Will Biden Gamble on a Ukraine Coalition?
First, what is the aim of the coalition? Is the aim to expel Russian forces from Ukrainian territory? Is the aim to reinforce Ukrainian defense lines and achieve a ceasefire for negotiations? Or is the coalition merely a device to drag the rest of the NATO alliance into a war with Russia that very few Europeans will support?
The Washington establishment is considering a risky and ill-defined intervention in Europe.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/will-biden-gamble-on-a-ukraine-coalition/ Douglas Macgregor, Nov 3, 2022,
When Napoleon Bonaparte began his 1812 campaign to conquer Russia, he led the largest “coalition of the willing” in history. In addition to its French core, Bonaparte’s army of more than 400,000 consisted of Italian, Dutch, German, and Polish soldiers. They were at best unenthusiastic. Frankly, other than the French, only Napoleon’s Polish allies were truly eager to march on Moscow.
By the time Bonaparte’s multinational force reached Moscow, paralyzing cold, ruinous battles, exhaustion, disease, and poor logistical planning reduced the original invasion force to less than half of its original strength. It was not long before Prussia and its North German allies defected to the Russians while the remainder (minus the Poles) deserted or died on the march home.
Today, the Biden White House appears to be considering the use of a multinational force aimed at Russia. The NATO alliance is unable to reach a unanimous decision to intervene militarily in support of Ukraine in its war with Russia. But as signaled recently by David Petraeus, the president and his generals are evaluating their own “coalition of the willing.” The coalition would allegedly consist of primarily, but not exclusively, Polish and Romanian forces, with the U.S. Army at its core, for employment in Ukraine.
All military campaigns succeed or fail based on strategic assumptions that underpin operational planning and execution. Without knowing the details of the ongoing discussions, it is still possible to raise questions about the coalition’s proposed operational “purpose, method, and end state.”
First, what is the aim of the coalition? Is the aim to expel Russian forces from Ukrainian territory? Is the aim to reinforce Ukrainian defense lines and achieve a ceasefire for negotiations? Or is the coalition merely a device to drag the rest of the NATO alliance into a war with Russia that very few Europeans will support?
Second, what will U.S. air and ground forces do if they are decisively engaged from the moment they cross the Polish and Romanian Borders into western Ukraine? The Russian High Command will no doubt identify the U.S. military component as the coalition’s center of gravity. It follows that Russian military power will focus first and foremost on the destruction of the U.S. warfighting structure together with its space-based command, control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities.
Third, is Washington building a “coalition of the willing” for political reasons or because it anticipates a resource-intensive commitment and needs regional allies to share the burden? Since it is unlikely that conventional U.S. military power would defeat conventional Russian military power on its own, can the U.S.-led coalition assemble the diverse military capabilities required to dominate Russian forces with enough striking power to compel a change in Russian behavior? Equally important, can U.S. and allied forces protect Europe’s numerous transportation networks, as well as air and naval bases, from Russian air and missile attack?
Fourth, will the coalition’s conduct of operations be subject to limitations deemed essential to allied partners? Differences of opinion always exist on questions of how to fight the opponent, how far to move, and just how much to risk. Lack of clarity about specific objectives can have serious consequences. In other words, how much unity of command can U.S. military commanders really expect from their allies in war and will the demand for unity of command outweigh purely national interests? It is useful to remember that Moscow enjoys complete authority over all its forces including those of its partners and allies. Russian unity of command is absolute. Moscow is not compelled to cope with diverging preferences and opinions from coalition members.
Finally, Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO insists that Ukraine’s failure to prevail in its war with Russia would be interpreted as a defeat for NATO. Would heavy losses inflicted on U.S. ground forces in a confrontation with Russian military power not also signal Washington’s defeat? How rapidly could U.S. and allied forces replace their losses? Would severe U.S. losses raise the specter of a U.S. nuclear response? When does support for Ukraine put NATO’s security and survival at risk?
Washington’s recently announced reiteration of strategic ambiguity regarding the “first use of nuclear weapons” raises additional questions. Spokesmen for the Biden administration indicate that the president will not follow through on his 2020 pledge and declare that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack against the United States or its allies.
Instead, President Biden approved a version of the policy from the Obama administration that permits the use of nuclear weapons not only in retaliation to a nuclear attack, but also to respond to non-nuclear threats. President Biden’s decision is at least as dangerous and destructive to American and Allied goals as was the Morgenthau Plan: a plan to deindustrialize Germany that, while rejected, probably lengthened the war against Nazi Germany by at least half a year. Does anyone in Washington, D.C., really believe that this new policy makes a nuclear war with Russia less likely?
Six Reasons Why Americans Should Care That US Troops Are In Ukraine
Andrew Korybko, Nov 2 2022, https://korybko.substack.com/p/six-reasons-why-americans-should
This is a big deal for more than just the obvious reason that it could push that declining unipolar hegemon closer to a hot war with Russia by miscalculation.
An unnamed senior military official revealed during a press briefing on Monday that US boots are on the ground in Ukraine as part of the Pentagon’s efforts to inspect and track weapons shipments to that crumbling former Soviet Republic according to a transcript published by the Department of Defense. This is a big deal for more than just the obvious reason that it could push that declining unipolar hegemon closer to a hot war with Russia by miscalculation.
Here are the six other reasons why Americans should care that US troops are in Ukraine:
The Deployment Proves That The Ukrainian Conflict Is Indeed A Proxy War On Russia
The US-led West’s Mainstream Media (MSM) nor the SBU’s anti-Semitic and fascist global troll network (“NAFO”) can no longer deny that the Ukrainian Conflict is indeed a NATO proxy war on Russia, which was obvious to all objective observers but has hitherto not been acknowledged by those two forces.
* America Is Indisputably Leading The Abovementioned Effort
Building upon the above, there’s no question that America is leading this multinational proxy war effort against that newly restored world power as evidenced by this latest deployment, which further confirms what Russia’s been saying this entire time about Washington’s direct involvement in the conflict.
* Public Pressure Might Have Played A Role In The Pentagon’s Accountability Mission
CBS News’ bombshell report in early August revealing that only around 30% of all foreign military aid to Ukraine actually reaches its destination provoked unprecedented public anger and might thus have played a role in the Pentagon’s commencing its accountability mission that its officials just disclosed.
* The US Doesn’t Fully Trust Its Ukrainian Proxies
Another element of the “official narrative” that was shattered by the Pentagon’s confirmation of its limited deployment to Ukraine is that the US supposedly places full trust in its Ukrainian proxies, which clearly isn’t true otherwise it wouldn’t be putting its troops in harm’s way to track weapons shipments.
* Ukrainian-Based Neo-Nazi Terrorist Groups Are A Credible Threat To Europe
Elaborating on the insight that was just shared in the preceding point, it can therefore be confidently surmised that American spy agencies also assess that Ukrainian-based Neo-Nazi terrorist groups are a credible threat to Europe since they’re the only actors who could realistically siphon off those arms.
* The Next Congress Might Use This Deployment As The Pretext For Scaling Down Military Aid
The US will inevitably have to scale down its arms shipments to Ukraine since its military-industrial complex lacks the capability to indefinitely sustain the pace, scope, and scale of this assistance, yet the next Congress might use this deployment as the pretext for doing so instead of admitting that fact.
The remainder of the analysis will summarize the six reasons that were just shared.
Americans should care that their country is leading NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine, especially since their own government doesn’t trust their local partners to the point where US troops had to be deployed to monitor arms shipments there. Public pressure might already have played a role in commencing this accountability mission so it therefore follows that subsequent such pressure could facilitate the next Congress’ potential plans to scale back aid to that country and hopefully foster peace.
USA’s deliberate ambiguity on use of nuclear weapons really means “don’t mess with us or we’ll nuke you”
Basically, the United States is holding the world hostage to its nuclear arsenal, saying that we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons any time we determine under any circumstances so that we have a broader definition of deterrence, meaning that we are deterring. But what are we deterring? You see, with a sole purpose declaration, we’re deterring a nuclear attack against us.
But the current nuclear strategy is to deter something that is ambiguous in nature, meaning we haven’t precisely spelled it out. We’re leaving the world guessing. And what we’re saying is, don’t mess with us, or else we’ll nuke you.
We can never use these weapons, but why are we building them as if they are a viable tool? This is why disarmament is so much better, so much more logical, and ultimately has a more humanitarian basis and national security basis than the continued pursuit of a so-called nuclear deterrent. Disarmament is the only thing that will save mankind. Continuing to pursue a nuclear deterrent could very well be the end of mankind
US Holds World Hostage to Its Nukes, Ex-American Intel Officer Says
Sputnik International, 29.10.2022
Earlier this week, Pentagon released nuclear posture, which suggests that the US doesn’t rule out use of the nuclear arsenal against non-nuclear threats – which contradicts previous pledges by the Biden administration.
