Part II: Hornfischer’s One Ocean…

Review by Bill Doughty––

James D. Hornfischer’s final book, “Who Can Hold the Sea,” opens with a poignant message from Jim’s widow, Sharon Hornfischer.

Sharon includes this advice:

“Jim believed, as I also do, that others of this generation and future generations will carry on telling the stories of our great nation’s history. Share your stories with your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, so that they are engaged in our nation’s history and our country’s continued fight for freedom and democracy. Encourage our next generation, take them to air shows, museums, and libraries; ignite the spark of curiosity in our future historians and writers so that they can continue to tell stories for us all to read.”

Hornfischer

It’s both sad and inspiring to read Jim Hornfischer’s final work. As both a gifted writer and historian, he created vivid true stories of Sailors and Marines and their leaders. This book’s preface, introduction, and acknowledgements bookend the story of the Cold War with tender personal messages.

Hornfischer’s “Who Can Hold the Sea” (Bantam Books, 2022) opens in the gray aftermath of World War II.

After confronting and defeating fascism, the United States and most of the Allies moved toward greater democracy, peacekeeping, rule of law, and liberty for all. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, held on to autocracy, aggression, violations of laws, and control of its citizens’ freedoms.

“For Truman,” Hornfischer observes, “the Soviet Union was a treacherous and malignant betrayer.”

Americans adjusted to postwar realities –– not only fear of spreading communism and Soviet expansion, but also budgetary turmoil that reached into the military. Some politicians proposed doing away with the Marine Corps and Navy and merging the service branches.

None other than Adm. William “Bull” Halsey spoke out against the merger in a speech thankfully excerpted by Hornfischer.

Halsey said, in part:

“Merger is not necessary. It is not desirable. It is plainly dangerous. It would destroy the initiative of individual services. It would hamstring their right to advance. It would deprive them of representation before Congress and the people. It would substitute military for civilian control. It might lead to military dictatorship.”

Admirals Chester Nimitz, Ernest J. King, Marc Mitscher, and Edward L. Cochrane –– along with Secretary of the Navy (and first Secretary of Defense) James V. Forrestal –– persuaded President Truman and others that the Navy had a strategic role in the Atomic Age; merger of the services, along with loss of the Marine Corps, would be a bad idea.

President Truman is welcomed aboard USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CV-42) by SECNAV Forrestal and Adm. Nimitz. Adm. Leahy pictured in background. (NHHC)

Truman visited Norfolk, Virginia, in April 1946 at the invitation of Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet Adm. Mitscher. Truman witnessed the power of naval aviation and capabilities of aircraft carriers USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CV-42) and the seemingly ubiquitous USS Midway (CV-41). Mitscher’s chief of staff was Capt. Arleigh Burke.

Then-SECNAV Forrestal was one of the principal architects of the post-war modern Navy. His global vision was based on peace through freedom and democracy, not communism or autocracy. Hornfischer writes, “If that world was to become a community, it would be possible, Forrestal thought, only with U.S. leadership, the victorious democracy investing its credibility and standing in the world to promote self-determination and freedom wherever it showed aspiration.” Hornfischer explores the role Forrestal played and delves into Forrestal’s controversial death at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

“Who Can Hold the Sea” vividly covers how Burke, Nimitz and Forrestal shaped the Navy during the Cold War. And strategic thinker and diplomat George Frost Kennan influenced the influencers, as Mahan had done for the first half of the century. Kennan recognized early the “perverse brutality and terror” of Joseph Stalin and Communism’s threat to Capitalism and democracy.

Watercolor of scorched USS Nevada (BB-36) as Nagato and Sakawa sink.. (Arthur Beaumont, 1946)

As a result of those fears, including the real fear that the Soviets were developing nuclear weapons, the United States rushed to conduct atomic bomb tests in the Pacific just a year after the war. In Operation Crossroads, the Navy positioned hundreds of pigs and goats, as well as 4,000 rats, aboard a target ship to test the results of radiation from a nuclear “cauliflower head.” The results were staggering and crippling.

The flagship of Adm. William H. “Spike” Blandy, who headed up Operation Crossroads, was contaminated with radiation, so “hot” it needed to “cool down” before it could be boarded.

After "Able" and "Baker," Blandy had to cancel a third "Charley" stage of the test, Hornfischer notes. “The radioactive mess had become impossible to manage.”

Later, he would celebrate the operation with a bizarre cake-cutting ceremony.

