Russia’s Ukraine invasion may have been preventable, The US made a huge mistake?
Russia’s Ukraine invasion may have been preventable, The US refused to consider Ukraine’s NATO status as Putin threatened war. Experts say that was a huge mistake, MSNBC, March 5, 2022, By Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC Opinion Columnist
The prevailing wisdom in the West is that Russian President Vladimir Putin was never interested in President Joe Biden’s diplomatic efforts to avert an invasion of Ukraine. Bent on restoring the might of the Soviet empire, this narrative goes, the Russian autocrat audaciously invaded Ukraine to fulfill a revanchist desire for some combination of land, power and glory.
In a typical account operating under this framing, Politico described Putin as “the steely-eyed strongman” who proved immune to “traditional tools of diplomacy and deterrence” and had been “playing Biden all along.” This telling suggests that the United States exhausted its diplomatic arsenal and that Russia’s horrifying and illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has involved targeting civilian areas and shelling nuclear plants, could never have been prevented.
But according to a line of widely overlooked scholarship, forgotten warnings from Western statesmen and interviews with several experts — including high-level former government officials who oversaw Russia strategy for decades — this narrative is wrong.
Many of these analysts argue that the U.S. erred in its efforts to prevent the breakout of war by refusing to offer to retract support for Ukraine to one day join NATO or substantially reconsider its terms of entry. And they argue that Russia’s willingness to go to war over Ukraine’s NATO status, which it perceived as an existential national security threat and listed as a fundamental part of its rationale for the invasion, was so clear for so long that dropping support for its eventual entry could have averted the invasion.
…………….. the abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but negligent.
The fact that the NATO status question was not put on the table as Putin signaled that he was serious about an invasion — so plainly that the U.S. government was spelling it out with day-by-day updates — was an error, and potentially a catastrophic one. It may sound cruel to suggest that Ukraine could be barred, either temporarily or permanently, from entering a military alliance it wants to be in. But what’s more cruel is that Ukrainians might be paying with their lives for the United States’ reckless flirtation with Ukraine as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.
…………. by dangling the possibility of Ukraine’s NATO membership for years but never fulfilling it, NATO created a scenario that emboldened Ukraine to act tough and buck Russia — without any intention of directly defending Ukraine with its firepower if Moscow decided Ukraine had gone too far.
But for the West to offer to compromise on Ukraine’s future entry into NATO would have required admitting the limitations of Western power.
“It was the desire of Western governments not to lose face by compromising with Russia,” Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry,” told me. “But it was also the moral cowardice of so many Western commentators and officials and ex-officials who would not come out in public and admit that this was no longer a viable project.”
The West didn’t want to set limits on NATO’s enlargement and influence or lose face. So what it did was gamble.
“The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I’m using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.”
What’s happened has happened, and there’s no going back. But it still matters.
The U.S. must do everything it can do to end this war — which is already brutalizing Ukraine, rattling the global economy, and could quite easily spiral into a nuclear-armed confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, if things get out of hand — as swiftly as possible, including negotiating on Ukraine’s NATO status and possible neutrality with an open mind. And over the longer term, Americans must realize that in an increasingly multipolar world, reckoning with the limits of their power is critical for achieving a more peaceful and just world………………………………………………..
Russia has grown concerned again about Ukraine for a number of reasons. Analysts like Lieven and Beebe point out that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has taken a number of sharp measures to eradicate Russian influence in Ukraine recently by doing things like banning the use of Russian language in schools and state institutions, shutting down Kremlin-linked television stations and arresting some of the most prominent Russo-sympathetic leaders in the country — all while cooperating on the ground with NATO. Russia read this as a sign that Kyiv was throwing its lot in with the U.S. and the prospect of an agreement ensuring autonomy for the separatist-held Donbas region, crucial to Russia’s plan to thwart Ukraine’s NATO entry, might be dead……………………
Emma Ashford, resident senior fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, wrote in an email that it was a “pity” that “NATO’s open-door principle was not up for debate.” Though she was skeptical about the political ability of the West to “promise to close NATO’s open door, particularly in a way that would have been credible to Moscow,” she said there were potential ways to deal with Moscow’s concerns, such as “a moratorium on NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, conventional arms control agreements limiting the scope of NATO military integration and cooperation with Ukraine, or some form of negotiated Ukrainian neutrality.”
The idea behind a moratorium — of, say, 20 years — is to provide a way for the West to propose to Russia that the issue can be taken up by a future generation of leaders, at a time when Russia’s political class has changed and geopolitics may have shifted………….
All we do know is that the NATO element mattered a great deal to Russia’s political establishment, and there’s reason to think it could’ve changed the course of negotiations. When things looked dicey, it was worth trying……..
dangling is incredibly dangerous, and it’s possible that it just caused Ukraine to experience the worst of all worlds: not receiving NATO protection while also enduring one of the most aggressive forms of Russian domination possible.
Many of the experts I spoke to said Ukraine’s neutrality or some kind of altered NATO status should be part of the discussion in diplomatic backchannels. Critics will say this constitutes “appeasement” of Putin. But as Biden has already made clear, the U.S. is not willing to wage war with Russia, and it certainly isn’t going to allow Ukraine into NATO when Russia is attacking it, since that would require all of NATO to go to war with Russia. The issue now is to think clearly about how to end a conflict that could spiral into World War III.
It is imperative that America develops a clearer understanding of its adversaries and behaves more judiciously in an increasingly multipolar world. It is not difficult to imagine the U.S. making a miscalculation over what China would be willing to do to secure its domination of the South China Sea. The U.S. may want to be the only great power in the world, free to expand its hegemony with impunity, but it is not. Refusing to see this is dangerous for us all. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/russia-s-ukraine-invasion-may-have-been-preventable-n1290831?featureFlag=true#anchor-ExpandingNATOwasalwayshugelycontroversial
How Much Less Newsworthy Are Civilians in Other Conflicts?
A lot less, particularly when they’re victims of the US, FAIR, JULIE HOLLAR, 18 Mar 22, As US news media covered the first shocking weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some media observers—like FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 2/28/22)—have noted their impressions of how coverage differed from wars past, particularly in terms of a new focus on the impact on civilians.
To quantify and deepen these observations, FAIR studied the first week of coverage of the Ukraine war (2/24–3/2/22) on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. We used the Nexis news database to count both sources (whose voices get to be heard?) and segments (what angles are covered?) about Ukraine during the study period. Comparing this coverage to that of other conflicts reveals both a familiar reliance on US officials to frame events, as well as a newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.
Ukrainian sources—no experts
One of the most striking things about early coverage has been the sheer number of Ukrainian sources. FAIR always challenges news media to seek out the perspective of those most impacted by events, and US outlets are doing so to a much greater extent in this war than in any war in recent history. Of 234 total sources—230 of whom had identifiable nationalities—119 were Ukrainian (including five living in the United States.)
However, these were overwhelmingly person-on-the-street interviews that rarely consisted of more than one or two lines. Even the three Ukrainian individuals identified as having a relevant professional expertise—two doctors and a journalist—spoke only of their personal experience of the war. Twenty-one (17% of Ukrainian sources) were current or former government or military officials.
Airing so many Ukrainian voices, but asking so few to provide actual analysis, has the effect of generating sympathy, but for a people painted primarily as pawns or victims, rather than as having valuable knowledge, history and potential contributions to determine their own futures.
Meanwhile, Russian government sources only appeared four times. Sixteen other Russian sources were quoted: 13 persons on the street, an opposition politician and two members of wealthy families.
Eighty sources were from the United States, including 57 current or former US officials. Despite the diplomatic involvement of the European Union, only two Western European sources were featured: the Norwegian NATO Secretary General and a German civilian helping refugees in Poland. There were also eight foreign civilians featured living in Ukraine: three from the US, three African and two Middle Eastern.
And while political leaders certainly bring important knowledge and perspective to war coverage, so too do scholars, think tanks and civic organizations with regional expertise. But these voices were almost completely marginalized, with only five such civil society experts appearing during the study period. All were in the United States, although one was Ukrainian-American Michael Sawkiw (CBS, 2/24/22), who represented the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (an organization associated with Stepan Bandera’s faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which participated in the Holocaust during World War II).
In effect, then, US news media have largely allowed US officials to frame the terms of the conflict for viewers. While officials lambasted the Russian government and emphasized “what we’re going to do to help the Ukrainian people in the struggle” (NBC, 3/1/22), no sources questioned the US’s own role in contributing to the conflict (FAIR.org, 3/4/22), or the impact of Western sanctions on Russian civilians.
The bias in favor of US officials, and the marginalization of experts from the country being invaded—as well as civil society experts from any country—recalls US TV news coverage of another large-scale invasion in recent history: the US invasion of Iraq. A FAIR study (Extra!, 5–6/03) at the time found that in the three weeks after the US launched that war, current and former US officials made up more than half (52%) of all sources on the primetime news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and PBS. Iraqis were only 12% of sources, and 4% of all sources were academic, think tank or NGO representatives.
n other words, though the bias is even greater when the US is leading the war, US media seem content to let US officials fashion the narrative around any war, and to mute their critics.
Visible and invisible civilians
But there are striking differences as well in coverage of the two wars. Most notably, when the US invaded Iraq, civilians in the country made up a far smaller percentage of sources: 8% to Ukraine’s 45%.
n other words, though the bias is even greater when the US is leading the war, US media seem content to let US officials fashion the narrative around any war, and to mute their critics.
Visible and invisible civilians
But there are striking differences as well in coverage of the two wars. Most notably, when the US invaded Iraq, civilians in the country made up a far smaller percentage of sources: 8% to Ukraine’s 45%.
