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It has taken the US military/security complex 31 years to get rid of President Reagan’s last nuclear disarmament achievement—the INF Treaty that President Reagan and Soviet President Gorbachev achieved in 1987.

The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was ratified by the US Senate on May 27, 1988 and became effective a few days later on June 1. Behind the scenes, I had some role in this, and as I remember what the treaty achieved was to make Europe safe from nuclear attack by Soviet short and intermediate range missiles, and to make the Soviet Union safe from US attack from short and intermediate range US nuclear missiles in Europe. By restricting nuclear weapons to ICBMs, which allowed some warning time, thus guaranteeing retaliation and non-use of nucular weapons, the INF Treaty was regarded as reducing the risk of an American first-strike on Russia and a Russian first-strike on Europe, strikes that could be delivered by low-flying cruise missiles with next to zero warning time.

When President Reagan appointed me to a secret Presidential committee with subpoena power over the CIA, he told the members of the secret committee that his aim was to bring the Cold War to an end, with the result that, in his words, “those God-awful nuclear weapons would be dismantled.” President Reagan, unlike the crazed neoconservatives, who he fired and prosecuted, saw no point in nuclear war that would destroy all life on earth. The INF Treaty was the beginning, in Reagan’s mind, of the elimination of nuclear weapons from military arsenals. The INF Treaty was chosen as the first start because it did not substantially threaten the budget of the US military/security complex, and actually increased the security of the Soviet military. In other words, it was something that Reagan and Gorbachev could get past their own military establishments. Reagan hoped that as trust built, more nuclear disarmament would proceed.

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Time Out for Nukes!

October 22, 2018

Time Out for Nukes!

With 122 nations having voted last summer to adopt a treaty for the complete prohibition of nuclear weapons, just as the world has banned chemical and biological weapons, its seems that the world is locked in a new Cold War time-warp, totally inappropriate to the times. We were warned last week from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that prior calculations about the risk of catastrophic climate change were off, and that without a full scale immediate mobilization humanity will face disastrous rising sea levels, temperature changes, and resource shortages.

Now is an opportunity to take a time-out on nuclear gamesmanship, new threats, trillions of wasted dollars and IQ point on weapons systems that Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev acknowledged, back in 1987 at the end of the Cold War, could never be used, warning that “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Now in 2018, more than 30 years later, when 69 nations have signed the treaty to ban the bomb and 19 of the 50 nations required to ratify the treaty for it to enter into force have put it through their legislatures, the US and Russia are in an unholy struggle to keep the nuclear arms race going with the US accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate Nuclear Force treaty which eliminated a whole class of land-based conventional and nuclear missiles in Europe, and Russia planning new weapons systems in response to a whole stream of US bad faith actions, the most egregious of which was President Bush walking out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty negotiated with the Soviet Union to ratchet down the nuclear arms race.

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Washington’s Latest Cold War Maneuver: Pulling Out of the INF

October 22, 2018

Washington’s Latest Cold War Maneuver: Pulling Out of the INF

Photo Source White House Photographic Office | CC BY 2.0

The Trump administration has decided to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the most comprehensive disarmament treaty ever negotiated between Washington and Moscow. National Security Adviser John Bolton, a long-time opponent of arms control, reportedly will inform Russian President Vladimir Putin this week that the United States will do so. The Trump administration will also be briefing our key European allies on the decision, which will complicate relations with Germany and France who favor maintaining the treaty. This is the latest in a series of U.S. steps over the past 20 years that have put the Russians on the defensive, and led Russian President Vladimir Putin to be more assertive in protecting Moscow’s interests in East Europe.

The INF treaty actually eliminated an entire class of intermediate-range missiles from the U.S. and Soviet arsenals in 1987. The Pentagon opposed the treaty, and Secretary of Defense Weinberger and his deputy for arms control and disarmament, Richard Perle, resigned in protest over President Ronald Reagan’s decision to go forward. The Pentagon has opposed all presidential decisions to pursue disarmament, although—in the case of INF—the Soviets destroyed more than twice as many missiles as the United States, and the European theatre became safer for U.S. forces stationed there. The treaty and the improved bilateral relations actually led to a slowdown in military spending in both the United States and Russia.

In 2002, President George W. Bush created the worst of all possible strategic worlds when he abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), the cornerstone of strategic deterrence and one of the pearls of Soviet-American arms control policy.

