The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50

09 October 2012

ByJoseph Nye

Klipping The Moscow Times

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis — those 13 days in October 1962 that were probably the closest the world has come to a major nuclear war. U.S. President John F. Kennedy had publicly warned the Soviet Union not to deploy offensive missiles in Cuba. But Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to cross Kennedy's red line surreptitiously and confront the Americans with a fait accompli. When a U.S. surveillance plane discovered the missiles, the crisis erupted.
Some of Kennedy's advisers urged an air strike and invasion to destroy the missiles. Kennedy mobilized troops, but also bought time by announcing a naval blockade of Cuba. The crisis subsided when Soviet ships carrying additional missiles turned back, and Khrushchev agreed to remove the existing missiles from the island. As then-U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it, "We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked."
At first glance, this was a rational and predictable outcome. The United States had a 17-to-1 advantage in nuclear weaponry. The Soviets were simply outgunned.
And yet the U.S. did not preemptively attack Soviet missile sites, which were relatively vulnerable because the risk that even one or two of the Soviet missiles would be fired at a U.S. city was enough to deter a first strike. In addition, both Kennedy and Khrushchev feared that rational strategies and careful calculation might spin out of control. Khrushchev offered a vivid metaphor in one of his letters to Kennedy: "We and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war."
In 1987, I was part of a group of scholars that met at Harvard University with Kennedy's surviving advisers to study the crisis. Robert McNamara, Kennedy's secretary of defense, said he became more cautious as the crisis unfolded. At the time, he thought that the probability of nuclear war resulting from the crisis might have been one in 50.
Douglas Dillon, Kennedy's treasury secretary, said he thought that the risk of nuclear war had been about zero. He did not see how the situation could possibly have escalated to nuclear war and thus had been willing to push the Soviets harder and to take more risks than McNamara was. General Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also believed that the risk of nuclear war was low, and he complained that the U.S. let the Soviet Union off too easily. He felt that the United States should have removed the regime of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
But the risks of losing control of the situation weighed heavily on Kennedy, too. This is why he took a more prudent position than some of his advisers would have liked. The moral of the story is that a little nuclear deterrence goes a long way.
Nonetheless, there are still ambiguities about the missile crisis that make it difficult to attribute the outcome entirely to the nuclear component. The public consensus was that the United States won. But how much it won, and why it won, is hard to determine.
There are at least two possible explanations of the outcome besides Soviet acquiescence to U.S. superior nuclear firepower. One focuses on the importance of the two superpowers' relative stakes in the crisis. The United States not only had a greater stake in neighboring Cuba than the Soviets did but could also bring conventional forces to bear. The naval blockade and the possibility of a U.S. invasion strengthened the credibility of U.S. deterrence, placing the psychological burden on the Soviets.
The other explanation questions the very premise that the Cuban missile crisis was an outright U.S. victory. The United States had three options: a "shoot-out" (bomb the missile sites); a "squeeze out" (blockade Cuba to convince the Soviets to withdraw the missiles); and a "buyout" (give the Soviets something they want).
For a long time, the participants said little about the buyout aspects of the solution. But subsequent evidence suggests that a quiet U.S. promise to remove its obsolete missiles from Turkey and Italy was probably more important than was thought at the time. The U.S. also gave a public assurance that it would not invade Cuba.
We can conclude that nuclear deterrence mattered in the crisis and that the nuclear dimension certainly figured in Kennedy's thinking. But it was not the ratio of nuclear weapons that mattered so much as the fear that even a few nuclear weapons would wreak intolerable devastation.
How real were these risks? On Oct. 27, 1962, just after Soviet forces in Cuba shot down a U.S. surveillance plane, killing the pilot, a similar plane taking routine air samples near Alaska inadvertently violated Soviet air space in Siberia. Fortunately, it was not shot down. But even more serious and unknown to Washington, Soviet forces in Cuba had been instructed to repel a U.S. invasion and had been authorized to use their tactical nuclear weapons to do so.
It is hard to imagine that such a nuclear attack would have remained merely tactical. U.S. scholar Kenneth Waltz recently published an article entitled "Why Iran Should Get the Bomb." In a rational, predictable world, such an outcome might produce stability. In the real world, the Cuban missile crisis suggests that it might not. As McNamara put it, "We lucked out."

Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard University, is the author of "The Future of Power." © Project Syndicate

Read more:http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/the-cuban-missile-crisis-at-50/469514.html#ixzz28zyDpEFo
The Moscow Times

Why Russia Smuggles U.S. Electronics

09 October 2012

ByAlexander Golts

Klipping The Moscow Times

Among all the senior officials, only Deputy Prime MinisterDmitry Rogozinfelt it necessary to respond to the FBI's arrest of former Russian nationals in the United States on charges of illegally exporting advanced electronics to Russia. Although Rogozin denied that any such shipments had occurred, he also said, "If we start saying publicly that we have a shortage of certain imported components, our oxygen will be cut off and their delivery will be cut off." Rogozin effectively admitted that deliveries of contraband do take place.
When the FBI arrested members of a Russian spy ring two years ago, it did not understand what the sleeper agents had been up to for more than a decade other than enjoying their U.S. u­pper­-­middle-class lifestyles on Russia's tab. This time the situation is far more transparent. Alexander Fishenko and 10 other colleagues who worked at Houston-based Arc Electronics are charged with working as unregistered agents and illegally exporting advanced electronics to Russia. Those components were reportedly used in the targeting systems of modern Russian weapons, avionics for combat aircraft and other projects that the Federal Security Service's secret Military Division 35533 laboratory had ordered.
But it seems that Fishenko and his partners were remarkably careless. According to the FBI, they exchanged candid e-mails with Russian buyers without taking any precautions whatsoever. For example, one Arc employee involved in the illegal exports repeatedly warned a Russian buyer that the equipment he had requested was on a list of products prohibited from export or else required special licensing. At the same time, he openly boasted in e-mails that he knew how to circumvent U.S. export-restriction laws. In addition, other employees openly stated in their correspondence that they had fabricated documents.
The way Russia tries to obtain intelligence and technology says much about the country. More than anything else, the use of sleeper agents showed that the Kremlin and its intelligence agencies were still stuck in 1950s-era thinking, despite the fact that the existence of nuclear weapons made it clear by the 1960s that this type of reconnaissance was unnecessary.
Perhaps, however, there is a better explanation: The intelligence network was set up to launder money for a group of senior Moscow officials. Thus, the illegal network was either set up to satisfy the wildly Cold War-era imperial aspirations of Russia's top brass, or else it was an illegal means of personal enrichment for powerful Russian officials.
Corruption coupled with weak attempts to imitate being a superpower have become the defining features of PresidentVladimir Putin's 12-year rule.
The current smuggling scandal demonstrates another important aspect of Putin's Russia. According to the FBI, U.S. electronic components were installed in MiG aircraft, air defense systems, anti-ship weaponry and secret electronic devices created by the FSB. This is what marks the fundamental difference between the way Russia carries out industrial espionage today and how it did so under Josef Stalin. Spies working under Stalin obtained the technology behind the components and spent insane amounts of money to manufacture these products domestically. Today, China follows this same pattern, manufacturing knockoffs of Western components.
By contrast, Russia can't pull off what the Chinese have done. Instead, Russia buys contraband electronic components. When these supplies run out, the country simply buys more. Nobody even attempts to manufacture those parts because Russia is incapable of implementing serial production of advanced electronic components in the country. One senior official from the defense sector interviewed by Interfax said 60 to 70 percent — and in some areas, up to 95 percent — of all electronics used in Russia's defense equipment are purchased abroad.
The best explanation for this is that producing it domestically is unprofitable. In the current Russian economy, it makes much more economic sense to have a few dozen firms acting as middlemen to buy the necessary electronics from all over the world — legally or illegally, if necessary.
The much-discussed 20 trillion ruble ($644 billion) rearmament program though 2020 is supposed to finally introduce serial production in the country's military production chain. But sooner or later, it will become evident that the new "advanced weapons" Russia is supposed to produce will be missing the electronics needed to make them work.
Still, does anyone really believe that serial production will ever implemented? Isn't the real goal to embezzle as much money as possible by promising to flood the army with modern equipment? To procure that government funding in the first place, military officials have to demonstrate the occasional "miracle" weapon that functions with the help of smuggled electronics.

