Washington Is Beating The War Drums — Paul Craig Roberts
June 17, 2014 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Washington Is Beating The War Drums
Paul Craig Roberts
I wish I had only good news to bring to readers, or even one item of
good news. Alas, goodness has ceased to be a feature of US policy and
simply cannot be found in any words or deeds emanating from Washington
or the capitals of its European vassal states. The Western World has
succumbed to evil.
In an article published by Op-Ed News, Eric Zuesse supports my
reports of indications that Washington is preparing for a nuclear first
strike against Russia. http://www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=180039
US war doctrine has been changed. US nuclear weapons are no longer
restricted to a retaliatory force, but have been elevated to the role of
preemptive nuclear attack. Washington pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty with Russia and is developing and deploying an ABM
shield. Washington is demonizing Russia and Russia’s President with
shameless lies and propaganda, thus preparing the populations of the US
and its client states for war with Russia.
Washington has been convinced by neoconservatives that Russian
strategic nuclear forces are in run down and unprepared condition and
are sitting ducks for attack. This false belief is based on out-of-date
information, a decade old, such as the argument presented in “The Rise
of U.S. Nuclear Primacy” by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press in the
April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization of American elites. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61508/keir-a-lieber-and-daryl-g-press/the-rise-of-us-nuclear-primacy
Regardless of the condition of Russian nuclear forces, the success of
Washington’s first strike and degree of protection provided by
Washington’s ABM shield against retaliation, the article I posted by
Steven Starr, “The Lethality of Nuclear Weapons,” makes clear that
nuclear war has no winners. Everyone dies. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/05/30/lethality-nuclear-weapons/
In an article published in the December 2008 issue of Physics Today,
three atmospheric scientists point out that even the substantial
reduction in nuclear arsenals that the Strategic Offensive Reductions
Treaty hoped to achieve, from 70,000 warheads in 1986 to 1700-2200
warheads by the end of 2012, did not reduce the threat that nuclear war
presents to life on earth. The authors conclude that in addition to the
direct blast effects of hundreds of millions of human fatalities, “the
indirect effects would likely eliminate the majority of the human
population.” The stratospheric smoke from firestorms would cause nuclear
winter and agricultural collapse. Those who did not perish from blast
and radiation would starve to death. http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ToonRobockTurcoPhysicsToday.pdf
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev understood this. Unfortunately,
no successor US government has. As far as Washington is concerned, death
is what happens to others, not to “the exceptional people.” (The SORT
agreement apparently failed. According to the Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute, the nine nuclear-armed states still possess a
total of 16,300 nuclear weapons. http://rt.com/news/166132-nuclear-weapons-report-obama/ )
It is a fact that Washington has policymakers who think, incorrectly,
that nuclear war is winnable and who regard nuclear war as a means of
preventing the rise of Russia and China as checks on Washington’s
hegemony over the world. The US government, regardless of party in
office, is a massive threat to life on earth. European governments,
which think of themselves as civilized, are not, because they enable
Washington’s pursuit of hegemony. It is this pursuit that threatens
life with extinction. The ideology that grants “exceptional,
indispensable America” supremacy is an enormous threat to the world.
The destruction of seven countries in whole or in part by the West in
the 21st century, with the support of “Western civilization” and the
Western media, comprises powerful evidence that the leadership of the
Western world is devoid of moral conscience and human compassion. Now
that Washington is armed with its false doctrine of “nuclear primacy,”
the outlook for humanity is very bleak.
Washington has begun the run up to the Third World War, and Europeans
seem to be on board. As recently as November 2012 NATO Secretary
General Rasmussen said that NATO does not regard Russia as an enemy.
Now that the White House Fool and his European vassals have convinced
Russia that the West is an enemy, Rasmussen declared that “we must adapt
to the fact that Russia now considers us its adversary” by beefing up
Ukraine’s military along with those of Eastern and Central Europe.
Last month Alexander Vershbow, former US ambassador to Russia,
currently NATO Deputy Secretary General, declared Russia to be the enemy
and said that the American and European taxpayers need to fork over for
the military modernization “not just of Ukraine, but also Moldova,
Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan.”