But on US TV news, antiwar sentiment appeared starkly different in the two conflicts. Of the 20 Russian sources in the study, ten (50%) expressed opposition to the war, significantly higher than the proportion polls were showing. Meanwhile, antiwar voices represented only 3% of all US sources in early Iraq coverage (FAIR.org, 5/03), a dramatic downplaying of public opposition.
Civilian-centered war coverage
The brunt of modern wars is almost always borne by innocent civilians. But US media coverage of that civilian toll is rarely in sharp focus, such that recent reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers an exceptional view of what civilian-centered war coverage can look like—under certain circumstances.
In our study, we looked not just at sources, but also the content of segments about Ukraine. In the first week of the war, the US primetime news broadcasts on ABC, CBS and NBC offered regular reports on the civilian toll of the invasion, sending reporters to major targeted cities, as well as to border areas receiving refugees.
Seventy-one segments across the three networks covered the impact on Ukrainian civilians, both those remaining behind and those fleeing the violence. Twenty-eight of these mentioned or centered on civilian casualties.
Many reports described or aired soundbites of civilians describing their fear and the challenges they faced; several highlighted children. A representative ABC segment (2/28/22), for instance, featured correspondent Matt Gutman reporting: “This little girl on the train sobbing into her stuffed animal, just one of the more than 500,000 people leaving everything behind, fleeing in cramped trains.”
Making the impact on civilians the focus of the story, and featuring their experiences, encourages sympathy for those civilians and condemnation of war. But this demonstration of news media’s ability to center the civilian impact, including civilian casualties, in Ukraine is all the more damning of their coverage of wars in which the US and its allies have been the aggressors—or in which the victims have not been white.
They seem so like us’
Many pundits and journalists have been caught saying the quiet part loud. “They seem so like us,” wrote Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph (2/26/22). “That is what makes it so shocking.”
CBS News‘ Charlie D’Agata (2/25/22) told viewers that Ukraine
isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European—I have to choose those words carefully, too—city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.
“What’s compelling is, just looking at them, the way they are dressed, these are prosperous—I’m loath to use the expression—middle-class people,” marveled BBC reporter Peter Dobbie on Al Jazeera (2/27/22):
These are not obviously refugees looking to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war. These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa. They look like any European family that you would live next door to.
While US news media have at times shown interest in Black and brown refugees and victims of war (e.g., Extra!, 10/15), it’s hard to imagine them ever getting the kind of massive coverage granted the Ukrainians who “look like us”—as defined by white journalists.
‘Give war a chance’
And one can certainly think of instances in which non-white refugees are given short shrift by US news. Despite their claims of deep concern for the people of Afghanistan as the US withdrew troops last year, for example, these same TV networks have barely covered the predictable and preventable humanitarian catastrophe facing the country (FAIR.org, 12/21/21). More than 5 million Afghan civilians are either refugees or internally displaced……………………………………
‘The booms of distant wars’
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine commenced, NBC anchor Lester Holt (2/25/22) mused:
Tonight, there are at least 27 armed conflicts raging on this planet. Yet so often the booms of distant wars fade before they reach our consciousness. Other times, raw calculations of shared national interests close that distance. But as we are reminded again in images from Ukraine, the pain of war is borderless.
Holt spoke as though journalists like himself play no role in determining which wars reach our consciousness and which fade. The pain of war might be borderless, but international responses to that pain depend very much on the sympathy generated by journalists through their coverage of it. And Western journalists have made very clear which victims’ pain is most newsworthy to them. https://fair.org/home/how-much-less-newsworthy-are-civilians-in-other-conflicts/
Chris Hedges: Waltzing to Armageddon
Consortium News, 18 Mar 22, The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter.
The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism.
That is why they have resurrected it.
The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
This provocation, a violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance.
This betrayal was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of U.S. troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington with Moscow. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps a cynical goal of the Western alliance, has now solidified an expanding and resurgent NATO and a rampant, uncontrollable militarism. The masters of war may be ecstatic, but the potential consequences, including a global conflagration, are terrifying.
Peace has been sacrificed for U.S. global hegemony. It has been sacrificed for the billions in profits made by the arms industry. Peace could have seen state resources invested in people rather than systems of control. It could have allowed us to address the climate emergency. But we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace. Nations frantically rearm, threatening nuclear war. They prepare for the worst, ensuring that the worst will happen.
So, what if the Amazon is reaching its final tipping point where trees will soon begin to die off en masse? So what if land ice and ice shelves are melting from below at a much faster rate than predicted? So what if temperatures soar, monster hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires devastate the earth? In the face of the gravest existential crisis to beset the human species, and most other species, the ruling elites stoke a conflict that is driving up the price of oil and turbocharging the fossil fuel extraction industry. It is collective madness.
The march towards protracted conflict with Russia and China will backfire. The desperate effort to counter the steady loss of economic dominance by the U.S. will not be offset by military dominance. If Russia and China can create an alternative global financial system, one that does not use the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, it will signal the collapse of the American empire. The dollar will plummet in value. Treasury bonds, used to fund America’s massive debt, will become largely worthless. The financial sanctions used to cripple Russia will be, I expect, the mechanism that slays Americans, if not immolation in thermonuclear war.
Washington plans to turn Ukraine into Chechnya or the old Afghanistan, when the Carter administration, under the influence of the Svengali-like National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, equipped and armed the radical jihadists that would morph into the Taliban and al Qaeda in the fight against the Soviets. It will not be good for Russia. It will not be good for the United States. It will not be good for Ukraine, as making Russia bleed will require rivers of Ukrainian blood.
Pandora’s Box of Evils
The decision to destroy the Russian economy, to turn the Ukrainian war into a quagmire for Russia and topple the regime of Vladimir Putin will open a Pandora’s box of evils. Massive social engineering — look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Vietnam — has its own centrifugal force. It destroys those who play God.
The Ukrainian war has silenced the last vestiges of the Left. Nearly everyone has giddily signed on for the great crusade against the latest embodiment of evil, Vladimir Putin, who, like all our enemies, has become the new Hitler.
The United States will give $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, with the Biden administration authorizing an additional $200 million in military assistance. The 5,000-strong EU rapid deployment force, the recruitment of all Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, into NATO, the reconfiguration of former Soviet bloc militaries to NATO weapons and technology have all been fast tracked.
Germany, for the first time since World War II, is massively rearming. It has lifted its ban on exporting weapons. Its new military budget is twice the amount of the old budget, with promises to raise the budget to more than 2 percent of GDP, which would move its military from the seventh largest in the world to the third, behind China and the United States.
Once military forces are deployed, even if they are supposedly in a defensive posture, the bear trap is set. It takes very little to trigger the spring. The vast military bureaucracy, bound to alliances and international commitments, along with detailed plans and timetables, when it starts to roll forward, becomes unstoppable. It is propelled not by logic but by action and reaction, as Europe learned in two world wars.
Staggering Hypocrisy
The moral hypocrisy of the United States is staggering. The crimes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine are more than matched by the crimes committed by Washington in the Middle East over the last two decades, including the act of preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act of aggression. Only rarely is this hypocrisy exposed as when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the body:
“We’ve seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.”
Hours later, the official transcript of her remark was amended to tack on the words “if they are directed against civilians.” This is because the U.S., which like Russia never ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty, regularly uses cluster munitions. It used them in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Iraq. It has provided them to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Russia has yet to come close to the tally of civilian deaths from cluster munitions delivered by the U.S. military.
The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter. No diplomacy. No attempt to address the legitimate grievances of our adversaries. No check on rampant militarism. No capacity to see the world from another perspective. No ability to comprehend reality outside the confines of the binary rubric of good and evil. No understanding of the debacles they orchestrated for decades. No capacity for pity or remorse.
Elliott Abrams worked in the Reagan administration when I was reporting from Central America. He covered up atrocities and massacres committed by the military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and by the U.S.-backed Contra forces fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He viciously attacked reporters and human rights groups as communists or fifth columnists, calling us “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” He was convicted for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair. During the administration of George W. Bush, he lobbied for the invasion of Iraq and tried to orchestrate a U.S. coup in Venezuela to overthrow Hugo Chávez.
There will be no substitute for military strength, and we do not have enough,” writes Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow:……………………….
Putin played into the hands of the war industry. He gave the warmongers what they wanted. He fulfilled their wildest fantasies. There will be no impediments now on the march to Armageddon. Military budgets will soar. The oil will gush from the ground. The climate crisis will accelerate.
China and Russia will form the new axis of evil. The poor will be abandoned. The roads across the earth will be clogged with desperate refugees. All dissent will be treason. The young will be sacrificed for the tired tropes of glory, honor and country. The vulnerable will suffer and die.
The only true patriots will be generals, war profiteers, opportunists, courtiers in the media and demagogues braying for more and more blood. The merchants of death rule like Olympian gods. And we, cowed by fear, intoxicated by war, swept up in the collective hysteria, clamor for our own annihilation.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. ……….https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/15/chris-hedges-waltzing-to-armageddon/
Why a No-Fly Zone over Ukraine is a bad idea – (lead to World War 3)
No-Fly Zone in Ukraine Would Be “Direct Involvement in the War,” Experts Warn, Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, March 16, 2022 , Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to demand the U.S. and NATO allies impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, an idea that President Biden has rejected even as a growing number of Republicans embrace the idea despite the risk it could draw the U.S. directly into the war against Russia and possibly spark a nuclear confrontation.
Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, co-authored an open letter signed by foreign policy experts who oppose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. It urges leaders to continue diplomatic and economic measures to end the conflict. “As you start thinking about how a no-fly zone would actually unfold, it becomes very obvious this would be direct involvement in the war against Russia, and rather than end the war, a no-fly zone would enlarge the war and escalate the war,” says Wertheim.
TRANSCRIPT……………………
STEPHEN WERTHEIM:………. what it means is that the United States and NATO forces would commit to shoot down enemy planes, any enemy plane that enters the zone. It’s quite clear Russia would not voluntarily comply with our verbal declaration of a no-fly zone, so we’d have to shoot those planes down. ………..
as you start thinking about how a no-fly zone would actually unfold, it becomes very obvious this would be direct involvement in the war against Russia. And rather than end the war, a no-fly zone would enlarge the war and escalate the war. And that’s why the Biden administration has, rightly, been very clear throughout this conflict that a no-fly zone would be escalatory and is not something that it wants to do………..
there is no really limited no-fly zone. A no-fly zone means a commitment not just to declare something, but to enforce it, by making sure that Russian planes cannot fly within that zone. And so, it would clearly be viewed as an act of war and an escalation by Russia………… What it really would be is an intermediate step toward a much wider war.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to ask you about the state of negotiations to end this war. The Ukrainian President Zelensky suggested earlier today that Russian demands are becoming more realistic. ………….. Zelensky’s remarks came a day after he acknowledged he doesn’t expect Ukraine to join NATO anytime soon, which is very significant.
………… STEPHEN WERTHEIM:……….. there are also some encouraging words coming out of the Biden administration, as well. Secretary of State Tony Blinken just recently suggested that the sanctions that have been imposed on Russia were not intended to be permanent. And what that signals is perhaps a willingness on the part of the United States to drop some of the most draconian sanctions on Russia if that becomes necessary in order to secure a peace settlement that the legitimate government of Ukraine, led by Zelensky, would desire. ………………………………………….. https://truthout.org/video/no-fly-zone-in-ukraine-would-be-direct-involvement-in-the-war-experts-warn/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=6141299d-bdd4-4062
Ukraine war a bonanza for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and more
Less than three full months into 2022, Lockheed Martin’s stock has surged by more than 25%, while the share prices of Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman have also risen by roughly 12%, 14%, and 16%, respectively.
War in Ukraine a Windfall for Weapons Industry
Military contractors “will benefit, and in the short term we could be talking about tens of billions of dollars, which is no small thing, even for these big companies,” said one analyst. Common Dreams KENNY STANCIL, March 15, 2022,
Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine is a bonanza for arms manufacturers, which are lined up to profit as the United States and its allies increase military spending in an effort to bolster Kyiv’s forces.
William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Hill on Tuesday that “there’s a lot of possibilities for ways that the contractors will benefit, and in the short term we could be talking about tens of billions of dollars, which is no small thing, even for these big companies.”
In the weeks since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade, lawmakers in the U.S. Congress approved a record-setting Pentagon budget, and their counterparts in several European countries also vowed to significantly boost military spending to counteract Moscow.
The $1.5 trillion government funding bill that U.S. President Joe Biden signed Friday greenlights an astronomical $782 billion in military spending—an increase of 6% over last year and nearly $30 billion above the White House’s initial request. The package also provides $6.5 billion in military aid to Eastern European nations, including $3.5 billion worth of additional weapons for Ukraine.
As The Hill reported, the extra support for Ukraine “comes on top of more than $1 billion the U.S. has already spent in the past year to arm Ukrainian soldiers with modern weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, manufactured by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies, and Raytheon’s anti-aircraft Stinger missiles.”
One arms industry lobbyist told the news outlet that an immediate effect of the U.S. ramping up weapons shipments to Ukraine is that “we’re going to have to backfill some of that ourselves, so that will force the Pentagon to buy more from some of the defense companies.”
As for longer-term implications, the lobbyist said that Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike expect to pass an even larger military budget next year, which “will pump more money into procurement and into [research and development].”
The U.S. is not the only country where military contractors are anticipating a bump in sales. Over the past few weeks, European countries including Germany, Italy, Poland, and Sweden have announced that they will boost military spending………….
“We are proud of the confidence the German Federal Ministry of Defense and Luftwaffe officials have shown in choosing the F-35,” Lockheed Martin said in a statement.
Less than three full months into 2022, Lockheed Martin’s stock has surged by more than 25%, while the share prices of Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman have also risen by roughly 12%, 14%, and 16%, respectively.
Even before the Kremlin attacked Ukraine last month, arms manufacturers could hardly contain their excitement over the prospect of war, which they explained would be good for their bottom lines.
AsThe Hill reported:…………………………………
The weapons industry lobbyist told the news outlet that higher military spending in Europe would be a boon for U.S.-based military contractors:…………..
One day after Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Quincy Institute’s Hartung warned against letting corporations and their allies in government use the war in Ukraine as a pretext for showering the military-industrial complex with even more money.
A week later, he argued that such a move would be “counterproductive” and potentially detrimental to U.S. security, echoing calls from anti-war groups that have long pushed for reallocating a portion of the Pentagon’s bloated budget to meet pressing human needs…………………
Last year, researchers at Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated that as much as half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon alone since its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan has gone to private military contractors.
Lindsay Koshgarian and her colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project and Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute, meanwhile, have estimated that corporations gobbled up more than half. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/03/15/war-ukraine-windfall-weapons-industry
Understanding the war in Ukraine
Understanding the war in Ukraine, https://independentaustralia.net/article-display/understanding-the-war-in-ukraine,16151 By Vijay Prashad | 14 March 2022 The war between Russia and Ukraine began long before 24 February 2022, the date provided by the Ukrainian Government, NATO and the United States for the beginning of the Russian invasion.
According to Dmitry Kovalevich, a journalist and a member of a now-banned communist organisation in Ukraine, the war actually started in the spring of 2014 and has never stopped since.
He writes to me from the south of Kyiv and recounts an anecdote: “What’s there at the front line?” asks one person. “Our troops are winning as usual!” comes the response. “Who are our troops?” the first person inquires and is told, “We’ll soon see.” In a war, everything is in dispute, even the name of Ukraine’s capital (Kyiv in Ukrainian, and Kiev in Russian, goes the debate online).
Wars are among the most difficult of reporting assignments for a journalist. These days, especially, with the torrent of social media and the belligerence of network news television channels, matters on the ground are hard to sort out. Basic facts about the events taking place during a war are hard to establish, let alone ensuring the correct interpretation of these facts.
Videos of apparent war atrocities that can be found on social media platforms like YouTube are impossible to verify. Often, it becomes clear that much of the content relating to war that can be found on these platforms has either been misidentified or is from other conflicts. Even the BBC, which has taken a very strong pro-Ukrainian and NATO position on this conflict, had to run a story about how so many of the viral claims about Russian atrocities are false.
Among these false claims, which have garnered widespread circulation, is a video circulating on TikTok that wrongly alleges to be that of a Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier, but is instead a video of the then-11-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli soldier in 2012. The video continues to circulate on TikTok with the caption, ‘Little girls stand up to Russian soldiers’.
Meanwhile, disputing the date for the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war as 24 February, Kovalevich tells me:
“The war in Ukraine didn’t start in February 2022. It began in the spring of 2014 in the Donbas and has not stopped for these eight years.”
Kovalevich is a member of Borotba (Struggle), a communist organisation in Ukraine. Borotba, like other communist and Marxist organisations, was banned by the previous U.S.-backed Ukrainian Government of Petro Poroshenko in 2015 (as part of this ongoing crackdown, two communist youth leaders – Aleksandr Kononovich and Mikhail Kononovich – were arrested by Ukrainian security services on 6 March).
“Most of our comrades had to migrate to Donetsk and Luhansk,” Kovalevich tells me. These are the two eastern provinces of mainly Russian speakers that broke away from “Ukrainian Government control in 2014” and had been under the control of Russian-backed groups.
In February, however, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognised these ‘two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent,’ making this contentious move the stepping stone for the final military invasion by Russia. Now, Kovalevich says, his comrades “expect to come back from exile and work legally”.
This expectation is based on the assumption that the Ukrainian Government will be forced to get rid of the existing system, which includes Western-trained-and-funded anti-Russian right-wing vigilante and paramilitary agents in the country and will have to reverse many of the Poroshenko-era illiberal and anti-minority (including anti-Russian) laws.
‘I feel nervous’
“I feel quite nervous,” Kovalevich tells me. “[This war] looks very grim and not so much because of the Russians but because of our [Ukrainian] armed gangs that are looting and robbing [the country].” When the Russians intervened, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy handed out weapons to any citizen who wanted to defend the country.
Kovalevich says:
My area was not affected by military actions — only by the terror of [right-wing] nationalist gangs.”
During the first days of the Russian military intervention, Kovalevich took in a Roma family who had fled from the war zone. “My family had a spare room,” Kovalevich tells me. Roma organisations say that there are about 400,000 Roma in Ukraine, most of them living in the western part of Ukraine, in Zakarpatska Oblast (bordering Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia).
Kovalevich says:
“The Roma people in our country are regularly assaulted by [right-wing] nationalists. The nationalists used to attack them [Roma] publicly, burning their encampments, calling it ‘cleansing garbage’. The police didn’t react as our far-right gangs always work in cooperation with either the police or with the security service.”
This Roma family, who was being sheltered by Kovalevich and his family, is on the move toward western Ukraine, where most of the Ukrainian-Roma population lives. “But it is very unsafe to move,” Kovalevich tells me. “There are nationalists [manning these] checkpoints [along] all roads [in Ukraine, and they] may shoot [anyone] who may seem suspicious to them or just rob refugees.”
Minsk agreements
The war in the Donbas region that began in 2014 resulted in two agreements being signed in Belarus in 2014 and 2015, which were named after the capital of Belarus and were called the Minsk agreements. These agreements were aimed at “[ending] the separatist war by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine”.
The second of these agreements was signed by two leading political figures from Ukraine (Leonid Kuchma, the President of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005) and from Russia (Mikhail Zurabov, the ambassador of the Russian Federation to Ukraine, 2009-2016), respectively. It was overseen by a Swiss diplomat (Leonid Kuchma, who chaired the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, 2008-2009).
This Minsk II agreement was endorsed by the UN Security Council resolution 2022 on 17 February 2015. If the Minsk agreements had been adhered to, Russia and Ukraine would have secured an arrangement that would have been acceptable in the Donbas.
Kovalevich tells me:
“Two Ukrainian governments signed the Minsk agreements but didn’t fulfil [them]. Recently Zelenskyy’s officials openly mocked the agreement, saying they wouldn’t fulfil it (encouraged by the U.S. and the UK, of course). That was a sheer violation of all rules — you can’t sign [the agreements] and then refuse to fulfil [them].”
The language of the Minsk agreements was, as Kovalevich says, “liberal enough for the Government”. The two republics of Donetsk and Luhansk would have remained a part of Ukraine and they would have been afforded some cultural autonomy (this was in the footnote to Article 11 of the 12 February 2015, Minsk II Agreement).
Kovalevich says to me:
“This was unacceptable to our nationalists and [right-wing nationalists]. [They] would like to organise purges and vengeance there [in Donetsk and Luhansk].”
Before the Russian military intervention, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that more than 14,000 people had been killed in the ongoing conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk despite the Minsk agreements. It is this violence that provokes Kovalevich to make his comments about the violence of the ultra-nationalists and the right-wing paramilitary.
“The elected authorities are a cover, masking the real rulers of Ukraine,” Kovalevich says. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy and his allies in the parliament do not drive the governing process in their country but have “an agenda imposed on them by the far-right armed groups
Peace?
Negotiations are ongoing on the Ukraine-Belarus border between the Russians and the Ukrainians. Kovalevich is, however, not optimistic about a positive outcome from these negotiations. Decisions, he says, are not made by the Ukrainian President alone, but by the right-wing ultra-nationalist paramilitary armed groups and the NATO countries.
As Kovalevich and I were speaking, the Washington Post published a report about plans for a U.S.-backed insurgency in Ukraine; former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implied an Afghanistan-style guerrilla war in Ukraine, saying: “We have to keep tightening the screws.”
Kovalevich says:
“This reveals that they [the U.S.] don’t really care about Ukrainians. They want to use this as an opportunity to cause some pain to the Russians.”
These comments by Clinton and others suggest to Kovalevich that the United States wants “to organise chaos between Russia and the Europeans”. Peace in Ukraine, he says, “is a matter of reconciliation between NATO and the new global powers, Russia and China”. Till such a reconciliation is possible and till Europe develops a rational foreign policy, “we will be affected by wars,” says Kovalevich.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
International Committee of the Red Cross calls for States to join UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
ICRC urgently appeals to States to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used, International Committee of the Red Cross, A statement by Helen Durham, Director of Law and Policy, ICRC, STATEMENT, 14 MARCH 2022,
Geneva (ICRC) – The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is alarmed by recent statements made with respect to nuclear weapons.
Five years ago this month, as States were beginning the negotiations of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the ICRC recalled that “[n]uclear weapons are the most terrifying weapon ever invented. They are unique in their destructive power, in the unspeakable human suffering they cause, and in the impossibility of controlling their effects in space and time. They threaten irreversible harm to the environment and to future generations. Indeed, they threaten the very survival of humanity.”
The only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons are never used again is by prohibiting and eliminating them. The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, of which the ICRC is a part, has repeatedly expressed its deep alarm at the increasing risk that nuclear weapons will again be used by intent, miscalculation or accident and stressed that any risk of use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable, given their catastrophic humanitarian consequences……
States must now heed the Movement’s call on all States to promptly sign, ratify or accede to, and faithfully implement the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Pending their elimination, all States and, in particular, the nuclear possessors and nuclear-allied States must take immediate steps to reduce the risk of intentional or accidental use of nuclear weapons, based on their existing international commitments.
In 2022, the first meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the 10th Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will provide key opportunities, but also tests, for States to make tangible progress towards achieving nuclear disarmament, a legal obligation of the international community as a whole.
Seldom have collective action and concrete, meaningful steps to free the world of the dark shadow of nuclear weapons been more urgent. https://www.icrc.org/en/document/icrc-appeals-nuclear-weapons-never-used
Peace Talks in Ukraine “Will Get Nowhere” If US Keeps Refusing to Join
Chomsky: Peace Talks in Ukraine “Will Get Nowhere” If US Keeps Refusing to Join, https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-peace-talks-in-ukraine-will-get-nowhere-if-us-keeps-refusing-to-join/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=0f3fe992-e64c-42c7-85ff-483718a7c020, C.J. Polychroniou, 14 Mar 22
As Russia steps up its assault on Ukraine and its forces advance on Kyiv, peace talks between the two sides were scheduled to resume today for the fourth time, but have now been postponed until tomorrow. Unfortunately, some opportunities for a peace agreement have already been squandered, so it’s hard to be optimistic about when the war will end. Regardless of when or how the war ends, though, its impact is already being felt across the international security system, as the rearmament of Europe shows. The Russian invasion of Ukraine also complicates the urgent fight against the climate crisis. The war takes a heavy toll on Ukraine and on the environment, but it also gives the fossil fuel industry extra leverage among governments.
In the interview that follows, world-renowned scholar and dissident Noam Chomsky shares his insights about the prospects for peace in Ukraine and how this war may impact our efforts to combat global warming.
Noam Chomsky, who is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive, is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, while a fourth round of negotiations was scheduled to take place today between Russian and Ukrainian representatives, it is now postponed until tomorrow, and it still seems unlikely that peace will be reached in Ukraine any time soon. Ukrainians don’t appear likely to surrender, and Putin seems determined to continue his invasion. In that context, what do you think of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s response to Vladimir Putin’s four core demands, which were (a) cease military action, (b) acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, (c) amend the Ukrainian constitution to enshrine neutrality, and (d) recognize the separatist republics in eastern Ukraine?
Noam Chomsky: Before responding, I would like to stress the crucial issue that must be in the forefront of all discussions of this terrible tragedy: We must find a way to bring this war to an end before it escalates, possibly to utter devastation of Ukraine and unimaginable catastrophe beyond. The only way is a negotiated settlement. Like it or not, this must provide some kind of escape hatch for Putin, or the worst will happen. Not victory, but an escape hatch. These concerns must be uppermost in our minds.
I don’t think that Zelensky should have simply accepted Putin’s demands. I think his public response on March 7 was judicious and appropriate.
In these remarks, Zelensky recognized that joining NATO is not an option for Ukraine. He also insisted, rightly, that the opinions of people in the Donbas region, now occupied by Russia, should be a critical factor in determining some form of settlement. He is, in short, reiterating what would very likely have been a path for preventing this tragedy — though we cannot know, because the U.S. refused to try.
As has been understood for a long time, decades in fact, for Ukraine to join NATO would be rather like Mexico joining a China-run military alliance, hosting joint maneuvers with the Chinese army and maintaining weapons aimed at Washington. To insist on Mexico’s sovereign right to do so would surpass idiocy (and, fortunately, no one brings this up). Washington’s insistence on Ukraine’s sovereign right to join NATO is even worse, since it sets up an insurmountable barrier to a peaceful resolution of a crisis that is already a shocking crime and will soon become much worse unless resolved — by the negotiations that Washington refuses to join.
………………………. Zelensky’s proposals considerably narrow the gap with Putin’s demands and provide an opportunity to carry forward the diplomatic initiatives that have been undertaken by France and Germany, with limited Chinese support. Negotiations might succeed or might fail. The only way to find out is to try. Of course, negotiations will get nowhere if the U.S. persists in its adamant refusal to join, backed by the virtually united commissariat, and if the press continues to insist that the public remain in the dark by refusing even to report Zelensky’s proposals.
In fairness, I should add that on March 13, the New York Times did publish a call for diplomacy that would carry forward the “virtual summit” of France-Germany-China, while offering Putin an “offramp,” distasteful as that is. The article was written by Wang Huiyao, president of a Beijing nongovernmental think tank.
C.J. Polychroniou: It also seems to me that, in some quarters, peace in Ukraine is hardly on top of the agenda. For example, there are plenty of voices both in the U.S. and in U.K. urging Ukraine to keep on fighting (although western governments have ruled out sending troops to defend Ukraine), probably in the hopes that the continuation of the war, in conjunction with the economic sanctions, may lead to regime change in Moscow. Yet, isn’t it the case that even if Putin actually falls from power, it would still be necessary to negotiate a peace treaty with whatever Russia government comes next, and that compromises would have to be made for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine?
Noam Chomsky: We can only speculate about the reasons for U.S.-U.K. total concentration on warlike and punitive measures, and refusal to join in the one sensible approach to ending the tragedy. Perhaps it is based on hope for regime change. If so, it is both criminal and foolish. Criminal because it perpetuates the vicious war and cuts off hope for ending the horrors, foolish because it is quite likely that if Putin is overthrown someone even worse will take over. That has been a consistent pattern in elimination of leadership in criminal organizations for many years, matters discussed very convincingly by Andrew Cockburn.
