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Speaker Harold Mock presents his lecture to the audience. LENA HENSLEY/Contributed
As part of the Sunday At The Museum lecture series on May 1, the Old School History Museum presented a lecture on a “timely, sobering and very important” topic as defined by Sandra Rosseter, OSHM Director, entitled ‘Living In A Nuclear World.’
The speaker, Harold Mock, shared his knowledge and views on how the arms race of the past nearly brought about World War III more than once, the purpose of the nuclear weapons, and the mechanisms that the world community developed to keep its dangers harnessed.
“Who would ever have thought that the topic planned months ago would be so timely today,” said Sandra Rosseter, the Director of the Old School History Museum. “Several months ago, Dr. Mock accepted the OSHM’s invitation to speak at our May 2022 Sunday At The Museum lecture series. He offered several topics, and we agreed that ‘Living in a Nuclear World’ would likely find an interested audience. However, neither of us imagined that, in a few months, the Ukrainian people would be living in a horrific, deadly situation or that the world would be discussing the threat of a nuclear attacks and/ or war.”
Mock teaches at Georgia College, where he is the director of the leadership programs and an assistant professor of history. Mock's degrees include a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia, where he also served as a Bradley Research Fellow; a master's degree in history from Virginia; and bachelor's degrees in political science and history from Georgia College. He is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Atlanta Council on International Relations.
“My views do not necessarily reflect the views of Georgia College, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, or of the State of Georgia,” Mock said.
He started from describing an incident that took place June 3, 1980. On that day, Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a National Security Advisor of the United States, received a phone call from Col. William Odom telling him that about 220 missiles were inbound from Soviet submarines and that they would detonate across the continental United States. Odom and the Pentagon's National Military Command Center analysts saw the same results on their maps as did the crews at NORAD, North American Aerospace Defense Command, in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and at site R, also known as Raven Rock in Southern Pennsylvania, the Pentagon's alternate command post. Brzezinski had his hand on the receiver to call the White House to make arrangements for the President’s evacuation when the phone rang again. It was Odom informing him that it was a mistake. The entire episode was caused by a malfunction of a 46-cent computer chip. The exact same thing happened just three days later. The same way, all the parties involved were sure that it wasn’t a drill and there could not be a mistake.
In 2018, Hawaiians received an emergency alert of a missile threat, which turned out to be false alarm.
“But, of course, people panicked diving under the beds or getting into bathtubs, trying to remember what they had drilled in school in the 50s and 60s and 70s,” Dr. Mock said. “Let's ask the question - do we still need nuclear weapons? I'm afraid, my answer is ‘yes.’”
In his opinion, living in a nuclear world will continue for many years for two reasons. The first one is deterrence of the existing and potential adversaries of the United States. The second reason is that the international arms control regime (the power of treaties and agreements placing restrictions on use of nuclear weapons) is getting weaker.
The deterrence strategy, according to Mock, is premised on the idea that nuclear weapons are most effective when they are not used. As long as the arsenal is large enough, no adversary would dare challenge the United States or their allies. It comes with a threshold, which, if crossed once, makes it impossible to go back.
“We can paraphrase Winston Churchill, who said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others,” Mock said. “Similarly, nuclear weapons are the worst form of deterrence, except for all of the others.
The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba was the closest the world ever came to a nuclear war. Afterwards, the U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushev agreed that it should never happen again. In the following years, a number of treaties placed voluntary restrictions on research, development, testing, deployment, and use of nuclear weapons. Thus, “layer upon layer, the world powers and the international community have built a structure that would limit the use of nuclear forces,” Mock said. “More importantly, they demonstrated their mutual commitment to a guiding concept that peace is better than war and that deterrence is better than deployment.”
Mock quoted a political scientist Thomas Nichols, who said that just a handful, perhaps a dozen nuclear warheads could destroy most of the Northern hemisphere.
“We developed more weapons, and suddenly we developed more targets,” Nichols wrote. “It reminds me of the old expression that when the only tool you have is a hammer, suddenly every problem starts to look like a nail,” said Mock. John F. Kennedy told the graduates of American University in 1963, “Our problems are manmade, therefore they can be solved by man.”
The lecture was followed by a lot of questions from the audience, in which the listeners asked Dr. Mock to express his opinion about the current situation in Ukraine. Answering questions, Mock said that, in his opinion, what is happening in Ukraine has gone far from what Vladimir Putin thought was going to happen, and that he could not imagine a scenario where Putin would willingly step down from power.
Mock said that, although sanctions against Russia were powerful, Putin and Russian oligarchs were well insulated from their effects.
“Putin's estimated to be one of the wealthiest people in the world. It's going to be a long time before he fills that pinch,” he said. “I believe that in the coming years it is going to become clear that this was a much more brutal, devastating conflict than we see now. There are more migrants and refugees than any other time in human history since 1945. But in terms of Putin being brought to account for that, I don't know how that would happen.”
Answering the question why the Americans should care about the Ukrainians, who were allies of Russians in a recent Serbian war, Mock said, “I would say we have had a consensus in the world since the second world war. We do not change borders by force, and the legitimate interests of governments must be respected. For the first time since WWII, Putin has suspended that entirely. That's unacceptable in world politics. It's important at the very least to outfit the Ukrainian people with weapons to resist Russian aggression.”
Mock said it was his belief that it was Putin's goal to reconstitute the Soviet Union; not in the way that the Soviet Union was in the 1980s but more of the Stalinist version of the Soviet Union, in which Russia was surrounded by defenseless buffer territories. He said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the most tragic event of the 20th century.
“Not WWI, WWII, not the Holocaust. Putin wrote an essay on Ukrainian history, which stated that the people of Ukraine were ethnically and historically a part of the Russian Federation, and that the two lands couldn’t be separated from one another. I think what he wants is Ukraine that is completely subordinated to the Russian Federation,” Mock said.