Scott Ritter, a military analyst and former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, explained Sputnik why Washington adopted new nuclear policies and what do they mean for regular Americans.
Sputnik: Why are Russia and Сhina to be blamed for the Biden’s administration failure to reduce nuclear weapons?
Scott Ritter: We have to look for somebody to blame. We can’t blame ourselves. That’s normally what happens. But we are solely to blame. President Biden ran on a platform that said that he would be seeking what’s called the single-use policy for nuclear deterrence. And what that means is its a single-purpose policy. And the single purpose would be that the sole purpose of the US nuclear weapons arsenal is deterrence. And that’s it; that we would never use nuclear weapons under any circumstance other than to respond to somebody using nuclear weapons against us; that we are here to deter a nuclear attack on the United States.
He’s broken that promise. The strategy that he has propagated recently is a strategy that continues the past practice of having deliberate ambiguity about the conditions and circumstances under which America could use nuclear weapons, up to and including a pre-emptive nuclear attack by the United States in response to a non-nuclear incident.
Basically, the United States is holding the world hostage to its nuclear arsenal, saying that we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons any time we determine under any circumstances so that we have a broader definition of deterrence, meaning that we are deterring. But what are we deterring? You see, with a sole purpose declaration, we’re deterring a nuclear attack against us. But the current nuclear strategy is to deter something that is ambiguous in nature, meaning we haven’t precisely spelled it out. We’re leaving the world guessing. And what we’re saying is, don’t mess with us, or else we’ll nuke you.
This has nothing to do with China and Russia. China and Russia have nuclear weapons arsenals. Which would be covered under the sole purpose doctrine. But this is about blackmailing the world. But we can’t tell the world that we’re blackmailing it. We have to blame it on China and Russia. But there’s no linkage whatsoever between the nuclear posture, as published by the Biden administration, and the nuclear arsenals of China and Russia. If that was it, then we’d have a bold purpose doctrine.
Sputnik: What’s the reason for the West to escalate the nuclear rhetoric?
Scott Ritter: That’s a separate question, separate from the issue of the nuclear posture in the National Security Strategy. We have a current situation right now where Ukraine is losing this conflict. The West is recognizing that ultimately Ukraine will lose this conflict and that there’s nothing they can do to forestall this defeat. And so what they’ve done is they have created in terms of an information warfare, propaganda driven exercise, the threat of a Russian nuclear strike against Ukraine. It makes no sense. I think Vladimir Putin addressed this in his presentation to the Valdai conference, that it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about a Russian nuclear weapon used in Ukraine. There’s no reason for this. It’s not part of their doctrine. It isn’t going to happen.
But this isn’t about reality. This is about shaping perception. And so that’s where this nuclear crisis is coming from today – talks of a dirty bomb, talks of a Russian pre-emptive nuclear strike, President Zelensky begging NATO to carry out their own pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Russia, NATO holding an annual exercise that trains the use of the very weapons President Zelensky asked NATO to use against Russia. NATO should have cancelled that exercise or at least postponed it to a later date, but they didn’t. Russia has now responded with its own strategic nuclear exercise. Again, an annual exercise, this one testing not tactical nuclear weapons, but strategic nuclear weapons.
And people are trying to make a linkage between all of this. There isn’t. But this is where the heightened rhetoric and the heightened threat and the heightened crisis comes from. This is independent from the publication of the National Security Strategy. The National Security Strategy isn’t designed to do anything different than what past national security strategies have done, which is to put the world on notice that the United States has a nuclear weapons arsenal, that it will use any time it determines, whether or not the threat is nuclear in nature. We’re holding the world hostage, but we’ve been holding the world hostage for decades.
Sputnik: In the 2022 NPR, the Pentagon refuses to back away from the possibility of using nuclear weapons in response to “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks” – what were the reasons to obliterate main agreements in the sphere of strategic security?
Scott Ritter: This is not a new position by the Pentagon. This is actually a posture that emerged during the presidency of George W. Bush. That was the first time that this notion that we would use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear threat emerged.
The Obama administration talked about walking away from that, but it’s very difficult for presidents to disentangle their desires from the pressures of the establishment. And when we’re dealing with nuclear weapons and the issue of nuclear deterrence, the establishment is extraordinarily powerful because they can always say that you’re weakening. You can tell a president that you’re weakening America, you’re putting American lives at risk…………………………………………………………………………
We can never use these weapons, but why are we building them as if they are a viable tool? This is why disarmament is so much better, so much more logical, and ultimately has a more humanitarian basis and national security basis than the continued pursuit of a so-called nuclear deterrent. Disarmament is the only thing that will save mankind. Continuing to pursue a nuclear deterrent could very well be the end of mankind. https://sputniknews.com/20221029/us-holds-world-hostage-to-its-nukes-ex-american-intel-officer-says-1102824182.html
War and Regrets in Ukraine
The truth is Moscow’s redline concerning Ukrainian entry into NATO was always real. Eastern Ukraine and Crimea were always predominantly Russian in language, culture, history, and political orientation. Europe’s descent into economic oblivion this winter is also real, as is support for Russia’s cause in China and India and Moscow’s rising military strength.
Washington may regret its role in the war in Ukraine.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/war-and-regrets-in-ukraine/ Douglas Macgregor, Oct 19, 2022
Of the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger, former national security advisor and secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford, said, “We should never have been there.” Before long, Americans, even the politicians inside the Beltway, will reach the same conclusion about Washington’s Ukrainian proxy war against Russia.
No one in the White House, the Senate, or the House consciously set out to turn the proxy Ukrainian war with Moscow into a contest of “competitive societal collapse” between Russia and NATO. But here we are. No one imagined that the Biden administration and the bipartisan war party would drive Americans and Europeans into a political, military, and economic valley of death, from which there is no easy escape. Yet that is precisely what is happening.
For the moment, Washington remains blind to these developments. Whether in print, radio, television, or online, the narrative is clear: despite horrific losses—at least 400,000 Ukrainian battlefield casualties including 100,000 soldiers killed in action—Ukrainian forces are winning. Moreover, the narrative says, America’s financial and economic dominance will ultimately overwhelm the deceptively weak Russian economy.
The Ukrainian-victory narrative admittedly benefits hugely from Western media that actively “tune out” opposing views and depict Russia and its armed forces in the worst possible light. The fact that nearly half a century of the Cold War conditioned Americans to think the worst of Russians certainly helps.
Yet there is also a measure of “true faith” at work, a condition of national narcissism, inside the Beltway that believes Washington can control what happens thousands of miles away in Eastern Ukraine. The message resonates in Congress because it rests on a critical strategic assumption that American citizens have yet to challenge: that American national power is limitless and unconstrained—as though a series of strategic failures, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, never happened.
Given that American politicians are always more preoccupied by domestic affairs than foreign policy, members of Congress are quick to adopt the “true faith.” This faith explains why for the last eight years members thought a future war with Russia was a low-risk affair. Ukrainians would provide the cannon fodder and Washington would provide the expensive weaponry and munitions.
Predictably, Washington’s governing strategic principles are unchanged from previous U.S. interventions around the world. Muddle through: masses of soldiers—in this case Ukrainians advised by U.S. and allied officers—and huge infusions of cash, equipment, and technology can and will permanently alter strategic reality in America’s favor.
The stupefying air of self-righteousness the Biden administration assumes when it attacks erstwhile strategic partners such as Saudi Arabia or delivers moralizing lectures to Beijing’s leadership, or when its media surrogates express contempt for the Russian state, is downright dangerous. Political figures in Washington are ready to indulge any transgression if it is committed in the name of destroying Russia. They do not view U.S. foreign policy in the context of a larger strategy, nor do they comprehend Russia’s capacity to hurt the United States, a bizarre judgment of Russia’s actual military and economic potential.
The result is a toxic climate of ideological hatred making it hard to imagine a contemporary U.S. secretary of State ever signing an international agreement renouncing war as an instrument of U.S. national policy, as Secretary of State Frank Kellogg did in 1928. But as one of Shakespeare’s characters in the Merchant of Venice warned, “The truth will out.”
The ongoing buildup of 700,000 Russian forces with modern equipment in Western Russia, Eastern Ukraine and Belorussia is a direct consequence of Moscow’s decision to adopt an elastic, strategic defense of the territories it seized in the opening months of the war. It was a wise, though politically unpopular choice in Russia. Yet, the strategy has succeeded. Ukrainian losses have been catastrophic and by November, Russian Forces will be in a position to strike a knockout blow.
Today, there are rumors in the media that Kiev may be under pressure to launch more counterattacks against Russian defenses in Kherson (Southern Ukraine) before the midterm elections in November. At this point, expending what little remains of Ukraine’s life blood to expel Russian forces from Ukraine is hardly synonymous with the preservation of the Ukrainian state. It’s also doubtful that further sacrifices by Ukrainians will assist the Biden administration in the midterm elections.
