Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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of a possible quarantine of Nicaragua, and the proposal is implicit in
much other commentary, for example, the Toronto Globe & Mail
editorial cited earlier, blustering about the possibility that the USSR
might provide Nicaragua with a radar system to monitor its own
territory, subjected to US attack. If it is indeed, as alleged, an intolerable
threat to world order for the USSR or Cuba to “bolster” a regime
attacked by the US in Central America, then evidently the US has a right
to impose a blockade to prevent them from doing what they have no
right to do. And if a superpower confrontation results, we can blame the
Russians as we go up in smoke.
Putting aside its moral level, all of this is the kind of thinking that has
led us close to nuclear war in the past, and will again.
In fact, the USSR would very likely back away from a military
confrontation with the US in the Caribbean. It has repeatedly done so
elsewhere after provocations that the US would not tolerate for a
moment, particularly in the Middle East, the most likely location for the
outbreak of global war. 3 Nevertheless, Lehman’s prognosis cannot be
discounted.
Senator Durenberger’s proposal illustrates what has been called “the
deadly connection”: the prospect that Third World intervention will lead
to superpower confrontation and nuclear war. This has come close to
happening quite a few times in the past, and will again. There is no
more urgent issue on the contemporary scene. 4
One such occasion was the Cuban missile crisis that brought the
world ominously close to nuclear war in 1962. At that time, according
to testimony of participants, planners considered a nuclear war highly
likely if they rejected Khrushchev’s offer to resolve the crisis peaceably
with complete withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. They rejected
this offer because it entailed simultaneous withdrawal of US missiles
from Turkey: obsolete missiles for which a withdrawal order had been