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“Putin’s Puppet” Advances Nuclear Missile Escalations Against Putin

October 21, 2018

“Putin’s Puppet” Advances Nuclear Missile Escalations Against Putin

Yesterday the news broke that Swamp Monster-In-Chief John Bolton has been pushing President Trump to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the 1988 arms control agreement between the US and the Soviet Union eliminating all missiles of a specified range from the arsenals of the two nuclear superpowers. Today, Trump has announced that he will be doing exactly as Bolton instructed.

This would be the second missile treaty between the US and Russia that America has withdrawn from since it abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. John Bolton, an actual psychopath who Trump hired as his National Security Advisor in April, ran point on that move as well back when he was part of the increasingly indistinguishable Bush administration.

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This is why John Bolton shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near US foreign policy. This would undo decades of bipartisan arms control dating from Reagan. We shouldn’t do it. We should seek to fix any problems with this treaty and move forward. https://fxn.ws/2q1FqTi #FoxNews

9:27 AM – Oct 20, 2018

US poised to pull out of nuclear arms treaty with Moscow: source

foxnews.com

“This is why John Bolton shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near US foreign policy,” tweeted Senator Rand Paul in response to early forecasts of the official announcement. “This would undo decades of bipartisan arms control dating from Reagan. We shouldn’t do it. We should seek to fix any problems with this treaty and move forward.”

“This is the most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s,” Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute, told The Guardian. “If the INF treaty collapses, and with the New Start treaty on strategic arms due to expire in 2021, the world could be left without any limits on the nuclear arsenals of nuclear states for the first time since 1972.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Perfect Storm Bringing China And Russia Together

October 12, 2018

The Perfect Storm Bringing China And Russia Together

During the Cold War, China and the Soviet Union regarded one another as strategic adversaries. Relations between Beijing and Moscow, however, have significantly improved over the years. Besides political alignment, the countries have complementary economies; China has an insatiable appetite for the raw materials which Russia has in abundance and Beijing has the financial strength to protect Moscow against the sanctions related to its annexation of Crimea.

Bilateral trade, as a consequence, has increased dramatically over the years. At the end of 2017, it stood at $80 billion, an increase of 30 percent year-on-year, with an aim to reach $200 billion by 2024. Much of this growth will need to come from energy trade, of which natural gas will likely make up a large part. An example of this natural gas growth is the Power of Siberia pipeline – which is currently nearing completion – and the Altay pipeline project which looks set to follow.

China’s booming demand for energy

The transformation of rural China a couple of decades ago into a global economic powerhouse has been admired across the globe. Even during the financial crisis of 2008, China served as a stabilizing force amid the turmoil. The Asian country’s expanding economy requires ever-larger volumes of energy to power homes and factories. Beijing’s adoption of more stringent rules to counter air pollution has created an energy revolution due to the coal-to-gas switch. This has had serious consequences for the global gas market.

Until recently, the LNG market was facing an oversupply. Growing demand in China due to its new rules on air pollution has absorbed much of the glut. According to analysts from Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., new supplies of LNG are “being easily mopped up by rampant market growth”. Political developments, however, have somewhat shifted Beijing’s focus from LNG to more pipeline gas from Russia. This has come at the right moment for Moscow as relations with its biggest customer, the EU, have deteriorated.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Unipolar Moments Never Last More Than a Moment

September 23, 2018

Unipolar Moments Never Last More Than a Moment

American leaders, politicians, policymakers and pundits are fond of talking about the “Unipolar Moment” and “Hyper Power” position that they imagine the United States enjoys in the world.

Totally lacking from this fantasy are any inconvenient historical facts.

The US Unipolar Moment (insofar as it existed at all) lasted less than a decade from the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of December 1991 to June 15, 2001. The US “moment” barely made it into the 21^st Century.

On that epochal day of June 15, 2001, two major events happened. First, US President George W. Bush gave a speech in Warsaw pledging to integrate the three tiny Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into NATO as a prime strategic goal of the United States.

That very same day, Russia and China created with four Central Asian nations the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO): The most populous and powerful international security organization in history.

This year, the SCO doubled in population by adding India and Pakistan at the same time – two major nuclear powers with a combined population of 1.5 billion people. That means the SCO now includes more than 3 billion people, around 40 percent of the human race.

From the moment the SCO was created – dedicated from its inception to preserve and protect a multipolar world from the domination of any one power, the US unipolar moment was dead and gone.

