Aerial view of missile launch site at San Cristobal, Cuba. Photo: John F. Kennedy Library.
A famous US politician shot. Nuclear missiles being positioned close to the territory of an enemy superpower. A nervous world wonders, ‘What next?”. It happened in the 1960s; it’s happening again today. We need a good song to wake us up.
Dylan’s breakthrough from songwriter to counter-culture prophet occurred a couple of months after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, a year out from the assassination of President Kennedy. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall was recorded – famously – in one take – in December 1962 – a couple of months after the world held its breath and waited for Armageddon.
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
He first clattered it out as a poem on his typewriter a few months earlier in a world edgy with Cold War tensions, in an atmosphere with more than a whiff of Plutonium and turmoil in the air.
Thom Donovan, writing in American Songwriter said: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall is a revelation song. It’s a beat-poet psalm with an end-of-times warning … It represents a feeling of hopelessness. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg famously wept the first time he heard the song.”
Things have not changed a lot since then. We are in the midst of a crisis that is at least as dangerous as 1962. It centers once more on a superpower intent on placing missile systems in the enemy’s backyard. The US announced this week that it will position Tomahawk cruise missile, SM-6 and hypersonic missiles in Germany from next year. They travel up to 5000km/h – so decision and response times for the Russians will be vanishingly short. We’re back to the brink of thermonuclear war. Without serious pause to think, we’ve leaped back to the 1960s.
Things have changed a lot since then. John F Kennedy isn’t US President, Joe Biden is. Should we be worried? The US has started firing missiles (using Ukrainians to press the red button) into Russia and promises many more. We also seem to lack the writer-prophet, the songs and the sense of atomic anxiety that electrified the world and launched a peace movement. The realization of what was at stake drove JFK to secretly write to his Russian counterpart Nikita Khrushchev on 26 October:
“If there is no intention,” he said, “to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.”
What an excellent thought. If only Joe Biden could think like that. But who was pulling on the rope at Kennedy’s end? We should all know – and never forget – that all the US chiefs of staff in 1962 argued for an immediate missile strike on Cuba followed by a full-blown invasion. During the crisis US Strategic Air Command was moved to DEFCON 2 – which is as scary as it sounds – meaning readiness for imminent nuclear war.
Having caused the crisis in the first place, Kennedy and his brother Bobby at least over-ruled the warlords and quite possibly saved our species. Would Joe Biden have the strength of mind to overrule the joint chiefs of staff if a similar moment arose on his watch? The atmosphere in the US is febrile, as evidenced by the shooting of Donald Trump this week. The Washington elite seems to be losing its collective mind, Biden being an avatar for the decline in critical faculties at the very moment we are entering the red zone.
Two sets of events, which have important echoes today, precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US had moved Jupiter medium-range nuclear missile systems into Turkey, prompting the Soviets to take countermeasures, including preparing to station missiles in Cuba and send Ilyushin jet bombers to the island. Kennedy and the Americans were understandably deeply concerned about this breach of the Monroe Doctrine and the very real threat it posed.
For its part, Cuba welcomed the deterrence Soviet missiles would provide. The previous year the Americans had launched the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and followed it with Operation Mongoose, a series of terrorist attacks inside Cuba carried out by the CIA. The government was also working with Mafia bosses Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante to assassinate Cubans leaders. As with the current US government, they were also using sanctions as economic warfare, intimidating other countries from trading with Cuba, so as to crush the country and trigger regime change. It all sounds remarkably familiar, doesn’t it? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more it changes the more it’s the same old story.
Both sides pulled back. The US withdrew the missiles from Turkey, promised not to invade Cuba and the Russians withdrew their weapons. Today the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine is intensifying; huge bases are being built in Romania, others soon in Finland and elsewhere. Fingers again hover over nuclear triggers but our culture has lost any visceral, kinetic, fear of what we are only minutes away from every single day from now on.
John F Kennedy and his brother Bobby, the “heroes” on the American side of the Cuban Missile Crisis, were both assassinated. To their credit, they had realized what was at stake and had chosen the path of de-escalation. Arms control and non-proliferation became central to great power diplomacy from the 1960s onward; important treaties like SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and the 1987 INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty) eliminated entire categories of weapons and dialed back tensions.
Now the temperature is again rising to boiling point; the treaties have been abandoned, nuclear weapons are again in high production, and all the lessons learned, the visceral fears felt, have been lost. The US will start stationing long-range missiles in Germany in 2026, a massive escalation that Russia has promised to respond to.
Trying to lure people back from the precipice is more ancient than Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet. The fact we haven’t suffered what peace advocates have been warning about doesn’t make them wrong; the stakes are too high, the politicians and military people are too irresponsible not to keep sounding the alert. De-escalation, restraint and dialogue must replace the clamor and rush to arms. Otherwise, one day, out of a blue sky, a hard rain’s gonna fall.