Hier een 'rondje Stan van Houcke' met twee berichten, één van afgelopen vrijdag en daaronder een bericht van afgelopen zaterdag. In het eerste artikel betoogt Paul Craig Roberts o.a., dat in het boek 1984 van George Orwell onwelgevallige informatie wordt verwijderd (ook uit de archieven), terwijl het nu al zo zot is, dat die informatie niet eens wordt gepubliceerd door de reguliere (massa-) media en het overgrote deel van de politici er geen aandacht aan besteden.........
Zo liet de hoogste autoriteit van de Russische strijdkrachten, luitenant generaal Viktor Poznihir weten, dat de Russische generale staf heeft geconcludeerd dat Washington een oorlog tegen Rusland voorbereidt...... Me dunkt een bericht waarna alle seinen in de westerse reguliere media op rood hadden moeten staan..... Roberts stelt dat zegge en schrijve een dagblad in de VS dit bericht bracht, het bericht is 'ook niet' terug te vinden in andere westerse media....... Geen politicus heeft een woord vuil gemaakt aan deze uiterst verontrustende zaak.......
Vergeet niet dat het Pentagon, Obama en Trump al hebben gesteld, dat de VS een eerste aanval met kernwapens in de toekomst niet uitsluit, een verklaring die de Britse feeks May, die premier mag spelen, voor Groot-Brittannië herhaalde na haar aanstelling als premier...... (GB is ook een kernwapenstaat)
Dit gecombineerd met de uitlating van Poznihir, zou bij iedereen de haren overeind moeten doen staan, immers als Rusland overtuigt is dat de VS een kernaanval wil uitvoeren, waar neocons (neoconservatieven) in de VS stellen, dat de Russische kernwapens in één klap uitgeschakeld kunnen worden, is de kans groot dat Rusland 'op de knop zal drukken......' Immers Rusland (noch China) zullen gelaten wachten op hun vernietiging door de VS......
In de 70er en 80er jaren van de vorige eeuw, zou dit tot massale demonstraties hebben geleid in het westen, helaas is daar nu, ongelofelijk genoeg, geen sprake van, terwijl de situatie nu veel ernstiger is dan destijds.........
Het tweede artikel van The Saker gaat in op die zogenaamde mogelijkheid van de VS, de kernwapens van de Russen met een eerste kernaanval uit te schakelen. Een ongelofelijk dom idee, zo wordt overduidelijk betoogd. Vandaar de concludie van The Saker, dat het gevaar niet van technologische doorbraken komt, maar uit de hoofden van neoconservatieven, die werkelijk denken dat een kernoorlog is te winnen.....
Mensen het is al met al een behoorlijk lang verhaal, maar meer dan de moeite waard!!
Are
You Ready to Die?
Paul Craig Roberts
In
George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, 1984,
information that no longer is consistent with Big Brother’s
explanations is chucked down the Memory Hole. In the real American
dystopia in which we currently live, the information is never
reported at all.
On April 26—16 days ago—Lt. Gen.
Viktor Poznihir, Deputy Chief of the Main Operations Directorate of
the Russian Armed Forces, stated at the Moscow International Security
Conference that the Operations Command of the Russian General Staff
has concluded that Washington is preparing a nuclear first strike on
Russia.
See:
The Times-Gazett in Ashland, Ohio, was
the only US print media that a Google search could turn up that
reported this most alarming of all announcements. A Google search
turned up no reports on US TV, and none on Canadian, Australian,
European, or any other media except RT and Internet sites.
I have been unable to find any report
that any US Senator or Representative or any European, Canadian, or
Australian politician has raised a voice of concern.
No one in Washington got on the
telephone to tell Putin that this was all a mistake, that the US was
not preparing a nuclear first strike on Russia, or ask Putin how this
serious situation could be defused.
Americans do not even know about it,
except for my readers.
I would have expected at least that
the CIA would have planted the story in the Washington Post, the New
York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR that General Poznihir was expressing
his personal opinion, nothing to be taken seriously. But apparently
Americans and their European vassals are not to even know that such
an accussation was made.
As I reported some time ago and more
recently in my column about North Korea, the Chinese leadership has
also concluded that the US intends a nuclear first strike against
China.
Alone either Russia or China can
destroy the US. If they act together, the destruction of the US would
be redundant. What is the intelligence, if any, and morality, clearly
none, of the US leadership that recklessly and irresponsibly invites
Russia and China to preempt Washington’s attack on them with an
attack on the US?
Surely not even insouciant Americans
are so stupid as to think that Russia and China will just sit there
and wait for Washington’s nuclear attack.
I lived through every stage of the
Cold War. I participated in it. Never in my life have I experienced
the situation where two nuclear powers were convinced that the third
was going to surprise them with a nuclear attack.
I supported Trump because he, unlike
Hillary, said he would normalize relations with Russia. Instead he
has raised the tensions between the nuclear powers. Nothing is more
irresponsible or dangerous.
We currently are in the most dangerous
situation of my lifetime, and there is ZERO AWARENESS AND NO
DISCUSSION!
How can this be? Putin has been
issuing warnings for years. He has told the Western presstitute media
on more than one occasion that they, in their dishonesty, are pushing
the world to nuclear war. Putin has said over and over, “I issue
warnings and no one hears.” “How do I get through to you?”
Maybe the morons will hear when
mushroom clouds appear over Washington and New York, and Europe
ceases to exist, as it will if Europe continues the confrontation
with Russia as is required from Washington’s well-paid vassals.
Within the last several years I
reported the Chinese government’s reaction to US war plans for a
nuclear strike on China. The Chinese showed how their submarines
would destroy the West Coast of the US and their ICBM's would finish
off the rest of the country.
I reported all of this, and it
produced no response. The Memory Hole wasn’t needed, as neither
Washington nor the presstitutes nor the Internet noticed. This is
insouciance to the thousandth degree.
In America and its subservient,
crawling on their knees vassal states, the information never gets
reported, so it never has to be put down the Memory Hole.
If you convince someone that you are
going to kill them, they are going to kill you first. A government,
such as what exists in Washington, that convinces powerful countries
that they are targeted, is a government that has no respect
whatsoever for the lives of its own people or the peoples of the
world or for any life on planet Earth.
Such a government as Washington is
evil beyond all measure, as are the media whores and European,
Canadian, Australian, and Japanese vassal states that serve
Washington at the expense of their own citizens.
Despite all their efforts to believe
otherwise, the Russian and Chinese leaderships have finally arrived,
belatedly, at the realization that Washington is evil to the core and
is the agent of Satan.
For Russia and China, the Satanic Evil
that rules in the West has reduced the choice for Russia and China to
them or us.
==========================
Making
Sense of the “Super Fuse” Scare
For
weeks now I have been getting panicked emails with readers asking me
whether the USA had developed a special technology called “super
fuses” which would make it possible for the USA to successfully
pull-off a (preemptive) disarming first strike against Russia.
Super-fuses were also mentioned in combination with an alleged lack
by Russia of a functioning space-based infrared early warning system
giving the Russians less time to react to a possible US nuclear
attack.
While
there is a factual basis to all this, the original report already
mislead the reader with a shocking title “How
US nuclear force modernization is undermining strategic stability:
The burst-height compensating super-fuze”
and by offering several unsubstantiated conclusions. Furthermore,
this original report was further discussed by many observers who
simply lack the expertise to understand what the facts mentioned in
the report really mean. Then the various sources started quoting each
other and eventually this resulted in a completely baseless “super
fuse scare”. Let’s try to make some sense of all this.
Understanding
nuclear strikes and their targets
To
understand what really has taken place I need to first define a
couple of crucial terms:
Hard-target
kill capability: this refers to the capability of a missile to
destroy a strongly protected target such as a underground missile
silo or a deeply buried command post.
Soft-target
kill capability: the capability to destroy lightly or
unprotected targets.
Counterforce
strike: this refers to a strike aimed at the enemy’s military
capabilities.
Countervalue
strike: this refers to a strike on non-military assets such as
cities.
Since
strategic nuclear missile silos and command posts are well protected
and deeply buried, only hard-target kill (HTK) capable missiles can
execute a counterforce strike. Soft-target kill (STK) capable systems
are therefore usually seen as being the ultimate retaliatory
capability to hit the enemies cities. The crucial notion here is
that HTK capability is not a function of explosive power, but
of accuracy. Yes, in theory, a hugely powerful weapon can
compensate to some degree for a lack of accuracy, but in reality both
the USA and the USSR/Russia have long understood that the real key to
HTK is accuracy.
During
the Cold War, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were more
accurate than submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) simply
because targeting from the surface and from a fixed position was much
easier than targeting from inside a submerged and moving submarine.
The American were the first to successfully deploy a HTK capable SLBM
with their Trident D-5. The Russians have only acquired this
capability very recently (with their R-29RMU Sineva SLBM).
According
to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists just a decade ago only 20% of US
SLBMs were HTK capable. Now, with the ‘super-fuse’ 100% of US
SLBMs are HTK capable. What these super-fuses do is very accurately
measure the optimal altitude at which to detonate thereby partially
compensating for a lack of accuracy of a non-HTK capable weapon. To
make a long story short, these super-fuses made all US SLBMs HTK
capable.
Yes
and no. What that means on paper is that the US has just benefited
from a massive increase in the number of US missiles with HTK
capability. Thus, the US has now a much larger missile force capable
of executing a disarming counterforce strike. In reality, however,
things are much more complicated than that.
Understanding
counterforce strikes
Executing
a disarming counterforce strike against the USSR and, later, Russia
has been an old American dream. Remember Reagan’s “Star Wars”
program? The idea behind it was simple: to develop the capability to
intercept enough incoming Soviet warheads to protect the USA from a
retaliatory Soviet counter strike. It would work something like this:
destroy, say, 70% of the Soviet ICBM/SLBMs and intercept the
remaining 30% before they can reach the USA. This was total nonsense
both technologically (the technology did not exist) and strategically
(just a few Soviet “leakers” could wipe-out entire US cities, who
could take such a risk?). The more recent US deployment of
anti-ballistic missile systems in Europe has exactly the same purpose
– to protect the USA from a retaliatory counterstrike. Without
going into complex technical discussions, let’s just say that this
point in time, this system would never protect the USA from anything.
But in the future, we could imagine such a scenario
1)
The USA and Russia agree to further deep cuts in their nuclear
strategic forces thereby dramatically reducing the total number of
Russian SLBM/ICBMs.
2)
The USA deploys all around Russia anti-ballistic systems which can
catch and destroy Russian missiles in the early phase of their flight
towards the USA.
3)
The USA also deploys a number of systems in space or around the USA
to intercept any incoming Russian warhead.
4)
The USA having a very large HTK-capable force executes a successful
counterforce strike destroying 90% (or so) of the Russian
capabilities and then the rest are destroyed during their flight.
This
is the dream. It will never work. Here is why:
1)
The Russians will not agree to deep cuts in their nuclear strategic
forces
2)
The Russians already have deployed the capability to destroy the
forward deployed US anti-ballistic system in Europe.
3)
Russian warheads and missiles are now maneuverable and can even use
any trajectory, including over the South Pole, to reach the USA. New
Russian missiles have a dramatically shorter and faster first stage
burn period making them much harder to intercept.
4)
Russia’s reliance on ballistic missiles will be gradually replaced
with strategic (long-range) cruise missiles (more about that later)
5)
This scenario mistakenly assumes that the USA will know where the
Russian SLBM launching submarines will be when they launch and that
they will be able to engage them (more about that later)
6)
This scenario completely ignores the Russian road-mobile and
rail-mobile ICBMs (more about that later)
Before
explaining points 4, 5 and 6 above, I need to mention another
important fact: one missile can carry either one single warhead or
several (up to 12 and more). When a missile carries several
independently targetable warheads it is called MIRVed as in “multiple
independently targetable reentry vehicle”.
