By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: September 21, 2009
In the early 1980s, according to newly released documents, Fidel Castro
was suggesting a Soviet nuclear strike against the United States, until
Moscow dissuaded him by patiently explaining how the radioactive cloud
resulting from such a strike would also devastate Cuba.
The cold war was then in one of its chilliest phases. President Ronald
Reagan had begun a trillion-dollar arms buildup, called the Soviet Union
"an evil empire" and ordered scores of atomic detonations under the
Nevada desert as a means of developing new arms. Some Reagan aides
talked of fighting and winning a nuclear war.
Dozens of books warned that Reagan's policies threatened to end most
life on earth. In June 1982, a million protesters gathered in Central Park.
Barack Obama, then an undergraduate at Columbia University, worried
about the nuclear threat and later wrote as a student and a journalist
about ways to avoid global annihilation.
The future president didn't know half the danger.
The National Security Archive, a private research group at George
Washington University, recently made public documents that reveal the
nuclear threat in new detail. The two-volume study, "Soviet Intentions
1965-1985," was prepared in 1995 by a Pentagon contractor and based on
extensive interviewing of former top Soviet military officials.
It took the security archive two years to get the Pentagon to release
the study. Censors excised a few sections on nuclear tests and weapon
effects, and the archive recently posted the redacted study on its Web site.
The Pentagon study attributes the Cuba revelation to Andrian A.
Danilevich, a Soviet general staff officer from 1964 to '90 and director
of the staff officers who wrote the Soviet Union's final reference guide
on strategic and nuclear planning.
In the early 1980s, the study quotes him as saying that Mr. Castro
"pressed hard for a tougher Soviet line against the U.S. up to and
including possible nuclear strikes."
The general staff, General Danilevich continued, "had to actively
disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences
for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S."
That information, the general concluded, "changed Castro's positions
considerably."
Moscow's effort to enlighten Mr. Castro to the innate messiness of
nuclear warfare is among a number of disclosures in the Pentagon study.
Other findings in the study include how the Soviets strove for nuclear
superiority but "understood the devastating consequences of nuclear war"
and believed that the use of nuclear weapons had to be avoided "at all
costs."
The study includes a sharp critique of American analyses of Soviet
intentions, saying the Pentagon tended to err "on the side of
overestimating Soviet aggressiveness."
New Details of Cold War Nuclear Threat - NYTimes.com (22 September 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/science/22nuke.html
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