McNamara criticizes nuclear policy

Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the escalation of the Vietnam War, condemned the nuclear policies of the United States and NATO in a Thursday lecture in Dodds Auditorium.

"What is shocking is that today, 15 years after the end of the Cold War, basic U.S. policy and NATO policy hasn't changed," McNamara said. "It is immoral. It is illegal. It is militarily unnecessary."

Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter GS '80 introduced McNamara to a capacity crowd. The lecture was simulcast in two rooms on the lower level of Robertson Hall as well.

Slaughter complimented McNamara on "a fairly extraordinary career" that included teaching at the Harvard Business School, serving as chief executive of the Ford Motor Company and leading the World Bank.

The former defense secretary began by enumerating the current nuclear forces.

"As we talk, the United States has about 6,000 nuclear warheads deployed," McNamara said. He added that about 2,000 of those weapons are on hair-trigger alert, meaning that they could be launched within 15 minutes.

McNamara later criticized the Bush administration's nuclear policy in particular.

"The importance of strategic stability between potential adversaries possessing nuclear weapons is absolutely essential," he said. "Elimination of that [anti-ballistic missile] treaty will eliminate or may eliminate the possibility of strategic stability."

Besides questioning Bush's withdrawal of the United States from the ABM treaty, McNamara suggested the U.S. is engaging in strategic hypocrisy. He said the United States has the strongest conventional forces, but claims to need nuclear weapons and tells some nations facing conventional threats not to acquire nuclear weapons.

McNamara said he believed if the U.S. does not change its strategy, other nations such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Syria will pursue nuclear weapons programs.

"We must move to eliminate nuclear weapons under verifiable terms," he said, adding that such an absolutist view was controversial.

Scott Lee, a graduate student in the Wilson School, said McNamara's hope for a world without nuclear weapons was "powerful, because often those who make that claim are accused of being politically naïve," but that it does not apply to the former defense secretary.

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McNamara also quoted the testimony of the mayor of Nagasaki to the International Court of Justice, which described the horrific injuries wrought by the blast effects, fire, heat and radiation of a nuclear explosion.

"Nagasaki became a city of death where not even the sounds of insects could be heard," he read.

Because of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, McNamara advised Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to "never, under any circumstances, initiate use of nuclear weapons." He said he believes both presidents agreed with him on a "no first-use" policy, but that they could not state so publicly at that time.

He also said he believed the U.S. government erred when dealing with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And misjudgment and miscalculation inherent in humans actions argue against the use of nuclear weapons, McNamara said.