Vice Adm. Blandy and his wife cut into an Operation Crossroads cake shaped to look like a radioactive geyser, as Rear Adm. Frank J. Lowry looks on, Nov. 7, 1946.

The Navy forged forward in developing deployable nuclear weapons, supported by John L. Sullivan, Secretary of the Navy.

“The atomic bomb would shape the entire forty-four-year span of the Cold War. Made even smaller and more easily deployable, with larger and larger payloads, it would place every crook and crevice of the world under threat of ruin. War planners schemed to win atomic exchanges, even as they and every policy maker had no sense of consequences, and prudence demanded keeping the weapon in Pandora’s box. Humility, terror, curiosity, eager innovation, and abject paranoia would be the diverse by-products of the bomb.”

Louis A. Johnson

Sullivan would fight for the Navy but would resign in the face of cutbacks, cancellation of construction of the CVA-58 class aircraft carrier USS United States, and favoritism for the Air Force by SECDEF Louis A. Johnson. “The new defense secretary was an equal opportunity irritant, abrasive and arrogant and making no effort to filter it,” Hornfischer writes. “Johnson’s animus toward the Navy was an open secret.”

Despite obstacles, the Navy forged ahead in developing deployable nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships, including submarines. 

Hornfischer reveals how close the world came to nuclear war in the decade-and-a-half after bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Leaders contemplated using nuclear weapons after Communist China threatened Formosa (Taiwan), after Communist North Korea invaded the South, and after Communists took power in French Indochina (Vietnam). Eisenhower was a voice of reason in nixing the idea of using the Bomb. Though not covered in this book, the Bay of Pigs incident comes to mind, when President John F. Kennedy, Navy veteran and WWII hero, proved to be the voice of reason in preventing nuclear war after the Soviet Union threatened to position nuclear weapons in Cuba.

Admittedly incomplete and somewhat unfinished, Hornfischer’s history of the Cold War is a compelling book thanks to the author’s distinctive style and grace. His writing shines in descriptions of not only events but also people, such as the great Arleigh Burke, “the son of a humble Colorado farmer,” a leader who embraced an ethos of good leadership.

“[Burke] had taken integrity, self-discipline, and strong principles from his father and mother, a teacher. In 1923, the year he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, the faculty had just compiled the first textbook on naval leadership. It listed the ‘essential qualities’ of a naval officer as personal dignity, honor, courage, truthfulness, faith, justice, earnestness, assiduity, judgment, perseverance, tact, self-control, simplicity, and loyalty –– to country and to service, to both one’s seniors and juniors. ‘Loyalty up and down was important because of the natural independence and self-reliance of the American sailor,’ and naval officers had to earn the respect of their men [and women] through their personal merit and example. Burke had been trained as a specialist in ordnance, earning a master’s degree in chemical engineering and becoming a design and production specialist in explosives. This background exposed Burke to the most advanced naval technologies of his time and would prepare him as CNO to promote the development of nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and guided and ballistic missiles.”

Burke helped guide the Navy through rough seas during the Cold War.

CNO Arleigh Burke on the bridge of USS Forrestal (CVA-59) March 12, 1956 as ship's CO Capt. Roy L. Johnson points out distant aircraft. (NHHC)

It’s bittersweet to read this excellent book about the Cold War knowing that Hornfischer is gone. He died last summer after a valiant fight with cancer. As mentioned, his wife Sharon offers a beautiful tribute to him and his legacy in the book’s preface.

Both Jim and Sharon offer acknowledgements at the end of this book. They thank retired Navy Admiral “Fox” Fallon, former commander of both U.S. Pacific Command and Fleet Forces Command and current board chairman of the Naval Historical Foundation. They also acknowledge and thank other graybeards, including retired Rear Admiral Samuel Cox, director of Naval History and Heritage Command and Curator of the Navy. The Hornfischers pay special tribute to the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas, hometown of the great admiral who led the winning strategy in the Pacific War.

This terrific book brought other books to mind that would make good companion reading: “Atlantic” and “Pacific” by Simon Winchester; "The Second Most Powerful Man in the World: The Life of Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt's Chief of Staff" by Phillips Payson O'Brien; “Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945-1950” by Jeffrey G. Barlow; "The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea” by John Piña Craven; “This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History” by T. R. Fehrenbach; “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire” by Jonathan M. Katz; “Opening the Great Depths: The Bathyscaph Trieste and Pioneers of Undersea Exploration” by Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers; and “The Blue Age: How the US Navy created Global Prosperity –– and Why We’re in Danger of Losing It” by Gregg Easterbrook. It goes without saying that every book by Hornfischer should be on the reading list for anyone interested in American maritime history.