It is worth noticing that most of the world is keeping apart from the awful spectacle underway in Europe. One telling illustration is sanctions. Political analyst John Whitbeck has produced a map of sanctions against Russia: the U.S. and the rest of the Anglosphere, Europe and some of East Asia. None in the Global South, which is watching, bemused, as Europe reverts to its traditional pastime of mutual slaughter while relentlessly pursuing its vocation of destroying whatever else it chooses to within its reach: Yemen, Palestine, and far more. Voices in the Global South condemn Putin’s brutal crime, but do not conceal the supreme hypocrisy of western posturing about crimes that are a bare fraction of their own regular practices, right to the present.
C.J. Polychroniou: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may very well change the global order, especially with the likely emergence of the militarization of the European Union. What does the change in Germany’s Russia strategy — i.e., its rearmament and the apparent end of Ostpolitik — mean for Europe and global diplomacy?
Noam Chomsky: The major effect, I suspect, will be what I mentioned: more firm imposition of the U.S.-run, NATO-based Atlanticist model and curtailing once again the repeated efforts to create a European system independent of the U.S., a “third force” in world affairs, as it was sometimes called. That has been a fundamental issue since the end of World War II. Putin has settled it for the time being by providing Washington with its fondest wish: a Europe so subservient that an Italian university tried to ban a series of lectures on Dostoyevsky, to take just one of many egregious examples of how Europeans are making fools of themselves.
Meanwhile, it seems likely that Russia will drift further into China’s orbit, becoming even more of a declining kleptocratic raw materials producer than it is now. China is likely to persist in its programs of incorporating more and more of the world into the development-and-investment system based on the Belt-and-Road initiative, the “maritime silk road” that passes through the UAE into the Middle East, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The U.S. seems intent on responding with its comparative advantage: force. Right now, that includes Biden’s programs of “encirclement” of China by military bases and alliances, while perhaps even seeking to improve the U.S. economy as long as it is framed as competing with China. Just what we are observing now.
There is a brief period in which course corrections remain possible. It may soon come to an end as U.S. democracy, such as it still is, continues on its self-destructive course.
C.J. Polychroniou: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may also have dealt a severe blow to our hopes of tackling the climate crisis, at least in this decade. Do you have any comments to make on this rather bleak observation of mine?
Noam Chomsly: Appropriate comments surpass my limited literary skills. The blow is not only severe, but it may also be terminal for organized human life on earth, and for the innumerable other species that we are in the process of destroying with abandon.
In the midst of the Ukraine crisis, the IPCC released its 2022 report, by far the most dire warning it has yet produced. The report made it very clear that we must take firm measures now, with no delay, to cut back the use of fossil fuels and to move toward renewable energy. The warnings received brief notice, and then our strange species returned to devoting scarce resources to destruction and rapidly increasing its poisoning of the atmosphere, while blocking efforts for extricating itself from its suicidal path.
The fossil fuel industry can scarcely suppress its joy in the new opportunities the invasion has provided to accelerate its destruction of life on earth. In the U.S., the denialist party, which has successfully blocked Biden’s limited efforts to deal with the existential crisis, is likely to be back in power soon, so that it can resume the dedication of the Trump administration to destroy everything as quickly and effectively as possible.
These words might sound harsh. They are not harsh enough.
The game is not over. There still is time for radical course correction. The means are understood. If the will is there, it is possible to avert catastrophe and to move on to a much better world. The invasion of Ukraine has indeed been a severe blow to these prospects. Whether it constitutes a terminal blow or not is for us to decide.
Message to Biden: Help De-Escalation in Ukraine or Risk Nuclear War
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/03/14/message-biden-help-de-escalation-ukraine-or-risk-nuclear-war, Instead of pouring in weapons and piling on sanctions, we should call on President Biden to begin good faith negotiations with all concerned parties, respecting each of their security concerns.
GERRY CONDON, March 14, 2022 “The first casualty of war is truth.” This simple yet profound statement is attributed to many, including Hiram Johnson in a speech in the U.S. Senate in 1918, during the “war to end all wars.”………………..
As the war rages in Ukraine in 2022, actual combat is eclipsed by well-practiced information warfare. It was not surprising when the White House and State Department began shouting that the Russians were about to launch a “false flag” event to justify their pending invasion of Ukraine. After all, isn’t that the way it is always done? Isn’t that the way the US did it with the Tonkin Gulf Incident in Vietnam, babies being thrown out of incubators in Kuwait, and Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Of course, the US has a bigger challenge claiming self-defense as it invades smaller, weaker countries halfway around the globe.
Twenty-four hour news coverage is keeping Americans hyped up and dumbed down
Once the fighting commences, deception is also an important ploy on the battlefield. The ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote, “God is not adverse to deceit in a just cause.” Aside from keeping the enemy guessing about when and where the next attack will be launched, it is critically important to maintain popular support for a questionable enterprise that requires the sacrifice of blood and treasure.
Totally absent from nonstop coverage of the war and condemnations of Russian president Putin is any reporting on the role of the United States and NATO in creating the crisis over Ukraine. No reports about the relentless NATO expansion up to the very borders of Russia. No mention of US missile emplacements in Romania and Poland. Nothing about the unilateral US exit from vital nuclear treaties—the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (George W. Bush, 2002), and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (Donald Trump, 2018).
Twenty-four hour cable news coverage of the ugly war in Ukraine is keeping Americans hyped up and dumbed down. The very real horror of war is on the screen for all to see. The bombed-out buildings, the mounting civilian casualties and the frightened refugees speak their own truth. Unfortunately, we rarely see the victims, the grieving families and the terrified refugees when the invader is the US. The “shock and awe” US terror bombing campaign on Baghdad was described by one network TV anchor as a “beautiful thing to see.”
Joe Biden is also worried about nuclear war, a serious concern for all modern presidents. Vladimir Putin is brandishing his large nuclear arsenal as a disincentive for direct US/NATO engagement in the Ukraine war. The US canceled a planned ICBM test launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California to its usual target in the much-bombed Marshall Islands. Apparently, the US did not want to risk spooking Putin, about whose mental state many people are speculating. Could it be that Putin is employing Richard Nixon’s famous “madman theory,” keeping his enemies at bay with unpredictability?
Of course, Russia has its own propaganda apparatus, but we will not be much exposed to it here in the US. Russia Today (RT) has been removed from most cable TV services as well as from YouTube. Well actually, almost everything Russian is currently being canceled, in a furious frenzy of the Russia-hating that has been central to US culture ever since World War II. The Russians are never given credit for their outsized role in defeating the Nazis, nor sympathy for the 27 million lives lost in that war.
The US routinely violates the UN Charter—and now Russia has done so
The Russian invasion is a terrible violation of the UN Charter, but hardly unprecedented. International law in no way restrained US war-making in Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia or Yemen. Russia’s invasion was not in self-defense—except in a preemptive sense—they were not under immediate military attack.
Some say that the ongoing Ukrainian war against two breakaway Russia-aligned provinces in eastern Ukraine provided Just Cause for Russia’s invasion. Fourteen thousand people have died in the violence there since 2014, when a US-backed coup overthrew a Russia-friendly president and replaced him with someone handpicked by the US.
Another annoying factoid is the well-documented role of Nazi militias in the 2014 coup and in the current government and military. These inconvenient truths in no way can justify the blatant Russian aggression, however, which is killing hundreds of innocent civilians and has created a dangerous crisis for humanity.
The Information War Presents the Peace Movement with a Dilemma
The nonstop barrage of information, misinformation, disinformation and rallying around the flag has presented the peace movement with a dilemma. How do peace-loving people righteously condemn the Russian invasion—the destruction of cities, the killing of hundreds of civilians, the displacement of millions? How do we express our outrage and our strong disapproval of this aggression and violence without appearing to join in the war fervor that is sweeping the US?
Conversely, how do we explain the role of the US and NATO in creating this crisis without appearing to justify this horrible violence? How do we demand that President Biden stop pouring fuel on the fire by sending more weapons into Ukraine? How do we tell people that sanctions are not an alternative to war, but rather an escalation of war?
Escalation is the very last thing we want. The Ukraine war presents the entire world with an existential threat. It is not alarmist to say this is the greatest imminent threat of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The one where the US was reacting to Russian nuclear missiles being positioned in Cuba, way too close for comfort. Does that ring a bell?
The Danger of Nuclear War Should Focus Our Attention
The very real danger of nuclear war should focus all our attention. With both US and Russian nukes on “hair-trigger alert,” what could go wrong? And then there are the 15 or so nuclear power plants in Ukraine, several of them reportedly compromised by the war. Is that a real threat or is it war propaganda? Perhaps both. It is in EVERYBODY’s interest to end this very dangerous war as soon as possible.
Joe Biden is not new to this conflict. Biden and—famously—his son Hunter, have been involved in the Ukraine mess at least since the 2014 coup, after which a Ukrainian oil company paid Hunter Biden $50,000 a month to sit on its Board. No conflict of interest there, all the Democrats insisted. Even without family enrichment, Joe Biden has long been dedicated to the Cold War project of putting the Soviet Union—and now Russia—in its place, which is no place, and with no respect.
The United States leads NATO—the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe is always a U.S. general. President Biden probably could have headed off the Russian invasion by simply saying publicly that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO. But he refused to do that. He called Putin’s bluff, and Putin showed him it was no bluff.
