Thatbattlelost, the 88-year-old veteran of the Kennedy and Johnsonadministrations hasrefused to fade away. He has now given his life overto ringing alarm bellsaround the USand the rest of the world over a far greater threat with which he was onceintimate – imminent nuclear apocalypse. In his Washingtonoffice, he makes calls and pensspeeches and articles on the subject,amid stacks of files and papers on a vastwooden desk he took with himwhen he left the World Bank, of which he waspresident from 1968 to1981. But once more, McNamara is being ignored by hissuccessors ingovernment. Nuclear armageddon is aperil most people here and in the UScomplacently associate withMcNamara’s cold war generation, now safelyconsigned to fuzzy newsreel memoriesof the Cuban missile crisis. It isMcNamara’s mission to tell them they arevery wrong.
“Neitherthe Americanpeople nor the British people really understand the dangerstoday,” hesays, jabbing at the air, every bit as passionate and cogentas when he leftthe Ford Motor Company to work for John Kennedy, onlyfar more aware of thepitfalls of power. “This is very, very dangerousfor the world. This is aproblem for the world, and the world mustbecome active, and it is not.”
Thedangers, in McNamara’seyes, are twofold. First, there is thepossibility of an accidental launchwhile the US and Russia still havethousands of warheads on a hair trigger, 14years after the end of thecold war. He describes the nuclear-readiness policyas “immoral,illegal, militarily unnecessary, and very, very dangerous interms ofthe risk of accidental use”.
Second,and even moreseriously, McNamara thinks, there is the increasing chancethat al-Qaida orsome other terrorist group will one day put togetherits own bomb.
“Duringthe cold warperiod there were very, very great dangers but . . . thedanger and the riskwere controlled by the political leaders. Here, thedanger may be outside thecontrol of political leaders.”
McNamarais not the onlyformer Pentagon overlord concerned about the directionin which events aremoving. Last year, Bill Clinton’s defence secretaryWilliam Perry made a speechin which he admitted he was more fearful ofthe nuclear threat than everbefore, and estimated that the chance of anuclear detonation on USsoil overthe next decade was as high as 50%. McNamara shies away fromputting figures onthe risk, but he agrees with Perry, beliving theworld’s current plight is”intolerable”.
May could have been themonth that something was done to contain these growing existential dangers. In New York,little noticedand little covered in the media, delegates from aroundthe world sat down totry to strengthen the 1970 Non ProliferationTreaty. Unusually for suchgatherings, there was a high degree ofconsensus on what should be done.Broadly speaking, there should bestricter controls on civilian nuclear powerprogrammes to prevent thembeing used as a cover for building a bomb, andpenalties for states suchas North Koreawho walk away from the NPT. On theother side of the equation, the clubof five nuclear states should keep pastpromises to disarm.
Straightforward, almost allthe delegates thought. But progress was blocked by the intransigence of the US and Iran. The Americans refused tocontemplate keeping past disarmament pledges like Clinton’ssignature on the Comprehensive TestBan Treaty. The Iranians refused tocountenance any mention of their nuclearprogramme as a subject forconcern and surveillance.
The conference was adisaster. It took a fortnight to agree an agenda. By the time McNamara arrivedin New Yorklastweek to appeal to the delegates and suggest paths out of the impasse,itwas already too late. Failure was guaranteed. “I felt they’daccomplishednothing,” he says.
McNamarabelieves theUnited Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan, should pickup the challenge andbring NPT violators to account before the securitycouncil. That idea drew somesupport from member states, but none so farfrom the most powerful.
Curbing the nuclearambitions of radical states such as Iranand North Koreaisnot going to be easy, McNamara acknowledges, but he suggests thatcombiningdemands for disarmament with threats of regime change, as theBushadministration is doing, is not the best diplomatic approach. Asfar as thethreat of a terrorist nuclear bomb is concerned, the mostpractical course ofaction, most experts agree, is to attempt to squeezesome of the atomictoothpaste back in the tube by gathering up andguarding the fissile materialleft over by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After the end of the coldwar, two USsenators,Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, designed a programme to do justthat,funding security around the old nuclear stockpiles and paying tokeep weaponsscientists in gainful employment. But today, that programmeis woefullyunder-funded – at a recent conference, Nunn told McNamarathe scheme was shorta billion dollars. “Now with a $400bn defencebudget which we have at thepresent time, excluding Iraqand Afghanistan.. . I can’t think of a more important use of $1bn than to pursueNunn’sprogramme to control fissile materials,” says McNamara.
Meanwhile, US strategicpolicy is still built on the cold war foundations of constant nuclearreadiness. “While we are speaking, we, the United States,have 6,000 strategic warheads deployed, each oneon average thedestructive power of the nuclear bomb that killed 100,000 humanbeingsat Hiroshima,”hesays. Two thousand of those warheads are ready to launch on15-minutewarning – a state of affairs McNamara describes as “so bizarreas to bebeyond belief”.
Thestrange world ofmutually assured destruction is one with which McNamarais intimately familiar.When he was defence secretary, the commander ofthe US strategic air command carried aspecial telephone with him day and night with a secure connection to thepresident.
Ifthat call was made, thegeneral’s orders were to answer by no later thanthe end of the third ring. Ifhe was told a nuclear attack on the USwas under way, he had betweentwo and three minutes to decide if it wasa false alarm and then recommend howto respond. The president then had10 minutes to ponder what to do next.McNamara says it is only by luckthat call was never made, given the inherentlikelihood of mistakes insuch a system. Throughout the 1962 Cuban missilecrisis, after theSoviet Union smuggled nuclear warheads on to America’sdoorstep, he was at President Kennedy’s side as the fate of the world hung inthe balance.
“On4.30 in theafternoon on Saturday, October 27 1962, after a full day ofmeeting of thepresident’s executive committee with President Kennedy,the joint chiefsrecommended that we undertake a strike on Cuba within roughly threedays,” he recalls. The CIA did not think the missiles had yet reached Cuba and thePentagon did not think the Soviets would put up much of a fight on such adistant battlefield. They were both wrong.
“Itwasn’t until 29years later that we learned at that specific moment -4.30 in the afternoon,Saturday October 27 62 – that the Soviets hadsomething in the order of 170nuclear warheads on the soil of Cuba,”McNamara says. “It would have been total disaster if we’d moved ahead. Andit was just by a hair that we avoided it.”
Untilthecrisis was defused and the missiles were withdrawn, McNamara wonderedifeach day would be the last. “I didn’t leave the Pentagon for 10 days.Islept there. And I remember one Saturday night that I said … ‘Wemight not bealive to see another Saturday night’.” Arguably, onlysomeone who hasknown first hand how close the world has come to self-destruction can convincinglysound the alarm this time around. McNamarais prepared to try. The question iswhether anyone is ready to listen toan old man with such a heavy conscienceand such a long memory.