It is possible to see these calls for more military spending as just
the normal functioning of agents for the US military/security complex.
Having lost “the war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington
needs a replacement and has set about resurrecting the Cold War.
This is probably how the armaments industry, its shills, and part of
Washington sees it. But the neoconservatives are more ambitious. They
are not pursuing merely more profits for the military/security complex.
Their goal is Washington’s hegemony over the world, which means
reckless actions such as the strategic threat that the Obama regime,
with the complicity of its European vassals, has brought to Russia in
Ukraine.
Since last autumn the US government has been lying through its teeth
about Ukraine, blaming Russia for the consequences of Washington’s
actions, and demonizing Putin exactly as Washington demonized Gaddafi,
Saddam Hussein, Assad, the Taliban, and Iran. The presstitute media and
the European capitals have seconded the lies and propaganda and repeat
them endlessly. Consequently, the US public’s attitude toward Russia
moved sharply negative.
How do you think Russia and China see this? Russia has witnessed
NATO brought to its borders, a violation of the Reagan-Gorbachev
understandings. Russia has witnessed the US pull out of the ABM treaty
and develop a “star wars” shield. (Whether or not the shield would work
is immaterial. The purpose of the shield is to convince the politicians
and the public that Americans are safe.) Russia has witnessed
Washington change the role of nuclear weapons in its war doctrine from
deterrent to preemptive first strike. And now Russia listens to a daily
stream of lies from the West and witnesses the slaughter by
Washington’s vassal in Kiev of civilians in Russian Ukraine, branded
“terrorists” by Washington, by such weapons as white phosphorus with not
a peep of protest from the West.
Massive attacks by artillery and air strikes on homes and apartments
in Russian Ukraine were conducted on the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen
Square, while Washington and its puppets condemned China for an event
that did not happen. As we now know, there was no massacre in Tiananmen
Square. It was just another Washington lie like Tonkin Gulf, Saddam
Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons,
Iranian nukes, etc. It is an amazing fact that the world lives in a
false reality created by Washington’s lies.
The movie, The Matrix, is a true depiction of life in the West. The
population lives in a false reality created for them by their rulers. A
handful of humans have escaped the false existence and are committed to
bringing humans back to reality. They rescue Neo, “The One,” who they
believe correctly to have the power to free humans from the false
reality in which they live. Morpheus, the leader of the rebels, explains
to Neo:
“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when
you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers,
lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save.
But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that
makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are
not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly
dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
I experience this every time I write a column. Protests from those
determined not to be unplugged arrive in emails and on those websites
that expose their writers to slander by government trolls in comment
sections. Don’t believe real reality, they insist, believe the false
reality.
The Matrix even encompasses part of the Russian and Chinese
population, especially those educated in the West and those susceptible
to Western propaganda, but on the whole those populations know the
difference between lies and truth. The problem for Washington is that
the propaganda that prevails over the Western peoples does not prevail
over the Russian and Chinese governments.
How do you think China reacts when Washington declares the South
China Sea to be an area of US national interests, allocates 60 percent
of its vast fleet to the Pacific, and constructs new US air and naval
bases from the Philippines to Vietnam?
Suppose all Washington intends is to keep taxpayer funding alive for
the military/security complex which launders some of the taxpayers’
money and returns it as political campaign contributions. Can Russia
and China take the risk of viewing Washington’s words and deeds in this
limited way?
So far the Russians, and only the Russians (and Chinese), have
remained sensible. Lavrov, the Foreign Minister said: “At this stage, we
want to give our partners a chance to calm down. We’ll see what happens
next. If absolutely baseless accusations against Russia continue, it
there are attempts to pressure us with economic leverage, then we may
reevaluate the situation.”
If the White House Fool, Washington’s media whores and European
vassals convince Russia that war is in the cards, war will be in the
cards. As there is no prospect whatsoever of NATO being able to mount a
conventional offensive threat against Russia anywhere near the size and
power of the German invasion force in 1941 that met with destruction,
the war will be nuclear, which will mean the end of all of us.
Keep that firmly in mind as Washington and its media whores continue
to beat the drums for war. Keep in mind also that a long history proves
beyond all doubt that everything Washington and the presstitute media
tells you is a lie serving an undeclared agenda. You cannot rectify the
situation by voting Democrat instead of Republican or by voting
Republican instead of Democrat.
Thomas Jefferson told us his solution: “The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It
is its natural manure.”
There are few patriots in Washington but many tyrants.
The Lethality of Nuclear Weapons
May 30, 2014 | Guest Contributor | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Author’s note: Paul Craig Roberts held top security clearances. He has repeatedly warned that a US-Russian nuclear war would wipe out the human race, along with all other complex forms of life. As a scientist with expert knowledge, I wish to echo and explain his warning.
The Lethality of Nuclear Weapons
Steven Starr
Nuclear war has no winner. Beginning in 2006, several of the world’s leading climatologists (at Rutgers, UCLA, John Hopkins University, and the University of Colorado-Boulder) published a series of studies that evaluated the long-term environmental consequences of a nuclear war, including baseline scenarios fought with merely 1% of the explosive power in the US and/or Russian launch-ready nuclear arsenals. They concluded that the consequences of even a “small” nuclear war would include catastrophic disruptions of global climate[i] and massive destruction of Earth’s protective ozone layer[ii]. These and more recent studies predict that global agriculture would be so negatively affected by such a war, a global famine would result, which would cause up to 2 billion people to starve to death. [iii]
These peer-reviewed studies – which were analyzed by the best scientists in the world and found to be without error – also predict that a war fought with less than half of US or Russian strategic nuclear weapons would destroy the human race.[iv] In other words, a US-Russian nuclear war would create such extreme long-term damage to the global environment that it would leave the Earth uninhabitable for humans and most animal forms of life.
A recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war”,[v] begins by stating:
“A nuclear war between Russia and the United States, even after the arsenal reductions planned under New START, could produce a nuclear winter. Hence, an attack by either side could be suicidal, resulting in self-assured destruction.”
In 2009, I wrote an article[vi] for the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament that summarizes the findings of these studies. It explains that nuclear firestorms would produce millions of tons of smoke, which would rise above cloud level and form a global stratospheric smoke layer that would rapidly encircle the Earth. The smoke layer would remain for at least a decade, and it would act to destroy the protective ozone layer (vastly increasing the UV-B reaching Earth[vii]) as well as block warming sunlight, thus creating Ice Age weather conditions that would last 10 years or longer.
Following a US-Russian nuclear war, temperatures in the central US and Eurasia would fall below freezing every day for one to three years; the intense cold would completely eliminate growing seasons for a decade or longer. No crops could be grown, leading to a famine that would kill most humans and large animal populations.
Electromagnetic pulse from high-altitude nuclear detonations would destroy the integrated circuits in all modern electronic devices[viii], including those in commercial nuclear power plants. Every nuclear reactor would almost instantly meltdown; every nuclear spent fuel pool (which contain many times more radioactivity than found in the reactors) would boil-off, releasing vast amounts of long-lived radioactivity. The fallout would make most of the US and Europe uninhabitable. Of course, the survivors of the nuclear war would be starving to death anyway.
Once nuclear weapons were introduced into a US-Russian conflict, there would be little chance that a nuclear holocaust could be avoided. Theories of “limited nuclear war” and “nuclear de-escalation” are unrealistic.[ix] In 2010 the Bush administration modified US strategic doctrine from a retaliatory role to permit preemptive nuclear attack, and Counterforce doctrine[x] – used by both the US and Russian military – emphasizes the need for preemptive strikes once nuclear war begins. Both sides would be under immense pressure to launch a preemptive nuclear first-strike once military hostilities had commenced, especially if nuclear weapons had already been used on the battlefield.
Both the US and Russia each have 400 to 500 launch-ready ballistic missiles armed with a total of at least 1800 strategic nuclear warheads,[xi] which can be launched with only a few minutes warning.[xii] Both the US and Russian Presidents are accompanied 24/7 by military officers carrying a “nuclear briefcase”, which allows them to transmit the permission order to launch in a matter of seconds.
