OMNI
NUCLEAR WAR DANGER ANTHOLOGY #1
Collected by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
https://omnicenter.org/donate/
Also see other OMNI anthologies onnuclear war, including:
Hiroshima/Nagasaki
WWIII
NWD: India and Pakistan
NWD: North Korea
Ukraine War
Nuclear Abolition
CONTENTS OF NUCLEAR WAR DANGER ANTHOLOGY #1
Doomsday Clock
Ukrainian War and Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight.
John Mecklin, why we’re 90 seconds on the Clock.
Martin ArmstrongonLikelihood of Nuclear War.
Lucero Oyarzun, ICAN. No more excuses.
Missed Opportunities, Close Calls
Siegfried Hecker, missed chances with North Korea.
Cuban Missile Crisis: Three Articles
Resistance
MLK’s Rejection of Militarism
Critique of US Bellicose National Security Strategy.
Ron Ridenour. Sharing Nuclear Secrets.
Warnings Intensify
Chris Hedges
Ali Abunimah. “The growing risk of nuclear armageddon cannot be ignored.”
Franҫois Diaz Maurin. “No Place to Hide.”
JOHN PILGER. “ANOTHER HIROSHIMA IS COMING — UNLESS WE STOP IT NOW.”
TEXTS
PRESENT URGENCY
NUCLEAR RISK
A time of unprecedented danger: It is 90 seconds to midnight.
This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.
The war in Ukraine may enter a second horrifying year, with both sides convinced they can win. Ukraine’s sovereignty and broader European security arrangements that have largely held since the end of World War II are at stake. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks.
And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.
Continue reading the full 2023 Doomsday Clock statement.
Visit our website now to watch the 2023 Doomsday Clock announcement.
John Mecklin explains why we’re just 90 seconds from midnight. BAS (2-20-23).
In this Santa Barbara Independent interview, Bulletin editor-in-chief John Mecklin discusses this year's Doomsday Clock announcement, if the Clock can be turned back, and the Russian government's response to the new time on the Clock. Read more.
“Infographic: Is global war on the horizon?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) (2-20-23). Data journalist Martin Armstrong's latest infographic in Statista draws on inspiration from the Doomsday Clock and the opinion of over 4,000 risk experts to reflect the likelihood of global war. Read more.
“90 seconds to midnight. No more excuses”.
| 10:05 AM (1 hour ago) |
| |||
|
| ||||
CLOSE CALLS AND PAST EMERGENCIES
North Korea. “Interview: Siegfried Hecker on 20 years of missed chances to deal with North Korea's nuclear program.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2-20-23).
In this interview with Bulletin editor-in-chief John Mecklin, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Heckerexplains how three US presidential administrations failed to take advantage of North Korea's apparent willingness to accept a new relationship with the US. Read more.
Cuban Missile Crisis: Three Articles
Jeremy Kuzmarov “You should thank this Russian Naval Officer that you and your loved ones are alive today.” “Let’s hope there are more Vasily Arkhipovs out there today—we need them now more than ever. “ [Gasedal.wordpress.com] CovertAction Magazine (December 15, 2022).
Movements, Strategy, WarAmericas, Cuba, Europe, Russia, Soviet Union (USSR), United StatesNewswireCuban Missile Crisis, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF), President John F. Kennedy, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Vasily Arkhipov
Vasily Arkhipov [Source: warhistoryonline.com]
On October 27, 1962, Soviet naval officer Vasily Arkhipov helped prevent the outbreak of World War III and saved humanity from nuclear catastrophe.
A minesweeper during the Pacific War, Arkhipov was the commander of a diesel submarine that had been sent by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to escort merchant ships bound for Cuba, which were equipped with a torpedo boat armed with a nuclear warhead.
On October 14, 1962, a U.S. spy plane flying over Cuba had revealed that the Soviet Union was building ramps for the installation of missiles with nuclear warheads, in retaliation for the United States deploying missiles with nuclear warheads capable of striking the Soviet Union in Italy, at Gioia del Colle (Apulia in southern Italy), and in Turkey.
President Kennedy’s imposition of a naval blockade after the spy plane discovery triggered the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis, during which time the submarine that Arkhipov commanded was being pursued by U.S. destroyers which, using depth charges, were trying to force Arkhipov’s submarine to the surface. [MORE click on opening text]
Another Grave Moment of Danger
Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara was not mincing his words when he said years after the events that “We came very, very close [to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis,] closer than we knew at the time.”
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., characterized the period of the Cuban Missile Crisis as “not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War [but] the most dangerous moment in human history.”
That moment of danger unfortunately appears just as sharp today.
IN THE NEWS Cuban Missile Crisis, a misplaced tape: Times the world came close to nuclear disaster. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Oct. 20, 2022). Bulletin Science and Security Board co-chair Sharon Squassoni talks with USA Today about lessons learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear close calls throughout history, and more. Read more. |
NUCLEAR RISK 60 years later: How many nuclear weapons did the US and USSR have in the Cuban Missile Crisis? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Oct. 20, 2022). To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bulletin is re-printing this Nuclear Notebook entry to provide essential details about the numbers and types of US and Soviet nuclear weapons that were operational during the crisis. Read more. |
RESISTANCE TO NUCLEAR WAR
“Dr. King’s Refusal to Accept ‘a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.’” 
On Jan. 12, to honor and celebrate the legacy and courage of Dr. King in championing a nuclear-free world, Defuse Nuclear War (DNW) hosted a livestream featuring the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis, Pastor Michael McBride, Judith LeBlanc, Daniel Ellsberg, Khury Petersen-Smith, David Swanson, Norman Solomon, former Ohio Senator Nina Turner, and India Walton. Watch the recording here. A focus of this event was Dr. King’s statement during his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.” During the event DNW issued a call to action and is offering people online organizing tools for sending messages and photos of loved ones and others, whose futures are at stake, to the White House and members of Congress.
A Critique of the Latest US Bellicose National Security Strategy.
The Editors . The Monthly Review (December 2022, Volume 74, Number 7). (Dec 01, 2022)
For the entire article go to https://monthlyreview.org/2022/12/01/mr-074-07-2022-11_0/?mc_cid=031c1f8fa3&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
In this most recent National Security Strategy for the United States, ideology is thus once again at the forefront, though articulated not in terms of capitalism versus communism, as it was in the Old Cold War, but rather democracy versus autocracy, defining the New Cold War. The leaders of the autocratic camp, as designated by Washington, are the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia, followed by “smaller autocratic powers” such as North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua (11, 41). These nations are accused of either actively carrying out or otherwise supporting war, imperialism, “genocide,” human rights violations, and the disruption of free markets, with the objective of overturning the “rules-based international order” put in place through decades of unrivaled U.S. hegemony over the world economy (8). Established institutions and norms—such as U.S.-dominated military alliances around the globe, the existing oil-price regime, dollar hegemony, and the “force multiplier” of the global financial system represented by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—are all under assault (20).
The autocracies are said to have the goal of making “the world safe for aggression and repression.” Meanwhile, Washington, that shining city on the hill, is the leader not only of the world’s formal democracies, but also of all those “other” nations that, although not in any sense democracies, support the U.S.-dominated, rules-based international order and thus are given honorary democratic status (18).
In its 2021 Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, the principal opponent of the United States on the world stage was referred to as China. However, in its 2022 report—under the cover of continued acceptance of the One China policy (which recognizes One China but with two governing systems)—the major U.S. enemy is now characterized throughout the report as the PRC, as opposed to China as a whole (including Taiwan). In this way, the Biden administration is able to underscore its military support of Taiwan while strongly implying that Taipei represents the appropriate governance structure for all of China (a viewpoint hearkening back to former Cold War policy, when “Red China” was the enemy). The new National Security Strategy stresses the “profound differences” that Washington has “with the Chinese Communist Party” and, indeed, its entire “system,” and makes no secret of its burning desire for regime change in the PRC (25).
In Biden’s words, the PRC alone has both “the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order” in ways that go against the U.S.-dominated, rules-based order (3). The new National Security Strategy openly (and falsely) accuses China of “genocide” and of being a would-be international aggressor (24). The PRC, by virtue of its governing system under the Chinese Communist Party, is designated as a “non-market actor” in all of its transactions, promoting “repression at home and coercion abroad,” transgressing accepted economic rules, and “exporting an illiberal model of international order” (3, 8, 14, 34). For the Biden administration, the principal U.S. strategic goal is, then, to “out-compete” China. But the new National Security Strategy makes it clear that this is to be primarily by military means, forcing the PRC to divert its resources in that direction and squeezing it by means of the more than 400 U.S. military bases that almost completely surround it, along with the expansion of the Quad and AUKUS alliances backed by Global NATO. The Biden National Security Strategy thus calls for a further militarization of the Indo-Pacific, and those countries on “the front lines” of “the PRC’s coercion” (23–24; John Pilger, “Atomic Bombings at 75,” Consortium News, August 3, 2020).
The 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy is even more ferocious when it comes to Russia. According to the Congressional Research Office of the U.S. government, Washington has carried out 251 military interventions (not including numerous counterinsurgency operations) on five continents since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Ben Norton, “U.S. Launched 251 Military Interventions Since 1991, and 469 Since 1798,” Multipolarista, September 13, 2022). Nevertheless, the new National Security Strategy suggests that it is Russia that is at the forefront of “imperialist foreign policy” in the world today. This charge is based on (1) Russia’s military operation, opposite to that of the United States, in Syria; and (2) on Russia’s intervention in Ukraine on its own Western border, in opposition to the U.S. proxy war there (25). In order to bolster its case, Biden’s National Security Council excludes from the report any reference whatsoever to the U.S.-directed Euromaidan coup in Ukraine in 2014, or to the civil war that immediately followed between Kiev (supported by the U.S./NATO) and the Russian-speaking populations in the East and South of the country (supported by Russia). Instead, readers are presented with the fiction that the war started with “Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.” The report then labels the 2022 war as emanating from “Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine” (25, 36, 39, 44). Not a single sentence is included on direct U.S./NATO involvement in the war or on its role in provoking it, even to the point of excluding any explicit mention of the massive U.S./NATO arms shipments to Ukraine. Nor is there any reference to NATO enlargement since 1997. With this near-complete erasure of history, the charge that the 2022 Russian intervention was “unprovoked” and “imperialist” assumes a fantastic form that should embarrass even the most strident U.S. war hawks.
The 2022 report of Biden’s National Security Council explicitly states that “we do not seek a new Cold War” (9). Yet, the actual document seeks to justify exactly that, while giving impetus to a new nuclear arms race (9). The explicit goal of the new U.S. imperial grand strategy is to defeat both the PRC and Russia by exerting controls over the “external environment” of both, squeezing them from without by means of economic/financial sanctions and growing military pressure (9). The PRC is seen as the bigger threat overall, while Russia has to be crushed first.
With respect to the United States itself, the 2022 National Security Strategy argues for an elimination of the barriers between U.S. foreign/military policy and domestic policy, which need to be “integrated,” effectively militarizing/securitizing the entire society, and particularly the technological and communication sectors (11). The object is to harness the entire country for the New Cold War struggle. Indeed, the National Security Council highlights the need to create a new “defense ecosystem,” which appears to be an all-encompassing Pentagon capitalism conceived as an organic entity with a life of its own (20).
What all of this indicates is that Washington is currently engaged in waging a New Cold War in the twenty-first century, justified as a struggle of democracy against autocracy—one that threatens to be far more dangerous than its twentieth-century counterpart (See John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, and Deborah Veneziale, The United States Is Waging a New Cold War [Tricontinental, September 13, 2022; also forthcoming from Monthly Review Press as Washington’s New Cold War]).
It is scarcely surprising, then, that, at the very moment that the 2022 National Security Strategy was due to be released, Biden was raising before a group of wealthy political donors the specter of nuclear “Armageddon,” arising out of the further escalation of the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine (David North, “Biden Warns: Prepare for Nuclear Armageddon,” World Socialist Website, October 7, 2022). As Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse once queried: “Does not the threat of an atomic catastrophe that could wipe out the human race serve to protect the very forces which perpetuate this danger?” (Marcuse, One Dimensional Man [Boston: Beacon, 1964), ix). What is desperately needed in this situation is a massive revival of the global peace movement aimed at steering the world away from exterminism and directed toward the creation of a new society based on substantive equality and ecological sustainability for the sake of the entire chain of human generations. There is no time to wait.
SHARING NUCLEAR SECRETS
Can An American Scientist Who Smuggled Critical Nuclear Secrets to the Russians After World War II Be Considered a “Good Guy”? New Film Says Yes.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
Listen to this Article: "Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"
| ) |
| ||
Narrated by Eunice Wong Bombs Away - by Mr. Fish (picture omitted) I have covered enough wars to know that once you open that Pandora’s box, the many evils that pour out are beyond anyone’s control. War accelerates the whirlwind of industrial killing. The longer any war continues, the closer and closer each side comes to self-annihilation. Unless it is stopped, the proxy war between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine all but guarantees direct confrontation with Russia and, with it, the very real possibility of nuclear war. Joe Biden, who doesn’t always seem to be quite sure where he is or what he is supposed to be saying, is being propped up in the I-am-a-bigger-man-than-you contest with Vladimir Putin by a coterie of rabid warmongers who have orchestrated over 20 years of military fiascos. They are salivating at the prospect of taking on Russia, and then, if there is any habitation left on the globe, China. Trapped in the polarizing mindset of the Cold War — where any effort to de-escalate conflicts through diplomacy is considered appeasement, a perfidious Munich moment — they smugly push the human species closer and closer toward obliteration. Unfortunately for us, one of these true believers is Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Putin is saying he is not bluffing. Well, he cannot afford bluffing, and it has to be clear that the people supporting Ukraine and the European Union and the Member States, and the United States and NATO are not bluffing neither,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned. “Any nuclear attack against Ukraine will create an answer, not a nuclear answer but such a powerful answer from the military side that the Russian Army will be annihilated.” Annihilated. Are these people insane? You know we are in trouble when Donald Trump is the voice of reason. “We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in world war three” the former president said. “And there will be nothing left of our planet — all because stupid people didn't have a clue ... They don't understand what they’re dealing with, the power of nuclear.” I dealt with many of these ideologues — David Petraeus, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland — as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Once you strip away their chest full of medals or fancy degrees, you find shallow men and women, craven careerists who obsequiously serve the war industry that ensures their promotions, pays the budgets of their think tanks and showers them with money as board members of military contractors. They are the pimps of war. If you reported on them, as I did, you would not sleep well at night. They are vain enough and stupid enough to blow up the world long before we go extinct because of the climate crisis, which they have also dutifully accelerated. If, as Joe Biden says, Putin is “not joking” about using nuclear weapons and we risk nuclear “Armageddon,” why isn’t Biden on the phone to Putin? Why doesn’t he follow the example of John F. Kennedy, who repeatedly communicated with Nikita Khrushchev to negotiate an end to the Cuban missile crisis? Kennedy, who unlike Biden served in the military, knew the obtuseness of generals. He had the good sense to ignore Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff and head of the Strategic Air Command, as well as the model for General Jack D. Ripper in “Dr. Strangelove,” who urged Kennedy to bomb the Cuban missile bases, an act that would have probably ignited a nuclear war. Biden is not made of the same stuff. Why is Washington sending $50 billion in arms and assistance to sustain the conflict in Ukraine and promising billions more for “as long as it takes”? Why did Washington and Whitehall dissuade Vladimir Zelensky, a former stand-up comic who has been magically transformed by these war lovers into the new Winston Churchill, from pursuing negotiations with Moscow, set up by Turkey? Why do they believe that militarily humiliating Putin, whom they are also determined to remove from power, won’t lead him to do the unthinkable in a final act of desperation? Moscow strongly implied it would use nuclear weapons in response to a “threat” to its “territorial integrity,” and the pimps of war shouted down anyone who expressed concern that we all might go up in mushroom clouds, labeling them traitors who are weakening Ukrainian and Western resolve. Giddy at the battlefield losses suffered by Russia, they poke the Russian bear with ever greater ferocity. The Pentagon helped plan Ukraine’s latest counteroffensive, and the CIA passes on battlefield intelligence. We are slipping, as we did in Vietnam, from advising, arming, funding and supporting, into fighting. None of this is helped by Zelensky’s suggestion that, to deter the use of nuclear weapons by Russia, NATO should launch “preventive strikes.” “Waiting for the nuclear strikes first and then to say ‘what’s going to happen to them.’ No! There is a need to review the way the pressure is being exerted. So there is a need to review this procedure,” he said. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the remarks, which Zelensky tried to roll back, were “nothing else than a call to start a world war.” The West has been baiting Moscow for decades. I reported from Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. I watched these militarists set out to build what they called a unipolar world — a world where they alone ruled. First, they broke promises not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany. Then they broke promises not to “permanently station substantial combat forces” in the new NATO member countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Then they broke promises not to station missile systems along Russia’s border. Then they broke promises not to interfere in the internal affairs of border states such as Ukraine, orchestrating the 2014 coup that ousted the elected government of Victor Yanukovich, replacing it with an anti-Russian — fascist aligned — government, which, in turn, led to an 8-year-long civil war, as the Russian populated regions in the east sought independence from Kiev. They armed Ukraine with NATO weapons and trained 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers after the coup. Then they recruited neutral Finland and Sweden into NATO. Now the U.S. is being asked to send advanced long-range missile systems to Ukraine, which Russia says would make the U.S. “a direct party to the conflict.” But blinded by hubris and lacking any understanding of geopolitics, they push us, like the hapless generals in the Austro-Hungarian empire, towards catastrophe. We call for total victory. Russia annexes four Ukrainian provinces. We help Ukraine bomb the Kerch Bridge. Russia rains missiles down on Ukrainian cities. We give Ukraine sophisticated air defense systems. We gloat over Russian losses. Russia introduces conscription. Now Russia carries out drone and cruise missile attacks on power, sewage and water treatment plants. Where does it end? “Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia?” a New York Times editorial asks. “Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war — and if so, how does crowing about providing U.S. intelligence to kill Russians and sink one of their ships achieve this?” No one has any answers. The Times editorial ridicules the folly of attempting to recapture all of Ukrainian territory, especially those territories populated by ethnic Russians. “A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal,” it reads. “Though Russia’s planning and fighting have been surprisingly sloppy, Russia remains too strong, and Mr. Putin has invested too much personal prestige in the invasion to back down.” But common sense, along with realistic military objectives and an equitable peace, is overpowered by the intoxication of war. On October 17, NATO countries began a two-week-long exercise in Europe, called Steadfast Noon, in which 60 aircraft, including fighter jets and long-range bombers flown in from Minot Air Base in North Dakota are simulating dropping thermonuclear bombs on European targets. This exercise happens annually. But the timing is nevertheless ominous. The U.S. has some 150 “tactical” nuclear warheads stationed in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Ukraine will be a long and costly war of attrition, one that will leave much of Ukraine in ruins and hundreds of thousands of families convulsed by lifelong grief. If NATO prevails and Putin feels his hold on power is in jeopardy, what will stop him from lashing out in desperation? Russia has the world's largest arsenal of tactical nukes, weapons that can kill tens of thousands if used on a city. It also possesses nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads. Putin does not want to end up, like his Serbian allies Slobodan Milošević and Ratko Mladić, as a convicted war criminal in the Hague. Nor does he want to go the way of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. What will stop him from upping the ante if he feels cornered? There is something grimly cavalier about how political, military and intelligence chiefs, including CIA Director William Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, agree about the danger of humiliating and defeating Putin and the specter of nuclear war. “Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they've faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” Burns said in remarks at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who also served as Defense Secretary under President Barack Obama, wrote this month that U.S. intelligence agencies believe the odds of the war in Ukraine spiraling into a nuclear war are as high as one in four. The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, echoed this warning, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in May that if Putin believed there was an existential threat to Russia, he could resort to nuclear weapons. “We do think that [Putin’s perception of an existential threat] could be the case in the event that he perceives that he is losing the war in Ukraine, and that NATO in effect is either intervening or about to intervene in that context, which would obviously contribute to a perception that he is about to lose the war in Ukraine,” Haines said. “As this war and its consequences slowly weaken Russian conventional strength…Russia likely will increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength to its internal and external audiences,” Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier wrote in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s threat assessment submitted to the same Armed Services Committee at the end of April. Given these assessments, why don’t Burns, Panetta, Haines and Berrier, urgently advocate diplomacy with Russia to de-escalate the nuclear threat? This war should never have happened. The U.S. was well aware it was provoking Russia. But it was drunk on its own power, especially as it emerged as the world’s sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, and besides, there were billions in profits to be made in arms sales to new NATO members. In 2008, when Burns was serving as the Ambassador to Moscow, he wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” Sixty-six U.N. members, most from the global south, have called for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine, as required by the U.N. Charter. But few of the big power players are listening. If you think nuclear war can’t happen, pay a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These Japanese cities had no military value. They were wiped out because most of the rest of Japan’s urban centers had already been destroyed by saturation bombing campaigns directed by LeMay. The U.S. knew Japan was crippled and ready to surrender, but it wanted to send a message to the Soviet Union that with its new atomic weapons it was going to dominate the world. We saw how that turned out. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. |
Ali Abunimah. “The growing risk of nuclear armageddon cannot be ignored.”
The Electronic Intifada . October 26, 2022. (more by The Electronic Intifada) | (Posted Oct 28, 2022). WarEurope, Russia, UkraineNewswireRussia-Ukraine War
Ukraine is losing the war and time is on Russia’s side.
You wouldn’t know it from the cheerleading propaganda that has filled Western media for months, but this is a fair conclusion from looking at the fundamentals.
That’s what I told Rania Khalek when I appeared on her BreakThrough News show Dispatches last week to talk about what remains an extremely dangerous crisis.
You can watch it above.
Franҫois Diaz Maurin. “No Place to Hide. How a Nuclear War Would Kill You and Almost Everyone Else.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. October 20, 2022.https://thebulletin.org/2022/10/nowhere-to-hide-how-a-nuclear-war-would-kill-you-and-almost-everyone-else/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=ThursdayNewsletter10202022&utm_content=NuclearRisk_NowhereToHide_10202022
In a nuclear war, hundreds to thousands of detonations would occur within minutes, resulting in tens to hundreds of millions of people dead or injured in a few days. But a few years after, global climatic changes caused by the many nuclear explosions could be responsible for the death of more than half of the human population on Earth. Read more.
JOHN PILGER. “ANOTHER HIROSHIMA IS COMING — UNLESS WE STOP IT NOW.” Consortium News. August 7, 2022. Popular Resistance. Educate!
Hiroshima 77.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of premeditated mass murder unleashing a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by lies that form the bedrock of 21st century U.S. war propaganda, casting a new enemy, and target – China.
https://popularresistance.org/john-pilger-another-hiroshima-is-coming-unless-we-stop-it-now/
. . .Today, an unprecedented campaign of propaganda is shooing us all off like rabbits. We are not meant to question the daily torrent of anti-Chinese rhetoric, which is rapidly overtaking the torrent of anti-Russia rhetoric. Anything Chinese is bad, anathema, a threat: Wuhan …. Huawei. How confusing it is when “our” most reviled leader says so.
The current phase of this campaign began not with Trump but with Barack Obama, who in 2011 flew to Australia to declare the greatest build-up of U.S. naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since World War Two. Suddenly, China was a “threat”. This was nonsense, of course. What was threatened was America’s unchallenged psychopathic view of itself as the richest, the most successful, the most “indispensable” nation.
What was never in dispute was its prowess as a bully — with more than 30 members of the United Nations suffering American sanctions of some kind and a trail of the blood running through defenceless countries bombed, their governments overthrown, their elections interfered with, their resources plundered.
Obama’s declaration became known as the “pivot to Asia”. One of its principal advocates was his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who, as WikiLeaks revealed, wanted to rename the Pacific Ocean “the American Sea”.
Whereas Clinton never concealed her warmongering, Obama was a maestro of marketing. “I state clearly and with conviction,” said the new president in 2009, “that America’s commitment is to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Obama increased spending on nuclear warheads faster than any president since the end of the Cold War. A “usable” nuclear weapon was developed. Known as the B61 Model 12, it means, according to General James Cartwright, former vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable”.
The target is China. Today, more than 400 American military bases almost encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to South-East Asia, Japan and Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as one U.S. strategist told me, “the perfect noose”.
The Unthinkable
A study by the RAND Corporation – which, since Vietnam, has planned America’s wars – is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the U.S. Army, the authors evoke the infamous catch cry of its chief Cold War strategist, Herman Kahn – “thinking the unthinkable”. Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a “winnable” nuclear war.
Kahn’s apocalyptic view is shared by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical fanatic who believes in the “rapture of the End”. He is perhaps the most dangerous man alive. “I was CIA director,” he boasted, “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses.” Pompeo’s obsession is China.
The endgame of Pompeo’s extremism is rarely if ever discussed in the Anglo-American media, where the myths and fabrications about China are standard fare, as were the lies about Iraq. A virulent racism is the sub-text of this propaganda. Classified “yellow” even though they were white, the Chinese are the only ethnic group to have been banned by an “exclusion act” from entering the United States, because they were Chinese. Popular culture declared them sinister, untrustworthy, “sneaky”, depraved, diseased, immoral.
An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, was devoted to promoting fear of the “yellow peril” as if all of Asia was about to fall down on the whites-only colony by the force of gravity.
As the historian Martin Powers writes, acknowledging China’s modernism, its secular morality and “contributions to liberal thought threatened European face, so it became necessary to suppress China’s role in the Enlightenment debate …. For centuries, China’s threat to the myth of Western superiority has made it an easy target for race-baiting.”
In the Sydney Morning Herald, tireless China-basher Peter Hartcher described those who spread Chinese influence in Australia as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows”. Hartcher, who favourably quotes the American demagogue Steve Bannon, likes to interpret the “dreams” of the current Chinese elite, to which he is apparently privy. These are inspired by yearnings for the “Mandate of Heaven” of 2,000 years ago. Ad nausea.
To combat this “mandate”, the Australian government of Scott Morrison has committed one of the most secure countries on earth, whose major trading partner is China, to hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American missiles that can be fired at China.
The trickledown is already evident. In a country historically scarred by violent racism towards Asians, Australians of Chinese descent have formed a vigilante group to protect delivery riders. Phone videos show a delivery rider punched in the face and a Chinese couple racially abused in a supermarket. Between April and June, there were almost 400 racist attacks on Asian-Australians.
“We are not your enemy,” a high-ranking strategist in China told me, “but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.” China’s arsenal is small compared with America’s, but it is growing fast, especially the development of maritime missiles designed to destroy fleets of ships.
“For the first time,” wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack… This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy…”
In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of international affairs at George Washington University, who wrote that a “blinding attack on China” was planned, “with strikes that could be mistakenly perceived [by the Chinese] as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma [that would] lead to nuclear war.”
In 2019, the U.S. staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War, much of it in high secrecy. An armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an “Air-Sea Battle Concept for China” – ASB – blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.
It is fear of such a blockade that has seen China develop its Belt and Road Initiative along the old Silk Road to Europe and urgently build strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands.
In Shanghai, I met Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and novelist, typical of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her best-selling book has the ironic title Socialism Is Great! Having grown up in the chaotic, brutal Cultural Revolution, she has travelled and lived in the U.S. and Europe. “Many Americans imagine,” she said, “that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the yellow peril has never left them… They have no idea there are some 500 million people being lifted out of poverty, and some would say it’s 600 million.”
Modern China’s epic achievements, its defeat of mass poverty, and the pride and contentment of its people (measured forensically by American pollsters such as Pew) are wilfully unknown or misunderstood in the West. This alone is a commentary on the lamentable state of Western journalism and the abandonment of honest reporting.
China’s repressive dark side and what we like to call its “authoritarianism” are the facade we are allowed to see almost exclusively. It is as if we are fed unending tales of the evil super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu. And it is time we asked why: before it is too late to stop the next Hiroshima.
END NUCLEAR WAR DANGER ANTHOLOGY #1