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In reply to the discussion: CIA director withheld information about JFK assassination [View all]Octafish
(55,745 posts)84. DCI Dulles and JCS chair Lemnitzer counseled JFK launch all-out attack on USSR in 1961.
They said that the best time for attack was "sometime in the fall of 1963," ensuring the nation's maximum nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. To them, an all-out surprise nuclear attack would end communism, once and for all. The thought that nuclear war might end us "forever," too, must not have occurred to them.
Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?
Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.
James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell
The American Prospect | September 21, 1994
During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies -- from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" -- worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.
But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., based on our growing lead in land-based missiles. And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.
The document reproduced opposite is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.
CONTINUED...
http://prospect.org/article/did-us-military-plan-nuclear-first-strike-1963
Makes one see where they got the idea for "Better Dead than Red."
The Real Eisenhower: Planning to Win Nuclear War
by Ira Chernus
Common Dreams
March 18, 2008
Peace activists love to quote Dwight Eisenhower. The iconic Republican war hero spoke so eloquently about the dangers of war and the need for disarmament. He makes a terrific poster-boy for peace. But after years of research and writing three books on Ike, I think it's time to see the real Eisenhower stand up. The president who planned to fight and win a nuclear war, saying "he would rather be atomized than communized," reminds us how dangerous the cold war era really was, how much our leaders will put us all at risk in the name of "national security," and how easily they can mask their intentions behind benign images.
From first to last, Eisenhower was a confirmed cold warrior. Years before he became president, while he was publicly promoting cooperation with the Soviet Union, he wrote in his diary: "Russia is definitely out to communize the world....Now we face a battle to extinction." On the home front, he warned that liberal Democrats were leading the U.S. "toward total socialism."
SNIP
For Eisenhower, the point of amassing a huge nuclear arsenal was not to deter war but to win it. This was enshrined as official policy in NSC 5810/1: "The United States must make clear its determination to prevail if general war occurs." The only meaningful war aim, he told the NSC, was "to achieve a victory." He described his war plan as "Hit the guy fast with all you've got if he jumps on you"; "hit 'em ... with everything in the bucket."
SNIP
Eisenhower assumed that a post-holocaust America would be a totalitarian state, ruled by martial law. But he worried about (among other things) what would happen to the credit structure of the country and how to print and sell war bonds to finance the next war if Washington were destroyed. At one NSC meeting he complained that if the President and the Vice President were "knocked off," the "damnable" law of succession would result in the Democrats (he called them "the other team" taking the White House. "To assure against that happening, the President thought the Vice President should be put in cotton batting."
SNIP
And we ignore it at our peril, because it was a policy that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would "push whole stack of chips into the pot" and "hit 'em ... with everything in the bucket"; who would "shoot your enemy before he shoots you"; who believed that the U.S. could "pick itself up from the floor" and win a nuclear war, even though "everybody is going crazy," as long as "only" 25 or 30 American cities got "shellacked" and nobody got too "hysterical."
CONTINUED
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/18/7742
Besides those cockroaches crawling out with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld from the undermountain secret command bunker, there might not be many Americans around after hitting them with "everything in the bucket," but, hey! As Eisenhower and crazy Gen. Powers said, even if only one American survives and no Russians, "We win!"
PS: Thank you for caring about democracy, ohheckyeah.
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Remarkable, considering how Corporate McPravda has only played the lone nut tune since Nov. 22, 1963
Octafish
Oct 2015
#5
No. Neither were the CIA-Mafia assassination contracts on Castro and Cuban leadership.
Octafish
Oct 2015
#6
The CIA Admitted To Lying About JFK’s Assassination, But No One Really Noticed
Octafish
Nov 2015
#87
I found John Davis' "Mafia Kingfisher: Carlos Marcello and the and the Assassination of John F. ...
Eleanors38
Oct 2015
#58
THAT is the crux of the dilemma: Secret Government does not trump the Constitution.
Octafish
Oct 2015
#35
Consistent with Talbot’s claims JFK’s policies did pose a dire threat to “deep power” interests
MinM
Oct 2015
#33
K&R! Thanks for the thread, octafish! Also, thanks for your tireless dedication to exposing the
Ghost in the Machine
Oct 2015
#23
Dulles knew Bay of Pigs Operation was COMPROMISED, yet gave it his blessing...
Octafish
Oct 2015
#62
(U) DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy - David Robarge
Octafish
Oct 2015
#46
''...the JFK case is being solved, thanks largely to the brute force of the power of the Internet.''
Octafish
Oct 2015
#55
DCI Dulles and JCS chair Lemnitzer counseled JFK launch all-out attack on USSR in 1961.
Octafish
Nov 2015
#84