The Hornfischers valued libraries, museums, research institutes, and, of course, books. As Jim writes, “Those interested in national and maritime affairs ought to be mindful of the major events of the past.”

Top Photo: Operation Crossroads "Baker Day" A-bomb underwater explosion, seen from shore of Bikini Atoll, 25 July 1946. NHHC

(In Part I of this review, we presented Hornfischer's view of "one global ocean." We also compared Gorbachev and Putin, discussed the rise of NATO, and presented some coincidental milestones that happened in August and September decades ago.)

Hornfischer’s 'One Ocean' in the Cold War

Review by Bill Doughty––

In his best, pure “The Last of the Tin Can Sailors” style, James D. Hornfischer tells the harrowing story of the fate of the submarine USS Cochino (SS-345) in “Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War, 1945-1960” (Bantam Books, 2022).

USS Cochino and other submarines, including USS Tusk (SS-426), were operating near the Arctic Circle in August 1949, seventy-three years ago this month, four years after World War II and at the start of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Hornfischer writes of the heroism of U.S. Navy Sailors trying to save their submarine after a gas leak, fire, and explosions. “Heroism,” he writes, “was never a function of rank.”

Hornfischer’s account of the Sailors’ valor, both aboard Cochino and the rescue submarine Tusk, is typically gripping and dramatic –– and too long to adequately excerpt here. Readers can find it in Chapter 11, “Abandon Ship.” But readers who invest time in reading all 400-plus pages of this book will be rewarded with an understanding of how the United States Navy and Marine Corps survived, thrived, and helped maintain peace in the aftermath of WWII and in the face of communist expansion, especially by the Soviets.

As a result of America’s commitment to democracy and its alliance with Western Europe –– impelled by the Truman Doctrine –– twelve nations, including the United States, signed the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, four months prior to the Cochino incident. Norway is one of those original NATO members.

Capt. Roy Benson, Commander of Submarine Development Group Two, met with the surviving American Sailors of Cochino and Tusk in Norway. He also met with Norwegian diplomats. Hornfischer writes:

“The relationship between Oslo and Washington, fully reciprocal and secure within NATO, was based on the security needs of democratic Norway and the strategic value of its coast … the Norwegian fjords offered plentiful tactical advantages for an enterprising fleet commander. These included ‘ready concealment; year-round ice-free deepwater paths to the sea by diverse routes, easy protection from surface or ground forces, ideal antiaircraft gun protection possibilities, [and] large seaplane sheltered landing areas. Thus, bases in the fjords could be advantageous to us as denial of them to the opponent would be disastrous to his plans.’ These insights would not be forgotten.

“The Norwegian officers who met Roy Benson and his men were ready to meet Russia in war. ‘Within thirty minutes of declaration of war,’ a host officer boasted to the Americans, ‘every Norwegian male would be in uniform and under arms and in another half hour every Communist would be dead or in custody.’ Scandinavians had known recently the sound of the treads of Russian tanks and held no illusions about Moscow’s continuing ambitions. They knew that Russia coveted naval bases in the fjords as a means of escaping the polar ice prison that constrained their potential to project naval power into the world. As Worthington put it, the Norwegians were ‘happy to see evidence that the U.S. Navy was thinking of their part of the world.’”

In his profound way, Hornfischer observes, “Nations that perceive threats globally were compelled to operate on the outer membrane of the possible.” Freedom and democracy took a stand against Communism and autocracy in the Cold War.

Now there are 30 nations as part of NATO, with Finland and Sweden on their way to becoming members in the face of Russian revanchism after Putin’s unprovoked attack on neighbor Ukraine earlier this year.

Stalin and Putin

Hornfischer examines the mindset of authoritarian Joseph Stalin under “Communism’s self-hypnosis” of blind belief but with the “political reflexes of a perpetually fear-bound despot.” He examines Russia’s national psychology and Stalin’s “mastery of the tools of the paranoid art.” Such feelings of persecution and victimization are familiar in studying other autocrats.