Yet top political leaders and policymakers of both the US and Russia seem to be unaware that their launch-ready nuclear weapons represent a self-destruct mechanism for the human race. For example, in 2010, I was able to publicly question the chief negotiators of the New START treaty, Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov and (then) US Assistant Secretary of State, Rose Gottemoeller, during their joint briefing at the UN (during the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference). I asked them if they were familiar with the recent peer-reviewed studies that predicted the detonation of less than 1% of the explosive power contained in the operational and deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear forces would cause catastrophic changes in the global climate, and that a nuclear war fought with their strategic nuclear weapons would kill most people on Earth. They both answered “no.”
More recently, on April 20, 2014, I asked the same question and received the same answer from the US officials sent to brief representatives of the NGOS at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee meeting at the UN. None of the US officials at the briefing were aware of the studies. Those present included top officials of the National Security Council.
It is frightening that President Obama and his administration appear unaware that the world’s leading scientists have for years predicted that a nuclear war fought with the US and/or Russian strategic nuclear arsenal means the end of human history. Do they not know of the existential threat these arsenals pose to the human race . . . or do they choose to remain silent because this fact doesn’t fit into their official narratives? We hear only about terrorist threats that could destroy a city with an atomic bomb, while the threat of human extinction from nuclear war is never mentioned – even when the US and Russia are each running huge nuclear war games in preparation for a US-Russian war.
Even more frightening is the fact that the neocons running US foreign policy believe that the US has “nuclear primacy” over Russia; that is, the US could successfully launch a nuclear sneak attack against Russian (and Chinese) nuclear forces and completely destroy them. This theory was articulated in 2006 in “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy”, which was published in Foreign Affairs by the Council on Foreign Relations.[xiii] By concluding that the Russians and Chinese would be unable to retaliate, or if some small part of their forces remained, would not risk a second US attack by retaliating, the article invites nuclear war.
Colonel Valery Yarynich (who was in charge of security of the Soviet/Russian nuclear command and control systems for 7 years) asked me to help him write a rebuttal, which was titled “Nuclear Primacy is a Fallacy”.[xiv] Colonel Yarynich, who was on the Soviet General Staff and did war planning for the USSR, concluded that the “Primacy” article used faulty methodology and erroneous assumptions, thus invalidating its conclusions. My contribution lay in my knowledge of the recently published (in 2006) studies, which predicted even a “successful” nuclear first-strike, which destroyed 100% of the opposing sides nuclear weapons, would cause the citizens of the side that “won” the nuclear war to perish from nuclear famine, just as would the rest of humanity.
Although the nuclear primacy article created quite a backlash in Russia, leading to a public speech by the Russian Foreign Minister, the story was essentially not covered in the US press. We were unable to get our rebuttal published by US media. The question remains as to whether the US nuclear primacy asserted in the article has been accepted as a fact by the US political and military establishment. Such acceptance would explain the recklessness of US policy toward Russia and China.
Thus we find ourselves in a situation in which those who are in charge of our nuclear arsenal seem not to understand that they can end human history if they choose to push the button. Most of the American public also remains completely unaware of this deadly threat. The uninformed are leading the uninformed toward the abyss of extinction.
US public schools have not taught students about nuclear weapons for more than 20 years. The last time nuclear war was discussed or debated in a US Presidential election was sometime in the last century. Thus, most people do not know that a single strategic nuclear weapon can easily ignite a massive firestorm over 100 square miles, and that the US and Russia each have many thousands of these weapons ready for immediate use.
Meanwhile, neoconservative ideology has kept the US at war during the entire 21st century. It has led to the expansion of US/NATO forces to the very borders of Russia, a huge mistake that has consequently revived the Cold War. A hallmark of neconservatism is that America is the “indispensable nation”, as evidenced by the neoconservative belief in “American exceptionalism”, which essentially asserts that Americans are superior to all other peoples, that American interests and values should reign supreme in the world.
At his West Point speech on May 28, President Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” Obama stated his bottom line is that “America must always lead on the world stage,” and “the backbone of that leadership always will be the military.” American exceptionalism based on might, not diplomacy, on hard power, not soft, is precisely the hubris and arrogance that could lead to the termination of human life. Washington’s determination to prevent the rise of Russia and China, as set out in the Brzezinski and Wolfowitz doctrines, is a recipe for nuclear war.
The need is dire for the president of the US, Russia, or China to state in a highly public forum that the existence of nuclear weapons creates the possibility of their use and that their use in war would likely mean human extinction. As nuclear war has no winners, the weapons should be banned and destroyed before they destroy all of us.
Steven Starr is the Senior Scientist for Physicians for Social Responsibility (www.psr.org) and Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri. Starr has published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Strategic Arms Reduction (STAR) website of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He has a website on the environmental consequences of nuclear war (www.nucleardarkness.org ).
The statements are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Physicians for Social Responsibility or the opinions of the University of Missouri and its faculty.
Endnotes:
[i] O. B. Toon, R. Turco, A. Robock, C. Bardeen, L. Oman, G. Stenchikov, “Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts and acts of individual nuclear terrorism”, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Vol. 7, 2007, pp. 973-2002. Retrieved from http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/acp-7-1973-2007.pdf
[ii] M. Mills, O. B. Toon, R. Turco, D. Kinnison, R. Garcia, “Massive global ozone loss predicted following regional nuclear conflict”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), April 8, 2008, vol. 105(14), pp. 5307-12. Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/105/14/5307.abstract
[iii] I. Helfand, “Two Billion People at Risk? Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supply, and Human Nutrition”, Physicians for Social Responsibility, November, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/two-billion-at-risk.pdf
[iv] A. Robock, L. Oman, G. Stenchikov, “Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences”, Journal of Geophysical Research –Atmospheres, Vol. 112, No. D13, 2007. Retrieved from http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockNW2006JD008235.pdf
[v] A. Robock, O. B. Toon, “Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 30, 2013. Retrieved from http://thebulletin.org/2012/september/self-assured-destruction-climate-impacts-nuclear-war
[vi] S. Starr, “Catastrophic Climatic Consequences of Nuclear Conflicts”, Updated 2009 version (from INESAP Bulletin 28, April 2008), Retrieved from http://icnnd.org/Documents/Starr_Nuclear_Winter_Oct_09.pdf
[vii] M. Mills, J. Lee-Taylor, “Nuclear War and Ultraviolet Radiation”, National Center for Atmospheric Research, AtmosNews, March 2, 2011. Retrieved from https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/research/3995/nuclear-war-and-ultraviolet-radiation
[viii] Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, “Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack: Critical National Infrastructures”, April, 2008, ISBN 978-0-16-080927-9; Retrieved from http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf
[ix] N. Sokov, “Why Russia calls a limited nuclear strike “de-escalation”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 13, 2014. Retrieved from http://thebulletin.org/why-russia-calls-limited-nuclear-strike-de-escalation
[x] H. Kristensen, R. Norris, I. Oelrich, “From Counterforce to Minimal Deterrence: A New Nuclear Policy on the Path Towards Eliminating Nuclear Weapons”, Federation of American Scientists, Occasional Paper No. 7, April, 2009.Retrieved from http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/doctrine/targeting.pdf
[xi] “Status of World Nuclear Forces (2014)”, Federation of American Scientists, Retrieved from http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html
[xii] S. Starr, “US and Russian Launch-Ready Nuclear Weapons: A Threat to All Nations and Peoples”, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, July, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.wagingpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2011_06_24_starr.pdf
[xiii] K. Lieber, D. Press, “The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy”, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006. Retrieved from http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61508/keir-a-lieber-and-daryl-g-press/the-rise-of-us-nuclear-primacy
[xiv] V. Yarynich, S. Starr, “Nuclear Primacy is a Fallacy”, Intelligent.ru, 2006 (Russian) 25 May 2006, Global Research, March 04, 2007. Retrieved from http://www.globalresearch.ca/nuclear-primacy-is-a-fallacy/4991
