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 3 - A Loaded Gun Onstage
In short, the picture painted by the study is the very opposite of the sensible, responsible US leadership pined for by those who have spent the past five years feeding the public the image of an idealized pre-Donald-Trump past. It instead shows US officials rashly jumping to nuclear strikes as a first response to Cold War conflict and ruling out the less inflammatory course of conventional warfare, well aware of global opposition to this idea and of the potential for things to spiral out of control into all-out nuclear war that informed it — all for the sake of prestige and psychological one-upmanship.
As Ellsberg told the Times, there’s no reason to believe the individuals in charge of US foreign policy today are any more reasonable, or have a view of reality any less distorted, than those who were itching to drop nuclear bombs on China in 1958. Under Trump, it was the supposed adults in the room who often urged some of the former president’s most reckless decisions on foreign policy.
We’ve always been lucky that, since 1945, the worst, most foolhardy parts of human nature have never won out when it comes to nuclear conflict. But luck has a way of running out, particularly now, as Washington stokes tensions again with China and embarks on a massive military buildup, while upgrading a nuclear stockpile that hasn’t been cut in a decade. The invention of nuclear arms was a real-life Chekhov’s gun whose damage is on a planetary scale; let’s not wait until the third act to see if it goes off.
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