MIRVs
are important for several reasons. First, one single missile with 10
warheads can, in theory, destroy 10 different targets. Alternatively,
one single missile can carry, say 3-4 real warheads and 6-7 decoys.
In practical terms what look like one missile on take-off can turn
into 5 real warheads, all targeted at different objectives and
another 5 fake decoys designed to make interception that more
difficult. MIRVs, however, also present a big problem: they are
lucrative targets. If with one of “my” nuclear warheards I can
destroy 1 of “your” MIRVed missiles, I lose 1 warhead but you
lose 10. This is one of the reasons the
USA is moving away from land-based MIRVed ICBMs.
The
important consideration here is that Russia has a number of possible
options to chose from and how many of her missiles will be MIRVed is
impossible to predict. Besides, all US and Russian SLBMs will remain
MIRVed for the foreseeable future (de-MIRVing SLBMs make no sense,
really, since the entire nuclear missile carrying submarine (or SSBN)
is a gigantic MIRVed launching pad by definition).
In
contrast to MIRVed missile, single warheads missiles are very bad
targets to try to destroy using nuclear weapons: even if “my”
missile destroys “yours” we both lost 1 missile each. What is the
point? Worse, if I have to use 2 of “mine” to make really sure
that “yours” is really destroyed, my strike will result in me
using 2 warheads in exchange for only 1 of yours. This makes no sense
at all.
Finally,
in retaliatory countervalue strikes, MIRVed ICBM/SLBMs are a
formidable threat: just one single R-30 Bulava (SS-N-30) SLBM or one
single R-36 Voevoda (SS-18) ICBM can destroy ten American cities. Is
that a risk worth taking? Say the USA failed to destroy one single
Borei-class SSBN – in theory that could mean that this one SSBN
could destroy up to 200 American cities (20 SLBMs with 10 MIRVs
each). How is that for a risk?
Contrasting
the US and Russian nuclear triad
Strategic
nuclear weapons can be deployed on land, in the oceans or delivered
by aircraft. This is called the “nuclear triad”. I won’t
discuss the aircraft based part of the US and Russian triads here, as
they don’t significantly impact the overall picture and because
they are roughly comparable. The sea and land based systems and their
underlying strategies could not be any more different. At sea, the
USA has had HTK capabilities for many years now and the US decided to
hold the most important part of the US nuclear arsenal in SSBNs. In
contrast, the Russians chose to develop road-mobile intercontinental
ballistic missiles. The very first one was the RT-2PM Topol (SS-25)
deployed in 1985, followed by the T-2PM2 «Topol-M» (SS-27) deployed
in 1997 and the revolutionary RT-24 Yars or Topol’-MR (SS-29)
deployed in 2010 (the US considered deployed road-mobile strategic
missiles, but never succeeded in developing the technology).
The
Russians are also deploying rail-mobile missiles called RT-23
Molodets (SS-24) and are about to deploy a newer version called RS-27
Barguzin (SS-31?). This is what they look like:
SSBNs
and road and rail mobile missiles all have two things in common: they
are mobile and they rely on concealment for survival as neither of
them can hope to survive. The SSBN hides in the depths of the ocean,
the road-mobile missile launcher drives around the immense Russian
expanses and can hide, literally, in any forest. As for the
rail-mobile missile train, it hides by being completely
indistinguishable from any other train on the huge Russian railroad
network (even from up close it is impossible to tell whether what you
are seeing is a regular freight train or a missile launching special
train). To destroy these systems, accuracy is absolutely not enough:
you need to find them and you need to find them before they fire
their missiles. And that is, by all accounts, quite impossible.
The
Russian Navy likes to keep its SSBNs either under the polar ice-cap
or in so-called “bastions” such as the Sea of Okhotsk. While
these are not really “no-go” zones for US attack submarines
(SSN), they are extremely dangerous areas where the Russian Navy has
a huge advantage over the US (if only because the US attack submarine
cannot count on the support of surface ships or aircraft). The US
Navy has some of the best submarines on the planet and superbly
trained crews, but I find the notion that US SSNs could find and
destroy all Russian SSBNs before the latter can launch unlikely in
the extreme.
As
for the land-based rail-mobile and road-mobile missiles, they are
protected by Russian Air Defenses which are the most advanced on the
planet, not the kind of airspace the US would want to send B-53, B-1
or B-2 bombers in. But most importantly, these missiles are
completely hidden so even if the USA could somehow destroy them, it
would failed to find enough of them to make a first disarming strike
a viable option. By the way, the RS-24 has four MIRVs (make that 4 US
cities) while the RS-27 will have between 10 and 16 (make that
another 10 to 16 US cities vaporized).
Looking
at geography and cruise missiles
Finally,
let’s take a look at geography and cruise missiles. Two Russian
cruise missiles are especially important to us: the Kh-102 and the
3M-14K(?):
|
KH-102
|
3M-14K
|
Range:
|
5500km
|
2600km
|
Launcher:
|
Strategic
bomber
|
Aircraft,
ship, container
|
Warhead:
|
Nuclear
450kt
|
Nuclear
(unknown)
|
What
is important with these two cruise missiles is that the KH-102 has a
huge range and that the KM-14K can be fired from aircraft, ships and
even containers. Take a look at this video which shows the
capabilities of this missile:
Now
consider where the vast majority of US cities are located – right
along the East and West coasts of the USA and the fact that the US
has no air defenses of any kind protecting them. A Russian strategic
bomber could hit any West Coast city from the middle of the Pacific
ocean. As for a Russian submarine, it could hit any US city from the
middle of the Atlantic. Finally, the Russians could conceal an
unknown number of cruise missile in regular looking shipping
container (flying a Russian flag or, for that matter, any other flag)
and simply sail to the immediate proximity to the US coast and
unleash a barrage of nuclear cruise missiles.
How
much reaction time would such a barrage give the US government?
Understanding
reaction time
It
is true that the Soviet and Russian space-based early warning system
is in bad shape. But did you know that China never bothered
developing such a space based system in the first place? So what is
wrong with the Chinese, are they stupid, technologically backward or
do they know something we don’t?
To
answer that question we need to look at the options facing a country
under nuclear missile attack. The first option is called “launch
on warning”:
you see the incoming missiles and you press the “red button”
(keys in reality) to launch your own missiles. That is sometimes
referred to as “use them or lose them”. The next option is
“launch on strike”:
you launch all you got as soon as a nuclear strike on your territory
is confirmed. And, finally, there is the “retaliation
after ride-out“:
you absorb whatever your enemy shot at you, then take a decision to
strike back. What is obvious is that China has adopted, whether by
political choice or due to limitation in space capabilities, either a
“launch on strike” or a “retaliation after ride-out” option.
This is especially interesting since China possesses relatively few
nuclear warheads and even fewer real long range ICBMs .
Contrast
that with the Russians who have recently confirmed that they have
long had a “dead hand system” called “Perimetr”
which automatically ascertains that a nuclear attack has taken place
and then automatically launches a counterstrike. That would be a
“launch on strike” posture, but it is also possible that Russia
has a double-posture: she tries to have the capability to launch on
warning, but double-secures herself with an automated “dead hand”
“launch on strike” capability.
Take
a look at this estimate of worldwide stocks of strategic nuclear
warheads: While China is credited with only 260 warheads, Russia
still has a whopping 7,000 warheads. And a “dead hand”
capability. And yet China feels confident enough to announce a “no
first use” policy. How can they say that with no space-based
nuclear missile launch detection capability?
Many
will say that the Chinese wished they had more nukes and a
space-based based nuclear missile launch detection capability, but
that their current financial and technological means simply do not
allow that. Maybe. But my personal guess is that they realize that
even their very minimal force represents a good enough deterrent for
any potential aggressor. And they might have a point.