The truth is Moscow’s redline concerning Ukrainian entry into NATO was always real. Eastern Ukraine and Crimea were always predominantly Russian in language, culture, history, and political orientation. Europe’s descent into economic oblivion this winter is also real, as is support for Russia’s cause in China and India and Moscow’s rising military strength.
In retrospect, it is easy to see how Congress was beguiled by the denizens of think tanks, lobbyists, and retired generals, who are, with few exceptions, people with a cocktail level of familiarity with high-end conventional warfare. Members of the House and Senate were urged to support dubious strategies for the use of American military assistance, including reckless scenarios for limited nuclear war with Russia or China.
For some reason, U.S. politicians have lost sight of the reality that any use of nuclear weapons would overwhelm the ends of all national policy.
USA’s new nuclear policies: first strike OK, “usable”weapons, nukes for Europe, for any purpose USA likes, and against non-nuclear nations.
Brandon’s “Usable Nukes” Are the Fast-Track to Jopocalypse MIKE WHITNEY • OCTOBER 31, 2022
“The Biden administration’s Nuclear Posture Review is, at heart, a terrifying document. It not only keeps the world on a path of increasing nuclear risk, in many ways it increases that risk. Citing rising threats from Russia and China, it argues that the only viable U.S. response is to rebuild the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal, maintain an array of dangerous Cold War-era nuclear policies, and threaten the first use of nuclear weapons in a variety of scenarios.” Stephen Young, Union of Concerned Scientists
Maybe you’re one of the millions of people who think the US would never use its nuclear weapons unless the threat of a nuclear attack was imminent.
Well, you’d be wrong, because according to the recently-released Nuclear Posture Review, the bar for using nukes has been significantly lowered. The new standard reads like this: (nukes can be used) “in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.”
“Defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies”??
That’s a pretty broad net, isn’t it? That could include anything from a serious threat to national security to an ordinary economic competitor. And that loosy-goosy definition appears to be just what the authors were looking for. The hardliners wanted to fundamentally change US nuclear doctrine so the conditions under which nukes could be used was greatly expanded. The obvious objective of this dramatic policy-shift is to eliminate any obstacle to the free and unfettered use of nuclear weapons. Which is precisely what the neocons have always wanted; a green light to Armageddon. Now they got what they wanted. Here are a few of the changes in policy that suggest that a full-blown nuclear war is no longer a remote possibility, but an increasingly likely prospect.
1– First-Strike Use: Biden refuses to rule out first-strike use of US nuclear weapons …in reversal of his campaign promise. This is from The Daily Mail:
“… on the campaign trail, Biden had vowed to switch to a ‘sole purpose’ doctrine, which maintains that the US would only use nuclear weapons to respond to another nation’s nuclear attack….
President Joe Biden is abandoning a campaign vow to alter longstanding US nuclear doctrine, and will instead embrace existing policy that reserves America’s right to use nukes in a first-strike scenario, according to multiple reports.” (Daily Mail)
2– Nuclear Escalation: The Biden team has accelerated the deployment of modernized U.S. B61 tactical nuclear weapons to NATO bases in Europe. (The B61-12 carries a lower yield nuclear warhead than earlier versions but is more accurate and can penetrate below ground.) This is from Reuters:
Russia said on Saturday that the accelerated deployment of modernised U.S. B61 tactical nuclear weapons at NATO bases in Europe would lower the “nuclear threshold” and that Russia would take the move into account in its military planning.
Amid the Ukraine crisis, Politico reported on Oct. 26 that the United States told a closed NATO meeting this month that it would accelerate the deployment of a modernised version of the B61, the B61-12, with the new weapons arriving at European bases in December, several months earlier than planned.
“We cannot ignore the plans to modernize nuclear weapons, those free-fall bombs that are in Europe,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told state RIA news agency. (Reuters)
3– ‘Tactical’ means ‘Usable’: Biden’s new regime of low-yield nukes (which can still blow up a city the size of New York.) are called “tactical” weapons because they are designed for use on the battlefield, which is to say, Biden no longer limits the use of nukes for national defense but also supports their use in conventional wars. (like Ukraine?) This is from Aljazeera:
“Tactical nuclear warheads were created to give military commanders more flexibility on the battlefield. In the mid-1950s, as more powerful thermonuclear bombs were being built and tested, military planners thought smaller weapons with a shorter range would be more useful in ‘tactical’ situations,” according to Al Jazeera’s defence analyst Alex Gatopoulos. (Aljazeera)
4– Fasttrack to Nuclear War: Biden’s New Euro-Nukes have lowered the threshold for nuclear war. This is from MSN:
Russia said on Saturday that the accelerated deployment of modernized US B61 tactical nuclear weapons at NATO bases in Europe would lower the “nuclear threshold” and that Russia would take the move into account in its military planning…
“The United States is modernizing them, increasing their accuracy and reducing the power of the nuclear charge, that is, they turn these weapons into ‘battlefield weapons’, thereby reducing the nuclear threshold,” Grushko said….
Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, said on Saturday on Telegram that the new B61 bombs had a “strategic significance” as Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons were in storage, yet these U.S. bombs would be just a short flight from Russia’s borders.
“We cannot ignore the plans to modernize nuclear weapons, those free-fall bombs that are in Europe,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told state RIA news agency. (MSM)
5– Increasing the Reasons for using Nukes: The Nuclear Posture Review abandons Biden’s promise to ensure that US nuclear weapons would be used for the “sole purpose” of deterring or responding to a nuclear attack. Instead, the NPR states that the US will consider the use of nuclear weapons “in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.”
Sole purpose could significantly reduce the risk of unintended escalation and increase the credibility of more flexible and realistic nonnuclear response options in a range of importance contingencies.” (Federation of American Scientists)
6– More Escalation: The US now reserves the right to use its nukes against non-nuclear weapon countries. This is from an article at Bloomberg News:
The Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy rejected limits on using nuclear weapons long championed by arms control advocates and in the past by President Joe Biden.
Citing burgeoning threats from China and Russia, the Defense Department said in the document released Thursday that “by the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.” In response, the US will “maintain a very high bar for nuclear employment” without ruling out using the weapons in retaliation to a non-nuclear strategic threat to the homeland, US forces abroad or allies.” (“Pentagon’s Strategy Won’t Rule Out Nuclear Use Against Non-Nuclear Threats”, Bloomberg)………………………………………………………………………….
The White House, the Pentagon and the entire US foreign policy establishment now march in lockstep behind the most fanatically-lethal defense policy in the nation’s 246-year history. The National Defense Strategy, the Nuclear Posture Review and the National Security Strategy all embrace the same reckless warmongering policy that will inevitably lead to mass annihilation and civilizational collapse. The doves and critical thinkers have all been removed from the foreign policy apparatus while the madmen and warhawks drag the world inexorably towards catastrophe. God help us. https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/brandons-usable-nukes-are-the-fast-track-to-jopocalypse/
Biden lost temper with Zelenskyy in June phone call when Ukrainian leader asked for more aid
Biden had barely finished telling Zelenskyy he’d just greenlighted another $1 billion in military assistance when the Ukrainian president started listing all the additional help he needed.
NBC News, Oct. 31, 2022, By Carol E. Lee, Courtney Kube and Dan De Luce
It’s become routine since Russia invaded Ukraine: President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speak by phone whenever the U.S. announces a new package of military assistance for Kyiv.
But a phone call between the two leaders in June played out differently from previous ones, according to four people familiar with the call. Biden had barely finished telling Zelenskyy he’d just greenlighted another $1 billion in U.S. military assistance for Ukraine when Zelenskyy started listing all the additional help he needed and wasn’t getting. Biden lost his temper, the people familiar with the call said. The American people were being quite generous, and his administration and the U.S. military were working hard to help Ukraine, he said, raising his voice, and Zelenskyy could show a little more gratitude.
Administration officials said Biden and Zelenskyy’s relationship has only improved since the June phone call, after which Zelenskyy made a statement praising the U.S. for its generous assistance. But the clash reflects Biden’s early awareness that both congressional and public support for sending billions of dollars to Ukraine could begin to fade. That moment has arrived just as the president prepares to ask Congress to greenlight even more money for Ukraine.
Biden now faces resistance from some Republicans and Democrats that wasn’t present when Congress approved previous Ukraine funds. The White House has discussed asking Congress for billions of dollars during the lame-duck legislative session after the midterm elections.
The White House hasn’t specified an amount publicly. Lawmakers and Ukraine lobbyists hope for $40 billion to $60 billion, and some officials familiar with the discussions expect the number to be roughly $50 billion.
