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Strangeloves Of The Sofa

Fatmouthing warmongers like Rep. Adam Kinzinger are pushing us closer to nuclear war with Russia
Screen Shot 2022-02-27 at 3.07.07 PM

You wanna know why I’ve been so anxious about Western warmongering, even as I support the Ukrainian resistance to Russia aggression? Check out what US Rep Adam Kinzinger says, and how Douthat responds:

Look, I”m 55 years old. That means I was 24 years old when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. I spent my entire youth in the shadow of the Cold War. I remember the day it all suddenly became real to me. I was 12, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had put nuclear conflict in my mind. I remember exactly where I was sitting — in the passenger seat of my dad’s muddy orange Ford Bronco, bucking along over a pasture after a morning of deer hunting — when I pointed out to him a thought I had just had: it would take 19 minutes for Soviet missiles to reach us in Louisiana, so at any given moment, we were only 19 minutes away from fiery annihilation.

He replied with something to the effect of, “Don’t think about it.”

Well, if your dad tells you “don’t think about it,” you bloody well are going to think about it! Along with about half the country, I watched the TV movie The Day After in 1983, as a high school student. It was a movie about what would America be like in the event of nuclear war. It really is impossible to convey to those born after the Cold War, or whose childhood memories of the world beyond themselves began after the Cold War, how ever-present the thought of nuclear death was. It’s not like it paralyzed us — life, obviously, did go on — but it was always there in the back of your mind, the thought that everything we love and everything we know could be vaporized in a flash.

Sting’s melancholy song “Russians” came out in 1985, when I was a senior in high school. Watching it today, it seems kind of … quaint, weirdly enough. But that’s only because I know how the Cold War ended. Back then, none of us did, and this is an accurate reflection of how very many people felt at the time:

And then it was over. It ended in part because of the resolve of Ronald Reagan, a man that everyone on the Left hated at the time, because they believed he was going to cause nuclear war. As grateful as I am to Reagan, it cannot be forgotten that under his leadership, and the radically unstable leadership in the dying Soviet Union, the world got awful damn close. A US government report discovered that in 1983, during the Able Archer exercise, the USSR and the US came a lot closer to nuclear war than we realized at the time. Back then, the Russian leadership, which was in turmoil in the post-Brezhnev era, was genuinely convinced that the US was going to attack them. And Washington wanted to keep them off-guard, as the report showed. Plus, at the time Reagan administration officials were publicly talking about how nuclear war was survivable and winnable. This is the context in which The Day After appeared.

When I read people today saying that the Russians are fools to think that NATO is an offensive alliance, not a defensive one, I think about how the world looked from the Kremlin in the early 1980s. There’s no way the US would have launched a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union — but that’s not the way the Soviets saw it. Similarly, the good intentions of NATO today don’t matter; what matters is what the Russian senior command thinks. It could be quite wrong, but that could still lead to nuclear war.

A few years ago, when I was working with the actor Wendell Pierce on his memoir, he told me about how in the 1980s, his older brother was a US army officer stationed in West Germany, and in charge of a nuclear missile battery of some sort. They would have exercises in which the men manning the launch controls would be tested to see if they would do as they were supposed to do, and fire the missiles when getting the order. To be effective, the exercise could not let the soldiers know it was fake. So Wendell’s brother and his men had to sit in that room and order what they knew could be the launch that would end the world. And they did, obeying orders.

Wendell told me that he spoke to his brother about that when the Cold War was over. His brother told him that to have the courage to make that call, he, the brother, had to have total confidence that the President would not have issued such a command if the Russians hadn’t launched first, and the annihilation of America was already assured. Can you imagine? I mean, seriously, can you imagine the pressure on men like Wendell’s brother — who indeed made that call in the exercise, not knowing if it was fake or real?

We owe our lives to the hesitation of Lt. Col Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who had a similar role in their military as Wendell’s brother had in our own. In 1983, a glitch in the Soviet early warning computer program told him that five US missiles were on their way. He felt that something was wrong, and did not pass the information up the line, because he knew that it would cause his superiors to order a launch that would cause Armageddon. Sure enough, later investigation found the problem. Petrov’s hesitation saved the world that day. Do you understand this? The decision of a single Russian officer likely kept the world from being incinerated on September 26, 1983. It was a Monday. I was in class, having started my junior year of high school. President Reagan was in New York, visiting the dying Terence Cardinal Cooke. This was the No. 1 song in the nation:

That era came to an end on Christmas Day, 1991, when the hammer-and-sickle standard was lowered for the final time over the Kremlin. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated a peaceful end to the conflict. My children have had the blessing of growing up without the fear that their parents had. But the nuclear weapons never went away. We still have them. So does Russia. Have people forgotten this?

Rep. Adam Kinzinger was 13 when the USSR folded — about the same age I was when the reality of what nuclear war would mean dawned on me. He never really knew what that felt like. So when I hear him fatmouthing about how the US ought to risk nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine, it chills me to the bone. He’s not the only one on the American scene making this kind of noise. Many of these people sneer at older folks, like me, who remember what that was like, and who are trying to figure out what we need to do to show resolve in the face of Russian military aggression, without pushing things too far. Again, I remind you: NATO would not have launched a first strike on the Soviets back in the day, but that is not how the paranoid Russian leadership saw it. Similarly, if Vladimir Putin, age 70, runs into trouble subduing Ukraine, and faces the prospect of being ousted by an internal coup, don’t you think his paranoia is going to ramp up? And then what?

The discourse among so many belligerent Americans, both liberals and conservatives, about this war is lunatic. I find it so much more realistic to talk to Hungarians. The horror of war is still within living memory here. I happen to live near the Castle in Buda, the hilly half of Budapest on the western side of the Danube. It was where the worst fighting of the 1945 Siege of Budapest took place, between the Red Army and the defending Germans, along with their Hungarian fascist allies. Here is the aftermath of the historic Matthias Church, a short walk from where I sit in my living room typing this:

It is difficult to explain to non-Hungarians the historical and religious significance of this church to the Hungarian people. This is what war did to it. The Matthias church has been restored today. Look:

Hungarians know, however, how quickly all of that could be turned to rubble. They know because in the lifetimes of many of them, it was. Of course that was conventional warfare; nuclear war would annihilate all of it, and all of us. Still, the point is that the Hungarians are so anxious because war is not an abstraction for them. I don’t believe that Rep. Kinzinger’s Illinois hometown has ever been devastated by warfare. Here is his home church, the non-denominational Village Church in Minooka, Illinois:

Not quite the Matthias church, but I’m sure Rep. Kinzinger and the people who worship there love it too, and would grieve if it were destroyed in war. Whatever happens in Ukraine, the Village Church will be safe, unless there’s a nuclear war. The point is, with a war going on in Ukraine, the Christians of Minooka are entitled to feel a lot more secure in their lives than the Christians of Budapest are. Hence, I think, the unreality of Kinzinger’s aggression. It’s too damned easy to sit on your couch in Kankakee and tweet exhortations to start World War III. As Douthat points out, where is the off-ramp for Kinzinger’s policy?

A side note: you know, it’s funny: the two former Soviet bloc nations who are proving most important to the West’s defiance of Putin — Poland (especially) and Hungary — are both led by conservative populist governments despised by right-thinking liberals and conservatives in both the EU and the US. Maybe, in this new Cold War environment, it’s not such a great idea for the West to attempt to destabilize these governments, just like it’s not a good idea back home in the US to alienate the constituencies the country will need to fight if war comes. Hungary’s government in particular is taking massive risks with its pro-Ukraine stance, given that this country gets 80 percent of its natural gas from Russia. But as a member of the EU, Hungary could have protected Russia from being kicked out of the SWIFT banking network. It did not.

Last night I saw a tweet, which I wish I had saved, in which someone pointed out that the Snake Island defenders who all supposedly went to their deaths — I praised them in this space — are all actually alive, and had been captured by the Russians, and pointed out that the Ghost of Kyiv fighter ace legend is untrue. Others responded angrily, saying that OK, so they may not be true, but we shouldn’t say that because believing those lies keeps up the morale of Ukraine supporters. This is a typical example:

Come on! One can recognize the value of propaganda in a war, but at the very least we in the US should be unwilling to believe lies, because they might draw us into a shooting war with Russia that could quickly turn nuclear. What is wrong with people? Have three decades of peace erased common sense? “Do this,” says Kinzinger, urging a NATO attack that would launch World War III. The fool! There is a fine line between insane courage and mere insanity, and Adam Kinzinger’s mouth is on the wrong side of it.

Just now, my laptop dinged, and a friend sent me this:

I’m going to post this, then walk over to the Matthias church, and pray for Ukraine, pray for peace, and pray that the American people will not listen to warmongers like Adam Kinzinger, whose Strangelove-of-the-Sofa bravado could get a lot of us killed.

UPDATE: The latest from Rep. Turgidson:

“Breathlessness over nukes.”

UPDATE.2:
A reader pointed out that I misidentified the photo of the 1945 Matthias church above. It’s actually the former Finance Ministry, which shared the square with the Matthias church, hence my confusion (I thought the church tower had been turned to rubble, hence its absence). He sent a replacement photo of the 1945 view of the Matthias church, which I have embedded above. Apologies.

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