This reality was confirmed less than three months later when al-Qaeda’s terror attacks of September 11, 2001 killed almost 3,000 people. More Americans died that day than in the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

George W. Bush should have been impeached for his gross incompetence. Instead his popularity soared. Imagining the Unipolar Moment (or Era) to be still in full flood he invaded Afghanistan later that year and Iraq less than two years later. The United States is still endlessly stuck in those unending wars.

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US Planned Nuclear Strikes To End China, Soviet Union As “Viable Societies”, Declassified Docs Show

September 3, 2018

US Planned Nuclear Strikes To End China, Soviet Union As “Viable Societies”, Declassified Docs Show

Like the famous George Santayana quote goes, “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” And thanks to a cache of documents released by George Washington University’s National Security Archive project, the American people are learning just how close their country came to sparking a devastating nuclear conflict with Russia and China back in the 1960s.

The Lyndon Johnson-era “Single Integrated Operational Plan” (or SIOP) laid out how the US military would carry out a retaliatory (or preemptive) nuclear strike with the objective of eliminating the Soviet Union and China as “viable” societies, and the USSR as a “major industrial power.” The “overkill” plan intended to wipe out 95% of its top-level targets with loss of human life as the primary metric for success. No version of the SIOP has ever been fully declassified, meaning that the documents released by GWU offered the first complete picture of the US’s Cold War-era nuclear-defense plans. While the US military had created the first version of the SIOP in the early 1960s, the version published by GWU is from 1964.

Here’s a summary of the new information included in the documents.

The Joint Staff review of the SIOP-64 guidance includes new information on nuclear war planning:

The SIOP guidance permitted “withholds” to hold back strikes on specific countries. Recognizing the reality of Sino-Soviet tensions, it would be possible to launch nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union without attacking China or vice versa or to withhold strikes from Eastern European countries, namely Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania.

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Watching America’s Collapse

August 27, 2018

Watching America’s Collapse

Existence is running out for America

In the 1950s and 1960s the United States was a vibrant society. Upward mobility was strong, and the middle class expanded. During the 1970s the internal contradiction in Keynesian demand management resulted in stagflation. Reagan’s supply-side economic policy cured that. With a sound economy under him, Reagan was able to pressure the Soviet government, which was unable to solve its economic problem, to negotiate the end of the cold war.

This happy development was not welcomed by powerful forces, both in the US and Soviet Union. In the US the powerful military/security complex was unhappy about losing the Soviet Threat, under the auspices of which its budget and power had soared. Right-wing superpatriot conservatives accused Reagan of selling out America by trusting the Soviets. The American rightwing portrayed President Reagan as the grade-two movie actor dupe of “cunning communists.”

In the Soviet government Gorbachev faced a larger problem. With trust established between the two nuclear powers, Gorbachev released the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe. Hardline elements in the Soviet Communist Party saw too much change too rapidly and concluded that Gorbachev had sold out the Soviet Union to Washington. This conclusion resulted in Gorbachev’s arrest, and the consequence of his arrest was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party.

With communism departed, the Russians forgot all of Marx’s lessons about capitalism and naively concluded that we were all now friends. The Yeltsin government opened to American advice and, by naively accepting American advice, Russia was looted and reduced to penury. Russia under Yeltsin became an American puppet state, and the Russian people paid for it with a great reduction in their living standard.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peace or Armageddon: Take Your Pick

July 20, 2018

Peace or Armageddon: Take Your Pick

Photo by Paul Sableman | CC BY 2.0

I had just turned 15 when the Cuban Missile Crisis suddenly erupted. Like everyone else my age I had been propagandized from early childhood to see the Reds as America’s mortal enemy and to fear their designs to wipe us off the map. So in October of 1962 I was shocked to learn that the Soviets had installed nukes only miles from our shores. It went without saying that we were innocent victims of a deadly plot. How monstrous! But it wasn’t long before I was also frightened, darkly so. The images I had seen as a child of about eight of the desolation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came back to me and I suddenly realized that the same fate could befall us. How had this happened?