In sharp contrast to Putin, is the pivotal leader who brought about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died today at the age of 91. A generation after the era covered in this book, Gorbachev famously proposed doing away with nuclear weapons. He worked with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush to reduce nuclear arms. Putin, on the other hand, threatens to use them, especially if NATO threatens to help Ukraine directly. Gorbachev’s USSR was brought down in the aftermath of the Chernobyl meltdown; Putin has his military fire upon and otherwise threaten nuclear power plants in an attempt to make Russia great again.

The fifteen-year span covered in this book covers the evolution of submarines and the nuclear navy and the game-changing development of the Polaris missile. Hornfischer briefly covers the Korean War, U.S. nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific, “Revolt of the Admirals,” and threats by Communist China to Taiwan. He reveals sometimes startling milestones that occurred in August or September:

• The secret mission of Operation Sandy near Bermuda, in which USS Midway (CV-41) would test for the first time a Navy ship’s ability to launch strategic ballistic missiles, Sept. 2-6, 1947.
• The creation of the CIA, led by its first director, Navy Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Sept. 18, 1947.
• The discovery by a military “Pole Vaulter” from Misawa Air Base of the Soviet Union’s apparent first nuclear test, Sept. 3, 1949.
• The first time Marines moved from ship (USS Sicily CVE-118) to shore aboard helicopters (HRS-1) into the Inchon area in South Korea, Sept. 1, 1952.
• The U.S. Navy’s confrontation with Communist China over bombardment in the staged attack on Quemoy islands in the Taiwan Strait, Aug. 23, 1958. (USS Midway was deployed from Pearl Harbor to provide deterrence and protection to Taiwan.)
• The first (unsuccessful) attempt by USS Nautilus (SSN-571), captained by William Anderson to find an “undersea Northwest Passage in reverse” under the Arctic, Aug. 19, 1957.
• The second (successful) attempt by USS Nautilus, captained by William Anderson, to transit the Arctic, arriving beneath the North Pole on Aug. 2, 1958.

Hornfischer’s taut style, found in “Tin Can Sailors,” "Neptune's Inferno," and "Ship of Ghosts," captures readers as his words pulsate about USS Nautilus's attempt.

USS Nautilus underway.

The submariners squeeze under and around walls of ice, not knowing what might lie ahead. “Only Neptune knew what kind of ice was in store for them in these tight underwater caves.”

From descriptions of Cochino’s failed attempt to transit the Barents Sea and Arctic Circle in August 1949 to Nautilus’s victorious achievement in August 1958, Hornfischer shows the resilience, commitment, and innovation of the U.S. Navy to “Hold the Sea.”

Echoing ret. Adm. James Stavridis, Hornfischer writes, “Though landsmen speak of the world’s seven seas, there is in fact only one global ocean.”

NATO Response Force and Allied Marines from the U.S., Sweden, Finland, and U.K. simulate amphibious assaults on a Swedish beachhead during BALTOPS June 10, 2015. The 17 Allied and partner countries integrated air, land, and sea operations and procedures to demonstrate the combined-forces capability to respond to threats in the Baltic region. (Sgt. Tatum Vayavananda.)

‘A Short [Bloody] History of Russia’ – Part II

Review by Bill Doughty––

Over the centuries, the Russian people turned to autocrats and tyrants when faced with seemingly endless invasions and conquests: Scandinavians, Normans, Mongols, Golden Horde, Khanates, Ottomans, French, Germans, and others. And authoritarian Russian leaders waged war over centuries to capture territory, subjugate neighbors, or put down revolts.

This is the second of a two-part review of Mark Galeotti’s short-but-deep “A Short History of Russia: How the World’s Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin.” We continue to see how the shadow of Russian history frames Putin’s actions and how Russia sees itself compared with the West. [Top photo: Russia's President Vladimir Putin speaks at the St. Vladimir Monument in Moscow.]

In 1831, Russia's Tsar Nicholas took away constitutional rights of people in Poland. The Poles revolted, and Nicholas's army crushed the revolution.

Facing other revolutions in Europe in 1848, “even though Russia was suffering from famine caused by unusually poor harvests and a cholera epidemic, Nicholas’s troops would again march in the name of the status quo.” They moved against free thinkers in Hungary, Krakow, and the Moldavian movement and fought Persians, Turks, Brits, and French armies.