President Biden Must Act Now to De-Escalate this Dangerous War
Whatever disagreements there are about how the Ukraine war came about, reasonable people should be able to agree on this: This war is very dangerous. It threatens to become a wider war in Europe. It could even lead to a civilization-ending nuclear war. It therefore must be brought to an end as soon as possible.
President Biden is in a position to make a bold diplomatic move that could bring this war to a screeching halt. Instead of pouring in weapons and piling on sanctions, we should call on President Biden to begin good faith negotiations with all concerned parties, respecting each of their security concerns.
Once the world has—hopefully—pulled back from the brink, we should begin a serious international discussion about how to abolish nuclear weapons and war once and for all. How will we avoid getting into the same kind of war with China over Taiwan? How can the United States adjust to a multi-polar world where it is no longer The Sheriff?
Veterans For Peace is offering its own Nuclear Posture Review, with sections on Russia and Europe and all the nuclear powers. It makes well-researched recommendations, such as implementing No First Use policies and taking nuclear missiles off “hair-trigger alert.” It calls on the US to rejoin the ABM and INF treaties, and to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It calls on the U.S. to initiate negotiations “to reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons,” as the five permanent UN Security Council members—the original nuclear powers—agreed when they signed the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. If the United States and other nuclear powers had kept their promise to eliminate nuclear weapons, we would probably not be at war today in Ukraine, or worrying about Armageddon.
HELEN CALDICOTT: Russia’s war could spell worldwide nuclear disaster
The U.S., as always, standing on its self-righteous dignity, is retaliating with economic sanctions and arming NATO neighbours with murderous weapons. It has rejected outright Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plea to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and to remove the missiles pointed at Russia in NATO countries that were liberated from the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War after Secretary of State James Baker promised that the U.S. would not enlarge NATO inch to the east.
HELEN CALDICOTT: Russia’s war could spell worldwide nuclear disaster https://independentaustralia.net/article-display/helen-caldicott-russias-war-could-spell-worldwide-nuclear-disaster,16149
By Helen Caldicott | 14 March 2022, Boasting the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine could spell catastrophe on a global scale, writes Dr Helen Caldicott.
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe” ~ Albert Einstein
How right he was. Now laced with thousands of nuclear weapons, some on hair-trigger alert, with a
determined leader invading a neighbouring country and threatening to use his nuclear arsenal, planetary life is hovering on the edge of obliteration.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world witnessed the dreadful human tragedy of atomic bombs:
‘People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball, that is, were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands.’
Knowing man’s propensity to fight, why in God’s name did the U.S. Government and Soviet Union authorise the brilliant scientists and weapons makers to construct thousands of nuclear weapons during and after the Cold War, culminating in more than 70,000 nuclear weapons during the ’70s and ’80s?
About 40 per cent of all U.S. scientists, engineers and technical professionals are engaged in weapons construction and design. And currently, Russia has 6,255 nuclear weapons, the U.S. has 5,550 and China, 350.
I am a physician, so let me describe the medical effects of a single bomb dropping on a city, be it New York or Boston. A Russian 20-megaton bomb would enter at 20 times the speed of sound exploding with the heat of the sun, digging a hole three-quarters of a mile (1.27 kilometres) wide and 88 feet (26.8 metres) deep, converting all buildings, people and earth shot up into the air as a mushroom cloud.
Twenty miles (32.2 kilometres) from the epicentre, all humans would be killed or lethally injured, some converted to charcoal statues. Winds of 500 mph (804 km/h) turn people into missiles travelling at 100 mph (161 km/h). A massive conflagration would follow covering 300 square miles (776.9 km2) and the fires would coalesce across the nation
As cities burn across the world, a massive cloud of toxic black smoke will elevate into the stratosphere blocking out the sun for ten years inducing a short ice age nuclear winter when all humans and most plants and animals will perish.
But the war in Ukraine is more than dangerous, hosting Chernobyl which contaminated 40 per cent of the European land mass with radioactive isotopes, together with 15 nuclear reactors and which could suffer meltdowns during wartime activities, causing unbelievable injury and death to people across Europe.
And a plant with six reactors was recently under attack.
God help us all.
The U.S., as always, standing on its self-righteous dignity, is retaliating with economic sanctions and arming NATO neighbours with murderous weapons. It has rejected outright Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plea to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and to remove the missiles pointed at Russia in NATO countries that were liberated from the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War after Secretary of State James Baker promised that the U.S. would not enlarge NATO one inch to the east.
Ukraine war triggers debate on Japan’s nuclear option,
The Interpreter. PURNENDRA JAIN, 14 Mar 22,
In a new and volatile strategic environment, a decades-
old commitment on non-proliferation is up for discussion.
In the wake of the Ukraine conflict, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s former prime minister and now head of the largest faction of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has suggested that Japan consider hosting US nuclear weapons facilities on Japanese soil, similar to some European nations, such as Germany, which have nuclear sharing arrangements with the United States.
Abe’s suggestion was made in the context of Ukraine having renounced nuclear weapons in 1994, leaving itself vulnerable today. The announcement also comes on top of deepening concerns about China’s growing military assertiveness around Japan’s maritime space and beyond, and the dangerous situation on the Korean peninsula with threats from the nuclear-capable rocket-launching North Korea.
Debates over whether Japan should host nuclear weapons or even go fully nuclear are not new………….. Discussion has since continued among political and scholarly communities as to whether Japan should go nuclear, opt for a nuclear sharing arrangement with the United States by hosting nuclear weapons, or maintain its current non-nuclear weapons status.
This latest eruption though is in a different context. This time, chairman of the General Council of the LDP Tatsuo Fukuda, who like his father Yasuo Fukuda before him holds an influential ruling party post and is touted as a future prime minister, has suggested that “we must not shy away from any debate whatsoever”. Last year’s LDP party presidential candidate and current LDP policy chief Sanae Takaichi also favours a debate. Some smaller conservative opposition parties want to include nuclear options in policy discussions while considering Japan’s strategic objectives. The main opposition parties have, however, strongly resisted any such prospects, arguing in favour of Japan’s non-nuclear status.
Abe’s suggestion was promptly and solidly rejected by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, as well as by the leader of the Komeito, the junior coalition partner of the ruling LDP. Even Defence Minister Nobuo Kishi, Abe’s younger brother, adopted into the Kishi family, also dismissed the idea of hosting nuclear weapons on Japanese shores. Kishi may have expressed this view in order to align with his boss, Prime Minister Kishida, rather than reflecting his true thinking on the matter, given his political pedigree.
Kishida quickly confirmed that Japan firmly adheres to the three non-nuclear principles adopted in 1967, to not possess, produce or permit the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan’s territory. These principles remain sacrosanct, even though Japan has made substantial departures in defence and security matters in the past decade…………….
Not only has the Kishida government announced an intended update to the NSS, first issued in 2013, it has also promised to revise the National Defence Program Guidelines and Mid-Term Defence Program issued in 2013 and 2018. All these updates and revisions are undertaken in view of a rapid transformation in the strategic environment……………….
| Japan, along with Germany, has often been recognised as an example of a “civilian state”. Germany currently hosts US nuclear weapons facilities and, in view of the Ukraine conflict, has announced a significant increase to its defence budget. Calls are now being made to urge Japan to follow suit. The postwar US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security has ensured that Japan has lived happily under US extended deterrence, including the nuclear umbrella. This arrangement is unlikely to change, barring an existential threat to Japan’s territory and sovereignty. But what seemed to be taboo in terms of Japan’s strategic policy – that is, breaching one per cent of GDP on defence spending and developing strike capabilities – is now being discussed seriously. No policy in international relations is eternal, it must change as a nation’s interests change. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/ukraine-war-triggers-debate-japan-s-nuclear-option |
Hypocritical cries of grief from weapons and other corporate businesses, as Western governments and media ramp up war fever.
[Ed. Here is the later part of this long article, which first details the history of other criminal wars, and the background to Russia’s understandable fear of Western aggression. I urge you to read the entire article, – while this bit examines only the current Ukraine situation]
Supporting this God-given path are not only big-biz executives, financiers, and military brass, but also a subservient media, obedient politicians aiming at highly-paid jobs when they leave politics, a number of labor leaders, and power holders in academia. They all form the Establishment, one quite similar in all so-called free and free market democracies, except that for over 80 years the U.S, sector has asserted its role in the pack as alpha wolf.
A Criminal War Ushers in the Worst of Times in Ukraine, Russia, and Europe
My overriding hope is that current talks may lead to peace, to an end of death and destruction, and to the repair and renewal of all efforts to build a world without exploitation, without aggrandizement, without aggression, without war.
Portside, March 12, 2022 Victor Grossman ”…………………………………………….Every single wartime death or wound is terrible; every missile, every bullet is unnatural. There are too many similar tragedies now in Ukraine. Yet, while writing this, I find myself thinking: Despite each and every tragedy—thank goodness that Ukraine has not been hit like Iraq in 2003, with the death of hundreds of thousands. Yet alas, while I see the Brandenburg Gate lit up with Ukrainian blue and yellow, I recall no Iraqi colors there in 2003, nor those of Palestinians in 2014 after the death of 547 children during the bombing of Gaza.
In the years that followed, as military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere mired down or lost, symbols, slogans, and catchwords about terror wore thin, the fearfulness of words like Islamism, communism, and socialism eroded, like Bolshevism and anarchism in earlier eras. The gargoyle faces, the grayed grimaces of Reagan’s Evil Empire warnings in 1983 needed replacement, for the pressures remained. Putin’s angular face and physique often have to suffice—or is the yellow peril back in play? And what are those pressures, refurbished but still very real?
