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TODAY. Sleeping our way to doom, through the media lies about the Ukraine war

Right now, there’s the Ukraine so-called “counter-offensive” (an interesting new term coined and designed to imply something a lot more substantial than the more familiar term “counter-attack”)

Well according to the Western corporate media, this “counter-offensive” IS something substantial. Indeed, it means that Ukraine is winning, will win, this war. Crimea and the Donbass will be returned to Ukraine, the Russian army will be routed, and the Russian economy crippled. And Ukraine will join NATO. Sure, it’ll take a while, but with more weapons from the West, it will be a success, and the West will fund the post-war repairs and restoration of Ukraine.

The other story, from Russia, is that even if it does take a while, the defeat of Ukraine is assured. And indeed, the Ukrainian “counter-offensive” will probably be over in a few weeks.

Somewhere in the middle, a few brave souls strive for the truth. Being myself a Westerner, I know little about independent thinkers and writers in Russia. But I suspect that any who criticise Putin and the Russian military authorities get punished.

As for Western writers who criticise Zelensky, or cast doubt on the Ukraine success story – well, politicians, academics, and the corporate media have no trouble in discrediting them, branding them as ‘Putin’s puppets’

The tragedy of it all is that we are now on the road to nuclear Armageddon, – and the public cannot trust “respected” media reports – as ill-advised “patriotism” trumps truth, and we just do not get the facts.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Christina's notes | 10 Comments

The Silent Slaughter of the Flower of Ukraine’s Youth

Now that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is underway, it is clear that the government and its Western allies are maintaining silence to conceal the brutal cost Ukraine’s brave young people are paying.

By Medea Benjamin | Nicolas J.S. Davies / Common Dreams. June 21, 2023
 https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/21/the-silent-slaughter-of-the-flower-of-ukraines-youth/

As Ukraine prepared to launch its much heralded but long delayed counteroffensive, the media published a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier with his finger on his lips, symbolizing the need for secrecy to retain some element of surprise for this widely telegraphed operation.

Now that the offensive has been under way for two weeks, it is clear that the Ukrainian government and its Western allies are maintaining silence for quite a different reason: to conceal the brutal cost Ukraine’s brave young people are paying to recover small scraps of territory from Russian occupation forces, in what some are already calling a suicide mission.

Western pundits at first described these first two weeks of fighting as “probing operations” to find weak spots in Russia’s defenses, which Russia has been fortifying since 2022 with multiple layers of minefields, “dragon’s teeth,” tank-traps, pre-positioned artillery, and attack helicopters, unopposed in the air, that can fire 12 anti-tank missiles apiece.

On the advice of British military advisers in Kyiv, Ukraine flung Western tanks and armored vehicles manned by NATO-trained troops into these killing fields without air support or demining operations. The results have been predictably disastrous, and it is now clear that these are not just “probing” operations as the propaganda at first claimed, but the long-awaited main offensive.

A Western official with intelligence access told The Associated Press on June 14, “Intense fighting is now ongoing in nearly all sectors of the front… This is much more than probing. These are full-scale movements of armor and heavy equipment into the Russian security zone.”

Other glimpses are emerging of the reality behind the propaganda. At a press conference after a summit at NATO Headquarters, U.S. General Mark Milley warned that the offensive will be long, violent, and costly in Ukrainian lives.

“This is a very difficult fight. It’s a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time and at high cost,” Milley said.

Russian videos show dozens of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles lying smashed in minefields, and NATO military advisers in Ukraine have confirmed that it lost 38 tanks in one night on June 8, including newly delivered German-built Leopard IIs.

Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute explained to TheNew York Times that the Russians are trying to inflict as many casualties and destroy as many vehicles as possible in the areas in front of their main defensive lines, turning those areas into lethal kill zones. If this strategy works, any Ukrainian forces that reach the main Russian defense lines will be too weakened and depleted to break through and achieve their goal of severing Russia’s land bridge between Donbas and Crimea.


Russia’s Ministry of Defense reported that Ukraine’s forces suffered 7,500 casualties in the first 10 days of the offensive. If Ukraine’s real losses are a fraction of that, the long, violent bloodbath that General Milley anticipates will destroy the new armored brigades that NATO has armed and trained, and serve only to escalate the gory war of attrition that has destroyed Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk, and Bakhmut, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians.

A senior European military officer in Ukraine provided more details of the carnage to Asia Times, calling Ukraine’s operations on June 8 and 9 a “suicide mission” that violated the basic rules of military tactics.

