NATO Intervention In Ukraine Could Spark Nuclear War. Here’s How It Could Happen

NATO Intervention In Ukraine Could Spark Nuclear War. Here’s How It Could Happen,The Federsalist, BY: HARRY KAZIANIS, MARCH 04, 2022   

In the simulation we mapped out, not only does NATO get sucked in unintentionally, but Russia releases nuclear weapons in its desperation.

How did we just kill a billion people?”

Over just three days, as I have done countless times over the last several years, a group of past and present senior U.S. government officials from both sides of the aisle gathered to wage a NATO-Russia war in a simulation at the end of 2019. In the course of what we called the NATO-Russia War of 2019, we estimated one billion people died. And if we aren’t careful, what happened in a simulation could happen if a NATO-Russia war erupts over Ukraine.

In fact, in the simulation I mentioned above from 2019, in which Russia invades Ukraine in a similar way as it did over the last week or so, not only does NATO get sucked in unintentionally, but Russia eventually releases nuclear weapons in its desperation. The result is an eventual escalation of bigger and more dangerous nuclear weapons whereby over one billion lives are lost.

But before we start staring into the abyss, allow me to explain the goal of such simulations. NATO clearly would have a massive conventional advantage in any war with Moscow, ensuring that in a straight-up fight Putin would lose. However, Russia has stated time and time again it will use nuclear weapons to defend its territory and its regime if it feels mortally threatened. Our simulation always seems to ask: Can we ever defeat Russian President Vladamir Putin in an armed conflict over Ukraine or the Baltics and not start a nuclear war in the process?

So far, over at least several years, and with at least 100 different participants that all held different ideas about war and political allegiances, the answer is a flat out no.

Setting the Scene for War

The scenario the group decided to test back in late 2019 was similar to today: The scenario the group decided to test back in late 2019 was similar to today: Russia decided to invade Ukraine under the excuse that it is must defend Russian-speaking peoples that are being “oppressed” by Ukraine’s fascist government. In our scenario, we assumed Russia performs far more admirably than it does today but has more limited objectives, in that Moscow wants to connect Crimea to separatist regions in Eastern Ukraine that are under its effective control. We assumed that Russia does that quickly, achieving most of its military objectives in roughly four days.

But Ukraine does not give up so easily, just like in real life today. Ukrainian forces, after taking heavy losses, mount an impressive counterattack, whereby Russia loses over 100 tanks and over 2,500 soldiers. Images on social media show Russian armor ablaze, elite Su-35 fighter jets are shut down from the skies, and arms are now flowing in from the West in massive numbers.

Putin is outraged. He thought Ukraine would simply roll over, but he does not factor into his calculus the nearly decades-long training Kyiv received from the U.S. and NATO nor Ukraine’s military build-up for the last several years that was focused on this scenario.

Russia then decides that its limited military objectives were a mistake, and that all of Ukraine must be “demilitarized.” Moscow then launches a massive ballistic and cruise missile strike followed up by Russia’s air force launching its own shock and awe campaign, destroying a vast majority of Ukraine’s command and control structure, air force, air defense, and armored units in the process. At the same time, Russia starts surging troops to the borders of Ukraine in what looks like an imminent general invasion and occupation of the entire country.

The Spark

Here is where things take a turn for the worst. A Russian ballistic missile’s guidance system fails and crash-lands into NATO member Poland, killing 34 civilians as it tragically lands into a populated village along the Polish-Ukraine border. While the missile was not directed at Poland intentionally, pictures on social media show children crying for their mothers and bodies left unrecognizable, and demands for justice and revenge mount.

To its credit, Poland, which has its own tortured history with the Soviet Union and Russia, does its best to show restraint. While not responding with its own military, it leads an effort to see that Moscow pays a steep price for its aggression in Ukraine and actions, even unintentional, in Poland. Warsaw leads a diplomatic and economic boycott of Moscow resulting in Russia being kicked out of SWIFT as well as direct sanctions on Russian banks, similar to what we are seeing today.

In our scenario, Russia’s reaction is also swift. Moscow decides to launch a massive cyber attack on Poland, having based cyber warriors all throughout NATO territory, using their geography and proxy servers to mask the origin of the attack. Russia, in just two hours, takes off-line Poland’s entire electrical grid, banking sector, energy plants, and more — essentially taking Poland back to the stone age.

And this is where the nightmare begins. Even though attribution is hard to achieve, Poland appeals to NATO and starts to privately share its desire to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Charter, declaring that an attack on one is an attack on the entire alliance. NATO is worried, as there is debate on how far to punish Russia while also feeling as if they do not have a clear military objective amongst the member states as some want to respond to what happened to Poland while others feel they must intervene militarily in Ukraine.

The Response

Here is where NATO surprises everyone. The alliance decides to set up a limited no-fly zone around the Ukrainian city of Lviv to protect innocent civilians and refugees that are trapped and have nowhere to go. Russia is warned: NATO is not intervening in the conflict, but will ensure that its planes and the airspace around Lviv are protected. NATO does make clear its jets will be in the skies above Ukraine, but will not operate from Ukrainian territory.