Thus for the first time in my life I questioned the world view fed to me since I had reached the age of reason only to discover (albeit gradually) that reason and logic were far from operative in our world. It dawned on me then as never before that if the American response to the crisis was a military one then we were finished. Just how perilous the situation was I would only fully appreciate much later but the fear was real enough at the time. Though I had been a newsboy I had never really read newspapers but began devouring every story on the crisis. My neighbors, like my own family, were inner-city working class people who didn’t pay much attention to politics but suddenly there was a palpable tension among adults. In the local A&P supermarket canned goods disappeared from the shelves. While no one in my neighborhood had summer homes in New Hampshire or Maine the newspapers reported an exodus of the well-to-do to the remote countryside. Here was an existential crisis of the first order.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Assange and Truth: the Deeper (Harder) Issue

June 21, 2018

Assange and Truth: the Deeper (Harder) Issue

Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0

When Harold Pinter got the Nobel Prize (2005), he described “a vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed”. He asked why “systematic brutality, widespread atrocities, ruthless suppression of independent thought” were well-known when they occurred in the Soviet Union. But the same events in the US, despite copious evidence, “never happened”.

It shouldn’t be a rhetorical question. The answer to Pinter’s question is known in countless cultures. It is not obscure. But it is not discussed much in the North.

John Pilger notes an “eerie silence” about Julian Assange. More than any investigative journalist of our time, Assange has exposed “the imperialism of liberal democracies: the commitment to endless warfare and the division and degradation of ‘unworthy’ lives: from Grenfell Tower to Gaza.”

And yet he’s been imprisoned for six years with no charges against him. There is no outcry.

The silence is eerie, but not surprising. Assange allows us to see with our own eyes the actions of US military in Iraq. We hear them laugh about the “dead bastards” on the ground, who were carrying cameras, not guns.

There are truths, which Wikileaks reveals, but there is also truth abouttruths. One truth is that empirical evidence, seen and believed, does not shake deep-seated expectations. When beliefs are well-established, presupposed in daily life, indeed, part of identity, evidence is explained away.

It’s how we reason. If I release an object that doesn’t fall, you don’t give up belief in gravity. If I show you a thousand times, you don’t waiver. You expectgravity. It is a presupposition of life and thought. If you questioned that belief, you’d have to rethink your relationship to the world. It’s a reason not to question it.

You see with your own eyes. You dismiss what you see. Or, you explain it away, rationally.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US Challenges Russia to Nuclear War

June 6, 2018

US Challenges Russia to Nuclear War

Now that the United States (with the cooperation of its NATO partners) has turned the former Soviet Union’s states other than Russia into NATO allies, and has likewise turned the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact allies into America’s own military allies in NATO, the United States is finally turning the screws directly against Russia itself, by, in effect, challenging Russia to defend its ally Syria. The US is warning Syria’s Government that Syrian land, which is occupied by the US and by the anti-Government forces that the US protects in Syria, is no longer really Syria’s land. The US is saying that there will be direct war between Syria’s armed forces and America’s armed forces if Syria tries to restore its control over that land. Tacitly, America’s message in this to Moscow is: now is the time for you to quit defending Syria’s Government, because, if you don’t — if you come to Syria’s defense as Syria tries to kill those occupying forces (including the US troops and advisors who are occupying Syria) — then you (Russia) will be at war against the United States, even though the US is clearly the invader, and Russia (as Syria’s ally) is clearly the defender.

Peter Korzun, my colleague at the Strategic Culture Foundation, headlined on May 29^th, “US State Department Tells Syria What It Can and Can’t Do on Its Own Soil” and he opened:

“The US State Department has warned Syria against launching an offensive against terrorist positions in southern Syria. The statement claims that the American military will respond if Syrian forces launch an operation aimed at restoring the legitimate government’s control over the rebel-held areas, including the territory in southwestern Syria between Daraa and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Washington is issuing orders to a nation whose leadership never invited America in the first place!

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From the Skripals to Douma, the Globalist Pravda Network Reveals its True Face

May 4, 2018

People living in the Soviet Union had a wonderful phrase to describe the two biggest circulation state-controlled newspapers, Pravda (meaning “truth”) and Izvestia (meaning “news”). There’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia, was the oft-repeated expression. It is unfortunate that the mainstream media in the Western nations these days don’t have similar sorts of names, since it deprives us of an endless source of amusement in coming up with similarly apposite phrases about them.

It is, however, increasingly clear that on the great issues of the day, you are about as likely to find the truth in them as you would have done in Pravda, although I expect their sports and gardening sections are still relatively reliable. As for the important political and geopolitical issues of the day, I tend to imagine that on the walls next to the desks in the offices of many of these papers and broadcasters are the following instructions:

Rules for Reporting on Global Affairs

Repeat Government line unquestioningly.

If Government line is questioned, accuse those doing the questioning of being Bots, Kremlin-trolls and useful idiots.

