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In 1898 a
mysterious explosion sank the American battleship Maine in Havana
harbor. While the exact cause is still debated, the results were
undeniable and decisive. Press and public clamor for retaliation led
swiftly to an American declaration of war against Spain followed by
an invasion of Cuba, the conquest the Philippines and Guam and the
sudden leap of the United States into the position of world-wide
imperialistic dominance it still occupies.
Slightly more than
a decade later, in 1914, two shots fired by a Serbian terrorist in
little-known Sarajevo, Bosnia set off World War I, a conflagration of
earthshaking global consequences which no one expected or wanted,
causing nearly 40,000,000 military and civilian deaths, the results
of which continue to reverberate throughout Europe, Asia and the
Middle East to the present day.
In 1950, at a peak in Cold War
tensions, political and strategic overreach by General Douglas
MacArthur commanding United Nations forces fighting North Korean
aggression against the South triggered an unanticipated and
overwhelming Chinese response. The result was three years of
additional bloody warfare in Korea, which in addition to hundreds of
thousands of deaths on all sides brought the world to the brink of
nuclear war.
Hydrogen Bomb
Credit: Unshootables.com/Creative Commons
Once again, in 1962, a dangerous
miscalculation by Soviet Premier Nikita
Khrushchev in attempting to place
nuclear missiles in Cuba to balance the presence of American missiles
around his country, brought the world closer than ever to the edge of
a nuclear war with unimaginable global consequences. How close we
came to disaster, we later learned, rested less on diplomacy than on
the heroic choice by a Soviet submarine Captain NOT to launch a
nuclear torpedo at an American destroyer despite faulty indications
that an attack was underway.
We know now that on at least three
other occasions, false positive readings on radar screens in both
Soviet and American nuclear defense systems nearly led to the
launching of retaliatory responses which could have brought
catastrophic results for both human civilization and the global
environment. In each case, only the actions of individual humans,
under intense pressure, choosing to interpret the reports as
electronic glitches rather than incoming missile tracks, prevented
disaster.
Slim Pickins rides the bomb in the movie Dr. Strangelove
Credit: basementrejects.com/Creative Commons
Exactly what chain of events might be
set off by the provocative statements, military posturing, accidents,
missile tests, war games or even deliberate actions by players in the
current dramatic standoff between North Korean dictator, Kim Jung Ill
and President Donald Trump is not yet known. What we do know,
however, is that massive historical conflicts and global disasters
can be triggered by rogue individuals or unanticipated events at
multiple levels in complex systems, often in
ways that are unimaginable and, in fact, entirely unpredictable.
The more heated the crisis
atmosphere, the more likely it is that preexisting ideological
predispositions or perceptual biases rather than objective facts will
determine the decision-making process. Were American destroyers
really under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin the summer of 1964—as
early reports reaching Washington indicated? Or, to what degree were
the reports interpreted, or shaped, to bring about the desired
political results?
Likewise, how was the
intelligence perceived or even “fixed” in the run-up to the 2003
U.S. invasion of Iraq, to support the incorrect preconception that
Saddam Hussein was on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons? And
what cascade of seemingly endless tragedy has ensued in the region
because of that decision?
Recent exposure to what
have been called “Black Swans” (unpredictable or unforeseen
events with extreme consequences) like the sudden collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1989, 9/11, or the almost-complete global financial
meltdown in 2008 should certainly give us pause; as should our
growing understanding of the sensitivity of interconnected planetary
systems to human activity.
What Chaos Theorists describe as the
“Butterfly effect” might, at least metaphorically, allow
us to recognize the snowballing impact that small, seemingly
inconsequential changes in one part of a complex system can unleash
in the system as a whole.
What this means in the current nuclear
standoff with North Korea is that there is no room for even the
slightest miscalculation, error or lack of caution. Threats and
over-heated rhetoric can only set the stage for a cascade of
disastrous consequences, the like of which only sheer good fortune has prevented
multiple times during our dangerous three-quarter century experiment
of dancing on the edge with the bomb. We can no longer rely on blind
luck to save us--from ourselves.
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You can also find this commentary on OpEdNews
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