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.

Read more:http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/why-russia-smuggles-us-electronics/469459.html#ixzz28zxI4h25
The Moscow Times

Don't Wait for a Ivanishvili Thaw With Russia

11 October 2012

By Georgy Bovt

Klipping The Moscow Times

Many members of Russia's political elite have been wondering whether Georgia will become a source of renewed tensions between Russia and the United States once billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream coalition, which won the parliamentary elections on Oct. 1, assume power.
Ever since Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was elected in 2003, the Kremlin has viewed Georgia as a "U.S. project." Russia sees this project as being focused not so much on supporting the democratic process in Georgia as in working to undermine Moscow's interests in the region. Russian authorities generally view all U.S. efforts to "support democracy" as subversive schemes by the U.S. State Department.
At the same time, however, many critics have already cast Ivanishvili as a potential "agent of Moscow," pointing out that he could not have accumulated assets worth $6.4 billion, gained primarily during his 20 years of doing business in Russia, without support from top officials in Moscow. Although the Kremlin was restrained in its response to Ivanishvili's victory, it clearly relished the defeat of Saakashvili, whom Moscow despises with a passion.
Although Ivanishvili's coalition won a comfortable 16-seat majority in parliament, the political situation in Georgia in the coming months is likely to be anything but calm. First, Georgian Dream is a motley coalition of six different political parties whose solidarity could easily fall apart in the near future. Second, Saakashvili will formally retain his presidential post for a year, after which Georgia will switch from a presidential to a parliamentary republic in accordance with amendments to the country's constitution that were adopted in 2010 and will go into force in October 2013.
But it is unlikely that Saakashvili will passively wait out the next year as a lame duck without attempting to influence affairs in his own favor. One option is to call for early parliamentary elections. Saakashvili understands that public opinion can be easily manipulated in Georgia and could quickly swing back toward his camp. He also understands that the Georgian Dream electoral victory was largely a result of luck and good timing after a video showing the torture of prisoners in a Georgian prison was released just before the elections. This scandal that was skillfully exploited by Ivanishvili.
Under Saakashvili, Russian-Georgian relations were essentially in a state of war. Moscow refused to view the Georgian president as a partner with whom it could sit at the same table and hold talks. With Ivanishvili as prime minister, the two countries have a good opportunity to rebuild relations from scratch. But experience shows that Moscow has not liked a single Georgian leader since 1991, even if it did initially welcome their rise to power on occasion. Russia's ruling elite have always been skeptical about the whole idea of Georgian statehood, viewing an independent Georgia as something of a historical aberration. What's more, an entire laundry list of unresolved issues in Russian-Georgian relations threatens to taint the Kremlin's view of Ivanishvili in much the same way as they colored Moscow's attitude toward Saakashvili.
One of the thorniest issues is Tbilisi's refusal to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, regions that broke away from Georgia as a result of the Russia-Georgia war in 2008. In theory, Georgia could do a lot to earn Moscow's favor, such as rejoining the Commonwealth of Independent States, joining the Collective Security Treaty Organization or declaring, as Ukraine did, its neutrality status with regard to NATO.
But even if Tbilisi adopted these measures, it is unlikely that Ivanishvili or any other Georgian leader would take South Ossetia and Abkhazia off the table. What's more, the majority of Georgians support the country's eventual accession to NATO, and Ivanishvili is not likely to oppose popular opinion on this issue.
At the same time, however, many Georgians would also like to see improved relations with Russia, including the restoration of regular flights and the easing of visa regulations between the two countries, as well as an end to trade wars over Georgian wines and Borjomi water. These are the areas in which a thaw in Russian-Georgian relations is possible.
But the practical implementation of these steps will largely depend on how Tbilisi pursues its relationship with Washington. If under Ivanishvili Georgia's relations with the U.S. remain just as strong as they were under Saakashvili and if Ivanishvili supports a gradual integration with NATO, then Georgia's thaw with Russia will end before it ever begins.

Georgy Bovt is a political analyst.