La Guerra Fría - Cap. 12. Destrucción mutua asegurada (1960-1972) - 480p

At the beginning of the 60s tensions of the Cold War became even greater. There was the threat of a confrontation. The two superpowers observed and waited, preparing meanwhile for a nuclear holocaust. World security depended on Mutual Assured Destruction. This threat of causing a Mutual Suicide is known as MAD. It's not crazy. Mutual Assured Destruction is the foundation of dissuasion.

On July 1, 1960, a RD-47 reconnaissance aircraft like this one undertook a routine mission to investigate the defensive thrones of the Soviet border. We left the Bryce Norton air base in England.

at that time it was our most advanced operations base and we were supposed to carry out that so-called routine mission at first there was no need to have problems during that flight and we thought it would be a relatively simple task despite the fact that the duration of the same was 12 hours the mission of this flight consisted of detecting our radar stations they wanted to know the location of the air defense systems of the Soviet Union

For this reason, they often flew near our borders. At first we flew in parallel to the Soviet coasts where Murmansk was located, the mouth of the Barents Sea and others. We knew that at that time the activity of the Russians in that area was very intense. I was on a service flight to intercept those planes and I went to the enemy meeting.

From the ground they guided me. When I saw the enemy plane, I identified it and communicated it to the base by radio.

"Test, test the right wing" and the commander of the aircraft, Major Palmen said: "Where the hell did that guy come from?" I made signals to the plane to follow me, but he did not obey me I communicated it to my base and asked them what I should do They answered me with an order: "Destroy it" I opened fire on the enemy plane and it started to burn

On the way back to the base, the pilots John McCone and his co-pilot Bruce Olmsted had to jump into the parachute to save their lives and were imprisoned in the Ljubljanska prison located in Moscow. The other four Americans on board perished in the air. On the front line, surveillance was constant. If it exploded, the war would soon acquire nuclear dyes.

The US Titan missiles, each armed with a nuclear head that could destroy Moscow, were ready for launch. Everything would have ended before we had time to stop and think about what we were doing. You don't need much time to launch a missile, it was an automatic procedure. At no time did we doubt that we were doing what we should.

If we had ever received a launch message referring to the PASS system, I would not doubt to say that my life expectancy was not higher than half an hour and the only thing I would have asked is if I was going to have the time needed to launch that missile before the one heading towards us reach its goal.

Pearl Harbor was still a painful wound in the minds of Americans. In Alaska, Greenland and England, BMEW radars or distant alarm radars to detect ballistic missiles were in operation. The United States did not want to be surprised again. The Cold War was a war that took place 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In our opinion, they intended to control the world and we represented one of the largest blocks with which they stumbled on their way. For this reason, we were one of their worst enemies and their main objective was to dominate our country.

They constantly faced us and things could not have gone otherwise. In my opinion, the Americans were aggressors who wanted to conquer the whole world and we would have to protect the world. In 1961, the new president of the United States, John Kennedy, took possession of his position in the midst of a tense nuclear world. His predecessor Eisenhower inherited the doctrine of massive reprisal.

The term "massive retaliation" as it was understood at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s was a policy of responding to major Soviet attacks, for example in Western Europe with a massive nuclear response.

The theory of the massive repressal had been conceived in a time of clear American superiority. Now the Russians were trying to get to their level.

There was a kind of obsession to reach and overcome the Americans to try to show the whole world that we were not far from them, that we also had nuclear weapons. There were those who thought that we could only avoid a nuclear war by facing world imperialism with a force of similar size to theirs.

Krusev used a very dramatic way to remind the West of the power of the Soviets. He filed a moratorium on nuclear tests. October 30, 1961. The crew of a Russian bomber prepares to launch the largest bomb he had ever seen in the world.

The explosion was equivalent to that would have caused more than 50 million tons of TNT, a number of explosives that exceeded that was used during the Second World War. 80 kilometers away people suffered the effects of the bomb. Khrushchev said he wanted this bomb hanged on imperialist heads like Damocles sword. Kennedy accepted the challenge. "In view of the Soviet action, it will be the policy of the United States.

But the super bomb was not the first of a series of Soviet nuclear tests, which made Kennedy angry.

I remember that we counted the seconds and then we dropped the bomb. We had to wear special glasses and run the curtains to protect us from radiation. We put on the glasses but we forgot to run the curtains because we wanted to take a look outside.

Suddenly it was like it was dawn. The clouds scattered and we could see a beautiful image, very beautiful, like a fairy tale. It was a mushroom that did not stop growing. It climbed high and soon left us behind.