In Moscow, Putin now gets a sense that NATO is destined to intervene on Ukraine’s side. Russia fears NATO will use this protected corridor as a base of operations to send ever more sophisticated weapons. And with its economy now in a tailspin due to sanctions, Putin feels the walls closing in him. Before NATO can impose its no-fly zone, Putin orders strikes on any remaining airfields and military assets around Lviv.

But here is where Putin miscalculates and sets the stage for a NATO-Russia war. Putin orders another massive cyber attack on the Baltic states’ military infrastructure, thinking that NATO will use the Baltics to stage an invasion of Russia.

This ends up being the last straw for NATO, which then decides direct intervention in Ukraine is necessary to push back against Russian aggression. Before even an announcement is made, Russian intelligence sees missile and troop movements that indicate an impending NATO attack and decide to strike first — with tactical nuclear weapons. NATO decides to respond in kind.

Russia then targets European cities with nuclear weapons, with NATO and America also responding in kind. What is left is nothing short of an apocalypse, with what we estimate is billion people dead.

No War Goes As Planned

In every scenario I have been a part of there is one common theme to all of them: When Vladimir Putin feels boxed in and feels Russia is directly threatened, usually from a mistake he makes on the battlefield, he decides to use whatever escalatory step he desires to try and make up for it.

While we may well soon see Ukraine and Russia find a diplomatic path out of this brutal war, both sides seem dug in. That means the chances for escalation like the above are high. And if Russia and NATO do become involved in direct conflict, Putin knows that in a conventional fight his regime would be defeated. That means Russia will choose nuclear war.

The only question in a NATO-Russia war seems obvious: how many millions or billions of people would die?

Harry J. Kazianis is director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest in Washington DC and executive editor of their publishing arm, The National Interest. The views expressed in this article are his own. He’s on Twitter @grecianformula.  https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/04/nato-involvement-in-ukraine-could-spark-nuclear-genocide-heres-how-it-could-happen/

March 7, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Now Is the Time for a Global Movement Demanding Nuclear De-escalation

Now Is the Time for a Global Movement Demanding Nuclear De-escalation,    https://truthout.org/articles/now-is-the-time-for-a-global-movement-demanding-nuclear-de-escalation/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=552e5725-9297-4a7c-a214-53c8c51615a3 Norman Solomon, Truthout March 3, 2022   

President Joe Biden spoke 6,500 words during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, but not one of them acknowledged the dangers of nuclear war that have spiked upward during the last decade and even more steeply in recent days. The militarism that Martin Luther King Jr. warned us about has been spiraling toward its ultimate destination in the nuclear era — a global holocaust that would likely extinguish almost all human life on Earth.

In the midst of this reality, leaders of the world’s two nuclear superpowers continue to fail — and betray — humanity.

In the stark light of March 2022, Albert Einstein’s outlook 75 years ago about the release of atomic energy has never been more prescient or more urgent: “This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense, there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.”

The phrase “narrow nationalisms” aptly describes the nuclear-weapons policies of the United States and Russia. They have been engaged in a dance of death with foreseeable human consequences on a scale that none of us can truly fathom.

Einstein expressed a belief that “an informed citizenry will act for life and not death.” But the dire nuclear trends have been enabled by citizenry uninformed and inactive.

Twenty years ago, the George W. Bush administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Despite his promising rhetoric, President Barack Obama plunged ahead to begin a $1.7 trillion program for further developing the U.S. nuclear arsenal under the euphemism of “modernization.” President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which had removed an entire category of missiles from Europe since the late 1980s — largely as a result of the international movement against nuclear weapons.

By killing the ABM and INF agreements, the U.S. government pushed the world further away from nuclear arms control, let alone disarmament. And by insisting on expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Russia’s borders — and in recent months continuing to insist that Ukrainian membership in NATO should stay on the table — the United States ignored Russia’s longstanding and reasonable concerns about NATO expansion.

Placement of ABM systems in Poland and Romania, touted as defensive, gave NATO the capacity to retrofit those systems with offensive cruise missiles. Overall, NATO’s claims of being a “defensive” alliance have been undercut by three decades of broken promises, as well as intensive war operations in Serbia, Afghanistan and Libya.

Russia has its own military-industrial complex and nationalistic fervor. The duplicity and provocations by the United States and its NATO allies do not in the slightest justify the invasion of Ukraine that Russia launched a week ago. Russia is now on a murderous killing spree no less abhorrent than what occurred from the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Right now, an overarching truth remains to be faced and acted upon: The nuclear superpowers have dragged humanity to a precipice of omnicide. The invasion of Ukraine is the latest move in that direction.

Last week, the extreme recklessness of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s not-so-veiled threat to use nuclear weapons was an indication of just how dangerous the Ukraine conflict has gotten — for everyone, everywhere. Passivity will get us nowhere. In the U.S., supporting antiwar protests and demanding real diplomacy while organizing for peace are essential.

“However soon the war ends, its effects on the European security order and the world will be and already are profound,” San Francisco State University scholar Andrei Tsygankov wrote days ago. “In addition to human suffering and devastation, the European continent is entering a new era of social and political divisions comparable to those of the Cold War. The possibility of further escalation is now closer than ever. Instead of building an inclusive and just international order, Russia and most European nations will now rely mainly on nuclear weapons and military preparations for their security.”