Let
me ask you this: how many US generals and politicians would be
willing to sacrifice just one major US city in order to disarm China
or Russia? Some probably would. But I sure hope that the majority
would realize that the risk will always remain huge.
For
one thing, modern nuclear warfare has, so far, only been “practiced”
only on paper and with computers (and thank God for that!)? So nobody
*really* knows for sure how a nuclear war would play itself out. The
only thing which is certain is that just the political and economic
consequences of it would be catastrophic and totally unpredictable.
Furthermore, it remains very unclear how such a war could be stopped
short of totally destroying one side. The so-called “de-escalation”
is a fascinating concept, but so far nobody has really figured this
out. Finally, I am personally convinced that both the USA and Russia
have more than enough survivable nuclear weapons to actually decide
to ride out a full-scale enemy attack. That is the one big issue
which many well-meaning pacifist never understood: it is a good thing
that “the USA and Russia have the means to blow-up the world ten
times over” simply because even one side succeeded in destroying,
say, 95% of the US or Russian nuclear forces, the remaining 5% would
be more than enough to wipe-out the attacking side in a devastating
countervalue attack. If Russia and the USA each had, say, only 10
nuclear warheads then the temptation to try to take them out would be
much higher.
This
is scary and even sick, but having a lot of nuclear weapons is safer
from a “first-strike
stability”
point of view than having few. Yes, we do live in a crazy world.
Consider
that in times of crisis both the US and Russia would scramble their
strategic bombers and keep them in the air, refueling them when
needed, for as long as needed to avoid having them destroyed on the
ground. So even if the USA destroyed ALL Russian ICBM/SLBMs, there
would be quite a few strategic bombers in holding patterns in staging
areas which could be given the order to strike. And here we reach one
last crucial concept:
Counterforce
strikes require a lot of HTK capable warheads.
The estimates by
both sides are kept secret, of course, but we are talking over 1000
targets on each side at least listed, if not actually targeted. But a
countervalue strike would require much less. The US has only 10
cities with over one million people. Russia has only 12. And,
remember, in theory one warhead is enough for one city (that is not
true, but for all practical purposes it is). Just look what 9/11 did
to the USA and imagine of, say, “only” Manhattan had been truly
nuked. You can easily imagine the consequences.
Conclusion
1: super-fuses are not really that super at all
The
super-fuses scare is so overblown that it is almost an urban legend.
The fact is that even if all the US SLBMs are now HTK capable and
even if Russia does not have a functional space-based missile launch
detection capability (she is working on a new one, by the way), this
in no way affects the fundamental fact that there is nothing, nothing
at all, that the USA could come up with to prevent Russia from
obliterating the USA in a retaliatory strike. The opposite is also
true, the Russians have exactly zero hope of nuking the USA and
survive the inevitable US retaliation.
The
truth is that as far back as the early 1980s Soviet (Marshal Ogarkov)
and US specialists had already come to the conclusion that a nuclear
war was unwinnable. In the past 30 years two things have dramatically
changed the nature of the game: first, an increasing number of
conventional weapons have become comparable in their effects to small
nuclear weapons and cruise missiles have become vastly more capable.
The trend today is for low-RCS (stealth) long range hypersonic cruise
missiles and maneuvering ICBM warheads which will make it even harder
to detect and intercept them. Just think about it: if the Russians
fired a cruise missile volley from a submarine say, 100km off the US
coast, how much reaction time will the US have? Say that these
low-RCS missile would begin flying at medium altitude being for all
practical purpose invisible to radar, infra-red and even sound, then
lower themselves down to 3-5 m over the Atlantic and then accelerate
to a Mach 2 or Mach 3 speed. Sure, they will become visible to radars
once they crosses the horizon, but the remaining reaction time would
be measured in seconds, not minutes. Besides, what kind of weapon
system could stop that missile type of anyway? Maybe the kind of
defenses around a US aircraft carrier (maybe), but there is simply
nothing like that along the US coast.
As
for ballistic missile warheads, all the current and foreseeable
anti-ballistic systems rely on calculations for a non-maneuvering
warhead. Once the warheads begin to make turns and zig-zag, then the
computation needed to intercept them become harder by several orders
of magnitude. Some Russian missiles, like the R-30 Bulava, can even
maneuver during their initial burn stage, making their trajectory
even harder to estimate (and the missile itself harder to intercept).
The
truth is that for the foreseeable future ABM systems will be much
more expensive and difficult to build then ABM-defeating missiles.
Also, keep in mind that an ABM missile itself is also far, far more
expensive than a warhead. Frankly, I have always suspected that the
American obsession with various types of ABM technologies is more
about giving cash to the Military Industrial Complex and, at best,
developing new technologies useful elsewhere.
Conclusion
2: the nuclear deterrence system remains stable, very stable
At
the end of WWII, the Soviet Union’s allies, moved by the
traditional western love for Russia, immediately proceeded to plan
for a conventional and a nuclear war against the Soviet Union
(see Operation Unthinkable and Operation
Dropshot).
Neither plan was executed, the western leaders were probably rational
enough not to want to trigger a full-scale war against the armed
forces which had destroyed roughly 80% of the Nazi war machine. What
is certain, however, is that both sides fully understood that the
presence of nuclear weapons profoundly changed the nature of warfare
and that the world would never be the same again: for the first time
in history all of mankind faced a truly existential threat. As a
direct result of this awareness, immense sums of money were given to
some of the brightest people on the planet to tackle the issue of
nuclear warfare and deterrence. This huge effort resulted in an
amazingly redundant, multi-dimensional and sophisticated system which
cannot be subverted by any one technological breakthrough. There is
SO much redundancy and security built into the Russian and American
strategic nuclear forces that a disarming first strike is all but
impossible, even if we make the most unlikely and far-fetched
assumptions giving one side all the advantages and the other all the
disadvantages. For most people it is very hard to wrap their heads
around such a hyper-survivable system, but both the USA and Russia
have run hundreds and even thousands of very advanced simulations of
nuclear exchanges, spending countless hours and millions of dollars
trying to find a weak spot in the other guy’s system, and each time
the result was the same: there is always enough to inflict an
absolutely cataclysmic retaliatory counter-strike.
Conclusion
3: the real danger to our common future
The
real danger to our planet comes not from a sudden technological
breakthrough which would make nuclear war safe, but from the demented
filled minds of the US Neocons who believe that they can bring Russia
to heel in a game of “nuclear chicken”. These Neocons have
apparently convinced themselves that making conventional threats
against Russia, such as unilaterally imposing no-fly zones over
Syria, does not bring us closer to a nuclear confrontation. It does.
The
Neocons love to bash the United Nations in general, and the veto
power of the Permanent Five (P5) at the UN Security Council, but they
apparently forgot the reason why this veto power was created in the
first place: to outlaw any action which could trigger a nuclear war.
Of course, this assumes that the P5 all care about international law.
Now that the USA has clearly become a rogue state whose contempt for
international law is total, there is no legal mechanism left to stop
the US from committing actions which endanger the future of mankind.
This is what is really scary, not “super-fuses”.
What
we are facing today is a nuclear rogue state run by demented
individuals who, steeped in a culture of racial superiority, total
impunity and imperial hubris, are constantly trying to bring us
closer to a nuclear war. These people are not constrained by
anything, not morals, not international law, not even common sense or
basic logic. In truth, we are dealing with a messianic cult every bit
as insane as the one of Jim Jones or Adolf Hitler and like all
self-worshiping crazies they profoundly believe in their
invulnerability.
It
is the immense sin of the so-called “Western world” that it let
these demented individuals take control with little or no resistance
and that now almost the entire western society lack the courage to
even admit that it surrendered itself to what I can only call a
satanic cult. Alexander Solzhenitsyn prophetic words spoken in 1978
have now fully materialized:
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life (Harvard Speech, 1978)
Five
years later, Solzhenitsyn warned us again saying,
To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our hands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing. Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.
We
have been warned, but will we heed that warning?
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