No winners – we are all losers in a nuclear war between USA and Russia

US-Russia Nuclear War Could Wipe Out Humanity – Nuclear Physician Warnshttp://au.ibtimes.com/articles/569300/20141013/nuclear-war-russia-over-ukraine-vladimir-putin.htm#.VD7HmWddUnk By Athena Yenko | October 13, 2014

A nuclear war that will deplete the ozone layer, emit radioactive pollution, form massive fire storms, and a nuclear winter could ignite between the United States and Russia over theUkraine crisis. Helen Caldicott, an Australian physician, an advocate of citizen action to address nuclear and environmental crises, the founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and a 1985 Nobel Prize nominee warns that the Cold War has returned and could escalate into a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. “It’s an incredibly dangerous situation. … If there’s a nuclear war tonight, that’s the Northern Hemisphere (of the entire world) gone,” she said at the National Press Club Newsmaker press conference.

She highlighted that the advances made by NATO to Russia’s border is perilous. She implied that NATO’s strategy was a provocation. She said that the only war that the two countries could engage is a nuclear one. The United States and Russia, she said, owns gigantic stockpiles of nuclear armaments. In fact, these two nations hold the 94 percent of the total 16,300 nuclear weapons around the world. “Do they really want a nuclear war with Russia? The only war that you can have with Russia is a nuclear war. … You don’t provoke paranoid countriesarmed to the teeth with nuclear weapons,” she stressed, according to The National Press Club.

Caldicott called attention to the fact that the impending nuclear war is a medical issue that “will create the final epidemic of the human race.” Ukraine has 15 large nuclear power plants in its possession. Any attack on these plants, whether with the most conventional of weapons, would result to a meltdown comparable to the Chernobyl in 1986. She underlined that the Chernobyl meltdown took the lives of more than a million people.

She lauds President Barack Obama for his support of nuclear disarmament. However, with the threats of the ISIS and the Ebola outbreak on his plate, other agencies have overwhelmed his decision. On the other hand, she thinks highly of Russian president Vladimir Putin saying that he is “very restrained at the moment.”

Caldicott underscored that the centenary of the start of the World War 1 had just passed but it the conflicts that spark it stand still. “You know how the First World War started 100 years ago: One person shot an archduke. The pride of the leaders and generals of the great nations did the rest: They went to war. Human fallibility was a major cause then. It is just as common today,” she said.