The radiation was so high that they came out of the scales of the meters, but of course we don't even remember that. Then suddenly a strong wind occurred when the expansive wave reached the plane and the controls went crazy. I tried to do with them to recover control quickly. The plane was giving bandages from side to side. So we knew what a nuclear explosion was.

It became clear that nothing would stop the Russians. They were not only launching that big bomb, but many others, and we essentially did the same. We looked for bombs everywhere, we took them to Nevada, and we detonated them just to respond to those Russian tests. It was a crazy period. In the West, public opinion was turning its back on the accumulation of bombs and nuclear tests.

In Great Britain, what began in 1958 as a march towards the Aldermaston armament center, was growing until it became an annual congregation in which dozens of thousands of people took part who protested for nuclear disarmament.

We took very seriously the fact that if a nuclear bomb was used in the London area, the effect would be so massive and would affect such an extensive geographical area that it would even affect people who had their homes miles and miles away. And we talked very seriously when we considered the possibility that this would happen.

The scientists have created it and it is there, ready for someone to get it and want to use it. Kennedy and his Secretary of Defense, McNamara, were increasingly aware of the danger of basing their actions on the strategy of massive repression. Nuclear weapons have no military utility whatsoever.

only serve to dissuade the contrary of use and this means that one himself should never take the first step against an opponent that has nuclear equipment to do it would be a suicide and it did not take long to get to that conclusion at first I did not know the difference between a nuclear weapon and a conventional weapon but it took me a while to find out in a few months I came to this conclusion the problem was how to put it into practice

McNamara presented himself before the heads of the state major with a very seductive alternative the soviet cities would no longer be used as white the only target of the attacks would be the soviet military forces this measure received the name of exclusion of the cities counter-attack force

And if both parties put into practice this measure, the number of victims in the unlikely and undesirable event that a nuclear war would be unleashed would be less.

This idea of ​​a plan that excluded cities and according to which only the military bases, missiles and submarines would be attacked, it was nothing more than an attempt to make the nuclear war morally acceptable. With this measure they tried to deceive all and every one of us.

Russians were not the only ones who showed sceptics. The head of the strategic air command, the commander General Power, was informed of the plan by one of the McNamara assistants.

General Powell insisted that the only way to deal with those barbarians was to make them jump everyone in the air and said: "But who is going to win this war?" and added: "I would be satisfied with two Americans and just one Russian, that would mean that we would have won" I answered: "Well, maybe one of those two Americans was a woman"

October 1962, to try to reduce the nuclear superiority of the United States, Khrushchev sends missiles to Cuba. It was real. It was not a joke. They were moving medium range missiles to Cuba, and I think there is no doubt of their reasons to take this measure. There should already be some there, and they certainly had a lot of facilities to introduce them on the island. It was a very tense situation.

Kennedy ordered a blockade and put his forces scattered around the world in a maximum alert situation. A large number of B-52 planes loaded with hydrogen bombs were ready for a war. During the Cuban crisis, when the siren sounded, we left like the soul that carries the devil.

I mean we were scared of what was approaching us so we just ran to the airplane we supplied energy and air to start the engines we moved that crank as fast as we could and we waited for a message from the strategic air command in which they would communicate the instructions on the type of exercise that was never we knew if we were in front of a simulacrum or if it was a real offensive at that time we had a hard time because we never knew what was going to happen

Faced with Kennedy's nuclear superiority, Khrushchev sent his ships to pick up all the missiles and take them back to Russia. Both the Khrushchev government and Kennedy's government proved to be sufficiently sensible and found a way out of this situation. The Cuban missile crisis was of great importance because it showed how close the world was to the edge of the nuclear precipice.

Moscow and Washington realized that it had to improve direct communication between the two cities. For this reason they installed the red telephone to keep in touch permanent. The following summer, impressed by how close they had been to start a world war, the Soviet Union, United States and Great Britain signed a treaty to limit nuclear tests. More atmospheric tests would not be carried out. Nuclear tests would continue to be carried out, but underground.

In Russia, the Kremlin had learned a lesson: it would never face the United States again from a position of inferiority. The lack of nuclear weapons and the weakness of the Soviet Union were a hard blow for Russian leaders. It was like a cold shower for the government, which realized that all those weaknesses had to be overcome.

The Soviet Union began to store nuclear forces and added to its arsenal hundreds of missiles. The Americans had to accept it because the reality was that they could no longer continue destroying all the Soviet forces.

It became clear that if we said that our main proposal consisted of focusing on the military capacity of the other side, those objectives would proliferate to such an extent that we could no longer establish a limited amount of money to be spent on strategic forces. In both sides, the military admitted that they could no longer protect their respective countries from destruction.

The superpowers had discovered that they had something in common. They were both interested in avoiding nuclear war. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the Cold War, which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation's closest allies,

A logic was beginning to emerge that left the discovery a dark panorama. Nuclear disarmament was an objective that could never be achieved, although a nuclear war was unthinkable.

In 1964, McNamara came to the conclusion that this plan of exclusion of cities was a dangerous illusion. Now he was convinced that the war could only be avoided with the threat of mutual suicide.

McNamara in particular was totally convinced that the only possible strategy was the one known as MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, and this meant that the only stable disuasive element that could be counted in the world was for both sides the ability of one and the other to end up with 25% of the population of the rival country.

It's not madness. Mutual assured destruction is the foundation of dissuasion. Today it's a derogative term, but those who denigrated it are those who do not understand what dissuasion means.

If we want a stable nuclear world, if it is an oxymoron, which, to put it another way, can first get a stable nuclear world, each part has to know for sure that it can deter the other.

for this there must be a balance and to reach that balance you have to understand that if one of the two parts begins to use nuclear weapons the other side will respond with the power enough to inflict unacceptable damage at this time the submarines played a crucial role

for the more successful both opponents had to be able to counterattack even after suffering a surprise attack the system polaris was a murderer of cities it has a capacity to ensure the destruction of any way of life that the Soviets had could not destroy therefore if they decided to make a first attack one day the system would be able to counterattack would take some time to receive the message from some national headquarters destroyed

but the day would come when the nuclear heads of the missiles would rain on them and then they would pay for their offensive I don't think the officer in command doubted at any time when it came time to launch we didn't think about what we had at home of course but we didn't let those thoughts influence our actions and we would have time to think about it after fulfilling our duty

people in the platoon were near nuclear weapons the fact that the people who were next to the nuclear weapons were people subjected to great tension and who were willing to use such weapons represented a great danger to the world and of course we felt uncomfortable but we had to fulfill our obligations just like the Americans with theirs

and if necessary we would have done it. How would all this have ended? The consequences for the world would have been really sad.

From the beginning I thought it was something immoral, decrepit. That is, I do not accept war when its main goal is to kill people. The first end of the war is to win that bloody conflict with the lowest possible number of casualties, first in the own side and second in the rival. It is always tried to minimize losses on both sides, but first of all it is one and what everyone wants is to win the war and that everything ends as soon as possible.

If the first day had involved attacks on cities, then it would have been just unbelievably intense. Ten millions of deaths. We would have had to face an incredible catastrophe. Even one million people were killed and many material losses. Even in a large city, a thermonuclear weapon would have caused unimaginable damage and unprecedented damage.

50 million people lost their lives in the Second World War, but that didn't happen in one day. In 1963, Peter Watkins, a British filmmaker, produced a documentary to show what a nuclear war would mean. 9:16 a.m. A single megaton nuclear missile overshoots Manston Airfield in Kent and airbursts six miles from this position.

At this distance, the heat wave is sufficient to cause melting of the upturned eyeball, third degree burning of the skin, and ignition of furniture. Twelve seconds later, the shock front arrives. Run!

The blast wave from a thermonuclear explosion has been likened to an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell. This film was named "Game of War". The BBC banned its broadcast. It was not broadcast on television until 20 years later.

During a couple of years, or at least for a whole year, great efforts were made to persuade the American people that it was worth investing in civil defense and practicing the techniques that were going to be used. This campaign failed. The public was not very interested in the subject.

In my opinion, the Americans came to the conclusion that if a thermonuclear war had to explode, the civil defense methods, although they would serve to preserve some lives, could not guarantee the same luck for most of them.

In addition, what would come next would make it not worth living.

Officially the Russians took much more seriously civil defense, but the reality was not very hopeful.

when people finally began to realize how dangerous these weapons were began to joke about the subject they said that if they threw a nuclear bomb near us what we would have to do would be to cover us with a white sheet and drag us to the cemetery if we could get there in my opinion the leadership is that there will still be no nuclear war

The leaders were guided by the idea that if it was not going to be a nuclear war, why spend money that on the other hand we did not have enough? On the other hand, in the event of war, civil defense would be of no use. The Russian attitude was very sensible and purely pragmatic. Although the possibility of a total war was distant, the dissuasion entranaba its own dangers.

In 1966 a B-52 that flew over the coasts of Spain tried to land in full flight with the help of a tank plane. In the town of Palomares, Simó Hortz, he was ready to go fishing like every day. I was fishing in front of Villaricos and the planes passed over that we always normally always looked at the planes. Two B-52 were going and landing.

and those behind it, you can see that they were broken and two planes exploded. I remember it, everything was fire in the air and pieces falling to the ground. Once everything fell to the ground, I remember all the neighbors running, going to the place where the smoke came out, because it was supposed that something was burning there. When the planes broke into pieces, four hydrogen bombs scattered across different parts of the coast. Three fell to solid ground and one was lost in the sea.

I saw it very clearly, it fell very close to me, the bomb. And when I saw the interest of the Americans, all the 6 fleets here, 5,000 soldiers came, there in the countryside, in the land, generals, colonels, and so many people came, great people from North America. The US fleet went to the sea to find the missing bomb. Those who stayed on land had to face another type of problem.

When the bombs hit the ground, the safety devices prevented a thermonuclear explosion, but the high-power explosives used to detonate the nuclear charges had exploded, thus dispersing plutonium radioactive particles in the air. They began to pass medical recognition, well, recognition here in the town, with a counter, then

There were neighbors who had to throw the clothes away because it was contaminated. There were neighbors who had to boil it. The houses were washed with detergents, with water. But at no time did the Americans, I understand, they didn't tell us or tell us. People were scared because at that time no one knew what it was. Only that they had forbidden you not to eat from that, not to go out into the street, not to touch a piece. Everything, it was everything, everything was permanently forbidden.

More than four barrels and a half of contaminated land were sent by boat to the United States to proceed to bury them. In the sea continued the search for the lost bomb. The Spaniards feared that the Mediterranean was contaminated. The ambassador of the United States, Vidal Duke, bathed in the sea in front of the cameras. - Do you detect any radioactivity in the water? - If this is radioactivity, I love it.

Eight days after the accident occurred, a US submarine found the missing bomb. It was intact. The Pentagon called the lost nuclear bombs "Broken Arrow". Palomares was number 14 since 1950, but it would not be the last. The number of Soviet accidents is still unknown.

Russian military did not convince the concept of McNamara of assured destruction. They considered that their main duty was to protect their homeland. For this reason they worked to create AVM devices or ballistic anti-missiles that could destroy US missiles in full flight. In my time it was shield and sword.

At first it was fought with sword and shield. Then they began to use tanks and anti-tank weapons to fight them.

Now it turned out that a missile was not invulnerable Science and technology advanced so fast that it was already possible to face the most dangerous and invincible weapons For the United States, Russia's AVM devices were a hard blow They were faced with a terrible paradox

By creating a defensive system, Russia had endangered the delicate nuclear balance.

We thought it was like a umbrella. Would a umbrella hurt someone? We just open it when it rains. That's how we saw the ABM system. It was like a umbrella to protect our population from a possible missile attack. In terms of MAD, if we believe in mutual assured destruction,

everything that affects both sides is mutual, hence the assured mutual destruction. It must be assured. It must be mutual and it must also be assured. In this way, everything that affects both sides, one or both, to its ability to kill 20% of the population of the rival, is by definition a destabilizing element. The introduction of the ABM system destabilized the assured mutual destruction.

the balance of terror. Both sides were terrified by the nuclear weaponry. We knew they would not attack and we would not either. But if one of the two sides managed to counter the other's ability to counterattack, then it would be in a very advantageous situation.

Also in the United States had been developing an AVM system, but McNamara was reluctant to authorize its production. The system was very easy to overcome and also did not go into the accounts.

The ratio of costs of defense systems against those of attack was very negative because if to produce defensive weapons, for example, $ 5 for the offensive, only one was missing. Therefore, the economic aspects favored the investment in offensive systems.

McNamara convinced President Johnson to abandon the production of AVM devices but only if the Soviets agreed to do the same in 1967 the Middle East war brought the international tension to the point of ebullition the United States supported Israel while the Soviet Union stood on the side of Egypt, Syria and Jordan

Israel did not need much time to obtain a crushing defeat on its enemies. The United States, afraid that the Soviet Union would come to Egypt's aid, prepared the 6th fleet to take action. In the Six-Day War, Israel and Egypt were confronted.

For this reason, the red phone was used for the first time. And one of the messages that Kosygin sent to President Johnson was: "If you want war, you will have war." It was a moment of great terror. To reduce the prevailing tension, President Johnson and the Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin, they agreed to meet in Glassboro, New Jersey. Despite the crisis in the Middle East, the ABM was the first point of the program.