Any “conventional” war that puts Russia and the United States in even indirect conflict has the very real potential of being a tripwire that could set off an exchange of nuclear missiles. Heightened tensions lead to fatigue, paranoia and greater likelihood of mistaking a false alarm for the real thing. This is especially dangerous because of land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), which are uniquely vulnerable to attack and therefore are on hair-trigger, “launch on warning” alert.

“First and foremost,” former Defense Secretary William Perry wrote in 2016, “the United States can safely phase out its land-based intercontinental ballistic missile force, a key facet of Cold War nuclear policy. Retiring the ICBMs would save considerable costs, but it isn’t only budgets that would benefit. These missiles are some of the most dangerous weapons in the world. They could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.” As Daniel Ellsberg and I wrote in The Nation last fall, “Contrary to uninformed assumptions, discarding all ICBMs could be accomplished unilaterally by the United States with no downside. Even if Russia chose not to follow suit, dismantling the potentially cataclysmic land-based missiles would make the world safer for everyone on the planet.”

But we’re not hearing anything from Congress or the White House about taking steps to reduce the chances of nuclear war. Instead, we’re hearing jacked-up rhetoric about confronting Russia. It’s all too clear that responsible leadership will not come from official Washington; it must come from grassroots activism with determined organizing and political pressure.

“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction,” Dr. King said as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. “I believe that even amid today’s mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow.”

Realistic hope seems to be in very short supply right now. But at this dire moment, all that we love demands our determination to organize.

March 5, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Russia’s nuclear alert means Nato must tread carefully

Russia’s nuclear alert means Nato must tread carefully, There is a scenario in which Moscow could use such weapons to ward off a western intervention ft.com

JEREMY SHAPIRO, 4 Mar 22, The writer is research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former official in the US state department .

President Vladimir Putin announced on Sunday that he was putting Russian nuclear forces on “high alert”. Alert status probably means little in terms of increasing the risk of escalation in Ukraine. But Putin’s ominous declaration reminded the world that Russia has, among the many destructive tools in its arsenal, many thousands of nuclear weapons.  ……………….

 How could Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lead to a nuclear confrontation? The most likely route is through Russian employment of a tactical nuclear weapon. Tactical nuclear weapons are relatively smaller bombs intended to be used in battlefield situations against concentrations of enemy forces. Estimates vary widely but Russia probably has between 1,000 and 2,000 such weapons in its arsenal, with a wide variety of yields and delivery mechanisms. They also vary greatly in explosive effect but could destroy anything from an armoured column to an entire town.  …………

The current situation …..highlights that tactical nuclear weapons are probably not a weapon that would be used against the Ukrainians. It is not necessary to pay the price of crossing the nuclear threshold to achieve Russian goals in Ukraine.  
High-yield conventional weapons or the dreaded thermobaric bombs, which draw in oxygen to create an intense explosion, are more than sufficient for any effect they might want and don’t force them to bear the nuclear stigma.  ………….

tactical nuclear weapons are intended to send the following message to Nato leaders: “You may have a more impressive military than I do, but I care a lot more and will kill us all if necessary.”  

Now, the Russian military is heavily engaged in Ukraine and thus particularly vulnerable to a Nato conventional attack in Belarus and western Russia, as well as in Ukraine. So in the current scenario, Russian leaders are most likely to use a tactical nuclear weapon to prevent or put an end to Nato intervention. In theory, therefore, it should be straightforward to avoid that outcome by not intervening. The west, in the minds of its own leaders, has no intention of intervening so they may not feel there is much chance of nuclear escalation.  

The problem is that, given the paranoia of Russian leaders, they probably expect Nato intervention, and may even believe it is already happening given European and American arms deliveries and Nato troop movements to eastern Europe. They may view Nato troop concentrations in states on Ukraine’s eastern flank as potential intervention forces and they may lack sufficient precision-guided weapons in their already very depleted inventory to attack them conventionally. They might also view weapons depots in neighbouring states that are supplying Ukrainian government forces as legitimate targets.  

Russian attacks of these sorts are not likely, but they are possible. Beyond the horrible death and radioactive fallout they would cause, such attacks would cross the nuclear threshold for the first time since 1945 and thus open the path to further nuclear escalation to the strategic level (ie the end of the world). Given that we very much want to avoid that, western leaders might think about taking steps to make it even less likely.  

 Such steps would involve thinking carefully about how the Russians understand “intervention”. Russian leaders, for example, might see volunteers from Nato countries filtering into Ukraine as covert advance guards for a full-scale intervention. They might regard arms convoys coming to Ukraine from Nato states as the functional equivalent of intervention. And, depending on their orientation, they might see troop dispositions in eastern flank states or troop movements to, say, help manage refugee flows at the border as a precursor to intervention.   

If it is truly not the intention of western leaders to intervene, they should make sure that their forces act in ways that will convince Russian leaders of that. The world may depend on it. https://www.ft.com/content/b6bfd338-f2e0-43c2-96f2-0cd918303ea2

March 5, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment