Late one night this past weekend the local city-operated cable channel in St. Louis ran a tape of a speech Noam Chomsky gave in Boulder, Colorado, recently. I was dead tired as I watched it, and began to drift off to sleep for a moment.
When I recovered, Chomsky was saying, so near as I could follow, that the reason Russian nukes weren’t launched at the U.S. last fall was because one of the three officers who had to approve the launch refused to cooperate.
Can anyone elaborate on what he was saying? Can anyone verify or refute it?
a search of the Chomsky archives at Zmag:
http://www.zmag.org/search/search_results.htm
or the home page if that doesnt work:
www.zmag.org
returns 83 mentions of “Russia” but I’m not finding anything anywhere similar to that. I dont entirely trust the Zmag search engine, the site is overworked and understaffed, but that quote see,s more that a bit beyond the pale. Do you have an approximate date on the speech?
Slipster-
Got it. You must have woken up about mid sentence, aparently there was a summit meeting in October on the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missle Crisis attended by representitives of the three major players. (US, Russia, Cuba)
from:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2938
“The nature of the threats was dramatically underscored last October, at the summit meeting in Havana on the 40th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, attended by key participants from Russia, the US, and Cuba.__ Planners knew at the time that they had the fate of the world in their hands, but new information released at the Havana summit was truly startling._ We learned that the world was saved from nuclear devastation by one Russian submarine captain, Vasily Arkhipov, who blocked an order to fire nuclear missiles when Russian submarines were attacked by US destroyers near Kennedy’s “quarantine” line._ Had Arkhipov agreed, the nuclear launch would have almost certainly set off an interchange that could have “destroyed the Northern hemisphere,” as Eisenhower had warned.”
A local announcer identified the sppech as having been made in Boulder about a month ago. Various remarks about Iraq suggested that the U.S. invasion had started recently, or was about to begin.
pfbob: thanks. This fits perfectly with what I heard; I think I did wake up in mid-sentence.