The president and the prime minister met.

First he took the word of the president and said: "We have to reach an agreement so that both sides stop manufacturing those ABM systems, which on the other hand are extremely expensive. Kosygin responded: "I am not in favor of that proposal. Why put objections to a system whose purpose is to defend the people? Defense is a moral principle while aggression is immoral.

Missiles represent aggression. If you agree to reduce the number of missiles, then we will talk about reducing our defense system. While discussions continued on the ABM, American scientists were preparing measures to counter them and they started with the MIRV, multiple independently directed reentry vehicles.

Now a single missile could carry 10 independent nuclear heads capable of destroying each of them an entire city.

when we enter the era of the mir the problems of strategic defense acquired a higher level of complication and also became more expensive because there was to devise different ways of getting multiple nuclear heads and all that garbage that we would throw into the atmosphere to induce error to the defense systems enemies

you can hit one ballistic missile. A device against ballistic missiles is enough to destroy one of those missiles. But now imagine that the ballistic missile in question had 10 independent nuclear heads. Then to destroy it would take at least 10 ABMs.

Here we have the figures to establish the comparison. The United States of America has in the ground installations of its launch bases 1,054 ballistic missiles. To counteract the effect of the same, we would have needed more than 10,000 ABMs.

An exorbitant figure. The Soviet Union came from the fact that if we don't stop this race,

The Soviet Union soon realized that if it did not stop the arms race, the United States, which enjoyed a better economic situation, could easily overcome us. Our leaders began to understand that we would have to choose between continuing to build socialism and communism or dedicate ourselves to manufacturing missiles.

In 1969, the two superpowers together spent more than 50 million dollars a day on nuclear weapons. It was a rhythm that seemed unsustainable to both parties. In the end they managed to meet in Helsinki to try to stop the armament career. These negotiations were called SALT.

"SALT stands for strategic weapons limitation" "It was an effort to put a kind of stop to the accumulation of strategic weapons launch systems" To reach an agreement was not going to be a simple task

It was like sinking into a swamp with your eyes closed. There were many unknowns and many problems to organize all those aspects. And one of the main reasons was that, before going to the meetings, Brezhnev called the members of the delegation and warned them very seriously that they should not talk more about the account.

He reminded them that the KGB would be listening to them and that if they did not obey, they would find themselves waiting for them in the Ljubljana prison. The Soviets were even more indecisive, if possible, because they feared doing something that would involve any kind of intrusion into their society.

and in fact it was inevitable that any subject related to the control of real weapons and will carry the relevant inspections and verifications etc. and this for the Soviets was like a sentence negotiations were prolonged throughout 1970 and 1971 both parties tried to adapt to the philosophy of the other

The Soviets really had it in their stomach, in their bones, in their veins, that right, that inherent right that nations have to defend themselves. In those first days there was no discussion of technical nature, of analytical-strategic nature. It was simply about the right that God has given us, even if they had not said God,

the right that every nation has to defend itself the Soviet Union felt naked and unprotected completely surrounded by the US nuclear forces

It was very difficult to protect that nation. When we improved our own ballistic missiles, although we did not have many, we realized that they had served to balance the balance. But at the beginning of the conversations we remembered all the types of weapons with which they could attack us.

Among the guests, Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor of Richard Nixon, held private meetings with the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. These meetings enabled the introduction of corrections or modifications, without any of the parties involved being discredited.

Speaking in private with Kissinger, we could establish the official point of view, and then talk more freely.

I said: "Henry, be careful or you will realize that ..." And I was thinking aloud. Then he commented: "Well, Anatoly, why do we have to endure this? Why don't we do it another way?"

sitting around a table the two rival forces made progress on the subject of anti-missile systems but just touched the most destabilizing of new technologies the multiple nuclear heads or mirv but this subject was not very widely discussed this issue was not discussed because at that time the Americans had that technology and the Russians did not

We consider that we should have it too. Finally in May 1972, after more than three years of negotiations, President Nixon moved to Moscow to sign the SALT agreements with Prime Minister Brezhnev. The ABM systems had been discredited and both parties had reached an agreement to limit them. The only agreement regarding the offensive weapons was nothing more than a temporary suspension of missile launchers.

superpowers were learning to cooperate however their failure to control the mv provoked that in the following decade russia and the united states added 12,000 nuclear heads to their respective arsenals preparations for the world's annihilation continued their course