Some are easy to call by name: Lockheed, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, friendly German rivals like Rheinmetall, Krupp, Maffei—and a further limited list. They earn their billions by producing and selling their products, which must constantly be multiplied, replaced—or used.
Thus, while military actions by Putin or any others may be treated by such folk with loud cries of condemnation or sympathy for the victims, behind their dampened Kleenex hankies we can sense their jubilation as military budgets soar, now nearly $780 billion a year in Washington, and the German government, previously tugged one way by traders with Russia or China, now being overwhelmed by the military monopolies, ambitious expansionists, and devoted Pentagon friends who, since the march into Ukraine, have gained the upper hand.
The military budget in Berlin now aims at topping the 50-billion-euro level, with ever more spending for jets, frigates, armed drones, and more personal armor as well; after all, those patriotic lads or lasses in uniform must not be neglected, but always sent well-armored to their deaths.
And how many have the courage to disapprove of all of this? To vote against it, in the Capitol or the Bundestag? Only a very, very few, now angrily disqualified or ignored.
Not only manufacturers of armaments are waving blue-yellow flags with one hand and concealing profit calculations with the other. If their real hopes come true, if Putin’s move goes awry and ends up with a regime change in Red Square, as in Maidan Square in 2014 but far bigger, what new opportunities would be opened up!
….……. Many are surely dreaming of wide new Eurasian monoculture, of unlimited raw materials, new markets, skilled proletarians. Tyson and Cargill, Bayer and BASF, GM and Daimler, Nestlé and Unilever, Murdock and Springer, Facebook and Amazon must certainly be checking electronic atlases for maps reaching from Smolensk to Vladivostok—and across the Amur River, too, where great multitudes could then be reached so much more easily.
What this all adds up to is a continuing hope for world hegemony—always with God’s help of course. Sen. Mitt Romney, once a candidate for the presidency, put it clearly:
“God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the world, or someone else will. Without American leadership, without clarity of American purpose and resolve, the world becomes a far more dangerous place, and liberty and prosperity would surely be among the first casualties.”
Supporting this God-given path are not only big-biz executives, financiers, and military brass, but also a subservient media, obedient politicians aiming at highly-paid jobs when they leave politics, a number of labor leaders, and power holders in academia. They all form the Establishment, one quite similar in all so-called free and free market democracies, except that for over 80 years the U.S, sector has asserted its role in the pack as alpha wolf.
Countries to be “taken out”
In a broadcast with Amy Goodman on March 2, 2007 one vector of a world-wide program was revealed by Gen. Wesley Clark: a memo by then-Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz which described “how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off with Iran.”
The timetable didn’t work out exactly—timetables often don’t—but was close enough. And if Iran could really be tamed once again, as in 1952, Georgia would then be close. And Russia as well.
Another vector was even more crucial. When East German annexation was agreed upon in 1990, Soviet army withdrawal was matched by the American and West German verbal promise to a very trustful Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would never expand past the Elbe River into East Germany or beyond.
The promise was soon broken. The Pentagon-based NATO moved with its military technology into East Germany and on to Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans, the Baltic countries, thus surrounding all but the southern flank of European Russia with an increasingly tight, hostile ring, featuring broadened, strengthened highways and rail lines pointing eastwards, potential missile launchers in Poland, swift jet planes, fueled and polished, in German and Belgian hangars, with nuclear bombs waiting nearby, and annual aggressive military maneuvers along Russian borders. NATO was spending $111 billion on armaments, Russia $62 billion.
And then north and south were linked. In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, no angel, faced a choice between the unsteady but undeniable advantages of economic cooperation with Russia, his country’s main energy supplier, or biting at the bait of promised Western prosperity, with all the luxuries it symbolized for many Ukrainians, especially in its western regions.
The American leadership, thinking no doubt of fat dividends but far more about closing that tight ring, or noose, around Russia and gaining control of Sevastopol, the big naval base on the Black Sea, Russian till then, by contract, decided to move ahead. After spending $5 billion or more on propaganda and organizing anti-Russian groups and parties, it re-animated its earlier “Orange Revolution.” Joining with openly pro-fascist groups—complete with swastikas, “Heil Hitler!” salutes, and all—it managed the ouster of the elected president, who had to flee to safety. In a famous decision, revealed in a hacked telephone call between the U.S. ambassador in Kiev and Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State, the American puppet Arseniy Yatsenyuk, referred to endearingly as “Yats” by Nuland, was installed by her as prime minister.
Leadership positions in Ukraine have changed several times since then, as the influence of varying oligarchs altered. Some things remained constant. Russian speakers were discriminated against and suppressed, resulting in the vote of a great majority in Crimea to become part of Russia once again—as they had been until 1954. Two Russian-speaking eastern provinces defied the anti-Russian pressures and broke away, with Moscow support. Armed Ukrainian militia units, some with openly pro-fascist symbols on their uniforms or skins, kept battering against them
Perhaps it was their strength which prevented the Kiev government from abiding by the peace agreements of Minsk, in which Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Kiev had agreed on seeking solutions, with partial autonomy for the Russian-speaking provinces, or was it pressure from Washington and local oligarchs which moved the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, at first seemingly in favor of negotiations, to back out?
Since that goal of world hegemony in many wealthy American brains, Republican and Democratic alike, was never abandoned, and only Russia and China stood in the way, Ukraine was clearly being built up as a counterforce against one such barrier, indeed as a ramp for further action. Which leads us to 2022.
Putin clearly disapproved of any ramps close to his borders. He hardly needed to leaf in the history books for the years 1812, or 1918-21, or 1941-45 to strengthen his resolve. With the increasing threat from an enlarged, aggressive NATO, he could not possibly ignore a Ukraine eagerly pushing to join up as soon as possible, after it had already joined in NATO wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. All the offers Russia made to negotiate the issues—above all a bar to Ukraine officially joining NATO—were rejected in the West as “non-starters” and accompanied by further waves of recriminations and new sanctions.
Was this extreme hostility by media and politicians, with its implied threats (and its actual incidents, as in Syria), the reason for Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine? Despite TV hours and piles of paper and ink expounding about it, I see absolutely no basis for warnings that Putin has plans to “expand his empire.” I have not seen a single word threatening Finland, Poland, Romania, or the Baltic trio, which are often loudest in exhortations. And Germany? The idea of Russia attacking Germany is fully unthinkable—though not enough to hinder big armament expansion plans in Berlin.
In the past, Russia was systematically threatened and also attacked—and is surrounded by a world with over 750 American military bases, with an American military budget bigger than the next ten countries combined, and with four times as many NATO soldiers as Russians in uniform. Even when Russia deployed troops outside its borders, bitter as these occasions were, they were only in countries which were on its borders, and hence—if under unfriendly control—were viewed as potential threats as much as Russian or Chinese deployments in Mexico or Canada would be viewed in the U.S. Ukraine definitely borders Russia—its heartland. Militarily, the USSR and Russia were always basically on the defensive, not on an offensive track.
And yet its soldiers, tanks, and planes have invaded Ukraine, with results just as horrible for those affected, even if not on the same scale, as American attacks in the Philippines and Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iraq—or in two of the worst crimes ever committed by humankind—at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We cannot look into Putin’s mind, nor know of possible threats he seems to have considered immediate. We must strictly reject any nonsense disputing the will of most Ukrainians to remain independent and sovereign—though not to become part of a NATO-led threat.
Why this war now?……………….
The invasion, for whatever reason, has not only caused great misery in Ukraine, but also given an immense steroid push to the forces on the political right, the traditional Russia-haters, those thinking constantly of protecting and increasing their fortunes and those who want no peace, but only victory, any victory, over Russia. They want to demolish not only the reign of Putin but Russia in general as a barrier to capitalist expansion, to a hegemony ruled from Washington, Wall Street, and the Pentagon.
It is these people who are demanding no-fly zones. Some 27 former Pentagon and State Department officials and a former top NATO military commander joined Zelensky in calling for a no-fly zone, although they know full well what that means. As even Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said of the demand: “It means starting World War III.”
On the other hand, the march into Ukraine has caused saddening collateral damage, another likely season with the splintering and weakening of progressive forces who work for peace and whose growth is becoming almost desperately necessary in the face of a growing fascistic menace around the world………… https://portside.org/2022-03-12/criminal-war-ushers-worst-times-ukraine-russia-and-europe
Nuclear threat: Faslane, home to Trident, symbol of humanity’s power and folly
Nuclear weapons are often described as a deterrent. But do they really deter? That they have “kept the peace” is just a story, “a myth”, not backed by evidence of cause and effect, as New York Times writer Ward Wilson has put it. He observed, “We don’t accept proof by absence in any circumstance where there is real risk.”
Nuclear threat: Faslane, home to Trident, symbol of humanity’s power and folly, https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/nuclear-threat-faslane-home-trident-110835394.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9uZXdzLmdvb2dsZS5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAG3X514QPdgktFOrKbKPrnzoSz6joD3PVpI6uSj2DBv3oIZTOIzUDZWnifcsw_SXXPYtt3h1orA3QYlShoI_rlgBn5o675_PqDys5-xmgpGOEFmBJ1ooQWfTzK9RMofsPeZk-CfshnVXybppn5h7kGhpqKtNAaeAVwv0YCeavNKnVicky Allan
Sun, 13 March 2022, On the northern shore of Gare Loch, washed by salt waters that merge into the Firth of Clyde, is the naval base, Faslane, home to Vanguard-class submarines. The UK has four such Trident-carrying submarines, each armed with eight missiles, each of which carries three warheads. All together, currently, the UK holds a stockpile of 225 such warheads. This sea loch, and the wildlife it sustains, knows little of the destructive capacity contained within it.
Each warhead is said to be eight times as destructive as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, which killed over 140,000 civilians. They are dark pearls of latent horror; symbols of humanity’s power and folly.
This stretch of shoreline has, for this reason, been one of the most controversial sites in Britain since the 1960s – first home to Polaris, more recently Trident. Concern over the threat of nuclear weaponry, has waxed and waned with the changes in global politics.
The SNP’s calls to scrap it were a key message of the Independence referendum, and one still repeated now. 2016 saw debate around whether the programme should be renewed at an enormous cost of £31 million for just the replacement submarines – CND estimated the overall cost would be more like £205 million. The House of Commons backed it, though only one Scottish MP voted in favour. Then, just last year, Boris Johnson announced a lift on the cap on the the number of Trident nuclear warheads it can stockpile by more than 40 percent by the middle of this decade. This ended thirty years of gradual disarmament.
UN Elder Mary Robinson’s view on this was clear, “While the UK cites increased security threats as justification for this move, the appropriate response to these challenges should be to work multilaterally to strengthen international arms control agreements and to reduce – not increase – the number of nuclear weapons in existence.”
We are now in another chilling moment. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, his threats of “consequences you have never seen”, have meant that the word nuclear is on our lips again. The threat, which not long ago had seemed half-forgotten, a childhood nightmare demoted down the current list of existential threats, was there again: “the nuclear option”. Might the Russian leader be mad and power-hungry enough to use it?
Ian Blackford recently confirmed the continuing support of SNP for getting rid of Trident, saying, “The idea that having nuclear weapons provides a deterrence that removes that threat is far-fetched, to say the least.”
Nuclear weapons are often described as a deterrent. But do they really deter? That they have “kept the peace” is just a story, “a myth”, not backed by evidence of cause and effect, as New York Times writer Ward Wilson has put it. He observed, “We don’t accept proof by absence in any circumstance where there is real risk.”
Above all Faslane is a reminder of the ridiculous nuclear arsenal the world has built. We may have already clambered down from the global peak stockpile of nuclear weapons which existed in 1986, but there is a long way to go. Approximately 13,080 nuclear warheads exist worldwide and almost 90 percent of them belong to two countries: the United States and Russia. There are more than enough, if such maths made any sense, to kill every human on the planet, one hundred times over.
That fact, and Putin’s terrifying recent posturings, should be a reminder that global nuclear disarmament must remain a key goal of our times.
Ukraine war fills Pentagon’s, NATO allies’ war chests
“Over multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican, we have tried to minimize friction with Putin and with Russia, in the hopes that it wouldn’t exacerbate a problem….And I feel like that era is over,” said Slotkin, a former Pentagon official. “I think it’s a sea change for how both the Defense Department and the State Department should think about our presence in Europe.”
[N]ow there is a unique moment of bipartisanship that will allow the Pentagon to request and receive just about anything it wants, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said last week during a House Armed Services Committee hearing. Congress is poised to approve $14 billion for Ukraine aid this week, including nearly $5 billion for additional troops in Europe and replenishing U.S. weapons already sent to Ukraine. The House passed the package Wednesday and the Senate is expected to vote on the bill by Friday.
“Over multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican, we have tried to minimize friction with Putin and with Russia, in the hopes that it wouldn’t exacerbate a problem….And I feel like that era is over,” said Slotkin, a former Pentagon official. “I think it’s a sea change for how both the Defense Department and the State Department should think about our presence in Europe.”
Ukraine war fills Pentagon’s, NATO allies’ war chests https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/113283937/posts/3880404511, Rick Rozoff, Anti-bellum
Stars and Stripes, March 10, 2022,
Congressional support for larger defense budget grows amid Ukraine invasion The changing security landscape in Eastern Europe will “no doubt” increase next year’s defense budget, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at an event last week. Other Capitol Hill lawmakers say they are also prepared to funnel more money to the Pentagon as the U.S. rethinks its national security and defense posture.
“President [Joe] Biden needs to put a serious budget proposal forward to confront the real threats we face,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said in a statement. “Russia is just one reason why defense spending needs to be higher. China and other nations are watching the seriousness and resolve of freedom-loving nations.”
Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine has prompted other NATO countries to pledge additional funding for their armed services.
In a reversal of decades of post-Cold War policy, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz said last month that his country would embark on a $110 billion rearming program. Poland announced last week that it will raise its spending on defense from 2% to 3% of the country’s gross domestic product. Leaders of France, Italy, Latvia and Romania have all vowed in recent days to boost their commitment to defense.
U.S. lawmakers authorized nearly $778 billion for defense spending for the 2022 fiscal year – $25 billion more than requested by the White House. The Biden administration has yet to submit its budget request for fiscal year 2023, which starts Oct. 1, but Smith said last week that the eventual spending plan will be “the most impactful and important budget that we’ve seen in the 25 years I’ve been in Congress.”
Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he wants to see defense expenditures grow by at least 3% to 5%, adjusted for inflation….
[N]ow there is a unique moment of bipartisanship that will allow the Pentagon to request and receive just about anything it wants, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said last week during a House Armed Services Committee hearing. Congress is poised to approve $14 billion for Ukraine aid this week, including nearly $5 billion for additional troops in Europe and replenishing U.S. weapons already sent to Ukraine. The House passed the package Wednesday and the Senate is expected to vote on the bill by Friday.
“Over multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican, we have tried to minimize friction with Putin and with Russia, in the hopes that it wouldn’t exacerbate a problem….And I feel like that era is over,” said Slotkin, a former Pentagon official. “I think it’s a sea change for how both the Defense Department and the State Department should think about our presence in Europe.”
Video analysis reveals Russian attack on Ukrainian nuclear plant veered near disaster.
NPR, March 11, 2022: Last week’s assault by Russian forces on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant was far more dangerous than initial assessments suggested, according to an analysis by NPR of video and photographs of the attack and its aftermath.
A thorough review of a four-hour, 21-minute security camera video of the attack reveals that Russian forces repeatedly fired heavy weapons in the direction of the plant’s massive reactor buildings, which housed dangerous nuclear fuel. Photos show that an administrative building directly in front of the reactor complex was shredded by Russian fire. And a video from inside the plant shows damage and a possible Russian shell that landed less than 250 feet from the Unit 2 reactor building.
The security camera footage also shows Russian troops haphazardly firing rocket-propelled grenades into the main administrative building at the plant and turning away Ukrainian firefighters even as a fire raged out of control in a nearby training building.
The evidence stands in stark contrast to early comments by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which while acknowledging the seriousness of the assault, emphasized that the action took place away from the reactors. In a news conference immediately after the attack, IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi made reference to only a single projectile hitting a training building adjacent to the reactor complex.
“All the safety systems of the six reactors at the plant were not affected at all,” Grossi told reporters at the March 4 briefing.
In fact, the training building took multiple strikes, and it was hardly the only part of the site to take fire from Russian forces. The security footage supports claims by Ukraine’s nuclear regulator of damage at three other locations: the Unit 1 reactor building, the transformer at the Unit 6 reactor and the spent fuel pad, which is used to store nuclear waste. It also shows ordnance striking a high-voltage line outside the plant. The IAEA says two such lines were damaged in the attack.
“This video is very disturbing,” says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. While the types of reactors used at the plant are far safer than the one that exploded
n Chernobyl in 1986, the Russian attack could have triggered a meltdown similar to the kind that struck Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, he warns.”It’s completely insane to subject a nuclear plant to this kind of an assault,” Lyman says.
In a news conference on Thursday, Grossi said that he had met with Ukrainian and Russian officials but failed to reach an agreement to avoid future attacks on Ukraine’s other nuclear plants. “I’m aiming at having something relatively soon,” he told reporters in Vienna.
The assault
On March 3, the nuclear plant was preparing for a fight. A news release posted to its website just hours before the assault described the facility as operating normally, with its assigned Ukrainian military unit ready for combat.
The Russian decision to move on the plant was clearly premeditated, according to Leone Hadavi, an open-source analyst with the Centre for Information Resilience, who helped NPR review the video.”It was planned,” Hadavi says, and it involved around 10 armored vehicles as well as two tanks. That is far more firepower than would have been carried by, say, a reconnaissance mission that might have stumbled across the plant by chance.
Just before 11:30 p.m. local time, someone began livestreaming the plant’s security footage on its YouTube channel. The livestream rolled on as Russian forces began a slow and methodical advance on the plant. The column of armored vehicles, led by the tanks, used spotlights to cautiously approach the plant from the southeast along the main service road to the facility.
Around an hour and 20 minutes later, one of the two tanks that led the column was struck by a missile from Ukrainian forces and was disabled.
That marked the beginning of a fierce firefight that lasted for roughly two hours at the plant. Immediately after the tank was disabled, Russian forces returning fire appeared to hit a transmission line connected to the plant’s main electrical substation. The IAEA says two of four high-voltage lines were damaged in the attack. Lyman says that these lines are essential to safe operations at the plant……..
Based on photos and damage assessments by Ukrainian officials and the IAEA, Lyman says that the damage appears to have been to some of the less hardened points within the nuclear plant. Unlike office buildings and elevated walkways, the reactors themselves and their spent fuel are sealed within a thick steel containment vessel that would withstand a great deal of damage.
But he also says that the host of systems required to keep the reactors safe are not hardened against attack. Cooling systems rely on exterior pipework; backup generators are kept in relatively ordinary buildings; vital electrical yards are out in the open; and the plant’s control rooms are not designed to operate in a war zone……………. https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1085427380/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant-zaporizhzhia
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