“We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with infantry support and do what they can,” he said. “They were trained by the British, and they’re playing Light Brigade,” he added, comparing the offensive to a suicidal charge into massive Russian cannon fire that wiped out Britain’s Light Cavalry Brigade in Crimea in 1854.

If Ukraine’s “Spring Offensive” plunges on to the bitter end, it could be more like the British and French Somme Offensive, fought near the French River Somme in 1916. After 19,240 British troops were killed on the first day (including Nicolas’s 20-year-old great-uncle, Robert Masterman), the battle raged on for more than four months of pointless, wanton slaughter, with over a million British, French, and German casualties. It was finally called off after advancing only six miles and failing to capture either of the two small French towns that were its initial objectives.

The current offensive was delayed for months as Ukraine and its allies grappled with the likelihood of the outcome we are now witnessing. The fact that it went ahead regardless reflects the moral bankruptcy of U.S. and NATO political leaders, who are sacrificing the flower of Ukraine’s youth in a proxy war they will not send their own children or grandchildren to fight.

As Ukraine launches its offensive, NATO is conducting Air Defender, the largest military exercise in its history, from June 12 to 23, with 250 warplanes, including nuclear-capable F-35s, flying from German bases to simulate combat operations in and over Germany, Lithuania, Romania, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea. The exercise has led to at least 15 incidents between NATO and Russian aircraft in the skies near Lithuania.

It seems that nobody in NATO’s foreboding fortress in Brussels has stumbled on the concept of a “security dilemma,” in which supposedly defensive actions by one party are perceived as offensive threats by another and lead to a spiral of mutual escalation, as has been the case between NATO and Russia since the 1990s. Professor of Russian history Richard Sakwa has written, “NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”

These risks will be evident in the upcoming NATO Summit in Vilnius on July 11-12, where Ukraine and its eastern allies will be pushing for Ukraine membership, while the U.S. and western Europe insist that membership cannot be offered while the war rages on and will instead offer “upgraded” status and a shorter route to membership once the war ends.

The continued insistence that Ukraine will one day be a NATO member only means a prolongation of the conflict, as this is a red line that Russia insists cannot be crossed. That’s why negotiations that lead to a neutral Ukraine are key to ending the war.

But the United States will not agree to that as long as President Joe Biden keeps U.S. Ukraine policy firmly under the thumbs of hawkish neoconservative desk warriors like Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland at the State Department and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House. Pressure to keep escalating U.S. involvement in the war is also coming from Congress, where Republicans accuse Biden of “hemming and hawing” instead of “going all in” to help Ukraine.

Paradoxically, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are more realistic than their civilian colleagues about the lack of any military solution. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, has called for diplomacy to bring peace to Ukraine, and U.S. intelligence sources have challenged dominant false narratives of the war in leaks to Newsweek and Seymour Hersh, telling Hersh that the neocons are ignoring genuine intelligence and inventing their own, just as they did to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

With the retirement of Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the State Department is losing the voice of a professional diplomat who was President Barack Obama’s chief negotiator for the JCPOA with Iran and urged Biden to rejoin the agreement, and who has taken steps to moderate U.S. brinkmanship toward China. While publicly silent on Ukraine, Sherman was a quiet voice for diplomacy in a war-mad administration.

Many fear that Sherman’s job will now go to Nuland, the leading architect of the ever-mounting catastrophe in Ukraine for the past decade, who already holds the #3 or #4 job at State as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

Other departures from the senior ranks at State and the Pentagon are likely to cede more ground to the neocons. Colin Kahl, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who worked with Sherman on the JCPOA, opposed sending F-16s to Ukraine, and has maintained that China will not invade Taiwan in the near future. Kahl is leaving the Pentagon to return to his position as a professor at Stanford, just as China hawk General C.Q. Brown will replace General Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when Milley retires in September.

Meanwhile, other world leaders continue to push for peace talks. A delegation of African heads of state led by President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on June 17, to discuss the African peace plan for Ukraine.

President Putin showed the African leaders the 18-point Istanbul Agreement that a Ukrainian representative had signed back in March 2022, and told them that Ukraine had thrown it in the “dustbin of history,” after the now disgraced Boris Johnson told Zelenskyy the “collective West” would only support Ukraine to fight, not to negotiate with Russia.

The catastrophic results of the first two weeks of Ukraine’s offensive should focus the world’s attention on the urgent need for a ceasefire to halt the daily slaughter and dismemberment of hundreds of brave young Ukrainians, who are being forced to drive through minefields and kill zones in Western gifts that are proving to be no more than U.S.- and NATO-built death-traps

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | 1 Comment

‘Truly shocking’: UK has enough plutonium to make almost 20,000 nukes

https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/truly-shocking-uk-has-enough-plutonium-to-make-almost-20000-nukes/. 21 June 23

A study published by a university in Nagasaki has revealed that the UK has enough stockpiled plutonium to make almost 20,000 atomic warheads with the same power as the bomb which totally-destroyed that Japanese city in August 1945.

The 2023 Fissile Material Directory[i] is published in June each year by the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition (RECNA)[ii], based at Nagasaki University. RECNA has been established for over twenty years as an educational and research institute at a university that has a medical faculty with a first-hand experience of the horror of nuclear weapons. Its primary goal is achieving a world free from nuclear weapons.

In January, the institute was visited by UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities Secretary Richard Outram, where he met Vice-Director Professor Tatsujiro Suzuki.

The study lists the UK as holding 119.7 tons of plutonium, the second highest stockpile in the world after Russia with 191.5 tons, and 22.6 tons of Highly Enriched Uranium. The plutonium stockpile is said to be sufficient to arm 19,947 atom bombs, like the ‘Fat Man’ bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, whilst the uranium stockpile has the potential to be turned into a further 355 devices comparable to the ‘Little Boy’ bomb dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier.

The Nagasaki bomb is estimated to have killed 35,000 – 40,000 people on the day and the Hiroshima bomb about twice that many.

The UK Government and nuclear industry has conceded in the 2022 UK Radioactive Material Inventory that 113 tons of UK-owned plutonium are currently managed by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, whilst a further 4 tons are in semi-assembled MOX or other fuel components. An additional 24 tons of foreign-owned plutonium are also held, a further legacy of the costly failure of the UK’s experiment with reprocessing[iii].

Across the world, RECNA estimates that 552 tons of plutonium and 1,260 tons of HEU are held, much of the latter in military hands. These are all deemed to be fissile materials and together could arm 92,000 plutonium bombs like the one used at Nagasaki and almost 20,000 uranium devices like that deployed at Hiroshima.

The Nuclear Free Local Authorities are gravely concerned about the future use of Britain’s plutonium stockpile. In recent weeks, the UK Government and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority have published plans suggesting that some of this material should be used as fuel for a new generation of nuclear reactors.

The NFLA fears that burning plutonium as fuel will simply lead to the creation of more nuclear waste,  that such material could be a target for terrorists or hostile state actors, especially in transit, and that these actions could lead to nuclear weapon proliferation. In its response to the government and industry plan the NFLA called for fissile material to be put ‘beyond use’ for all time[iv].

Responding to the RECNA report, Councillor Lawrence O’Neill, Chair of the NFLA Steering Committee, said:

“The data published by RECNA is both astonishing and truly shocking. If only a tiny fraction of Britain’s stockpile of fissile materials ended up in the wrong hands for use by terrorists or in military action then the consequences could be too awful to contemplate. In the UK, and elsewhere in the world, anti-nuclear campaigners need to continue to work together to lobby our respective governments to make these stockpiles safe and beyond use, and the time to do that is now.”  

June 22, 2023 Posted by | - plutonium, UK | Leave a comment

Judge Who Ruled Against Assange Built Career as Barrister Defending UK Government

“absurd that a single judge can issue a three-page decision that could land Julian Assange in prison for the rest of his life and permanently impact the climate for journalism around the world.”

Jonathan Swift, the High Court judge who has just rejected Julian Assange’s attempt to halt his extradition to the US, is the government’s former top lawyer and previously defended the Defence and Home Secretaries.

SCHEERPOST, By Mark Curtis / Declassified UK, 19 June 23

  • Swift was entrusted to act for the Defence and Home Secretaries in at least nine legal cases
  • His “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies” while representing the government

onathan Swift, the High Court judge who has rejected Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the US, has a long history of working for the government departments that are now persecuting the WikiLeaks founder.

Swift, who ruled against Assange on 6 June, was formerly the government’s favourite barrister. 

He worked as ‘First Treasury Counsel’ – the government’s top lawyer – from 2006 to 2014, a position in which he advised and represented the government in major litigation. 

Swift acted for the Defence and Home Secretaries in at least nine cases, Declassified has found.

…………………….. It was reported in 2013 that Swift had been paid nearly a million pounds – £975,075 – over the previous three years for representing the government.

Swift now presides over Assange’s extradition case being fought by the Home Office for whom he previously worked.

As with previous judges who have ruled against Assange, the case raises serious concerns about institutional conflicts of interests at the heart of the UK legal system…………………………………………

Ruling

In his rejection of the appeal by Assange’s lawyers, Swift curtly dismissed all eight grounds to their arguments as “no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the District Judge”, who previously ruled on the case.

Media freedom group Reporters Sans Frontieres said Swift’s ruling brought Assange “dangerously close to extradition”. 

It added it was “absurd that a single judge can issue a three-page decision that could land Julian Assange in prison for the rest of his life and permanently impact the climate for journalism around the world.”

The US government seeks to extradite Assange in order to try him in connection with WikiLeaks’ publication of leaked classified documents that informed public interest reporting around the world. 

Assange faces a possible 175 years in prison and would be the first publisher prosecuted under the US Espionage Act.  https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/19/judge-who-ruled-against-assange-built-career-as-barrister-defending-uk-government/

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Legal, UK | Leave a comment

SCOTT RITTER: On Horseradish & Nuclear War

Consortium News, June 21, 2023

When Vladimir Putin was recently asked about the potential use of nuclear weapons in the context of Ukraine, an understanding of back-alley Russian slang was needed to understand his response.  

“……………………………….During the June 16 discussion period of the plenary session of the 2023 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Russian leader was asked about his views on the potential use of nuclear weapons in the context of the ongoing Ukrainian conflict.

“This use of nuclear weapons is certainly theoretically possible,” Putin bluntly answered.

“For Russia, this is possible if a threat is created to our territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty, the existence of the Russian state. Nuclear weapons are created in order to ensure our security in the broadest sense of the word and the existence of the Russian state.”

Putin’s answer reflected long-standing Russian nuclear doctrine, which postulates the use of nuclear weapons in the case of an existential threat, nuclear or otherwise, to the survival of Russia.

Putin then sought to put the audience at ease. “But we, firstly, do not have such a need,” Putin noted, “and secondly, the very factor of reasoning on this topic already lowers the possibility of lowering the threshold for the use of weapons. This is the first part.”

What came next was classic Putin. “The second is that we have more such weapons [i.e., tactical nuclear weapons] than the NATO countries. They know about it and all the time they persuade us to start talks on reductions.”

Putin paused, before shrugging and, with a half-smile, saying “Khren Im”.

Putin paused, before shrugging and, with a half-smile, saying “Khren Im”.Khren Im is a Russian slang term derived from the word “horseradish” (khren), thus a literal translation of the phrase used by Putin would be “horseradish them.” But khren closely resembles a more salty term …….. khren Im is understood to mean “F*ck them.”“F*ck them, you know?” Putin said, to the obvious mirth of the audience……………….

The “them” in the horseradish reference made by the Russian president is the United States. Two weeks prior to Putin’s man-in-the-street reaction, on June 2, U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, addressed a conference hosted by the Arms Control Association, in Washington, D.C. The topic, not surprisingly, was the administration’s approach to U.S.-Russian arms control.

Biden’s Nuclear Strategy ……………………………………………………….

Likewise left unspoken was Russia’s contention that the U.S. was in violation of the New START Treaty by keeping some 101 strategic delivery systems from being inspected, despite being required to do so by the provisions of the New START Treaty.Khren Im.

Sullivan called out Russia’s decision to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, without elaborating on either the threats made to Belarus by several NATO members, including Poland and the Baltic states. Nor did he acknowledge that the Russian action parallels a similar U.S. policy in stationing some 100 nuclear B-61 gravity bombs on the territories of five NATO nations. Khren Im.

Sullivan strongly criticized Russia for its total disregard for international law, including arms control treaties such as the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) from which Russia recently withdrew, without putting the Russian decision in proper historical perspective. This perspective involves the ongoing disregard by the U.S. and NATO of deliberate inequities in the CFE structure that were brought on by the ongoing expansion of NATO.

Nor did the U.S. national security adviser acknowledge that it was the U.S., not Russia, which had withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate Forces Treaty, both of which are considered foundational for all arms control treaties going forward.[Related: U.S. Establishment: Nixing Arms Control]Khren Im.

Sullivan’s presentation ignored such salient matters as the purpose behind NATO’s certification of the F-35 fighter as a nuclear-capable delivery system, and what the deployment of nuclear-capable F-35s to NATO nations not included in the existing shared nuclear defense scheme meant to the scope and scale of the NATO nuclear deterrence model considering the continued NATO Baltic Air Policing and South European Air Policing operations.

Sullivan also failed to address the current “launch-on-warning” posture employed by the Biden administration, which positions the U.S. to carry out a first nuclear strike against Russia, and the role that the continued patrols in Europe and Asia by American nuclear-capable B-52H strategic bombers, including aggressive flight profiles appearing to simulate the launch of nuclear-armed cruise missiles against Saint Petersburg.

Sullivan also ignored the impact of the Biden administration’s ongoing plans to bring back medium- and intermediate-range nuclear-capable missiles to the European theater will be on the overall nuclear balance of power between the U.S.-NATO and Russia.Khren Im.

A day before Putin addressed the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov spoke to the media about the “opposing, irreconcilable positions” of Russia and the U.S. concerning the resumption of discussions regarding the New START treaty. “[T]he suspension of New START remains in effect,” Ryabkov said, “and this decision may be revoked or reconsidered only if the U.S.  demonstrates a willingness to abandon its fundamentally hostile policy toward the Russian Federation.”Khren Im……………………………………………………………………

While people are right to be concerned about the policy recommendations made by prominent Russians such as Karaganov, they must also address the root cause of such pronouncements, namely the policies of the Biden administration to achieve the strategic defeat of Russia in Ukraine, seemingly at whatever cost (especially when the cost is paid in the blood of Ukrainian soldiers)

Russia will not use nuclear weapons to fulfil the tasks set forth in its Special Military Operation. It will use nuclear weapons to preserve Russian territorial integrity. The reality today is that the irresponsible policies of the U.S. and its NATO allies have sought the expansion of NATO up to the Russian borders . As they abandoned every opportunity to prevent a conflict with Russia over Ukraine, there is a war between Russia and Ukraine that has resulted in Ukraine irrevocably losing 20 percent of its territory (the oblasts of Kherson, Zaparizhia, Donetsk and Lugansk, along with the Crimea).

All of that territory has been absorbed into the Russian Federation and makes any effort to strip them away from Russia by definition an existential conflict where, if Russia were to lose, would necessarily trigger the use of nuclear weapons.

And yet Biden and his NATO allies continue to feed a Ukrainian fantasy where the reacquisition of these territories by Ukraine is a desirable outcome.

Has either Biden, his advisers, or the American public considered the potential consequences of this action? Are they willing to trade Boston for Poznan, or sacrifice humanity for the sake of appeasing Ukrainian sensibilities? The answer appears to be “no.”

As for Russia, one is guided by the words of Vladimir Putin: “Khren Im”F*ck them. But in reality, F*ck us. All of us. If this insanity is allowed to continue unabated, it is lights out for all of humanity.

Chew on that the next time you cheer on the Ukrainian counteroffensive or applaud the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund the Ukrainian military.

It is high time for the American public to recognize that our only hope for a survivable future is one where arms control and nuclear disarmament once again serve as the cornerstone of a U.S.-Russian relationship, and that the shortest possible path toward achieving that objective is for Russia to win its war against Ukraine.

And for those politicians in the U.S. and Europe who have invested their political futures on the suicidal mission of feeding Ukraine’s anti-Russian fantasies?

Khren Im.   https://consortiumnews.com/2023/06/21/scott-ritter-on-horse-radishes-nuclear-war/

June 22, 2023 Posted by | weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Reverse Cuban Missile Crisis

America now plans to install tactical nuclear weapons in Romania and Poland. 

BY TYLER DURDEN. WEDNESDAY, JUN 21, 2023 – Authored by Gilbert Doctorow,  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/reverse-cuban-missile-crisis

What I am about to say is surely known and under analysis in the American intelligence agencies. It is being used by the Pentagon to quietly change its nuclear force posture in Europe. However, we hear not a word about it in the media, not in mainstream, and not yet in alternative news.

I maintain that it is very important for it to be heard and reflected upon by the general public in the United States and in Europe, disagreeable though it may be at the start of a new week. So here goes…

Last Friday when I published my selective account of the Q&A session with President Vladimir Putin at the culmination point of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum I omitted one important issue:

how Russia will respond to the dispatch of “Ukrainian” F-16s from some air base in a NATO country into the war zone in Ukraine.  I was considering remedying that oversight on Saturday morning when a comment from one reader forced my hand. She wrote in that Italy’s daily newspaper La Repubblica quoted Putin as saying on Friday Russia will destroy such a base in response. I responded on Saturday in the Comments section that the Russian President had in fact been evasive in his comment, saying only that Russia could destroy such a base and was now taking the issue under advisement.

However, yesterday evening’s edition of the Vladimir Solovyov talk show indicates that the Republicca reporter was closer to the truth than I. A patient and knowledgeable Russian colonel in retirement who is a frequent guest on the talk show explained  that the Kremlin is now considering exactly with what means to destroy such a NATO air base, not whether to do it. And the likely means will be use of tactical nuclear weapons on a Ramstein or whatever NATO base is involved. We may say that Germany is placing itself in the bulls-eye of any escalation in the Ukraine war if it proceeds with the F-16s to Ukraine program.

Why all the fuss over the F-16s, you may ask. After all, Putin has said loud and clear that Russia will destroy the F-16s in the air just as it has been destroying the Leopard tanks and America’s Bradley armored personnel carriers while pushing back the ongoing Ukrainian counter-offensive. To understand better, we have to thank the good colonel once again. He alerted us to an important detail that you will not find mentioned in The New York Times:

the first F-16s scheduled to be supplied to the Ukrainian Air Force are from Belgium and Denmark, and are all nuclear-capable, which is not a necessary feature of these planes. 

Since the Russians are unable to determine what kind of munitions the “Ukrainian” F-16s will actually be delivering to the war zone, they must assume that they are carrying tactical nuclear bombs intended to be dropped on the Russian Army troop concentrations. The effect of such an attack could be devastating, hence the Russian threat to the air bases from which such planes are launched.

The next important revelation made during the Solovyov show came with respect to the first delivery of tactical nuclear weapons to Minsk which was marked by a visit to Belarus and interview with Lukashenko by the co-host of the Sixty Minutes news and discussion show Olga Skabeyeva. In answer to her question about where the nuclear warheads are being stored, Lukashenko said ‘everywhere.’  The meaning of this was kindly deciphered for us laymen by the colonel in retirement on the Solovyov program:  this signifies a cardinal shift in the Russian handling of tactical nuclear arms away from their traditional separation of the warheads kept in a central storage far from the delivery carriers to the method used by the U.S. military with respect to its tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. The Americans, he said stored the nukes just under the jets that would be used to deliver them.  Now in Belarus, the warheads will also be just next to the planes and Iskander missiles that will carry them. This means that the time to launch will depend only on the time for approval from the Boss. And with respect to that, Lukashenko told Skabeyeva that he had just to make a phone call to Vladimir Vladimirovich and approval would be instantaneous.

Why such a hair-trigger mechanism for unleashing nuclear weapons to defend Belarus?  For an answer to that, go to Monday’s article in The Financial Times on how Poland is now preparing hundreds of Belarus fighters to go across the border and overthrow Lukashenko. To which I can only say:  Warsaw, watch out!  Lukashenko is one bold and decisive defender of his country, as his standing on the streets with a Kalashnikov in his hands when there were Western financed and promoted street demonstrations in Minsk aiming to overthrow him.

Still another item from the Solovyov show demanding our attention concerns what the good colonel calls the American response to the shipment of nuclear arms to Belarus:  America now plans to install tactical nuclear weapons in Romania and Poland.  Why, one might ask, in those two countries? For that you need only consider what the Kremlin has been saying for more than a decade about the U.S. bases set up in both countries supposedly to house anti-ballistic missile systems intended to bring down Iranian missiles fired on Europe. The Russians always objected that these installations would be dual-purpose and were a cover for placing nuclear-armed cruise missiles directed against themselves.  Now if the USA indeed puts such missiles into the two countries, the Russian claims will have been vindicated and Washington is shown, yet again, to be a blatant liar on the world stage.

Finally, the colonel gave us an invaluable insight to changes in Russian thinking on tactical nuclear weapons which we otherwise missed. I have in mind Putin’s answer at the Forum to the question of whether Russia would use tactical nuclear weapons in the Ukraine theater. Putin’s loud and clear ‘no’ was, of course, an answer to the proposals of Sergei Karaganov for preemptive and instructive nuclear strikes in his just published essay in the magazine Russia in Global Affairs. As I reported, Putin went on to say that Russia has no need to show force by some preemptive strike because everyone knows it has many more tactical weapons than the West. And while the United States has called for talks on reduction of stockpiles of such weapons, Russia will not enter into such talks, and says to the West, “fuck you,” if I may translate his rude remark in Russian into corresponding four-letter English.

That last remark brought smiles to the faces of many Russians in the audience. But it was not just theatrics, says the good colonel: in fact Russia had been talking with Americans about the possibility of reducing stockpiles, but now, in the context of the NATO proxy war it has no intention of resuming such talks.

With that I end today’s survey of our dismal progression on the way to Armageddon.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Prodding the Pentagon

Politico 6/21/23

FIRST IN NATSEC DAILY — PRODDING THE PENTAGON: A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation today that would require the Defense Department to pass an independent audit by the end of fiscal year 2024.

If enacted, the Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023 would require any DOD component that fails to pass an audit to return 1 percent of its budget to the Treasury for deficit reduction.

“If we are serious about spending taxpayer dollars wisely and effectively, we have got to end the absurdity of the Pentagon being the only agency in the federal government that has never passed an independent audit,” wrote Sen. BERNIE SANDERS (I-Vt.), who co-led the bill alongside CHUCK GRASSLEY (R-Iowa).

Co-sponsors include Sens. RON WYDEN (D-Ore.), MIKE LEE (R-Utah), ELIZABETH WARREN (D-Mass.), MIKE BRAUN (R-Ind.), JEFF MERKLEY (D-Ore.), RAND PAUL (R-Ky.), ED MARKEY (D-Mass.), and TAMMY BALDWIN (D-Wis.).

The Pentagon, which has a budget totaling $886 billion for fiscal year 2024, has long come under fire for excessive spending. Calls for oversight have ramped up in recent months after reports of massive price gouging by defense contractors, who will receive almost half of the budget this year.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Russian MP believes Ukrainian counteroffensive will end in July – Zelensky says operation is not going well

 https://www.rt.com/russia/578360-ukrainian-counteroffensive-end-weeks-mp/ 21 June 23

Moscow’s troops are likely to repel Kiev’s offensive in July and launch an attack of their own, Andrey Kartapolov has claimed.

Kiev’s forces will exhaust their offensive capabilities in July if the current Ukrainian casualty rate persists, the head of Russia’s State Duma Defense Committee, Andrey Kartapolov, said on Tuesday.

Ukrainian troops have lost some 900 soldiers to deaths and injuries over the past 24 hours alone, the colonel general explained. According to Kartapolov, they have also lost nine tanks and dozens of armored vehicles over the same period. “If it continues at this pace, I believe we will finish repelling [this offensive] in three weeks and move on to dynamic actions ourselves,” the MP predicted in an appearance on the ‘Solovyov Live’ show.

The lawmaker claimed that Ukraine had already lost around 20,000 soldiers out of the 40,000 to 50,000 it had reportedly trained for the offensive. While he did not name his sources, he claimed the much-awaited Ukrainian operation had largely failed.

“Every tactic they have used has not worked as of now,” he said. Kiev’s troops did not advance further than the Russian forward defense area security zone and did not even reach the first defense line, the MP added.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, over 600 Ukrainian servicemen have been killed over the past 24 hours, as Kiev’s troops continued their attacks on Russian positions. The Ukrainian forces also lost dozens of armored vehicles, as well as a dozen artillery pieces, including at least three US-made M777 howitzers, the ministry revealed in its daily briefing on Tuesday.

Kiev’s large-scale offensive began on June 4. Ukrainian troops have suffered heavy losses in the attacks, which have been repelled by Russian forces, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Last week, it said that 7,500 of Kiev’s frontline troops had either been killed or wounded. Russian President Vladimir Putin also said last week that Kiev had lost up to 30% of the heavy equipment supplied to it by the West.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Scientists monitoring ‘doomsday’ glacier in Antarctic warn climate change happening faster than ever before.

Collapse of the Thwaites glacier and its accompanying ice sheet could lead to more than three metres of sea level rise. The British Antarctic Survey is hoping to find out how fast it might collapse

i news, By Daniel Capurro, Environment Correspondent, June 20, 2023 

Antarctica is changing at “a pace that we’ve never seen before” with the potential collapse of key ice sheets threatening three metres of sea level rise in a century, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has warned.

Scientists at the BAS, which is launching a new 10-year strategy, are part of a multinational effort to monitor the Thwaites glacier, which has been dubbed the “doomsday glacier”.

The river of ice has retreated more than eight miles since the 90s and is already responsible for 4 per cent of global sea level rises. Were it to melt entirely, this would cause a rise in the sea level of 65 centimetres.

More worryingly, it is thought to be both the keystone and the “weak underbelly” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

If Thwaites were to pass a tipping point and be lost completely, said the BAS, it could potentially lead other glaciers around it to rapidly disintegrate and eventually to the collapse of the entire ice sheet.

Were that to happen, global sea levels would rise by more than three metres, with Cambridge, the headquarters of the BAS, suddenly finding itself on the edge of saltwater marshes.

“There’s this common perception of sea level changes a few millimetres a year, and therefore we all relaxed thinking what are a few millimetres?” said Dr Dominic Hodgson, head of the Ice Sheets and Climate Change team at the British Antarctic Survey. “But when we look back at the historical record, we can see that in the past when ice sheets melted, they do in very non-linear jumps.”

There are periods of meltwater pulses, where essentially an ice sheet collapses and the sea level rises by several metres in the 100 years or so. It’s really rapid.”

BAS scientists are now racing to understand the composition of the bedrock beneath the glacier. Depending on how hard or soft it is could affect whether the glacier takes just five years to disappear or 500, although Dr Alex Brisbourne, who is part of the bedrock team, said the worst-case scenarios already appeared unlikely.

Even without such a collapse, the picture from the Polar regions is a troubling one. “We’ve seen extreme temperatures in Antarctica in the last couple of years, over 20°C, which is completely unsustainable for keeping ice,” said Dr Hodgson.

“We’ve got serious problems happening, starting in the polar regions and spreading out to the rest of the planet that we have to address now,” he said………….
more https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/scientists-racing-doomsday-glacier-change-faster-ever-2422082

June 22, 2023 Posted by | ANTARCTICA, climate change | Leave a comment

Ocean heat is off the charts – what it means for humans and ecosystems around the world

Ocean heat is off the charts – what it means for humans and ecosystems around the world

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Chinese astronauts install radiation-exposure experiment outside Tiangong space station

By Andrew Jones, 21 June 23,  https://www.space.com/astronauts-install-radiation-experiment-china-tiangong-space-station

 China plans to conduct radiation experiments on plant seeds, microorganisms and small animals.

China is running a biological radiation exposure experiment outside its space station.

The country’s Shenzhou 16 astronauts — Jing Haipeng, Zhu Yangzhu and Gui Haichao — installed the experiment outside the Tiangong space station‘s Mengtian science module on June 10, China’s National Space Science Center (NSSC) announced in a statement. 

The experiment was deployed using Mentian’s dedicated payload airlock and attached to an external payload adapter using the space station’s small robotic arm.

The experiment payload contains 13 sample box units loaded with biomaterials. These are designed to study the impact of cosmic radiation and microgravity on organisms, the origin and evolution of life and the development of space radiation mutagenic resources.

The equipment can be used for in-orbit experiments on biological samples, including plant seeds, microorganisms and small animals, according to NSSC. The temperature inside each sample container unit can be adjusted to suit the organisms it is hosting. 

On-orbit medical research involving space radiation biological exposure is of great significance to supporting China’s human spaceflight program. That program is ambitious, with plans to launch long-term crewed missions in Earth orbit and send people to the surface of the moon, the Chinese-language outlet Science and Technology Daily reported.

The experiment payload was developed jointly by the NSSC and Dalian Maritime University. It is intended to operate for five years and is planned to be used for several scientific projects.

The Shenzhou 16 crew arrived at Tiangong on May 30 and will remain aboard the space station until November. 

June 22, 2023 Posted by | China, radiation, space travel | Leave a comment

Kiev planning strike on Russia with Western-made missiles – Moscow

 https://www.rt.com/russia/578329-himars-strike-russia-shoigu/ 21 June 23,

Attacks with Storm Shadow and HIMARS missiles outside zone of active hostilities will trigger retaliation, minister has warned

The Ukrainian military leadership has plans to use Western weapons to strike parts of Russia that are not part of the active zone of hostilities, including Crimea, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has warned.

In particular, officials in Kiev want to use HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles, he said. The weapon systems have been delivered to Kiev by the US and the UK respectively and, if such attacks are launched, it would escalate the NATO nations’ involvement in the conflict, according to Shoigu.

Such an operation will “result in immediate strikes against the decision-making centers in the territory of Ukraine,” he stated. The defense minister was speaking on Tuesday during a high-profile meeting in his department.

The minister also offered a brief update on the special military operation in Ukraine, stating that since June 4 Kiev’s forces launched 263 attacks against Russian positions. “All of them were repelled, the enemy failed to reach its goals,” he added.

The Ukrainian government this month launched its long-anticipated counteroffensive. So far, it has failed to achieve significant advances on the ground, according to Russian reports and to accounts in Western media.

The US and its allies have supplied Western-made military hardware worth billions of dollars in preparation for the Ukrainian operation, including main battle tanks that they’d previously hesitated to offer.

The Russian military claimed to have destroyed a significant portion of the arsenal in the past two weeks, as Ukrainian forces failed to breach minefields or to deal with Russian advantage in artillery firepower and air superiority.

The delivery in May of Storm Shadow missiles was another move to give Ukraine additional military capabilities ahead of the counteroffensive. These have a range of up to 300 kilometers (200 miles), which is superior to other weapons that Kiev has access to.

The Russian Ministry of Defense regularly reports intercepting the British-made weapons in its regular updates on the Ukraine campaign.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment