Admirers of Oppenheimer might have an interest in the Jun 19, 1959 roll-call vote rejecting Lewis Strauss as Secretary of Commerce:
| All Votes | Democrats | Republicans | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yea | 48% | 46 | 15 | 31 |
| Nay | 52% | 49 | 47 | 2 |
| Present | 1 | 1 | 0 | |
| Not Voting | 2 | 1 | 1 | |
unknown. unknown Required. Source: VoteView.com.
Among the nays were future presidents John F. Kennedy (who gets a fleeting mention in the movie) and Lyndon B. Johnson, then the Senat Majority Leader.
From the testimony of Dr. David Hill (Rami Malek's role)
Louis Menand at The New Yorker:
What is the track record of the press since Lippmann’s day? In “City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington” (Chicago), Kathryn J. McGarr weighs the performance of the Washington press corps during the first decades of the Cold War. She shows, by examining archived correspondence, that reporters in Washington knew perfectly well that Administrations were misleading them about national-security matters—about whether the United States was flying spy planes over the Soviet Union, for example, or training exiles to invade Cuba and depose Fidel Castro. To the extent that there was an agenda concealed by official claims of “containing Communist expansion”—to the extent that Middle East policy was designed to preserve Western access to oil fields, or that Central American policy was designed to make the region safe for United Fruit—reporters were not fooled.
So why didn’t they report what they knew? McGarr, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks it’s because the people who covered Washington for the wire services and the major dailies had an ideology. They were liberal internationalists. Until the United States intervened militarily in Vietnam—the Marines waded ashore there in 1965—that was the ideology of American élites. Like the government, and like the leaders of philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation and cultural institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, newspaper people believed in what they saw as the central mission of Cold War policy: the defense of the North Atlantic community of nations. They supported policies that protected and promoted the liberal values in the name of which the United States had gone to war against Hitler.
Many members of the Washington press, including editors and publishers, had served in the government during the Second World War—in the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the C.I.A.), in the Office of War Information, and in other capacities in Washington and London. They had been part of the war effort, and their sense of duty persisted after the war ended. Defending democracy was not just the government’s job. It was the press’s job, too.
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There was another reason for caution: fear of nuclear war. After the Soviets developed an atomic weapon, in 1949, and until the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, end-of-the-world nuclear anxiety was widespread, and newsmen shared it. The Cold War was a balance-of-power war. That’s what the unofficial doctrine of the American government, “containment,” meant: keep things as they are. Whatever tipped the scale in the wrong direction might unleash the bomb, and so newspapers were careful about what they published.
When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was.
American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show. The government censored those pages when it declassified the study for public release.
The document was disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a classified history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, 50 years ago. Mr. Ellsberg said he had copied the top secret study about the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time but did not disclose it then. He is now highlighting it amid new tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan.
...
Mr. Ellsberg quietly posted the full study online in 2017, when he published a book, “Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” One of its footnotes mentions in passing that passages and pages omitted from the study are available on his website.
Two years before American scientists tested the atomic bomb in a New Mexico desert in 1945, Igor Kurchatov, father of the Russian atomic program, was already examining hand-drawn sketches smuggled out of Los Alamos and ferried 6,000 miles to his Moscow laboratory. These diagrams spelled out the principles of implosion, a theory so new to Soviet scientists that they used the phrase “explosion toward the inside” because no word existed for it in Russian.
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My students’ textbooks mute this story. “American Pageant,’ one of the most widely used texts for Advanced Placement history, offers this lone sentence: “Soviet agents did infiltrate certain government agencies, though without severely damaging consequences, and espionage may have helped the Soviets to develop an atomic bomb somewhat sooner than they would have otherwise.”
“May have”? Scientist Kurchatov saw things a bit differently. Writing to superiors in 1943, he described American secrets as having “a huge, invaluable significance for our state and science.”
More lopsided is “The Americans,” another leading textbook. A lengthy section on McCarthy’s slimy Red-baiting tactics dominates a chapter on the Cold War. Tacked at the end is a sentence about newly released Soviet cables that implicated Alger Hiss, a State Department official, which “seemed” to prove his guilt as a spy. Students, however, never learn about a second cable (KGB File 36857) that named agent “Alger” and explained his role in procuring documents for the Soviets.
