Off the Shelf

McNamara and the Nuclear CrisisIn October 1962 the world was one trigger away from its first nuclear exchange. The man who played a key role...

McNamara and the Nuclear Crisis
In October 1962 the world was one trigger away from its first nuclear exchange. The man who played a key role in defusing the crisis was then American President John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara. As the confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union played out, McNamara was perhaps quickest to gauge the new language of war and the drastically reduced timespan in which military decisions could spin out of control into catastrophe. Long after his stint as defence secretary (1961-68) and at the World Bank (1968-81) ended, McNamara has kept trying to make sense of how nuclear weapons interface with politics.

Writing in the latest issue of Foreign Policy, McNamara now argues that the time has come for America to completely stop using nuclear weapons as a foreign policy tool. The Cold War has ended, he says, but “much of the current US nuclear policy has been in place since (he) was secretary of defence, and it has only grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years”.

In fact, the intervening years have brought to light further details of how close the US came to nuclear conflict during the Cuban Missile Crisis. McNamara writes of a meeting with Castro in 1992: “I asked Castro whether he would have recommended that Khrushchev use the weapons in the face of a US invasion, and if so, how he thought the US would respond. ‘We started from the assumption that if there was an invasion of Cuba, nuclear war would erupt,’ Castro replied. ‘We were certain of that… we would be forced to pay the price that we would disappear.’”

Story continues below this ad

More than forty years on, he says, “there is no way to reduce the risk (of nuclear catastrophe) to acceptable levels, other than to first eliminate the hair-trigger alert policy and later to eliminate or nearly eliminate nuclear weapons.”

Treating van Gogh
Just think, commands a review in The New York Times, what would have been the loss to art if Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Allan Poe had been administered strong doses of Prozac? Art and literature will always continue to argue the fringe benefits of depression —beyond those sunflowers and stories about the House of Usher — but if writer Peter D. Kramer has his way, no one need ever be down in the dumps again.

Kramer’s last book, Listening to Prozac, won over many readers to the view that depression is a medical condition, that it should be treated as such and not seen romantically as a byproduct of pain and disillusionment.

It is a case he takes again now in Against Depression. There is still a huge battle to be waged, as he says depression is still “an illness that signifies refinement”, while its in his view “the most devastating disease known to humankind.”