“Again, the double-headed eagle looked both ways. Nicholas was at once committed to –– as he saw it –– saving Europe from its own ungodly and illegitimate dalliance with liberalism, as well as protecting Russia from European ideas. Aware of the advances in West from European ideas. Aware of the advances in Western science and technology, he wanted to adopt the elements of the West that looked useful, while ignoring the social, political and legal contexts from which they sprang. Without a thriving mercantile class to generate investment capital, without free and open debate in universities and educated circles to generate ideas, and without greater social mobility to generate new cohorts of innovators and skeptics, Russia would always remain backward, desperately trying to adopt and adapt the inventions of others.”

Tsar Alexander II, Alexander II, Empress Maria, 1870

Differences in the interpretation of orthodox Christianity and a desire to keep and control Crimea continued to fuel conflict between Russia and the West.

Despite the skill of some tsarist generals and the bravery of Russia’s serf army, they were outgunned and out-modernized by British and French forces in Crimea. But the war was a catalyst for “arguably the most ambitious social engineering project Russia had yet to see” under Nicholas’s son, Alexander II –– in effect moving out of feudalism. Reforms, however, triggered protests for more freedoms, leading to the state’s response: more repression.

Alexander’s son and heir, Alexander III, proved to be “that most terrible of leaders, both foolish and dutiful” with no answers to new challenges facing Russia in the modern age with growing imperial powers, including in Asia.

“Russia’s eastward expansion had brought it into conflict over Manchuria and Korea with a rising and aggressive Japan.”

A surprise attack by Japan at Port Arthur ignited the Russo-Japanese war that the Russians thought, wrongly, they could win quickly, bringing a sense of victory home to reunite the country. “It soon became clear that this would be anything but (quick). Japan had, after all, been modernizing rapidly and was fighting closer to home.”

Imperial Russian cruiser Jemchug (Zemstchug), interned by the Imperial Japanese Navy in Manila, Philippines, 1905, following Battle of Tsushima. (NHHC)

Galeotti describes the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, which marked the end of the war, as “an expensive and humiliating defeat.” The tsar was still considered “God’s chosen representative” by the people, but 150,000 protesters turned out for a peaceful demonstration, singing hymns and holding religious icons.

But Imperial Guards fired at them and killed hundreds, triggering the 1905 Revolution and leading inexorably to the revolutions of 1917 and Russian Civil War, 1918-22 and the rise of Communism.

World War I is described as a cataclysm that finally ended Russia’s “zombie regime’s existence.” 

Stalin and Lenin busts

Lenin killed off his rivals to rise to power. After he died, his body was mummified and put on display to be deified by the public. The Communist Party continued a form of imperialism, expanding its borders, promoting authoritarianism, and (ironically) establishing a hierarchy of rapacious aristocrats –– now oligarchs.

Stalin took Lenin’s viciousness to a new level. Stalin was “willing to think own a scale which none of his predecessors had the callous coldheartedness to dream.” Land was confiscated and nationalized. Stalin's collectivization of farmlands brought devastation to Ukraine, where three million people died of famine in 1932-3.

Socialism at any cost was another form of “the age-old Russian dilemma,” Galeotti says, which “after all, had been how to modernize while maintaining state power.”

Stalin turned to terror –– even against his own Communist Party. He purged three quarters of representatives to the Party Congress, ninety percent of military generals, and three of the five Red Army marshals. “He understood power at a visceral level, and kept firm control of the political police.” And he understood the power of propaganda, playing to myths, misinformation, and the Big Lie of the father-like “Good Tsar” to justify autocracy.

“As fascism rose in Europe (in the 1930s), Stalin had first hoped to use it to reach some common cause with Britain and France, then opportunistically made his own deals with Hitler’s Germany, leading to their joint partition of Poland in 1939 … Stalin had hoped to postpone war against Germany to give him as much time as possible to prepare.

“When in June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, it came as a devastating strategic surprise.”

Russia became a superpower as the "USSR" on the crucible of World War II, subsuming Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, with East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania becoming its vassal states.

Brave Russians, Ukranians, and others fought for their survival and not only turned the Nazis away, as they’d done to Napoleon, but also marched from the east into Germany and Berlin itself.

“No wonder the Russians still call this the Great Patriotic War,” Galeotti observes. “It is impossible to underestimate its importance. More than 20 million died in the war, and everybody suffered.”

After Germany’s signing of surrender, while the rest of the Allies recognized May 8 as VE (Victory in Europe Day), Russia chose May 9 as their own exclusive Victory Day to commemorate their role in defeating the Nazis.