“Well, let’s face it,” historian Maurice Isserman wrote in 1999 in reference to Hiss’ guilt, “the debate just ended.”
None of us can be completely objective. What matters is what we do when our preconceptions collide with new evidence.
This happened to Walter and Miriam Schneir. In their 1965 book about the Rosenbergs, they sought to prove that allegations of spying were baseless. Confronted with new evidence 30 years later, the husband-and-wife team reassessed their lifework. Their efforts to establish the Rosenbergs’ innocence had been in vain — a realization that was “painful news for many people, as it is for us,” they wrote.
When the evidence changes, so must the story.
Jeffrey Lewis, director of the east Asia nonproliferation program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies:
“This is literally the end of a North Korean movie – North Korea develops nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, compelling the US president to come to Pyongyang,” said Lewis, referring to a series called The Country I Saw.
“It’s an incredible coup for Kim. The message is that Saddam and Gaddafi disarmed.
They are dead,” he said. “Kim finished the nuclear weapons program. He gets a summit with the president of the United States.
“We should be talking to Pyongyang, but you don’t frontload the big concession.”Mark Landler at NYT:
Behind the scenes, events unfolded even more haphazardly. Mr. Trump was not scheduled to meet Mr. Chung until Friday, but when he heard that the envoy was in the West Wing seeing other officials, the president summoned him to the Oval Office, according to a senior administration official.
Mr. Trump, the official said, then asked Mr. Chung to tell him about his meeting with Mr. Kim. When Mr. Chung said that the North Korean leader had expressed a desire to meet Mr. Trump, the president immediately said he would do it, and directed Mr. Chung to announce it to the White House press corps.
Mr. Chung, nonplused, said he first needed approval from Mr. Moon, who quickly granted it in a phone call. Mr. Trump later called Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, and the two discussed coordinating diplomatic efforts. Mr. Trump also plans to call President Xi Jinping of China.
The best reforms to the nuclear command and control system would be ones that maximized the opportunity for the human element to mitigate risks by maximizing time for deliberation and assessment. The best reforms are ones that would increase the time that the President and his advisors would have available so as to make considered decisions incorporating the widest set of inputs, including, if possible, inputs from leaders in Congress. Of course, efforts to extend decision times must not run afoul of the always-never dilemma. Reforms that maximized decision time but rendered the nuclear arsenal unusable in a crisis or conventional conflict would undermine deterrence and could actually make a nuclear war more, not less, likely. Moreover, measures aimed at providing radical solutions at the hardware level risk being undone by workarounds at the software or wetware levels. Nevertheless, investments -- even costly investments -- in systems that buy more decision time in crises are likely among the wisest expenditures we can make. For instance, enhanced missile defenses may be a prudent option in light of the growing threat from North Korea – one that gives the President more time to assess before reacting. And upgrading communications systems to ensure that the President will have immediate access to all of his/her relevant advisors even under demanding scenarios would be a prudent investment in national security.
POTUS has sole authority to order nuclear weapons launch, that order cannot be countermanded by SecDef @wellerstein https://t.co/jV3SCGUkFA— William J. Perry (@SecDef19) August 8, 2017
[C]ould a president make the decision to use a nuclear weapon without any interference from others?
Bruce G. Blair, a former Minuteman missile-launch officer and research scholar at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, told Business Insider that the answer, essentially, is yes.
Blair pointed to a step-by-step outline of the nuclear chain of command which he helped describe in Bloomberg earlier this year.
Here's what would happen, according to Blair: The president would consult with top military brass about the use of a nuclear weapon. The president would come to a decision. The order would be verified and officially issued. The launch crews would take over. And, finally, the missiles would be deployed.
If the threat wasn't imminent, he said it would likely take a few days to prepare the weapons. But, if in the middle of a sustained conflict during which nuclear weapons had been on the table as a last resort, the process would be vastly accelerated — missiles could be in the air within a window as small as 15 minutes.
Congress could do nothing to stop the decision if it were made in haste, Blair said.Click here for a scenario.
In a series of impromptu statements about nuclear weapons, Donald Trump is threatening to upend longstanding U.S. nonproliferation policy, even as his advisers contradict him and muddy his intentions.
The president-elect had alarmed and perplexed some experts and others in Washington when he pronounced, without offering more details, via Twitter on Thursday that the U.S. “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
He further escalated his call on Friday, telling the MSNBC program “Morning Joe” that he is fine with the country taking part in an “arms race” if it puts the U.S. in a stronger position against foreign adversaries.
“Let it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” Trump told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” during an off-air conversation on Friday.
After the remark was reported on MSNBC, though, incoming Trump press secretary Sean Spicer pushed back and insisted that the remarks came from a “private conversation” with “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski. While he told the “Today” Show’s Matt Lauer that “there is not going to be” an arms race, he told CNN that Trump is not going to “take anything off the table,” either.
President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to stand by his plans to establish a registry for Muslims and temporarily ban Muslim immigrants from the United States.The proposed Muslim ban is still on his website.
Speaking outside his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump did not walk back the proposals after he was asked by a reporter whether he was rethinking or reevaluating them in the wake of a fresh terrorist attack in Berlin.
“You know my plans all along,” Trump said.
He went on to add that the attack on a Berlin Christmas market, which was claimed by the Islamic State, had vindicated him. German authorities are seeking a 24-year-old Tunisian migrant, who they say has ties to Islamist extremists, in connection with the attack, which killed 12 people and injured dozens.
“I’ve been proven to be right. One-hundred-percent correct,” Trump said. “What’s happening is disgraceful.”
China flew a long-range nuclear-capable bomber outside China for the first time since President-elect Donald Trump spoke with the president of Taiwan, two US officials told Fox News.
The dramatic show of force was meant to send a message to the new administration, according to the officials. It marks the second time Beijing flew bombers in the region since Trump was elected.
Even more concerning for the Pentagon, China has been seen by American intelligence satellites preparing to ship more advanced surface-to-air missiles to its contested islands in the South China Sea.
Trump's call with Taiwan's President Tsai ling-wen broke decades- long protocol after American leaders stopped communicating directly with the Taiwan president in 1979, when diplomatic ties were severed and the United States shifted to a new "one-China" policy. China protested Trump's call with President Tsai.Just before the election, John-Clark Levin an essay titled "How Trump Could Realistically Start a Nuclear War." This passage is ... unnerving.
The Chinese H-6 bomber flew along the disputed "Nine-Dash line" Thursday, which surrounds the South China Sea and dozens of disputed Chinese islands, many claimed by other countries in the region.
Then, on a sleepy summer morning in 2020, Chinese jets make simulated attack runs against the USS Ronald Reagan, operating in the South China Sea. Trump’s pride is pricked. Officials in Beijing have been bragging about how the SCS is becoming a Chinese lake. It makes him look weak. So Trump orders the jets shot down (which he has already said he would do in similar circumstances). Several Chinese airmen die. China responds by shooting down a B-1 bomber off Taiwan.
Trump orders the carrier to enter Chinese waters in a show of force to reassert American might in the region. The admirals who would have resisted such recklessness have already left or been muscled out. Chinese warships intercept, and in the tense and confused standoff, someone starts shooting. American firepower blows the smaller Chinese vessels out of the water. In minutes, DF-21 carrier-killer missiles rain down on the U.S. strike group, and when the smoke clears, the Ronald Reagan is on the bottom along with a couple thousand American sailors. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Beijing has ordered its nuclear forces to maximum alert in preparation for a first strike.
6,500 miles away in Washington, an admiral approaches President Trump as an aide unlatches the nuclear football. “Well, Mr. President. Here are your options…”
One reason towers above all others why Donald Trump must not be President: his unfitness to command America’s nuclear arsenal. Yet nuclear war is so frightening and cataclysmic that it is hard to think about rationally, or to grasp as a real possibility. Even Trump’s harshest critics can’t see him waking up one morning and deciding to annihilate Mexico. So where’s the danger? What follows is one plausible scenario, based on the judgments of veteran security experts.
It’s November 9. The polls badly misjudged turnout, and Trump has pulled off a stunning victory. Transition team Chairman Chris Christie’s first task is assembling a solid national security staff, but most of the top officials who would normally serve in a Republican administration refuse to serve under Trump (many have already stated this publicly).
So instead of the smartest and ablest leaders, Trump is forced to fill essential defense and intelligence posts with hacks — the B-level talent whose ambition overcomes their objections, and the C-level talent whose loyalty wins them undeserved appointments. Some good people do go to work in the Trump White House, judging they’d rather be in the Situation Room than the alt-righters who’d otherwise get their jobs. Maybe, they think, they can influence Trump for the better.
By the end of Trump’s first 100 days, though, it’s clear that his lifelong leadership style will not change. First, he surrounds himself with people who flatter him and tell him whatever he wants to hear, because he is a “great loyalty freak.” Second, he can’t take criticism or dissent, and sees these as disloyalty that must be punished. Third, he has a profound insecurity that cannot tolerate advice from big minds and strong personalities. Instead, he famously said, “Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you.” Over Trump’s first years in office, these traits force more good people out of government, replaced by those willing to follow Trump blindly.
Meanwhile, just as Trump boasted during the campaign that he knew more about ISIS than the generals, he now demoralizes top military leaders, publicly denigrating their competence even as he thwarts them with meddling and micromanagement. Trump continues to alienate the CIA, just as during the campaign he ignored consensus assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies in their briefings to him, instead bizarrely insisting that the DNC hacks weren’t the work of Russia, but perhaps a “400-pound man sitting on his bed.” Under these conditions, many of the best people in the Pentagon leave, and Trump makes good on his campaign statements by firing others.
On an October afternoon in 2019, terror strikes again — this time, a truck bomb in Jersey City kills almost a hundred people. Trump’s first instinct — as it has been throughout his long and well-documented life — is immediate and overwhelming retaliation. Despite contemplating nuclear counterattacks during the campaign (“Somebody hits us within ISIS — you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?”), Trump now orders conventional punitive airstrikes on civilian areas in Raqqa, Syria. “We have no choice, people,” Trump says. Trump’s Justice Department insists that the strikes are legal, but as images of maimed children fill the airwaves, officers of conscience start retiring or resigning rather than participate in what they see as war crimes.
Then, on a sleepy summer morning in 2020, Chinese jets make simulated attack runs against the USS Ronald Reagan, operating in the South China Sea. Trump’s pride is pricked. Officials in Beijing have been bragging about how the SCS is becoming a Chinese lake. It makes him look weak. So Trump orders the jets shot down (which he has already said he would do in similar circumstances). Several Chinese airmen die. China responds by shooting down a B-1 bomber off Taiwan.
Trump orders the carrier to enter Chinese waters in a show of force to reassert American might in the region. The admirals who would have resisted such recklessness have already left or been muscled out. Chinese warships intercept, and in the tense and confused standoff, someone starts shooting. American firepower blows the smaller Chinese vessels out of the water. In minutes, DF-21 carrier-killer missiles rain down on the U.S. strike group, and when the smoke clears, the Ronald Reagan is on the bottom along with a couple thousand American sailors. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Beijing has ordered its nuclear forces to maximum alert in preparation for a first strike.
6,500 miles away in Washington, an admiral approaches President Trump as an aide unlatches the nuclear football. “Well, Mr. President. Here are your options…”
The scenario above illustrates how Trump would gradually force prudent and principled people out of our military and intelligence communities, and surround himself only with people who defer to his darkest instincts. Under those conditions, with 1,367 nuclear warheads at his sole command, Trump’s morbid impulsiveness and urge for immediate and overwhelming retribution create enormous risk.
A bluff or miscalculation can escalate with terrifying speed, and this is made much more likely because Trump’s instability would send mixed signals to foreign powers. One week, he might allow the Russians to provoke him in the Baltic, and the next week decide it’s worth risking war. Uncertainty breeds danger.
One need not accept that a scenario like this is actually probable to still find Trump unacceptable. Even a 10 percent chance of the casualties and costs of a nuclear catastrophe is more ruinous than any plausible corruption that might be perpetrated by his opponent.
This is an issue that transcends policy and transcends politics. If you agree, please share this warning as widely as you can during these final days before the election—what might be America’s final hours to prevent this scenario from coming to pass. It may be uncomfortable, and it may feel futile, but each of us has a responsibility to make sure that everyone we know who still reluctantly supports this man runs this terrible calculus before casting their vote.
A president of the United States can, in theory, launch nuclear war by personal decision—without any checks or balances. Whether we really think any of the candidates for president in 2016 would cavalierly start a nuclear war, the bombastic and bizarre character of much of this year’s electoral debate should make us take this question seriously. Someday, the United States really could have a mentally ill president who chose to do the unthinkable. The odds are low, but we should seek to make them even lower, given the stakes at hand. Because it looks like humankind will be stuck with the nuclear bomb for many decades (if not centuries) to come, moreover, the solution to this problem cannot be simply to get rid of all existing nuclear arsenals. We need a more immediate answer.
To be sure, a president is required by the War Powers Act of 1973 to seek congressional approval for any military action within 60 days of its inception. But most presidents consider that act unconstitutional. In any event, a nuclear war could easily devastate the planet within just days or hours—long before the 60-day stipulation would be binding. Even if a president had obtained congressional approval for a war that began using only conventional weapons, no provisions of the War Powers Act would require subsequent congressional action prior to nuclear escalation.Only twelve Americans have ever held this power:
In short: A president could push the button all by himself or herself, legally- and constitutionally-speaking. Physically, military personnel would need to carry out the strike of course. They could choose not to, perhaps at the instruction of the secretary of defense or the four-star officer leading Strategic Command—who together constitute the chain of command between the president and the trigger-pullers. But any military officer ignoring a presidential order would be in open insubordination, subject to dismissal and court martial.
As with his predecessors, Trump’s power over the life and death of entire nations would be practically unbounded. Today, the nuclear deluge he could command would consist of thousands of weapons, each 10 or 20 times more deadly than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nearly 2,000 U.S. strategic nuclear weapons aimed primarily at Russia and China (at a ratio of roughly 2 to 1), with additional dozens aimed at each of several other nations—North Korea, Iran and Syria—would be at a President Trump’s disposal from his first minutes in office. The city of Moscow alone lies in the bore sights of more than 100 U.S. nuclear warheads.
There are no restraints that can prevent a willful president from unleashing this hell.
If he gave the command, his executing commanders would have no legal or procedural grounds to defy it no matter how inappropriate it might seem. As long as the president can establish his or her true identity by his or her personal presence in the Pentagon’s nuclear war room or its alternates (places like Site R at Fort Richie near Camp David), or by phone or other means of communications linking him or her to these war rooms using a special identification card (colloquially known as “the biscuit” containing “the nuclear codes”) in his or her possession (or, alternatively, kept inside the “nuclear briefcase” carried by his or her military aide who shadows the president everywhere he or she works, travels and plays), a presidential nuclear decision is lawful (putting international humanitarian law aside). It must be obeyed as long as it is constitutional—i.e., the president as commander in chief believes he or she is acting to protect and defend the nation against an actual or imminent attack.
But within these broad constraints there is no wiggle room for evasion or defiance of the president’s orders. That’s true even if the national security adviser, the secretary of defense (who along with the president makes up the “national command authority”) and other top appointees and advisers disagree with the president’s decision. It does not matter whether the United States has already come under attack by nuclear or non-nuclear weapons. It does not even matter if the commander in chief simply orders the use of nuclear weapons on an ordinary day for reasons unknown to all but him or her. Under the president’s open-ended mandate to decide when the national interest is threatened, ordering up a nuclear strike is his or her prerogative, and obeying the order is incumbent upon the military servants of civilian authority.
Federal legacy IT investments are becoming increasingly obsolete: many use outdated software languages and hardware parts that are unsupported. Agencies reported using several systems that have components that are, in some cases, at least 50 years old. For example, the Department of Defense uses 8-inch floppy disks in a legacy system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation's nuclear forces. In addition, the Department of the Treasury uses assembly language code—a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed. OMB recently began an initiative to modernize, retire, and replace the federal government's legacy IT systems. As part of this, OMB drafted guidance requiring agencies to identify, prioritize, and plan to modernize legacy systems. However, until this policy is finalized and fully executed, the government runs the risk of maintaining systems that have outlived their effectiveness. The following table provides examples of legacy systems across the federal government that agencies report are 30 years or older and use obsolete software or hardware, and identifies those that do not have specific plans with time frames to modernize or replace these investments.Brian Fung reports at The Washington Post:
There are parallels here to fiction, which can be just as instructive. In the 2004 hit TV series “Battlestar Galactica,” humanity comes under assault from robots that it created. Much of the human space fleet is taken by surprise, crippled by a robot-built computer virus that spreads from ship to ship thanks to the sophisticated networks linking the crafts together. The Galactica, an obsolete warship due to be mothballed, is one of the few to survive the initial surprise attack. Why? Because the Galactica’s systems were not part of the humans’ IT network, sparing it from the virus that disables the rest of the fleet. The lesson seems clear: Sometimes, newer is not better.
As it happens, a similar logic underpins the U.S. military’s continued use of floppy disks. The fact that America’s nuclear forces are disconnected from digital networks actually acts as a buffer against hackers. As Maj. General Jack Weinstein told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2014:Jack Weinstein: I'll tell you, those older systems provide us some -- I will say huge safety when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world.
Lesley Stahl: Now, explain that.
Weinstein: A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network. Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure on the way it's developed.
Stahl: Meaning that you're not up on the Internet kind of thing?
Weinstein: We're not up on the Internet.
Stahl: So did the cyber people recommend you keep it the way it is?
Weinstein: For right now, yes.
Overall, 43% of Americans support the deal. This falls short of a majority, but supporters significantly outnumber opponents of the deal, who make up 30% of the public. Fully a quarter of Americans (26%) are undecided, however.
Support for the deal falls along familiar political lines. 60% of Democrats back the agreement, which could mark a major legacy acheivement for a Democratic president. 55% of Republicans oppose the deal. Yet Republicans are more likely to support the Iran deal (28%) than Democrats are to oppose (13%), and independents are narrowly in favor (38-31%) with 31% undecided.
Americans also tend to think Iran, not the U.S. and its allies, got the most out of the deal, by 38% to 11%. 20% say both got about the same amount – the “win-win” described by Iran’s foreign minister after the deal was announced.
If Iran breaks the agreement and begins developing a nuclear weapon, majorities of nearly all political and demographic groups say they would approve of the US and its allies taking military action against Iran. Overall 64% say they would approve of using military force in this event, against only 18% who would disapprove.
And if public confidence in the deal is an indication, support for military action may soon be tested. Only 23% of Americans are even somewhat confident the deal will prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, while 27% are “not so confident” and another third are “not confident at all”.
These numbers are consistent with findings before the agreement was announced that showed Americans in favor of negotiations but also distrustful that Iran would keep up with their end of a bargain.
The U.S. and other global powers announced that they've set the "parameters" of a nuclear deal with Iran. But Americans don't trust Tehran, with a bipartisan majority saying that Congress should have to approve any agreement, according to the latest IBD/TIPP Poll.
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By a 62% to 30% margin in the IBD/TIPP Poll of 900 adults completed Wednesday, Americans don't believe Iran would keep its side of any nuclear bargain. Half of Democrats expect the Islamic regime to keep its word vs. just 12% of Republicans and 27% of independents.
"One thing is very clear: People are really skeptical of a deal with Iran," said Raghavan Mayur, president of Technometrica, IBD's polling partner.
Obama won't submit any nuclear deal to Congress, defying a majority of Americans from across the political spectrum. Overall, 58% say lawmakers should vote on the deal vs. 35% who do not. That includes 54% of both Democrats and Republicans, along with 67% of independents.
As Obama touted the "historic understanding," 46% of Americans say the president is focusing on his legacy while ignoring Iran's growing influence in the Mideast, vs. 44% who disagree. Not surprisingly, Americans are divided along partisan lines, with independents split too.
Meanwhile, U.S.-Israel relations have "significantly worsened" under President Obama, according to a 45% plurality. Some 40% say ties haven't changed, while 6% say they've "significantly improved."
Republicans and independents are far more likely to see a deterioration than Democrats.Scott Clement and Peyton G. Craighill report at The Washington Post:
By a nearly 2 to 1 margin, Americans support the notion of striking a deal with Iran that restricts the nation’s nuclear program in exchange for loosening sanctions, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.
But the survey — released hours before Tuesday’s negotiating deadline — also finds few Americans are hopeful that such an agreement will be effective. Nearly six in 10 say they are not confident that a deal will prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, unchanged from 15 months ago, when the United States, France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia reached an interim agreement with Iran aimed at sealing a long-term deal.
Overall, the poll finds 59 percent support an agreement in which the United States and its negotiating partners lift major economic sanctions in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. Thirty-one percent oppose a deal.Pew reports:
Ahead of a March 31 deadline for nuclear talks with Iran, more Americans approve (49%) than disapprove (40%) of the United States negotiating directly with Iran over its nuclear program. But the public remains skeptical of whether Iranian leaders are serious about addressing international concerns over their nuclear enrichment program.
If a nuclear agreement is reached, most Americans (62%) want Congress to have final authority over the deal. Just 29% say President Obama should have final authority over any nuclear agreement with Iran.
The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted March 25-29 among 1,500 adults, finds that just 27% have heard a lot about the nuclear talks between the United States and Iran in Lausanne, Switzerland. Another 49% have heard a little about the negotiations, while 24% have heard nothing at all.
After taking office in 1981, incoming President Ronald Reagan appointed [Paul] Nitze to lead the U.S. delegation to the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks in Geneva, but for almost a year, Nitze and his team found it impossible to reach an agreement with the Soviet delegation. Finally, Nitze invited his Soviet counterpart Yuli Kvitsinsky to meet with him privately and work out a proposal to bypass the prior conditions both sides had imposed on the negotiating process. On July 16, 1982, the two men took their discussion to a wooded slope of the Jura Mountains, on the border between Switzerland and France. Away from the rest of their negotiating teams, the two diplomats crafted a fresh proposal to reduce the superpowers' stockpile of intermediate-range missiles. Nitze's bold act of personal diplomacy captured the imagination of the world press and inspired a long-running Broadway play, A Walk in the Woods.The incident happened three years before Gorbachev became General Secretary.
On this day in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis, which threatened to start a superpower war, came to a close when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove 42 intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Cuba. For its part, Washington promised not to invade the Communist island, while pledging (secretly) to dismantle its own missiles in Italy and Turkey.At the Council on Foreign Relations, James M. Lindsay writes:
Confident that the crisis was headed to a peaceful and satisfactory conclusion, Kennedy called former presidents Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower. He told them only what was in the news. He didn’t tell them about the secret promise he had made to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The former presidents not surprisingly applauded Kennedy’s skill in forcing Khrushchev to capitulate.
Not everyone one was pleased that the missile crisis had been resolved peacefully. Fidel Castro was outraged. He would later lead his fellow Cubans in chants of “Nikita, mariquita, lo que se da no se quita!” (“Nikita, you little homosexual, what is given should not be taken back!”)
None of that was a concern for JFK. After calling presidents Truman and Eisenhower, he turned to his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and invoked the memory of Abraham Lincoln. “This is the night I should go to the theater,” said the president. RFK replied, “If you go, I want to go with you.”
A second letter from Moscow demanding tougher terms, including the removal of obsolete Jupiter missiles from Turkey, is received in Washington. Over Cuba, An American U-2 plane is shot down by a Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile and the pilot, Major Rudolph Anderson, is killed. President Kennedy writes a letter to the widow of USAF Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr., offering condolences, and informing her that President Kennedy is awarding him the Distinguished Service Medal, posthumously.A PBS documentary describes the shoot-down:
At a tense meeting of the Executive Committee, President Kennedy resists pressure for immediate military action against the SAM sites. At several points in the discussion, Kennedy insists that removal of the American missiles in Turkey will have to be part of an overall negotiated settlement. The Committee ultimately decides to ignore the Saturday letter from Moscow and respond favorably to the more conciliatory Friday message. Air Force troop carrier squadrons are ordered to active duty in case an invasion is required.
Later that night, Robert Kennedy meets secretly with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. They reach a basic understanding: the Soviet Union will withdraw the missiles from Cuba under United Nations supervision in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. In an additional secret understanding, the United States agrees to eventually remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey.