Garrett M. Graff

Opinion contributor

Today, for the first time in seemingly a generation, the possibility of nuclear war looms over daily life once again. North Korea is now regularly testing ballistic missiles, including two so far this month alone.

I’ve spent the past five years studying the U.S. government’s doomsday plans through the Cold War, examining how shifting eras, evolving technologies and the growing megatonnage of nuclear arsenals changed the way our leaders thought about the world-ending catastrophe of nuclear war. My research made me realize what a near-miracle it is that the war never turned hot.

So how did two generations of American and Soviet leaders prevent the worst-case scenario and stop the catastrophic thing from happening — and, more important, what lessons are there for the Trump administration? Six stand out:

1) Make decisions deliberately. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, President Kennedy wasn’t particularly worried about an outright attack by the Soviet Union — he was worried about stumbling into war unintentionally. He was haunted by a non-fiction book that had come out that year, historian Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, that traced how the great powers, simultaneously headstrong and yet unsure of themselves, slipped, miscalculated and stumbled into World War I in the summer of 1914. As the Cuban crisis looked darkest, Kennedy told his brother Bobby that he wanted to avoid someone someday writing a comparable The Missiles of October.

2) Words matter — so communicate clearly. Throughout the missile crisis, the era’s antiquated telecommunications hampered efforts to de-escalate. Exchanges between the Kremlin and the Soviet Embassy in Washington relied, in part, on a bicycle messenger from the local Washington Western Union office.

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After the crisis, the two nations created the first direct communications link, a series of teletype machines that came to be known as the “hotline,” the so-called red phone that exists in today’s popular imagination. The hotline has never actually been a phone — for good reason. It needed to convey clearly and accurately what the sender intended, and speech could be garbled or misunderstood. Heads of state speaking for their country in a crisis needed to be able to speak with nuance and exactitude. They feared the risks of an unscripted phone call, risks even more pronounced today with a misunderstood 140-character presidential tweet.

3) Understand that misunderstandings are the rule, not the exception. Modern governments and militaries are large, complex enterprises, where miscommunications and oversights are to be expected. On one of the tensest days of the missile crisis, an American U-2 surveillance plane set out on a routine, pre-scheduled flight, only to become disoriented over the North Pole and stumble into Soviet airspace. Both governments understood in the moment that accidents happen — and that not every apparent provocation actually is one. The incident underscored to Kennedy that tensions needed to ease quickly. As he complained that afternoon, after hearing about the U-2 flight: “There’s always some son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word.”

4) Err on the side of caution and restraint. Both the United States and the Soviet Union weathered serious incidents that might well have escalated into nuclear war except for the calm heads of the staff involved who, at moments of great danger and import, decided not to overreact. Both in 1979 and 1980, computer glitches in U.S. early-warning systems at NORAD — the bunker in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., that keeps an eye on North America — falsely reported Soviet missile launches.

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And, on Sept. 26, 1983, at the Soviet’s control bunker in Serpukhov-15, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov watched as first one and then four more incoming missiles registered on his tracking computers. He made a quick determination: It was probably just a mistake. “I had a funny feeling in my gut,” he explained. He was right — it was a glitch. If Petrov had chosen to raise the alarm, the Kremlin’s leadership would have been particularly predisposed to believe that President Reagan might launch a surprise first strike, and to respond in kind.

5) Remember the information you have before you is incomplete — and quite possibly wrong. Fifty-five years of history since the end of the missile crisis have shown how little the leaders in that moment grasped what was unfolding before them, and particularly what the motives of their adversaries had been in the moment. In installing missiles in Cuba, it turns out, Premier Nikita Khrushchev was trying to defensively protect Cuba and Fidel Castro — not, as Kennedy’s team thought at the time, field an offensive weapon against the United States. This lesson was underscored last month with word that the U.S. did not, in fact, have an aircraft carrier steaming toward North Korea as the government and news media had reported.

6) Peace is the hardest work of all. Dwight Eisenhower boasted that as president, he was most proud of the simplest of accomplishments: “We kept the peace.” Many times, war would have been the simpler option for him, and what his aides and military advisers were advocating. Keeping peace, he had learned, was something that had required daily resolve. “People ask how it happened," Eisenhower said. “By God it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.”

Garrett M. Graff, a journalist and historian, is the author of Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die. Follow him on Twitter @vermontgmg

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