Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet

by Todd Wilkinson

  “We don’t see each other enough. I’ll never forget those days I spent with Ted in Montana.”

  The highest human virtue, Gorbachev asserts, raising an index finger and having his thoughts translated by interpreter Pavel Palashchenko, is compassion forged by trust, knowledge, and heart.

  For a time, as the leader of the so-called “Evil Empire,” Gorbachev possessed the means to complete half of the equation for mutually assured global destruction. He and a circle of military advisors in the former Soviet Union could, if they felt provoked, have pushed the proverbial button and launched a full-scale nuclear attack on the United States, wiping America from the map.

  Besides obliterating a perceived antagonist, such an exchange would have meant the end of the world as we know it. Years after meeting with Ronald Reagan in the Icelandic city of Reykjavik, Gorbachev still is bothered by how agonizingly close the two came to reaching historic accord on a plan that would have committed the military superpowers to total elimination of their nuclear arsenals. At the height of the Cold War, in 1986, the United States had tens of thousands of warheads and the Soviets about forty-five thousand—many an order of magnitude more powerful than the first and last devastating bombs deployed on human populations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

  Gorbachev traveled to Cambridge hoping to jumpstart the process of correcting that missed opportunity, which he considers, to this day, his greatest personal failure. He is doing what he can to encourage the two former enemies to stay in negotiations and not settle for saber rattling or token gestures. He counts his droog—Ted Turner—and Turner’s co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, former US senator Sam Nunn, as being critical catalysts for one day achieving what Gorbachev and Reagan did not get done.

  “My hope is that one day zero nukes will be left on the face of the Earth,” Turner says. “I’m a peacenik who would like to see complete eradication. Well, okay, maybe we can keep a couple of missiles if we ever need them to stop an asteroid or battle aliens from outer space.”

  He is being wry, he confesses, but adds, “I’m dead serious when I say there is no rational reason why we need nuclear weapons for military purposes. The more that we have, the more likely it is that one goes off accidentally or that the material used to make the warheads falls into the hands of bad guys.”

  During the 1980s, there was the infamous incident when US missile command went to highest alert after radar mistook a flock of geese for incoming Soviet missiles. More recently, an Air Force jet took off from North Dakota bound for Louisiana and, by mistake, carried six armed nuclear bombs in its payload. A simple malfunction of the aircraft or a crash caused by weather could have resulted in disaster.

  “But that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Turner says. “The more I’ve learned, the more I realize that, but for the grace of God, we’ve dodged a number of nuclear bullets. We’ve been playing Russian roulette.”

  “What I love about Ted is that he has natural smarts, sincerity, plain-spokenness and yet profound courage,” Gorbachev says.

  “And,” he adds, “he is relentless.”

  Nuclear disarmament has been more than a sideline interest for Turner. While he credits Nunn, Allison, and others for “giving me an advanced understanding” of the grim realities of the issue, he says it has been Gorbachev, whom he met in Moscow at the height of Cold War tensions in the 1980s, who turned his education into a nagging passion that will not let him rest.

  “Ted was one of the few Americans who reached out a sincere hand of friendship to me and my countrymen when no one else would,” Gorbachev says. “These things you never forget.”

  Turner’s maxim: Friends don’t blow each other up.

  It is now several months after Turner flew into Boston to rendezvous with Gorbachev. He is alone in Atlanta at the end of a grueling business day, following nonstop meetings with members of his staff. The final event of the afternoon was him meeting with journalists from around the world who have won internships at CNN. Even though Turner doesn’t own the cable channel anymore, he still enjoys getting together with the international contingent of young reporters. It is as much a matter of them seeking him out—he is, to them, an American enigma.

  True to form, high in his office eyrie, alone as the sun sets, he begins to riff.

  “America hasn’t had any of her great cities deliberately destroyed by human hands since the Civil War. 9/11 was terrible, absolutely horrendous, but it could have been worse.”

  He is musing in a state of mind his friends call “the zone”—a mental space in which he is partially engaged in a conversation at hand and adrift in other possibilities that only he can see. That’s where his reputation for aloofness comes from, but it doesn’t mean a lack of focus.

  He paces now and stops before a large picture window looking out upon Centennial Park, the heart of Atlanta. Thanks to his friendship with the late cosmologist Carl Sagan, Turner says he has come to realize that chaos is a fundamental operating principle in the universe.

  “There is only so much we can control. We as a species on this planet have lulled ourselves into believing that order and calm are the norm. We can’t control what the heavens throw at us. As Carl often said, until we establish a colony somewhere else in the solar system, we need to use our brainpower and focus our attention on preventing avoidable human catastrophes here on Earth.”

  Moments earlier, Turner concluded a short crosstown telephone call with Sam Nunn, the former US senator from Georgia who arrived back in the Big Peach following a trip to meet with Russian colleagues in Moscow.

  Nunn is known globally not only for his knowledge of military affairs, having been chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but also for his levelheadedness. In Nunn’s call with Turner, he vented frustration.

  It is the waning months of the George W. Bush Administration. Nunn has rejected invitations from Democratic and Republican moderates to have him run as an Independent candidate for president.

  Partisan wrangling had complicated efforts to get the US and Russia to ratify the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Nunn considered the accord essential to compelling the former Cold War adversaries to scale back the number of nuclear weapons in their arsenals and stockpiles. (It would later be ratified in 2010 though the debate over the role of having atomic, biological, and chemical weapons available as tools of mass destruction continues to flare as a political issue.)

  More worrying, Nunn told Turner, he feared that crucial opportunities for preventing nuclear doomsday materials from falling into the hands of terrorists may have been squandered.

  A consummate brooder, Turner took a gallows humor poke at the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded warning system. “What level of risk are we under today, Sam? Is it red, orange, blue, or pink?”

  Nunn answered sternly: “Ted, I don’t think we can afford to think about nukes with a threat level that is ever unelevated. We’ve just been damned lucky.”

  After Turner bid Nunn adieu for the night, he stood at the window above Luckie Street and shared what he was thinking. Hardware that commemorated triumphs in his earlier life glittered in various corners of the room, mementos from winning the America’s Cup yachting race and his former baseball team, the Atlanta Braves, taking the World Series. In some ways, he regards them as superficial relics that will mean even less “if we don’t resolve the big important stuff.”

  “Wouldn’t it be a shame if this is as good as it gets? The time we’re living in now may come to be recounted in history as the happiest, richest, most peaceful and civilized there ever was. I know it’s an arbitrary year, but in 2060—that’s half a century from now—my own grandkids may look back and conclude, ‘They had it all, but they let it slip away.’”

  Nunn and Turner have stood together in the former Soviet Union, in the backs of dilapidated nuclear facility warehouse
s, holding nuclear materials that could be turned into agents of mass horror. Outside Moscow, they’ve sat in the actual chair where Gorbachev and his successors literally had a red button in front of them for triggering a nuclear war. And they know the consequences of a small amount of highly enriched uranium, plutonium, or other materials finding its way into the wrong hands.

  Illustrating the anxiety he shares with Nunn, Turner holds forth with a tale, for now a purely hypothetical one. It begins ironically enough with a thought of serenity, a tranquil carefree afternoon in Midtown Manhattan.

  “I love New York, except when the Braves are playing the Mets or Yankees,” he says, his blue eyes lighting up at the memory of regular visits he’s paid to the city for various business endeavors, yachting events, and forums associated with the United Nations.

  “People say I own a lot of land, and it’s true, I do. We’ve got somewhere around two million acres. But you know what? The twenty-two acres that comprise Rockefeller Center, just as an example, are worth a lot more, in a dollar amount, than all of my real estate combined. That’s because it’s located in one of the cradles of modern civilization.”

  Most experts dealing with the nuclear threat use disaster scenarios to make a point. Turner’s is based upon conversations he has had with Allison, the noted public policy expert at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and former assistant defense secretary.

  Turner asks the listener to imagine a balmy day in April. A nice one after a long winter. Central Park is a picture of tranquillity. Workers take late lunches, cutting out early from cubicles. Times Square is its usual electric hive of humanity just before rush hour. Mobs of tourists pose in front of landmark marquees and billboards, taking snapshots for posterity. Street musicians and thespians perform next to food vendors.

  “Some of those folks are hungry for a real meal and find their way over to my Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant on West 51st Street for a bison burger or steak,” Turner, ever the showman, says grinning, then adding that his eatery is only a few blocks away from where his pal and fellow Montana ranch owner, David Letterman, broadcasts his late night television show at the Ed Sullivan Theater.

  How glorious New York is, Turner says. “It’s the cultural capital of the world. For us, it’s what Athens, Rome, and Constantinople represented in their primes.”

  Among the frenetic bustle on this otherwise placid day, he describes a van creeping forward in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The vehicle’s driver pulls in front of a modest high rise near Broadway and Seventh Street. Hazard lights on, the motorist appears to be making a routine delivery.

  Impatient cabbies are logjammed behind the vehicle and honk their horns. Passersby on foot, dammed up at a crosswalk, shout insults. A policeman walks to the window to tell the driver to shoo on because his rig is disrupting the orderly flow of things.

  “The driver is a nobody,” he notes, explaining that his protagonist has no wealth or influence, yet he’s carrying the accumulated power of the ages. Economic desperation, hopelessness, perhaps misplaced religious zealotry—all of it combined with a hatred for American foreign policy and imperiousness—have brought him to this turning point.

  “He doesn’t believe he has anything to live for. And the rest of the world has indicated to him that it doesn’t care.”

  The man’s hand is twitching. He grins at the attending officer. From this nano-instant forward, Turner says, everything that is great and secure about Manhattan, America, and the world will inexplicably change.

  “All that our civil society represents, all of our progress and dreams and thoughts about the future, based on our accomplishments of the past, will disappear. And we can’t ever go back. There isn’t a do-over. We ignored the wake up calls. The hard work that our ancestors put in to build a better world for us is all for naught. What we gave our grandchildren . . . was . . . complacency.”

  He becomes quiet, halting his narrative. Choked up, he shakes his head. He is thinking about missed opportunities now—in the present—not only with nuclear security but every major environmental issue where the empiricism of science, he says, is being ignored.

  He cites the biodiversity crisis portending a sixth major species extinction episode, global human population soaring to nine billion by the middle of this century, climate change cooking the interior regions of America where he has several major bison ranches, and rising seas, meanwhile, likely to inundate coastal areas, essentially repeating the effects of Hurricane Katrina, sparking massive human exoduses that will affect billions around the world.

  He composes himself and continues.

  The van driver, carried forward by a series of small individual decisions fueling a feeling of alienation and resentment, compresses his index finger. There will be no surviving eyewitnesses interviewed in the aftermath of this Ground Zero, only accounts of a searing flash observed from afar. It will become part of the lore of human storytelling.

  Like an exploding star, the van carrying a nuclear suicide bomber vaporizes before the blast can break out past the sound barrier. The concussive amplitude fans the superheat created by a split atom. The energy released reaches tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit. No, this weapon didn’t originate in a Russian silo.

  Riding a typhoon of fire, debris, and shrapnel, the shockwave accelerates to six hundred miles an hour, down the steel, concrete, and glass canyons of the West Side. Buildings within a wide radius are reduced to smithereens. Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, the Empire State Building, American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Madison Square Garden now cease to stand but as skeletons; the oasis of Central Park resembles the aftermath of Hiroshima, he says.

  And then, the conflagration spawns a secondary inferno. A convection cloud of dust and smoke mushrooms twenty thousand feet—almost four miles—into the sky. Commercial pilots in the air, their planes jolted by turbulence, will say they thought it was a volcanic eruption.

  Particles rain down over much of Manhattan Island with deadly radiation wafting across the East and Hudson Rivers into other boroughs and New Jersey, he says. Following the first wave—the nuclear blast—and the second—the firestorm—and then a third—radiation—comes a fourth, a tsunami of primordial human panic on the perimeter.

  “Less than ten seconds have passed from the moment the police officer made eye contact with the terrorist,” Turner says.

  Hundreds of thousands of people are dead and an equal number, at least, will perish within a half mile of Times Square from their wounds or exposure. Hundreds of thousands more will become deathly ill in the weeks that follow.

  “We know, but on the ground no one knows for sure yet what has happened,” Turner says, trying to think how the news media would respond.

  Television and radio stations scramble to go live with broadcasts, but the electromagnetic pulse of gamma rays has knocked out local communication.

  The mayor of New York hastily tells the civil defense staff—that is, if the mayor and civil defense staff are capable—to activate the emergency protocol for a controlled evacuation that was prepared in the wake of September 11, 2001.

  Masses of people scurry from pummeled buildings onto streets and try to flee. Emotion overwhelms calls for rational calm. It is the confusion of 9/11 times ten.

  Waterways are radioactive. Wall Street, the nerve center of the American economy, has been transformed into a post-industrial midden.

  If it is Manhattan that has been struck, and not Washington, DC, Turner says, the president of the United States and his military commanders will want to formulate a swift and decisive response. “There will be an urge to fire back, to retaliate, but the question is at whom?”

  One of the first frantic phone calls made from the White House will be to Moscow to prevent a potential exchange of warheads, hoping that the failsafe protocols between the two nuclear s
uperpowers work. If the nuclear explosion has occurred in Moscow, the process will be reversed.

  The bomber was not acting on behalf of a nation. He was born in the womb of the world’s have-nots, the class of humanity, Turner says, that many Americans dismiss as out of sight, out of mind, out of impact on their lives.

  At Harvard, Allison has contemplated and written about the effects of just such a scenario. He says the detonation of a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb in Times Square, as Turner describes, would obviously not merely alter the nebulous concept of the future.

  “Ted and Sam Nunn and I have spoken about the real impact, the worst of which, if you can believe it, wouldn’t be the physical devastation. The real blow would be to our human psyche. As bad as 9/11 was, this would be unthinkable.”

  Allison goes on with his explanation of social disruption, “Our society, in fact the basis of civilization, has been predicated on having reliable, predictable expectations about the future, expectations that enable you to rationally plan and think ahead. This has been the key to sanity. In the aftermath of this trauma, it would be gone.”

  He pauses, then adds, grimly, “especially if those responsible for the first bomb had a second one with plans to use it.”

  Allison has a sobering website—www.nuclearterror.org/blastmaps.html—at which readers can plug in their own zip code and see the scale of devastation were a Dragonfire bomb detonated in their own community.

  “I’ve learned that we need to be scared,” Turner says. “Whatever it takes to shake us into consciousness. Some of the same people who try to diminish the nuclear threat never thought an event like 9/11 would be possible either.”

  Turner himself says that it has been a long personal journey for him to reach this point. Nunn recalls an evening over drinks with Turner in Atlanta when they discussed an existential question: What do you do when you know something terrible could happen without your intervention?