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On October 27, 1962, the 12th day of the Cuban missile crisis, a bellicose and rattled Fidel Castro asked Nikita Khrushchev, his patron, to destroy America.
1962年10月27日，即古巴导弹危机的第12天，狂欢和嘎嘎作响的菲德尔·卡斯特罗（Fidel Castro）要求他的赞助人尼基塔·赫鲁晓夫（Nikita Khrushchev）摧毁美国。
“I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous,” Castro wrote in a cable to Moscow, “and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba—a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law—then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.”
卡斯特罗（Castro）在对莫斯科的有线电视中写道：“我相信帝国主义者的侵略性使他们变得极为危险，而且，如果他们设法对古巴进行入侵（一种残酷的行为） - 违反了普遍和道德律法的残酷行为，那将是永远消除这种危险的时刻，以最合理的自我防御能力，并没有其他解决方案。
We exist today because Khrushchev rejected Castro’s demand. It was Khrushchev, of course, who brought the planet to the threshold of extinction by placing missiles in Cuba, but he had underestimated the American response to the threat. Together with his adversary, John F. Kennedy, he lurched his way toward compromise. “In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to carry out a nuclear strike against the enemy’s territory,” Khrushchev responded. “Naturally you understand where that would lead us. It would not be a simple strike, but the start of a thermonuclear world war. Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I find your proposal to be wrong, even though I understand your reasons.”
我们之所以存在，是因为赫鲁晓夫拒绝了卡斯特罗的需求。当然，是赫鲁晓夫（Khrushchev）通过在古巴施放导弹来使地球濒临灭绝，但他低估了美国对威胁的反应。他和他的对手约翰·肯尼迪（John F. Kennedy）一起走向妥协。赫鲁晓夫回答说：“在10月27日的电缆中，您提出我们是第一个对敌人领土进行核罢工的人。”“自然，你知道那将导致我们的位置。这不是一个简单的罢工，而是热核世界大战的开始。亲爱的同志菲德尔·卡斯特罗（Fidel Castro），我发现您的建议是错的，即使我理解您的原因。”
Castro was 36 years old during the missile crisis. He was 84 when I met him, in Havana, in late summer 2010. He was in semiretirement, though he was still Cuba’s indispensable man. I spent a week with him, discussing, among other things, the Nuclear Age and its diabolical complexities. He still embraced the cruel dogmas of Communist revolution, but he was also somewhat reflective about his mistakes. I was deeply curious about his October 27 cable, and I put this question to him: “At a certain point it seemed logical for you to recommend that the Soviets bomb the U.S. Does what you recommended still seem logical now?” His answer: “After I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn’t worth it.”
在导弹危机期间，卡斯特罗今年36岁。当我在2010年夏末在哈瓦那遇见他时，他当时84岁。尽管他仍然是古巴必不可少的男人，但他仍处于半决赛。我和他呆了一个星期，讨论了核时代及其恶魔般的复杂性。他仍然拥护共产主义革命的残酷教条，但他也有些反思了自己的错误。我对他的10月27日电缆感到非常好奇，我向他提出了这个问题：“在某些时候，建议您建议苏联炸弹炸弹美国是否现在仍然合乎逻辑？”他的回答是：“在我看到了我所看到的，知道我现在所知道的之后，这是不值得的。”
Read: Jeffrey Goldberg discusses Israel and Iran with Fidel Castro
阅读：杰弗里·戈德堡（Jeffrey Goldberg）与菲德尔·卡斯特罗（Fidel Castro）讨论以色列和伊朗
The problem with wisdom is that it tends to come slowly, if it comes at all. As a species, we are not particularly skilled at making time-pressured, closely reasoned decisions about matters of life and death. The sociobiologist E. O. Wilson described the central problem of humanity this way: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” The main challenge of the 80 years since the Trinity atomic test has been that we do not possess the cognitive, spiritual, and emotional capabilities necessary to successfully manage nuclear weapons without the risk of catastrophic failure. Khrushchev and Castro both made terrifying mistakes of analysis and interpretation during the missile crisis. So, too, did several of Kennedy’s advisers, including General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, who argued that a naval blockade of Cuba, unaccompanied by the immediate bombing of missile sites, was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”
智慧的问题在于，如果它到来，它往往会缓慢。作为一个物种，我们并不是特别熟练地做出有关生与死问题的时间紧迫，紧密理解的决定。社会生物学家E. O. Wilson以这种方式描述了人类的核心问题：“我们具有旧石器时代的情感，中世纪的机构和神灵的技术。”自三位一体原子测试以来的80年的主要挑战是，我们没有成功管理核武器所需的认知，精神和情感能力，而没有灾难性失败的风险。在导弹危机期间，Khrushchev和Castro都犯了可怕的分析和解释错误。因此，肯尼迪（Kennedy）的几位顾问，包括空军参谋长柯蒂斯·勒梅（Curtis Lemay），他辩称，立即爆炸导弹遗址的海军封锁古巴无人陪伴，“几乎和慕尼黑的痛苦一样糟糕。”
Today, the Global Operations Center of the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees America’s nuclear forces, is housed in an Offutt Air Force Base building named for LeMay. This decision has always struck me as an indirect endorsement by America’s nuclear establishment of the bias toward action embodied by the sometimes-Strangelovian LeMay. Bias toward action is an all-purpose phrase, but I first heard it in the context of nuclear warfare many years ago from Bruce Blair, a scholar of nonproliferation and a former Air Force missile-launch officer. It means that the nuclear-decision-making scripts that presidents are meant to follow in a crisis assume that Russia (or other adversaries) will attempt to destroy American missiles while they are still in their silos. The goal of nuclear-war planners has traditionally been to send those missiles on their way before they can be neutralized—in the parlance of nuclear planning, to “launch on warning.”
如今，监督美国核力量的美国战略司令部的全球运营中心被安置在以Lemay命名的空军基地建筑中。这一决定一直使我成为美国对有时是trangelovian lemay体现的行动的偏见的间接认可。对行动的偏见是一个通用的短语，但是我在多年前从核战争的背景下从非扩散的学者和前空军导弹官员布鲁斯·布莱尔（Bruce Blair）那里听到了这一短语。这意味着总统要在危机中遵循的核决策脚本认为，俄罗斯（或其他对手）将试图在美国导弹仍在孤岛中销毁它们。传统上，核战争计划者的目标是将这些导弹送到途中，然后才能被核计划中和核计划的话，以“发出警告”。
Many of the men who served as president since 1945 have been shocked to learn about the impossibly telescoped time frame in which they have to decide whether to launch. The issue is not one of authority—presidents are absolute nuclear monarchs, and they can do what they wish with America’s nuclear weapons (please see Tom Nichols’s article “The President’s Weapon”). The challenge, as George W. Bush memorably put it, is that a president wouldn’t even have time to get off the “crapper” before having to make a launch decision, a decision that could be based on partial, contradictory, or even false information. Ronald Reagan, when he assumed the presidency, was said to have been shocked that he would have as little as six minutes to make a decision to launch. Barack Obama thought that it was madness to expect a president to make such a decision—the most important that would ever be made by a single person in all of human history—in a matter of minutes.
自1945年以来担任总统的许多男人都震惊地了解了他们必须决定是否要发射的时间范围。这个问题不是权威之一 - 主持人是绝对的核君主，他们可以用美国的核武器做他们希望的事情（请参阅汤姆·尼科尔斯的文章“总统的武器”）。乔治·W·布什（George W.罗纳德·里根（Ronald Reagan）担任总统时，据说他震惊了他只有六分钟的时间才能决定发射。巴拉克·奥巴马（Barack Obama）认为，希望总统在整个人类历史上做出这样的决定，这是一个疯狂的事。
We are living through one of the more febrile periods of the nuclear era. The contours of World War III are visible in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia has been aided by Iran and North Korea and opposed by Europe and, for the time being, the United States. Pakistan and India, two nuclear states, recently fought a near-war; Iran, which has for decades sought the destruction of Israel through terrorism and other means, has seen its nuclear sites come under attack by Israel and the United States, in what could be termed an act of nonproliferation by force; North Korea continues to expand its nuclear arsenal, and South Korea and Japan, as Ross Andersen details elsewhere in this issue, are considering going nuclear in response.
我们生活在核时代更高温时期之一。在俄罗斯对乌克兰的入侵中，世界大战的轮廓可见。俄罗斯已得到伊朗和朝鲜的帮助，并由欧洲反对，目前是美国。巴基斯坦和印度两个核国家最近与近战争进行了战斗。数十年来，伊朗通过恐怖主义和其他手段寻求摧毁以色列的伊朗，其核遗址受到以色列和美国的攻击，这可以被称为武力的不变行为；朝鲜继续扩大其核武库，正如罗斯·安德森（Ross Andersen）在本期其他地方的细节一样，韩国和日本正在考虑发动核。
Humans will need luck to survive this period. We have been favored by fortune before, and not only during the Cuban missile crisis. Over the past 80 years, humanity has been saved repeatedly by individuals who possessed unusually good judgment in situations of appalling stress. Two in particular—Stanislav Petrov and John Kelly—spring to my mind regularly, for different reasons. Petrov is worth understanding because, under terrible pressure, he responded skeptically to an attack warning, quite possibly saving the planet. Kelly did something different, but no less difficult: He steered an unstable president away from escalation and toward negotiation.
人类将需要运气才能生存。以前，我们一直受到财富的青睐，不仅在古巴导弹危机期间。在过去的80年中，人类在令人震惊的压力中具有异常良好的判断力的个人反复拯救人类。特别是两个人，尤其是斯坦尼斯拉夫·彼得罗夫和约翰·凯利 - 出于不同的原因，我经常想到。彼得罗夫值得理解，因为在巨大的压力下，他对攻击警告持怀疑态度，很可能拯救了地球。凯利做了一些不同的事情，但同样困难：他使一位不稳定的总统摆脱了升级和谈判。
In September 1983, Petrov was serving as the duty officer at a Soviet command center when its warning system reported that the United States had launched five missiles at Soviet targets. Relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were tense; just three weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a civilian South Korean airliner. Petrov defied established protocols governing such an alert and declared the launch warning to be false. He understood that the detection system was new and only partially tested. He also knew that Soviet doctrine held that an American attack, should it come, would be overwhelming, and not a mere five missiles. He reported to his superiors that he believed the attack warning to be a mistake, and he prevented a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers by doing so. (Later, it was determined that a Soviet satellite had mistakenly interpreted the interplay between clouds and the sun over Montana and North Dakota as missile launches.)
1983年9月，彼得罗夫（Petrov）在苏联指挥中心担任值班官员，当时其警告系统报告说，美国已经在苏联目标发射了五枚导弹。美国和美国之间的关系是紧张的；仅仅三个星期前，苏联人击落了一架平民韩国客机。彼得罗夫（Petrov）违反了管理此警报的既定协议，并宣布发射警告为错误。他了解到检测系统是新的，只经过部分测试。他还知道，苏联教义认为，美国的袭击将是压倒性的，而不是只有五枚导弹。他向上级报告说，他认为袭击警告是一个错误，他通过这样做阻止了两个超级大国之间的核交换。（后来，确定苏联卫星错误地解释了蒙大拿州和北达科他州的云与太阳之间的相互作用为导弹。）
John Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who served as White House chief of staff for part of Donald Trump’s first term, is known for his Sisyphean labors on behalf of order in an otherwise anarchic decision-making environment. Kelly, during his 17 months as chief of staff, understood that Trump was particularly dangerous on matters of national security. Trump was ignorant of world affairs, Kelly believed, and authoritarian by instinct. Kelly experienced these flaws directly in 2017, when Trump regularly insulted the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, who was widely regarded as inexperienced and unstable himself. After North Korea threatened “physical action” against its enemies, Trump said, “They will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
约翰·凯利（John Kelly）是退休的四星级海洋将军，曾在唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）的第一任期担任白宫参谋长，他在原本无政府状态的决策环境中代表他的西西弗（Sisyphean）劳动而闻名。凯利（Kelly）在担任参谋长的17个月中了解到，特朗普在国家安全方面特别危险。特朗普对世界事务一无所知，凯利认为是本能的专制。凯利（Kelly）在2017年直接经历了这些缺陷，当时特朗普经常侮辱朝鲜领导人金正恩（Kim Jong Un），后者被广泛认为是缺乏经验和不稳定的人。在朝鲜威胁要对其敌人的“身体行动”之后，特朗普说：“他们将遇到火与愤怒，坦率的权力，这个世界从未见过的人。”
Read: John Kelly finally lets loose on Trump
阅读：约翰·凯利（John Kelly）终于放开了特朗普
Kelly repeatedly warned Trump that such language could cause Kim, eager to prove his bona fides to the senior generals around him, to overreact by attacking South Korea. But Trump continued, tweeting: “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!” Kim later responded by firing missiles over Japan and calling Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”
凯利一再警告特朗普说，这种语言可能会导致金正日，渴望证明他对周围的高级将军的善意，通过攻击韩国来反应过度。但是特朗普继续说：“如果朝鲜不明智地采取行动，军事解决方案现在已经完全到位，被锁定和装载。希望金正恩会找到另一条道路！”金后来回应了对日本发射导弹，并称特朗普为“精神错乱的美国dotard”。
According to reporting in Michael S. Schmidt’s book, Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, Kelly told Trump, “You’re pushing him to prove he’s a man. If you push him into a corner, he may strike out. You don’t want to box him in.” Schmidt wrote, “The president of the United States had no appreciation for the fact that he could bring the country not just to the brink of a war at any moment—but a nuclear war that could easily escalate into the most dangerous one in world history.” Kelly realized that his warnings to Trump weren’t penetrating, so he played, instead, on Trump’s insecurities, and on his need to be a hero, or, at the very least, a salesman. “No president since North Korea became a communist dictatorship has ever tried to reach out,” Kelly told Trump, according to Schmidt. “No president has tried to reason with this guy—you’re a big dealmaker, why don’t you do that.”
根据迈克尔·S·施密特（Michael S.施密特写道：“美国总统对他不仅可以随时将该国带到战争的边缘，而且一场核战争很容易升级到世界历史上最危险的战争。”凯利意识到他对特朗普的警告没有渗透，因此，他在特朗普的不安全感以及他需要成为英雄的需要，或者至少是推销员的情况下演奏了。施密特说：“自从朝鲜成为共产党独裁统治以来，没有总统曾试图伸出援手。”“没有总统试图与这个人推理 - 你是一个大交易者，你为什么不这样做。”
Kelly’s diversion worked: Trump quickly became enamored of the idea that he would achieve a history-making rapprochement with North Korea. Kelly understood that such a deal was far-fetched, but the pursuit of a chimera would cause Trump to stop threatening nuclear war.
凯利（Kelly）的转移奏效了：特朗普很快就对自己将与朝鲜实现历史和解的想法感到迷恋。凯利（Kelly）了解到，这样的交易是牵强的，但是对嵌合体的追求将导致特朗普停止威胁核战争。
Trump remains an unstable leader in a world far more unstable than it was during his first term. No president has ever been anything close to a perfect steward of America’s national security and its nuclear arsenal, but Trump is less qualified than almost any previous leader to manage a nuclear crisis. (Only the late-stage, frequently inebriated Richard Nixon was arguably more dangerous.) Trump is highly reactive, sensitive to insult, and incurious. It is unfair to say that he is likely to wake up one morning and decide to use nuclear weapons—he has spoken intermittently about his loathing of such weapons, and of war more generally—but he could very easily mismanage his way, again, into an escalatory spiral.
特朗普仍然是一个不稳定的领导者，比他的第一任期更加不稳定。从来没有任何总统接近美国国家安全及其核武库的完美管家，但特朗普几乎没有任何管理核危机的领导人的资格。（只有晚期，经常被煽动的理查德·尼克松（Richard Nixon）更加危险。）特朗普具有高度反应性，对侮辱敏感和顽强。不公平地说，他很可能有一天早晨醒来并决定使用核武器 - 他间歇性地谈到了自己对这种武器的厌恶和更普遍的战争 - 但他可能很容易地以自己的方式不当，再次成为升级的螺旋形。
From the November 1947 issue: Albert Einstein on avoiding atomic war
从1947年11月的发行中：艾伯特·爱因斯坦（Albert Einstein）避免原子战争
The successful end of the Cold War caused many people to believe that the threat of nuclear war had receded. It has historically been difficult to get people to think about the unthinkable. In an article for this magazine in 1947, Albert Einstein explained:
冷战的成功结束使许多人相信核战争的威胁已经消退。从历史上看，很难让人们思考不可想象的事情。爱因斯坦在1947年的这本杂志的一篇文章中解释说：
The public, having been warned of the horrible nature of atomic warfare, has done nothing about it, and to a large extent has dismissed the warning from its consciousness. A danger that cannot be averted had perhaps better be forgotten; or a danger against which every possible precaution has been taken also had probably better be forgotten.
公众被警告过原子战的可怕本质，对此一无所有，并且在很大程度上驳斥了警告的意识。无法避免的危险也许最好被遗忘。或危害所有可能采取的预防措施的危险也可能会被遗忘。
We forget at our peril. We forget that 80 years after the world-changing summer of 1945, Russia and the United States alone possess enough nuclear firepower to destroy the world many times over; we forget that China is becoming a near-peer adversary of the U.S.; we forget that the history of the Nuclear Age is filled with near misses, accidents, and wild misinterpretations of reality; and we forget that most humans aren’t quite as creative, independent-minded, and perspicacious as Stanislav Petrov and John Kelly.
我们忘记了危险。我们忘记了1945年改变世界的80年后，仅俄罗斯和美国就拥有足够的核火力来摧毁世界多次。我们忘记了中国正在成为美国的近人对手。我们忘记了核时代的历史充满了对现实的几乎遗失，事故和狂野的误解。而且我们忘记了大多数人不像斯坦尼斯拉夫·彼得罗夫（Stanislav Petrov）和约翰·凯利（John Kelly）那样创造性，独立和敏锐。
Most of all, we forget the rule articulated by the mathematician and cryptologist Martin Hellman: that the only way to survive Russian roulette is to stop playing.
最重要的是，我们忘记了数学家和密码学家马丁·海尔曼（Martin Hellman）所阐明的规则：生存俄罗斯轮盘赌的唯一途径就是停止演奏。
