parade just after these events and asked the question, “After the next war, who will fight?” Once nations had these most horribly destructive weapons, who could guarantee that they would not be used once war began? And once nuclear weapons were unleashed, who would survive to fight another war?
My father, a grade school teacher, went on to start an organization called “The Sacramento Peace Center”. Its mission was to help Americans understand the need to reduce and hopefully eliminate, nuclear weapons. It was not a “communist front” organization, as was so often charged against any group working for peace in those days. In fact, my father later told me that some communists did try to infiltrate the organization and he put a stop to it. He did not excuse the communist world for its nuclear weapons program, any less than ours. He saw the first sign of hope with the nuclear test ban treaty signed by President Kennedy on August 5th, 1963, that eliminated above-ground nuclear testing and all the radioactive fall-out that those tests pumped into the atmosphere.
There have been many nuclear war close calls since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. However, the public learned about most of these after the fact. One year, within a month, we survived two close calls and we have two brave men to thank for it. On September 26th, 1983, an alarm sounded in a Russian base that monitored threats of nuclear attack. The man on duty that day was Stanislav Petrov and he had thirty minutes to decide if this alarm was genuine. As he checked his sources, all were pointing to this being a real attack from the US. However, the one source that could make it unanimous was unavailable as night had fallen over that part of the earth covered by Soviet satellites. He bravely called his superiors to tell them that the alarm was false, even though he could not then be sure of it. Later, they determined that the source of the alarm was a faulty computer.
Just a month later, NATO began conducting a war games exercise in Europe that would culminate in a simulated “Defcon 1” nuclear attack. This was at a time when the US was deploying nuclear weapons in Western Europe to counter an earlier deployment of short-range nuclear missiles by the Soviets in Eastern Europe. Needless to say, both sides were nervous, but none more so than the Soviets. When they observed the NATO war games, they began to think it was a ruse to disguise a real attack. The US and NATO were oblivious to this. But thankfully, there was a high-ranking KGB officer, Col. Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, who had been spying for the US. He, at great risk to himself, revealed that the Soviets were seriously preparing to counter what they believed was an imminent attack that would involve the use of nuclear weapons. Hearing this, the US President at the time, Ronald Reagan, scaled back the exercise and averted an unintended nuclear war.
This same president later met with the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Iceland in 1986 when they nearly agreed to full nuclear disarmament. Both men wanted to rid the world of this nuclear sword of Damocles that hangs over the head of every man, woman and child on the planet. Reagan wanted to continue developing the so-called Star Wars Defense system that would shield the US and any other country that had it, from most, if not all, nuclear missile strikes. Gorbachev balked at this. He thought that he would not be able to sell nuclear disarmament to the Russian military if it did not include a commitment by the US to scrap this program. We still don’t have a robust nuclear shield but we do have an enormous number of nuclear weapons in the world which, if launched, would reach their targets in even less time than in 1986.
As we look back, it is sobering to realize that we have escaped nuclear destruction on many occasions, several of which can be largely credited to a single brave individual.My father did not single-handedly rescue us from a nuclear war, but if we ever do eliminate nuclear weapons, and indeed, war of any kind, it will be because there will be more such people brave enough to risk derision and even death, to achieve it.And whether a day of universal peace ever arrives, I am certain that those who sincerely sought it will find in heaven the outstretched hand of the Prince of Peace and hear His words, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” (Matthew 5:9)