A source familiar with the conversation said that Biden was direct with Zelenskyy about handling the issues in the appropriate military channels but that the exchange wasn’t heated or angry.
A spokesperson for the National Security Council declined to comment on the story.
A spokesperson for Zelenskyy didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Top U.S. officials warn there are no signs the war is ending any time soon.
Before the June 15 phone call, the president’s frustrations with Zelenskyy had been building for weeks, three people familiar with the call said. Biden and some of his top aides felt that the administration was doing as much as it could as quickly as it could but that Zelenskyy continued to focus publicly on only what wasn’t being done.
From Zelenskyy’s perspective — as well as that of some Eastern European governments and U.S. lawmakers from both parties — there has been repeated frustration that the Biden White House moves too slowly on weapons requests, initially hesitating to approve certain capabilities Ukraine requested most urgently, only to relent weeks or months later under pressure, according to two sources familiar with the Ukraine government’s view, congressional aides and two European officials……………………………………..
The proportion of Americans who are extremely or very concerned about Ukraine’s losing the war has dropped by 17 percentage points since May, from 55% to 38%, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted last month. And the proportion of Americans who say they’re not too concerned or not at all concerned about Russia’s winning was up from 16% to 26%, according to the survey.
The potential change in political will in the U.S. for continuing to send aid to Ukraine could upend how both the White House and Zelenskyy have approached the issue so far.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the Biden administration has been criticized for moving too cautiously. Now the president faces potential pushback from some Republican lawmakers and progressive Democrats that he’s providing too much aid.
The shifting dynamics on Capitol Hill also could force Zelenskyy’s team to rethink how it engages with Washington, as it has often tried to leverage its support in Congress to get more out of the White House. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/biden-lost-temper-zelenskyy-phone-call-ukraine-aid-rcna54592
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Pentagon Scraps Submarine Nuclear Cruise Missile Program
The United States’ newly declassified Nuclear Posture Review and its National Defense Strategy show that the U.S. government is intent on modernizing and updating its nuclear arsenal.
National Interest, by Caleb Larson, 31 Oct 22, The U.S. Department of Defense has decided to ax the sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, known as the SLCM-N, instead opting to refurbish current stockpiles of nuclear weapons and rely on the Trident, a submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missile.
A fact sheet for the recently-published nuclear posture review, which outlines the United States’ nuclear capabilities, described the future of the U.S. strategic deterrence arsenal…………………………………………………
For now, it seems the United States will not pursue a naval nuclear cruise missile but instead focus on modernizing and refurbishing the capabilities it already has. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/pentagon-scraps-submarine-nuclear-cruise-missile-program-205627
THE BIGGEST LIE – ADDICTED TO WAR – WHAT MOST AMERICAN PEOPLE DON’T KNOW and DON’T WANT TO KNOW
The mainstream media will never tell the truth about this, as they are owned by the very people and corporations who make huge profits from U.S. wars.
THE BIG LIE is so big and so complete in the United States. It’s like mass hypnosis. Like mass brainwashing. ……… Most Americans are taught to believe that we are The Good Guys. And once again, most people are not taught about the true nature of U.S. foreign policy
THE BIG LIE is so big and so complete in the United States. It’s like mass hypnosis. Like mass brainwashing. ……… Most Americans are taught to believe that we are The Good Guys. And once again, most people are not taught about the true nature of U.S. foreign policy
https://www.addictedtowar.com/the-big-lie, By Frank Dorrel – Publisher of ADDICTED To WAR: www.addictedtowar.com, 31 Oct 22,
What Is This BIG LIE – I Am Talking About? ………………..
Well, it’s not Donald Trump claiming that he won the 2020 election for President……….
I’m not talking about Climate Change/Global Warming.…. now heating faster than expected
I’m not talking about Systemic Racism in the United States.………. this terrible situation.
I’m not talking about The Prison Industrial Complex………… this sad story is not really a secret
I’m not talking about Poverty and Homelessness…………. very sad situation happening to millions of American people.
I’m not talking about COVID, the pandemic that has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American people in the last two years
THE BIG LIE
The BIG LIE I am talking about has to do with U.S. foreign policy and U.S. wars, both overt and covert. We are not told the truth about them or that the U.S. is a Global Empire that controls much of the World through force and power and threatens Third World countries, who are not willing to do as we say. Most American people do not know these things. Most do not believe these things are true. And most people are not willing to take a closer look at all of this.
I suggest you go to my website to see what I am talking about. Go to the Film Page: www.addictedtowar.com/films and watch as many of these important anti-war films as you can. They are all on YouTube and can be watched for free. Take as long as you need. I do not think you will find another list like this anywhere on the Internet. I have watched all of these films at least two or more times. Every one of them is very well done. Altogether, they reveal THE BIG LIE. These films are never aired on television. Not even on PBS.
Go to the Talks and Interviews Page: www.addictedtowar.com/talks-interviews – and watch and listen to as many of them as you can. The very first talk is by Martin Luther King Jr. It’s titled – BEYOND VIETNAM: A Time To Break Silence. Once again, take your time to watch these talks by these activists. They reveal the horrors our country has been committing all of these years with its many wars against innocent poor people around the World.
THE BIG LIE
I am talking about is what Martin Luther King Jr. said in his BEYOND VIETNAM Speech: “The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in The World Today, My Own Government.” The Military, the Oil Companies, the Corporations, the Weapon Makers, the Bankers, the Mainstream Media & the Politicians, also known as The Military-Industrial-Complex. They make war for profit and also to control the resources of the World. And WE, the PEOPLE are LIED to about this. One of their biggest weapons is propaganda. And they really know how to use it. It is a global battle of the rich versus the poor. And war is, for the most part, racist. We bomb, invade and kill mostly people of color.
Read this article by James Lucas titled: THE UNITED STATES HAS KILLED MORE THAN 20 MILLION PEOPLE IN 37 NATIONS SINCE WWII: https://popularresistance.org/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-in-37-nations-since-wwii
Read this article by Professor Larry Mosqueda of Evergreen State College titled: SHOCKED and HORRIFIED, written on September 15th, 2001: www.globalissues.org/article/257/shocked-and-horrified
The mainstream media will never tell the truth about this, as they are owned by the very people and corporations who make huge profits from U.S. wars. Most people in the government will not talk about or look at this. If they were to do so, they would become outcasts and pariahs, shunned by others in the government. And for the most part, people in the military will not look at or talk about these things. However, some have spoken out. And many of them are listed on my site. The one group that does look at this issue is the Anti-War Movement. We are part of the alternative media in this country. You can see who some of these organizations are by going to: www.addictedtowar.com/sources-and-websites . CovertAction DEMOCRACY NOW, is on this list.
There is an anti-war movement in this country. But it’s just not big enough to make much of a difference. Most people are not taught about these things in their schools, in their churches, or by their parents. And they won’t learn about THE BIG LIE by watching the mainstream news on television or by reading the mainstream newspapers.
HOW DID I LEARN ABOUT THE TRUE NATURE OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY?
I first started learning about all of this when I discovered KPFK 90.7 FM Radio in 1980. KPFK is part of the Pacifica Network: https://pacificanetwork.org – consisting of five radio stations in this country. They are KPFA in Berkeley, KPFK in Los Angeles, WBAI in New York, WPFW in Washington DC and KPFT in Houston. The first Pacifica station was KPFA in Berkeley. It was started in 1949 by Lou Hill, a man who refused to go to World War II. He wanted to have a station that was against war, dealt with social injustice and had no commercial sponsors so that the truth could be told. I discovered KPFK by chance. No one told me about it.
Read more: THE BIGGEST LIE – ADDICTED TO WAR – WHAT MOST AMERICAN PEOPLE DON’T KNOW and DON’T WANT TO KNOWI had a job as a driver for the University of Southern California. I drove about 200 miles a day. One day in 1980, I was turning the FM channels and heard Alan Watts talking on KPFK. He was an amazing storyteller, a philosopher of sorts, and very interesting to listen to. He was already dead when I started listening to him. So every Monday at 2:00 PM, I put on KPFK. Then one Monday, I left the station on and heard Noam Chomsky talking about U.S.-supported death squads in El Salvador.
That was the beginning for me. From that time on, I listened to KPFK as much as possible. I discovered many other truth-tellers on KPFK, talking about U.S. foreign policy, who you would never hear on the mainstream media. People like Howard Zinn, Ramsey Clark, Michael Parenti, Daniel Ellsberg, John Stockwell, Philip Agee, S. Brian Willson, Roy Bourgeois, Medea Benjamin, Kathy Kelly & many others. Then I discovered Blase Bonpane, who had his own weekly program on KPFK called WORLD FOCUS.
I began listening to Blase every week. Soon he became my mentor. The more I learned about what the U.S. had been doing with its foreign policy, the more upset I got. During the listener-sponsored fund-drives, I would order books and talks by these truth-tellers. Whenever they came to Los Angeles to speak, I would go to listen to them in person. I joined the Veterans For Peace group in Los Angeles and would go to their meetings. It was there that I met Tony Russo and learned so much about what he called THE U.S. WAR IN VIETNAM. Tony had been partners with Daniel Ellsberg in revealing The Pentagon Papers.
At that time, I was learning about what was happening in Nicaragua, with the U.S. supporting the Contra’s and the history of U.S. interventions there. The more I learned, the worse it got. I had no idea that my country, the United States, had been doing so many terrible things to innocent poor people all over the World. I went to hear John Stockwell at least three times. He had been a marine and was the CIA Station Chief in Angola. The stories he told about the atrocities the CIA had been committing around the World were absolutely chilling. You can hear him giving an amazing talk in 1989 here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmYZ_kWHk3Q .
It was on KPFK that I first heard about S. Brian Willson, as he and three other veterans began their VETERANS FAST FOR LIFE on the Capitol Steps in Washington DC in 1986. They were protesting U.S. foreign policy in Central America; in Nicaragua,
El Salvador and Guatemala. They fasted for something like 40 days and got a lot of attention all over the country through the Pacifica Network and the anti-war movement. I sent them a $100 donation and a letter of support. And I went on a march supporting these four veterans, S. Brian Willson, Charlie Liteky, Duncan Murphy and George Mizo – in Downtown Los Angeles and marched with a big crowd, right behind Jackson Browne and Kris Kristofferson.
On September 1st, 1987, I heard Blase Bonpane say on KPFK that Brian Willson had been run over at The Concord Naval Weapons Station in Northern California by a train that was carrying weapons to be shipped to Central America and used to kill innocent people there. Brian lost both legs but survived the attack. One year later, he came to Los Angeles to give a talk, which I heard about on KPFK. I went to hear him and my life was changed forever. To this day, I have never heard anyone speak quite like Brian did that night. He was so clear with his message against the U.S. war in Vietnam. I’ll never forget one thing he said: “How could I have gone 10,000 miles across the ocean to take part in killing people I did not know anything about”. Brian had been a believer in that war. He was a conservative republican, an anti-communist and an All-American young man. But he had his epiphany when he witnessed a fishing village in Vietnam that we had bombed & napalmed. He was sent to inspect the success of this mission. He saw maybe 100 people, all of them dead or dying. No soldiers. No weapons. Only women, children and a few older men. He went to four other villages that week and observed the same thing. We were killing villagers and reporting that they were V.C. or Viet Cong. Brian started to speak out against what he had witnessed and soon he was sent back to the States. Some years later, he became a full-time anti-war activist. Brian’s mantra is: We Are Not Worth More. They Are Not Worth Less.
Everything that Brian writes about on his website is well worth reading: www.brianwillson.com . You can watch Brian at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ_cO1wC0yI – An excellent film about Brian titled: “PAYING THE PRICE FOR PEACE: The Story of S. Brian Willson” – can be rented or bought at: www.addictedtowar.com/about-paying-the-price . I was the associate producer on this amazing film. Brian is the last segment in my film: “What I’ve Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy: The War Against The 3rd World.” If you have never seen my film, please take the time to watch it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gMGhrkoncA . And once again, watch the films on The Film Page and the talks on The Talks & Interviews Page. In doing so, you could earn what would be like the equivalent of a PH.D in: The True History of U.S. Foreign Policy.
There is also the Book Page, which lists over 90 excellent books you can read, most on the topic of U.S. Foreign Policy: www.addictedtowar.com/books .
HOW DO THEY GET AWAY WITH ALL OF THIS? WHY MOST PEOPLE CAN’T SEE THESE TRUTHS?
Here is why I believe that most Americans cannot and will not see these truths that I have been talking about. THE BIG LIE is so big and so complete in the United States. It’s like mass hypnosis. Like mass brainwashing. Like something out of Orwell’s book 1984. I believe the biggest tool for brainwashing is the television set that we watch. Most Americans are taught to believe that we are The Good Guys. And once again, most people are not taught about the true nature of U.S. foreign policy in their schools, in their churches or by their parents. And they won’t learn about THE BIG LIE by watching the mainstream news on television or by reading the mainstream newspapers.
I Think The Following Is A Very Important Point In All of This!
Many people have lived a pretty good life here in the United States. They have had a lot of freedom and have been given a lot of opportunity to do what they want, to go for their own special dreams. Not everyone gets there, but at least, many have had that chance. This doesn’t necessarily happen if you are Black or Latinx or Native American or poor. And many people have had various problems fitting in our society and end up unhappy and discontented. But this is America. The Land of The Free and The Home of The Brave. There are so many things here that people appreciate. This is certainly true in my case. And many people have come here from other countries in order to have a better life. And ironically, many of these people have come from some of the very countries we have attacked and invaded. We have had it good here compared to them.
But do these facts make it OK to have a foreign policy that has literally killed millions of innocent people and ruined the lives of many millions more, all for lies?
We are told that our military goes into other countries to help the people and bring freedom and democracy. But of course, that is not what has been happening with our foreign policy. How do you help people when you invade them, drop bombs on them, send in drones to kill them, place sanctions on them and support dictators who oppress them. Most Americans do not want to believe or accept that our country has been doing these horrendous things and still is. And the policies of the U.S. also has ruined the lives of millions more people all over the World. This is not what most American’s believe. It’s much easier being ignorant than it is to realize that this is happening and has been happening all along.
For those of us who have come to understand these things, it is not easy, as we learn that others do not want us to tell them about this or to try to educate them about this. And since the vast majority of Americans do not know or believe these things, it’s very easy to dismiss those of us who do, calling us crazy or conspiracy theorists, without ever looking at the evidence we have to show them. I cannot tell you how many friends I have had in my life who are no longer my friends. Many will not call me back or respond to emails I have sent them about this. It is an amazing thing to experience. After over 40 years of being an activist, I do understand why people do not want to know. It’s just too painful to know. It’s simply easier not to know. Life can be hard. Life can be difficult. And it certainly is now with all that we are dealing with. But life is so much easier not having to deal with the information I have been talking about. However, by denying these truths, we unknowingly support the deaths and destruction of millions.
I do want to say that most of the people who have been involved, in one way or another, in carrying out these barbarous acts committed by the U.S. are not necessarily lying. For the most part, they are simply following orders. The soldiers follow orders. The politicians go along with what they are told. And the reporters in the mainstream media don’t really do true journalism. They get their stories from the State Department, the CIA or other government sources. They don’t investigate on their own to see if these stories are really true or not. The victims of U.S. foreign policy are in other countries, out of sight, out of mind. And the people I have just mentioned will not look at the information we in the anti-war movement try to give them. So the terrible, horrible and unbelievable things our country does happens because we live THE BIG LIE here in the United States.
I want to close with something important that Blase Bonpane said back in 2009. He said:
“The reason he did his anti-war work was because he wanted to stop his country (United States) from killing millions of innocent people all over the world”.
What Blase said is the very same reason why I have been doing my anti-war work all of these years. Blase was loved and respected by so many people. He died in 2019.
And I also want to thank all of the Truth-Tellers and Anti-War Activists I have mentioned in this article and who are on my website – for being my teachers, and for continuing to do this important work. The question is how can we reach enough people to change from being a war-like country to a Peace-Like country? Peace means that we help people in other countries and in our own country. We do not invade them, we do not bomb them, we do not starve them and we do not kill them.
You can read the 2004 edition of ADDICTED To WAR: www.addictedtowar.com/read-book . The 2015 edition can be purchased here: www.addictedtowar.com/store . ADDICTED To WAR is a book that most everyone (12 years and older) can read and understand. Hundreds of high school teachers and college professors have used it in their classrooms. We need to have more teachers and professors using it. When I was in high school, a book like ADDICTED To WAR could never have been used in class at all. I have read it every year since we first published it in 2002. I always think what a fantastic, one-of-a-kind book ADDICTED To WAR is.
In 2000, I put together my film compilation titled: “WHAT I’VE LEARNED ABOUT U.S. FOREIGN POLICY: The War Against The Third World.” I updated it in 2015, adding three new segments.
It can be seen here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gMGhrkoncA – If you have not seen it, please do.
Publisher: ADDICTED To WAR
Associate Producer: PAYING THE PRICE FOR PEACE: The Story of S. Brian Willson
Producer: What I’ve Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy:
Member: Veterans For Peace
310-838-8131
All at Once Mainstream Pundits Push for WW III
When they’re not arguing that World War Three is coming and we must all prepare to fight it and win, they’re arguing that a global conflict is already upon us and we must begin acting like it, as in last month’s New Yorker piece “What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia?”
These Beltway swamp monster pontifications are directed not just at the general public but at government policymakers and strategists as well, and it should disturb us all that their audiences are being encouraged to view a global conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some kind of natural disaster that people don’t have any control over.
Every measure should be taken to avoid a world war in the nuclear age. If it looks like that’s where we’re headed, the answer is not to ramp up weapons production and create entire industries dedicated to making it happen, the answer is diplomacy, de-escalation and detente.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/10/28/all-at-once-mainstream-pundits-push-for-ww-iii/ October 28, 2022, Caitlin Johnstone says it should disturb everyone in the nuclear age that writers at influential publications frame the rise of a multipolar world as something that must inevitably bring on unspeakable violence and human suffering.
Mainstream punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the U.S. needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they frame it as something that happens to the U.S. as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it.
As though it would not be the direct result of the U.S.-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar, planetary domination.
The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that is owned and operated by the supremely influential think tank the Council on Foreign Relations.
“The United States and its allies must plan for how to simultaneously win wars in Asia and Europe, as unpalatable as the prospect may seem,” writes Thomas G. Mahnken, adding that in some ways “the United States and its allies will have an advantage in any simultaneous war” on those two continents.
Mahnken doesn’t claim a world war against Russia and China would be a walk in the park; he also argues that in order to win such a war the U.S. will need to — you guessed it — drastically increase its military spending.
“The United States clearly needs to increase its defense manufacturing capacity and speed,” Mahnken writes. “In the short term, that involves adding shifts to existing factories. With more time, it involves expanding factories and opening new production lines. To do both, Congress will have to act now to allocate more money to increase manufacturing.”
But exploding U.S. weapons spending is still inadequate, Mahnken argues, saying that “the United States should work with its allies to increase their military production and the size of their weapons and munitions stockpiles” as well.
Mahnken says this world war could be sparked “if China initiated a military operation to take Taiwan, forcing the United States and its allies to respond,” as though there would be no other options on the table besides launching into nuclear-age World War Three to defend an island next to the Chinese mainland that calls itself the Republic of China.
He writes that “Moscow, meanwhile, could decide that with the United States bogged down in the western Pacific, it could get away with invading more of Europe,” demonstrating the bizarre Schrödinger’s cat Western propaganda paradox that Putin is always simultaneously (A) getting destroyed and humiliated in Ukraine and (B) on the cusp of waging hot war with NATO.
Again, this is just the latest in an increasingly common genre of mainstream Western punditry.
In “The skeptics are wrong: The U.S. can confront both China and Russia,” The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin wags his finger at Democrats who think aggressions against Russia should be prioritized and Republicans who think that military and financial attention should be devoted to China, arguing por que no los dos? (Why not both?}
In “Could The U.S. Military Fight Russia And China At The Same Time?“, 19FortyFive’s Robert Farley answers in the affirmative, writing that “the immense fighting power of the U.S. armed forces would not be inordinately strained by the need to wage war in both theaters” concluding that “the United States can fight both Russia and China at once… for a while, and with the help of some friends.”
In “Can the U.S. Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?” Bloomberg’s Hal Brands answers that it would be very difficult and recommends escalating in Ukraine and Taiwan and selling Israel more advanced weaponry to get a step ahead of Russia, China and Iran respectively.
In “International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming,” the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig writes for Foreign Policy that a global democracies-versus-autocracies showdown is coming “with the United States and its status quo-oriented democratic allies in NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia on one side and the revisionist autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran on the other,” and that aspiring foreign policy experts should adjust their expectations accordingly.
When they’re not arguing that World War Three is coming and we must all prepare to fight it and win, they’re arguing that a global conflict is already upon us and we must begin acting like it, as in last month’s New Yorker piece “What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia?”
These Beltway swamp monster pontifications are directed not just at the general public but at government policymakers and strategists as well, and it should disturb us all that their audiences are being encouraged to view a global conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some kind of natural disaster that people don’t have any control over.
Every measure should be taken to avoid a world war in the nuclear age. If it looks like that’s where we’re headed, the answer is not to ramp up weapons production and create entire industries dedicated to making it happen, the answer is diplomacy, de-escalation and detente.
These pundits frame the rise of a multipolar world as something that must inevitably be accompanied by an explosion of violence and human suffering, when in reality we’d only wind up there as a result of decisions that were made by thinking human beings on both sides.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no omnipotent deity decreeing from on high that we must live in a world where governments brandish Armageddon weapons at each other and humanity must either submit to Washington or resign itself to cataclysmic violence of planetary consequence. We could just have a world where the peoples of all nations get along with each other and work together toward the common good rather than working to dominate and subjugate each other.
As Jeffrey Sachs recently put it, “The single biggest mistake of President Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”
We could have a world where our energy and resources go toward increasing human thriving and learning to collaborate with this fragile biosphere we evolved in. Where all our scientific innovation is directed toward making this planet a better place to live instead of channeling it into getting rich and finding new ways to explode human bodies.
Where our old models of competition and exploitation give way to systems of collaboration and care. Where poverty, toil and misery gradually move from accepted norms of human existence to dimly remembered historical record.
Instead we’re getting a world where we’re being hammered harder and harder with propaganda encouraging us to accept global conflict as an unavoidable reality, where politicians who voice even the mildest support for diplomacy are shouted down and demonized until they bow to the gods of war, where nuclear brinkmanship is framed as safety and de-escalation is branded as reckless endangerment.
We don’t have to submit to this. We don’t have to keep sleepwalking into dystopia and Armageddon to the beat of manipulative sociopaths. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and we’ve got a whole lot more at stake here than they do.
We can have a healthy world. We’ve just got to want it badly enough. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because, ultimately, they absolutely do require it.
A failure to review America’s nuclear posture
By Joe Cirincione | October 28, 2022
The question is complicated by a process that gives those most interested in continuing nuclear programs the authority to write the policy governing these weapons.
The Pentagon controls the pen
https://thebulletin.org/2022/10/a-failure-to-review-americas-nuclear-posture/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter10312022&utm_content=NuclearRisk_FailureToReview_10282022#post-heading—By Joe Cirincione | October 28, 2022,
President Joe Biden has passed on his best chance to operationalize his stated goal of reducing the role in US security policy of America’s more than 5,400 nuclear weapons with the public release on October 27 of the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).
Biden is now the 14th president over eight decades to attempt to reconcile the risks that derive from nuclear deployments with the demands of deterrence. He has discovered how difficult this can be.
Biden’s NPR adjusts nuclear policy and programs at the margins while making no significant changes to the Pentagon’s budgets and deployments. It endorsed dozens of nuclear-weapons programs that will cost an estimated $634 billion over this decade, according to a May 2021 assessment from the Congressional Budget Office. Including in that estimate missile defense programs, weapons programs added after the Congress report and expected inflation could bring the cost to almost $1 trillion per decade for several decades to come.
This includes proceeding with a new land-based, long-range missile rushed toward production in the last months of the Trump administration without examining less expensive and less dangerous alternatives to its production. That project alone could cost $264 billion overall.
This failure is not unique to Biden. Every president in the nuclear age has struggled to control the weapons supposedly under his sole authority. Primarily this is because US nuclear posture is not a rational response to an external threat environment. It is driven by those who see nuclear superiority as a tool of global power, those who use nuclear security as a wedge issue in partisan politics, and by those powerful arms corporations that realize vast profits from manufacturing, marketing, and maintaining these deadly arsenals
The question is complicated by a process that gives those most interested in continuing nuclear programs the authority to write the policy governing these weapons. The Pentagon controls the pen. Biden appears to have concluded that it is too costly in political terms to fight for his views, which included repeated statements that the United States has no need to ever use a nuclear weapon first. He has let the Pentagon dictate his strategy rather than challenge a bureaucracy resisting any alteration of current programs and doctrine.
Elsewhere, I have detailed how a safer, more rational nuclear policy could have included, among other steps, reducing the number of deployed strategic warheads by one-third, to about 1,000, taking nuclear-armed missiles off hair-trigger alert, embracing no first use or sole purpose doctrines, and requiring an additional senior official to authorize launch. Pacts such as AUKUS that encourage the spread of nuclear weapons technology must also be rethought.
But consideration of these and other steps were effective excluded early in the process when the Defense Department fired then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Leanor Tomero, whom Biden had placed in charge of nuclear and missile defense policy and who had been pressing, following Biden’s presidential guidance, for consideration of some of the alternatives. According to knowledgeable sources, Pentagon staff complained to Republican staff on the Senate Armed Services Committee that Tomero wasn’t sufficiently supportive of “nuclear modernization” – the euphemism for the mountain of contracts that drive the nuclear posture.
Tomero was an early casualty of an entrenched nuclear bureaucracy fiercely protective of its contracts, secrecy, and privilege . As American University Professor Sharon Weiner wrote: “The nuclear weapons establishment will limit choice by presenting everything as an interlocking set of military requirements instead of multiple options for meeting deterrence goals.” She was right.
As Weiner predicted and the NPR reflects, “These options will likely allow, at best, only narrow deviations from the status quo.”
President Bill Clinton was the first to issue an NPR in 1994; Biden should be the last. Policy should flow from the White House to executing departments, not the reverse. Let this be the end of a flawed, inadequate, and dangerous nuclear posture review process.
Western military-industrial corporate-media show only the NATO-USA war-mongering side of the news
it’s long been sickeningly obvious that our mainstream media show one side of the story: the NATO, Washington, imperial, war-mongering side.
The Military-Industrial Media Complex Strikes Again https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/28/the-military-industrial-media-complex-strikes-again/ BY EVE OTTENBERG 28 Oct 22, Tens of thousands protested against the skyrocketing cost of living and against Macron in France October 16, led by left-wing politician Jean Luc Melenchon, but there were few front page or top-of-the hour headlines in the U.S. Huge protests occurred in Rome the same day to demand an end to Italy’s involvement in NATO, but no coverage on the west side of the Atlantic. Thousands protesting in Paris October 22 against NATO, but little notice in North America. Massive protests against NATO and inflation due to sanctions on Russian energy in France, Germany and Austria in September, but little news of it here in the heart of the empire. German police beat citizens protesting energy shortages and record-high inflation, both due to Russia sanctions, the week of October 17, but that was not covered in the USA. Seventy thousand Czechs protested in Prague September 3 against NATO involvement in Ukraine, demanding gas from Russia (before some mysterious imperial somebody with means and motive blew up Nordstream 1 and 2, probably to nip the political effects of those protests in the bud) and ending the war, but that got little coverage in U.S. corporate media.
Ever get the sense there are things our media hides from us? Hmm. Ever wonder why enormous protests against the policies of the Exceptional Empire and its attack dog, NATO, seem, um, to be downplayed? Ever think our corporate news outlets behave more like the propaganda arm of our neoconservative state department and military than a free press? Well, if so, you may be onto something.
Lots of Europeans are unhappy about NATO, the Ukraine war, sanctions on Russia and the wild inflation and deindustrialization – which will result in gargantuan unemployment – those sanctions caused. As their living standards sink like stones, Europeans know who is to blame, namely their supposedly great ally across the Atlantic, and many have soured on their so-called alliance with the hegemon. But Washington doesn’t seem to care. Let the Europeans go broke and protest. The important thing is not reporting this news to the American people, who, if they heard about it, might get a subversive inkling that their government had not behaved in an entirely honorable manner.
Meanwhile lies swarm everywhere. Some unintentional, others not. Most recently we have U.S. joint chiefs of staff chairman Mark Milley claiming that if Ukraine falls, the current world order will collapse. Sadly, this is hogwash. What will collapse are the tumescent egos of U.S. and European politicos and military men. Not surprisingly, they conflate that with the world order. But there are other, far more sinister reasons to make such garishly incendiary pronouncements, namely to prepare the American population for the unthinkable – and it is unthinkable, because if the U.S. attacks Russia with nukes, both the U.S. and Russia will be annihilated. Will Biden and his generals get a nuclear war? Unclear. But what’s clear as day is that Americans travel like lemmings to their doom, thanks to the fibs of their rulers and media.
Somehow all the big news gets blacked out. Like China dumping $100 billion worth of U.S. treasuries and what that means if this becomes a trend (I’ll tell you what it means: we’re $30 trillion in debt and we can’t pay, so when we cart SUVs full of cash to the supermarket, we’ll make those Weimar wheelbarrows look petite). Or how sanctions on Russian energy backfired and caused ruinous inflation in Europe, pretty awful inflation here in the U.S. and pushed the whole west toward recession…or maybe ultimately depression. Or how Biden’s ever more reckless sanctions on China could wind up bankrupting us all. China is, after all the chief U.S. trading partner. Sanction China, as Biden recently did to its chip and semiconductor sector, and prices for everything explode upwards.
But money isn’t everything. What about Biden’s devil-may-care attitude toward continued human life on this planet, which he endangers every time he opens his mouth to bloviate that the U.S. will throw its military into the fray, should Taiwan and China go to war? True, Biden’s bellicose pronunciamentos do make the news – he is, after all, the ruler of one of the most violent empires in human history – but details of their global life-and-death implications, namely that they could kill us all? Not so much.
No, this news is not of interest to the editorial bigwigs who tell us what to think. They’re too busy stuffing our heads with bubble gum for the brain like rubbish about Tik Tok, or celebrity drivel or anything else deeply stupid enough to cretinize viewers and readers, so they won’t notice that their utility bills doubled in recent months, or their grocery bills shot up many percentage points, or the world is closer to being incinerated in a nuclear apocalypse than it has ever been.
But they notice anyway. And even though they may lack the finely tuned mental framework to fit it all together, thanks to their news consumption habits, lots of people have begun to glimpse that Washington’s idiocy could get them blown up tout de suite and meanwhile is bleeding them dry and will very soon be bleeding them drier. Hence the public’s growing reluctance to keep handing Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, blank checks. The GOP even climbed onto the bandwagon and announced it won’t fund this misbegotten war if it regains congress. I, for one, will be astonished if Republicans have the backbone to keep that promise. Anyway, Biden plans to preempt this oath by forking over more billions to Kiev now. This will not, ahem, help the Dems, which is probably what Republicans count on. But then Biden gets to look like he’s a man of principle (the show must go on), while the rest of us go broke and calculate our distance from atomic ground zero. Americans struggle with utility bills, grocery and gas prices, medical and educational debt. They don’t need to fund defense contractors to the tune of billions of dollars so Ukrainians and Russians can kill each other halfway around the world. And they certainly don’t need a war that has humanity teetering on the brink of nuclear Armageddon.
In an unexpected dribble of good news, on October 24 the Washington Post reported that some 30 members of the progressive caucus urged Biden to get diplomacy to end the war rolling. The next day, they sniveled and recanted. This was the first time any Dems had the guts not to cheerlead for more bloodshed and more war on Moscow. What caused this initial sea change, I don’t know. But it was good news. Better late than never, it seemed. It appeared to mean some on the so-called left in Washington had finally come to their senses and just might not behave as disgracefully as so many European socialists did once World War I started, when they abandoned their erstwhile pacifism. For a long time, honestly, it has looked like that was the inheritance Dem progressives wanted to claim, an inheritance not just of shame and mass murder, but, were the Ukraine war to morph into World War III, human extinction.
For less than a day the sun of reason and goodness shone down. Briefly, the people who consider themselves of the left decided this danger of humanity’s mass execution was worth speaking out about and that diplomacy for peace is the only sane route out of the fiasco. But then, the next day they chickened out of bucking their party’s bloodlust. Even their timid gesture was too much to ask. These people are not leftists. They are cowards. They are a disgrace to the left. If anyone in the progressive caucus ever speaks out for diplomacy again, I’ll be very impressed.
Speaking of being impressed, how about that Washington Post actually playing this story big, about progressives calling for diplomacy, instead of burying it? That was unexpected, to say the least. Because it’s long been sickeningly obvious that our mainstream media show one side of the story: the NATO, Washington, imperial, war-mongering side. And it’s been doing that, shamelessly, for a generation. (It did that earlier too, but with a bit of actual embarrassment, whenever it got called out.) Remember Iraq’s infamous weapons of mass destruction? The editors who hyped that lie for months on end went on to bigger and better things, and so did the politicians – Biden even became president! – while an entire country, Iraq, was bombed to smithereens, based largely on mendacious reporting and political chicanery and now, decades later, has simply
swirled down the drain.
And who can forget the frenzy whipped up to justify NATO’s criminal 1999 bombing of Serbia? Nowadays Biden and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg would have you believe NATO is a “defensive” organization. What it did to Serbia should have tossed that mistake in the trash long ago. Instead, the error persists (not accidentally). When Russia reacted to the chance of Ukraine joining NATO and thus the presence of a hostile bomb-happy axis on its borders, western rulers protested that NATO is “defensive.”
So also clamor our media, prevaricating just as they do every time they mention the U.S. defense department, which should ditch that moniker and return to the previous, more honest “war department.”
You know things are bad when absurd chuckleheads like former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi are the ones almost nailing reality on the head. He did that October 20 with his remarks that Ukraine provoked Russia into its invasion. It could be argued that Kiev did so by slaughtering 14,000 Russian-speakers in the Donbass since 2014 and then, last winter, massing huge numbers of troops on that region’s border, in preparation for what Moscow took to be a genocide.
But actually, Ukraine’s supposed instigation had lotsa help. It would have been more accurate for Berlusconi to say that Ukraine’s puppet master, the U.S., provoked Moscow with its nonstop incitement by expanding NATO eastward since the Soviet Union’s fall, as numerous American experts and diplomats – from cold war brain-trust luminary George Kennan to former ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock to CIA chief William Burns to great powers expert John Mearsheimer, and others – had warned, and more recently egged Moscow to attack with a 2014 Kiev coup and the eight years of violent nonsense that followed, and that Washington did so with premeditation to rupture the economic relationship between Russia and Europe; but nonetheless Berlusconi landed his verbal dart on the board with the bullseye. And when you have to go to Berlusconi for informed commentary, you’re in trouble, because he recently chose his side in the Italian government and it was the fascist one. So now things are so bad that fascists are among the people objecting to imperial propaganda. Fun times.
But we have the same disastrous mess here in the U.S., where the next presidential election could shape up to be a choice between Trump’s fascism or Biden’s nuclear war. Choice? Ho, ho. That’s no choice. That’s death on the installment plan or instant death. Either way it’s disastrous for ordinary people, because Trumpism either ends what civilization we have in America, which has a dire, global because imperial impact, or Bidenism directly ends civilization on earth.
At the start of the Ukraine war, Biden promised not to launch World War III. He broke that promise, by flooding Ukraine with weapons, CIA operatives and some special forces. To call this reckless is an understatement. Biden’s refusal to use his considerable weight to promote peace negotiations killed thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, will likely kill many more, and also endangers the lives of billions of other people, worldwide – 5.3 billion from nuclear-winter-induced starvation, who would suffer a slow, agonizing death. And I’m not talking about the canard that Russia may use a low-yield nuclear device on the battlefield. I’m talking about Moscow and Washington determining that they really are in a hot war and the long-range, high-yield nuclear missiles that could then begin to fly.
Biden’s sole task is to prevent this. His desire to be seen as the new FDR, as a friend of the unions, as some sort of social democrat, mean nothing if he can’t deescalate this war with Moscow. If Biden wants any legacy other than that of earth’s destroyer, leaving humanity a cold, charred, radioactive planet, he will stop his war-mongering garbage at once and throw his definitive, presidential heft behind peace negotiations with Moscow. And Washington must be an in-person party to those negotiations. Absent that, anything else he does goes down in history, if there even is a history, as a waste.
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Hope Deferred. She can be reached at her website.
Dennis Kucinich: Where Are the Pro-Peace Democrats?
https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2022/10/30/dennis-kucinich-where-are-the-pro-peace-demby Aaron Maté Posted on From The Grayzone: Pushback with Aaron Maté
Dennis Kucinich on the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ Ukraine letter debacle and how to revive the US peace movement at a time when elected progressives are afraid to take a stand against war.
Dennis Kucinich, who led Congressional opposition to the Iraq war, reacts to the Congressional Progressive Caucus retracting a letter calling for diplomacy with Russia. “If we don’t believe in diplomacy,” Kucinich asks, “then where do we go as a country?”.
Dennis Kucinich is a former Congressmember (D-Ohio) and former Mayor of Cleveland.
Talk World Radio: Dennis Kucinich: Democrats Should Not Make Support for War a Test of Party Loyalty
Cuban missile crisis, 60 years on: new papers reveal how close the world came to nuclear disaster
In 1962, a Soviet submarine commander nearly ordered a nuclear launch, newly translated accounts show, with modern parallels over Ukraine all too clear
Guardian, Julian Borger in Washington 27 Oct 2022
The commander of a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine panicked and came close to launching a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago, after being blinded and disoriented by aggressive US tactics, according to newly translated documents.
Many nuclear historians agree that 27 October 1962, known as “Black Saturday”, was the closest the world came to nuclear catastrophe, as US forces enforced a blockade of Cuba to stop deliveries of Soviet missiles. On the same day a U-2 spy plane was shot down over the island, and another went missing over Siberia when the pilot lost his way.
Six decades on from the “world’s most dangerous day”, last week’s revelation that a Russian warplane fired a missile near a British Rivet Joint surveillance plane over the Black Sea has once more heightened concerns that miscalculation or accident could trigger uncontrolled escalation.
In October 1962, the US sent its anti-submarine forces to hunt down Soviet submarines trying to slip through the “quarantine” imposed on Cuba. The most perilous moment came when one of those submarines, B-59, was forced to surface late at night in the Sargasso Sea to recharge its batteries and found itself surrounded by US destroyers and anti-submarine planes circling overhead.
In a newly translated account, one of the senior officers on board, Captain Second Class Vasily Arkhipov, described the scene……………………………………………………………
In his account, Arkhipov played down his role and how close the B-59 submarine commander, Savitsky, came to launching the submarine’s one nuclear-tipped torpedo. However, Svetlana Savranskaya, the director of the National Security Archive’s Russian programmes, interviewed another submarine commander from the same brigade, Ryurik Ketov, who said Savitsky was convinced they were under attack and that the war with the US had started.
The commander panicked, calling for an “urgent dive” and for the number one torpedo with the nuclear warhead to be prepared. However, because the signalling officer was in the way, Savitsky could not immediately get down the narrow stairway through the conning tower, and during those few moments of hesitation, Arkhipov realised that the US forces were signalling rather than attacking, and deliberately firing off to the side of the submarine.
“He called to Savitsky and said: ‘calm down, look they are signalling, not attacking, let’s signal back.’ Savitsky turned back, saw the situation, ordered the signalling officer to signal back,” Savranskaya said. She added that two other officers would have had to confirm any order from Savitsky before the nuclear torpedo could have been launched.
Tom Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, said the aggressive tactics used by the American submarine hunters contributed to the close shave…………………………………………….
Saved ‘primarily because of luck’
The B-59 incident was just one of a cascade of crises that day. A U-2 went missing over Siberia when the pilot lost his bearings, blinded by the aurora borealis and misled by compass malfunction close to the north pole.
Some F-102 interceptor jets were scrambled to protect the U-2, but the joint chiefs of staff who gave the order for their launch were not aware they had been armed with nuclear missiles as a matter of course once the alert level was raised to Defcon 2.
Minutes later, the joint chiefs heard that another U-2 had been shot down over Cuba and assumed it was a deliberate escalation by Moscow. In fact, the order had been given independently by two Soviet generals in Cuba. The joint chiefs were also unaware that there were 80 nuclear warheads on the missiles already in Cuba when they gave their recommendation for the US to carry out airstrikes and then an invasion of Cuba.
The recommendation was overruled by president John Kennedy, as negotiations with Soviet representatives, some of them in a Washington Chinese restaurant, were making progress, leading ultimately to the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba while US missiles were pulled back from Turkey.
Tom Collina, the director of policy at the Ploughshares Fund, a disarmament advocacy group, said Black Saturday “reminds us that the reason we’ve gotten out of things like that in the past is primarily because of luck”.
“We had some good management, we had some good thinkers,” Collina, co-author of The Button, a book on the nuclear arms race, said. “But basically, we got lucky in the closest situations where we could have gotten involved in nuclear war.”……………………………..
“The lesson we should have learned in 1962 is that humans are fallible, and we should not combine crises with fallible humans with nuclear weapons,” Collina said. “Yet here we are again.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/27/cuban-missile-crisis-60-years-on-new-papers-reveal-how-close-the-world-came-to-nuclear-disaster
Biden to scrap Trump missile project but critics attack US ‘nuclear overkill’
Arms control advocates say changes from Trump era outlined in Nuclear Posture Review do not go far enough
Guardian, Julian Borger , 28 Oct 22,
The Biden administration has confirmed it will cancel a submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile programme begun by Donald Trump, as part of its review of nuclear policy.
The administration will also retire a gravity bomb, the B83-1, from its arsenal as part of its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), but arms control advocates argued the changes from the Trump era did not go far enough.
The administration is retaining another weapon variant introduced by Trump, a low-yield warhead called the W76-2, intended to deter an adversary like Russia using a low-yield weapon. The Democratic party manifesto in 2020 had called the W76-2 “unnecessary, wasteful, and indefensible”……………………..
Jon Wolfsthal, who was special assistant to Barack Obama on arms control and nonproliferation issues, expressed disappointment in the Biden NPR.
“The world is a dangerous place and our allies and we still rely on nuclear deterrence but this document ignores the role the US can play to make nukes less usable, less likely,” Wolfsthal said on Twitter……………………………………
In response to the NPR, Jessica Sleight, partner for policy at Global Zero, a disarmament advocacy group, said: “Contrary to President Biden’s stated intentions to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, this Nuclear Posture Review continues decades of nuclear overkill, doubles down on needless weapons programs, and fails to advance overdue reforms to policy and posture that would make the United States, its allies, and the world safer.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/27/biden-trump-missile-nuclear-posture-review
1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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