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Turkey could have been first battleground of nuclear confrontation
As memoirs and documentaries surface surrounding the events of the Bay of Pigs in 1962 in the wake of McNamara's death, it has once more come out that Turkey could have been the second country after Japan to suffer the wrath of nuclear strikes.
McNamara, who passed away at the age of 93, is also known as the architect of the infamous Vietnam War, which his own son opposed at one point by participating in the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s.
In a piece published in The New York Times, McNamara recounts how Turkey could have become the second country after Japan to face the destruction of nuclear strikes. Talking also on the nuclear bombing of Japan, McNamara confesses that they had all committed war crimes by burning “to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo.” Working for the US Army's Air Forces at the time, McNamara helped Gen. Curtis E. LeMay by running statistical analyses of the American attacks on Japanese soil.
McNamara names American troops as “war criminals” and says the only reason they had not been tried like the Nazis was the simple reason that they had won the war.
“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo -- men, women and children,” McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He -- and I'd say I -- were behaving as war criminals.”
McNamara posed the question of morality by asking, “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” and found no answer.
At the height of the Cold War, when the US started preparing plans to invade Cuba to get rid of the nuclear threat which had stationed itself on the doorstep of the US, McNamara feared Soviets could attack Turkey, which had American nuclear warheads, and ignite an all-out nuclear war that could have resulted in the destruction of a considerable part of the world. McNamara put forward the details of his life and work at the helm of the Pentagon between 1961 and 1968 in the documentary film “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.” The documentary was released in 2003.
At the height of the missile crisis, on Oct. 27, 1962, McNamara laid out the prospects for war. “The military plan is basically invasion,” he said. “When we attack Cuba, we are going to have to attack with an all-out attack.”
He continued, “The Soviet Union may, and, I think, probably will, attack the Turkish missiles.” The US would then have to attack Soviet ships or bases in the Black Sea, he said. The chances of an uncontrolled escalation were high. “And I would say that it is damn dangerous,” he said. “Now, I'm not sure we can avoid anything like that if we attack Cuba. But I think we should make every effort to avoid it. And one way to avoid it is to defuse the Turkish missiles before we attack Cuba.”
The crisis and the specter of an all-out nuclear confrontation were averted when the US withdrew its warheads from Turkey in return for the Soviets doing the same in Cuba.
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