Russian soldiers celebrate the defeat of the Nazis in Berlin in May 1945.

But, “the Great Patriotic War represented the apotheosis of a long-standing Russian messianism,” Galeotti writes. Was Russia really a unique entity? Shrouded in a cloak of Sovietism, was it a true defender of orthodoxy and the West, as it seemed to be in helping defeat Nazism? “The irony is that the savior of Europe then became the occupier of half the continent and the threat to the rest, and the Iron Curtain not only locked Russia away from Europe, it made it more ‘other’ than ever.”

The truth hurt. “Horrific details of Stalinist terror challenged the heroic narrative of Soviet industrialization, and even the triumph of the Second World War was undermined by accounts of bad generalship and a callous disregard for the lives of soldiers,” Galeotti observes.

History was not on the side of the Communist Party or of Russia in the 20th century. So, for the most part, Soviet and Russian leaders have tried to erase or rewrite parts of their history they don’t like.

Afghan resistance fighters observe damage to a village caused by Soviet bombing. (DoD)

Despite some blips to the contrary, Khrushchev and Brezhnev maintained a coexistent detente with the West, but by the time of Brezhnev’s death in 1982, “The Soviet Union was mired in a vicious conflict in Afghanistan in which boys were coming home in zinc coffins while the official media still claimed there was no war there.”

Gorbachev was the reformer who brought about the end of the Soviet Union. “His ambition was to save the soviet system. Instead he was to kill it.”

Gorbachev questioned the tsarist system and dogmatic central planning through “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness). As a result, he helped burn down the house of cards and end the Soviet Union. Fifteen new nations arose from the ashes, including the Russian Federation.

Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, proved to be a poor leader, overcome by alcohol, health issues, painkillers, and self-indulgence, according to Galeotti. Under Yeltsin, Russia saw a rise in oligarchs, corruption, and organized crime. But with military failures in Chechnya, the Kremlin looked for a new authoritarian leader as a successor to Yeltsin.

KGB agent Putin

“They settled on a relatively unknown figure, a certain Vladimir Putin.” Putin, the “new tsar” and “henchman of choice” promised a return to orthodoxy and order, a “dictatorship of the law. Putin had been a KGB officer before becoming a politician, Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff, and head of the Federal Security Service (successor to the KGB).

Galeotti says Putin’s vision for his country had three points: (1) Russia is prey when divided, strong when united; (2) Russia is (supposedly) not an aggressor but won’t be a victim of the West; and (3) Neither Asiatic nor Eurasian, Russia “it is European but proper European.” “Its orthodox faith is the genuine form of Christianity.”

“A Short History of Russia” includes some good photos and some great maps by Helen Stirling. One of the maps is labeled “Putin’s Wars” and shows locations for the Second Chechen War, 1999-2009; Cyberattack on Estonia, 2007; Invasion of Georgia, 2008; Annexation of Crimea, 2014; Intervention of Donbas, 2014-; Covert ‘political war’ against West, 2014-; and Intervention into Syria, 2015-.

The Kremlin’s effort to convince the world that the Russians are exceptional and better than the West is belied by Putin’s actions in 2022. The attempt to “persuade Russians that they are a special people, apart from Europe and embattled by its malign cultural and geopolitical forces, demonstrates that they are swimming against the tide,” Galeotti concludes.

“This has become a country in which reimagining history has become not just a national pastime but an industry.”

Galeotti evaluates Putin compared with other Russian leaders of the past, including Ivan the Terrible, Stalin (“the much more terrible”), Peter the Great, Lenin, Catherine the Great, and others. And he concludes, perhaps incorrectly, that Putin is largely just a transitional figure.

He also concludes (albeit from a 2020 perspective) that Russia is moving closer to Europe.

Goya's Saturn (Cronus)

Not under Putin. Not in 2022.

Since Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine beginning February 24, Professor Galeotti has provided invaluable assessments, including in The Spectator last month where he observes how Putin is floundering and “seems determined to turn against those he was once closest to –– out of fear, anger and hubris. In the process, he is only further weakening his regime.”

Galeotti compares Putin to the bloodthirsty Greek titan Cronos, which is appropriate considering Russia’s early history of patricide, fratricide, siblicide, filicide and various other -cides.

“Cronos thought that by devouring his children he would be safe. He actually drove the last [his sixth offspring], Zeus, to slay him. We are a long way from any such potential parricide, but it seems fitting that the very agency which did the most to encourage and benefit from Putin's increasing paranoia and isolation is also the first to suffer from it.”

The Cronos comparison brings us back to the beginning of Russia’s long and bloody history –– starting with pagans and ancient, discredited, and messianic wars of aggression.

Add “genocide” to Putin’s record of homicidal mania. Are we also witnessing Russia’s suicide at the hand of a “weak strongman”?

Waking up to ‘The Fate of the Earth’

Review by Bill Doughty––

“The Fate of the Earth” by Jonathan Schell (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982) is landmark book calling for nuclear weapons control. It was written 38 years ago –– and nearly 38 years after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (pictured above) in order to end the war with Japan in WWII.

Schell asks Americans to open their eyes to a continuing danger of Mutually Assured Destruction that would be brought about by nuclear war, even if the war is started by accident.

“A society that systemically shuts its eyes to an urgent peril to its physical survival and fails to take any steps to save itself cannot be called psychologically well,” Schell asserts. Looking at the problem of mass extinction by nuclear weapons makes us sick, he says, but the true sickness is in not confronting what is real.

Schell contends there’s a new reality: nuclear weapons have made war obsolete. “By effectively removing the limits on human access to the forces of nature, the invention of nuclear weapons ruined war, which depended for its results, and therefore for its usefulness, on the exhaustion of the forces of one of the adversaries.”

Rickover

An icon of the nuclear Navy saw the new reality even during the Cold War.

“On the occasion of his retirement, Admiral Hyman Rickover, who devoted a good part of his life to overseeing the development and construction of nuclear-powered, nuclear-missile-bearing submarines for the United States Navy, told a congressional committee that in his belief mankind was going to destroy itself with nuclear arms. He also said of his part in the nuclear buildup that he was ‘not proud’ of it, and added that he would like to ‘sink’ the ships that he had poured so much of his life into. And, indeed, what everyone is now called on to do is to sink all the ships, and also ground all the planes, and fill in all the missile silos, and dismantle all warheads.”

This book is rich with history, context, and philosophy and includes numerous references to early thinkers (Socrates, Lucretius, Plutarch, and Pericles); historians and philosophers (Arendt, Burke, Camus, de Tocqueville, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, and Clausewitz); and the Bible (Genesis, Ten Commandments, Armageddon, and Jesus Christ –– “prince of peace” and “a servant to all”).

An early image of Jesus Christ: "not to judge the world but to save it."

In a presentation reminiscent of John Hersey’s spellbinding “Hiroshima,” Schell makes a disturbing analysis of the various ways humans would die during and especially after an all-out nuclear conflagration: radiation, fires, starvation, exposure, long-term illnesses, and short-term diseases –– all leading to possible extinction of our species.

“The weight of extinction, like the weight of mortality, bears down on life through the mind and spirit but otherwise, until the event occurs, leaves us physically undisturbed,” Schell writes.

“At present, most of us do nothing. We look away. We remain calm. We are silent. We take refuge in the hope that the holocaust won’t happen, and turn back to our individual concerns. We deny the truth that is all around us. Indifferent to the future of our kind we grow indifferent to one another. We drift apart. We grow cold. We browse our way toward the end of the world. But if once we shook off our lethargy and fatigue and began to act, the climate would change. Just as inertia produces despair –– a despair often so deep that it does not even know itself as despair –– arousal and action would give us access to hope, and life would start to mend: not just life in its entirety but daily life, every individual life. At that point, we would begin to withdraw from our role as both the victims and the perpetrators of mass murder. We would no longer be the destroyers of mankind but, rather, the gateway through which the future generations would enter the world. Then the passion and will that we need to save ourselves would flood into our lives. Then the walls of indifference, inertia, and coldness that now isolate each of us from others, and all of us from the past and future generations, would melt, like snow in the spring. E.M. Forster told us, ‘Only connect!’ Let us connect. Auden told us, ‘We must love one another or die.’ Let us love one another –– in the present and across the divides of death and birth. Christ say, ‘I come not to judge the world but to save the world.’ Let us, also, not judge the world but save the world. By restoring our severed links with life, we will restore our own lives.”

Schell presents a stark choice.

“Two paths lie before us. One leads to death, the other to life. If we choose the first path –– if we numbly refuse to acknowledge the nearness of extinction, all the while increasing our preparations to bring it about –– then we in effect become the allies of death, and in everything we do our attachment to life will weaken: our vision, blinded to the abyss that has opened at our fee, will dim and grow confused; our will, discouraged by the thought of trying to build on such a precarious foundation anything that is meant to last, will slacken; and we will sink into stupefaction, as though we were gradually weaning ourselves from life in preparation for the end. On the other hand, if we reject our doom, and bend our efforts toward survival –– if we arouse ourselves to the peril an act to forestall it, making ourselves the allies of life –– then the anesthetic fog will life; our vision, no longer straining not to see the obvious, will sharpen; our will, finding secure ground to build on, will be restored; and we will take full and clear possession of life again.”

He imagines mechanisms that would prevent the threat of nuclear war: destruction of weapons, destruction of the factories that manufacture them, and clear-eyed verification as part of international cooperation as we realize our ignorance in order to achieve greater reverence for the “swollen power” to destroy ourselves as a species. 

At first, Schell's thesis may come off as overly hopeful or even naive, but he realizes the importance of first strengthening international cooperation in order to achieve mutually assured survival. "The present-day United Nations," he says, "is the empty husk of those irresolute good intentions." 

As usual, education and critical thinking are key to understanding and wisdom.

“We are in deep ignorance. Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder, our wonder should make us humble, our humility should inspire us to reverence and caution, and our reverence and caution should lead us to act without delay to withdraw the threat we now pose to the earth and to ourselves.”

In his more recent “The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger” (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company; 2007), Schell ties the nuclear threat to another existential danger: climate change.

“The two perils have a great deal in common. Both are the fruit of swollen human power –– in the one case, the destructive power of war; in the other, the productive power of fossil-fuel energy. Both put stakes on the table of a magnitude never present before in human decision making. Both threaten life on a planetary scale. Both require a fully global response. Anyone concerned by the one should be concerned with the other. It would be a shame to save the earth from slowly warming only to burn it up in an instant in a nuclear war.”

Will 2020 be a turning point for world cooperation in starting to deal with global climate change, a worldwide pandemic, and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons?

Schell’s “Fate of the World” was written on the eve of President Reagan’s historic meeting with leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, so in “The Seventh Decade” he focuses on the potential as well as the missed opportunities during and after the Cold War.

Reagan and Gorbachev

Reagan and Gorbachev tried to have nuclear weapons “dispatched to history’s graveyard. Superior power was no longer the route to dominance. Certainly, global empire was out of the question,” just as all-out war itself had been made obsolete.

The Republican Party of 2020 has no platform, stating, “Resolved, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention,” and “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” Despite no mention in a formal platform, President Trump has boasted about upgrading and building more nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party’s extensive platform says, in part, “Democrats believe the United States has a moral responsibility and national security imperative to prevent the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and eventually secure their elimination.”

President-elect Biden's platform also resolves:

“Democrats believe that the sole purpose of our nuclear arsenal should be to deter—and, if necessary, retaliate against—a nuclear attack, and we will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military. We will work to maintain a strong, credible deterrent while reducing our overreliance and excessive expenditure on nuclear weapons. The Trump Administration’s proposal to build new nuclear weapons is unnecessary, wasteful, and indefensible.”

Notably, the platform echoes President Reagan’s commitment to reducing nuclear dangers by returning to talks and treaties. 

“Democrats commit to strengthening the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, maintaining the moratorium on explosive nuclear weapons testing, pushing for the ratification of the UN Arms Trade Treaty and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and extending New START. Just as was the case during the height of the Cold War, it’s in our interest to work with Russia to verifiably limit and reduce our nuclear stockpiles. We will build on this foundation to negotiate arms control agreements that reflect the emergence of new players like China, capture new technologies, and move the world back from the nuclear precipice.”

The position to eventually eliminate nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons comes in a section of the platform called “Renewing American Leadership,” which says, "We can only be strong in the world when we are strong and united at home. We believe that a healthy democracy, just society, and inclusive economy are essential prerequisites for effective American leadership abroad. And we believe that the ultimate measure —and purpose—of our foreign policy is whether it protects and advances America’s security, prosperity and values—and delivers results for all Americans.”

Schell demands an eyes-wide-open examination of the global threats we face. He challenges us to think differently about the future in order to preserve the future –– and our species.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden meets a Sailor aboard Nimitz-Class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76). Biden and Dr. Jill Biden visited San Diego in 2009.