If the persistent questioning won’t go away and the Government line is seen to be contradictory and full of holes, bury the issue completely and start posing deep questions, such as “What will Meghan wear?” or “Is there a gender pay gap in midwifery?” or “How much sugar is really bad for you?”

The Skripal and Douma episodes have demonstrated this perhaps more than any others. First the Government line has been dutifully parroted by the media in a relentless propaganda campaign — no questions asked. Then there have been attempts to silence or ridicule those who didn’t bow to the parrots and who were asking legitimate questions — including the appalling treatment meted out to distinguished military men.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

That Collapse You Ordered…?

April 30, 2018

That Collapse You Ordered…?

I had a fellow on my latest podcast, released Sunday, who insists that the world population will crash 90-plus percent from the current 7.6 billion to 600 million by the end of this century. Jack Alpert heads an outfit called the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab (SKIL) which he started at Stanford University in 1978 and now runs as a private research foundation. Alpert is primarily an engineer.

At 600 million, the living standard in the USA would be on a level with the post-Roman peasantry of Fifth century Europe, but without the charm, since many of the planet’s linked systems — soils, oceans, climate, mineral resources — will be in much greater disarray than was the case 1,500 years ago. Anyway, that state-of-life may be a way-station to something more dire. Alpert’s optimal case would be a world human population of 50 million, deployed in three “city-states,” in the Pacific Northwest, the Uruguay / Paraguay border region, and China, that could support something close to today’s living standards for a tiny population, along with science and advanced technology, run on hydropower. The rest of world, he says, would just go back to nature, or what’s left of it. Alpert’s project aims to engineer a path to that optimal outcome.

I hadn’t encountered quite such an extreme view of the future before, except for some fictional exercises like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (Alpert, too, sees cannibalism as one likely byproduct of the journey ahead.) Obviously, my own venture into the fictionalized future of the World Made by Hand books depicted a much kinder and gentler re-set to life at the circa-1800 level of living, at least in the USA. Apparently, I’m a sentimental softie.

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Russia Warns Of ‘Precise And Painful’ Response To Any Future US Sanctions

April 19, 2018

Russia Warns Of ‘Precise And Painful’ Response To Any Future US Sanctions

Russia is continuing to warn the West of further attacks against Russia. Whether it be in the form of missiles or sanctions, the former Soviet Union doesn’t seem like they wish to play “war games” any longer.

The United States this month added several Russian firms and officials to a sanctions blacklist in response to what it said were the Kremlin’s “malign activities.” Moscow says those sanctions are unlawful and has warned that it will retaliate in a “painful” manner.

“No one should be under any illusions,” said Valentina Matvienko, who is closely aligned with the Kremlin, was quoted as saying by the Interfax News Agency.Matvienko, the speaker of the Russian upper house of parliament, said on Wednesday that Moscow’s response to any United States sanctions will be targeted and painful, Russian news agencies reported.

“Russia’s response to the sanctions, our so-called counter-sanctions, will be precise, painful, and without question sensitive for exactly those countries that imposed them [the sanctions] on Russia,” she was quoted as saying, according to Reuters. “Sanctions are a double-edged sword and those who impose them should understand that sanctions against countries, especially those like Russia, will carry with them risks of serious consequences for those who impose them,” Matvienko added.

Lawmakers in the lower house of the Russian parliament have drawn up legislationthat would give the government powers to ban or restrict imports of U.S. goods and services ranging from medicines to software and rocket engines. However, the Kremlin has not yet said if it backs such measures.

U.S. President Donald Trump mentioned the joint U.S., French, and British military operation last weekend that struck several sites in Syria to punish the Russian-backed government of President Bashar Assad for an apparent chemical attack that killed civilians. Trump said the strike was “absolute precision.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mises the Man and His Monetary Policy Ideas Based on His “Lost Papers”

April 3, 2018

MISES THE MAN AND HIS MONETARY POLICY IDEAS BASED ON HIS “LOST PAPERS”

One day in 1927 Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, stood at the window of his office at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, and looked out over the Ringstrasse (the main grand boulevard that encircles the center of Vienna). He said to his young friend and former student, Fritz Machlup, “Maybe grass will grow there, because our civilization will end.” He also wondered what would become of many of the Austrian School economists in Austria. He suggested to Machlup that, clearly, they would have to immigrate, perhaps, to Argentina, where they might find work in a Buenos Aires nightclub. Friedrich A. Hayek could be employed as the headwaiter, Mises said, while Machlup, no doubt, would be the nightclub’s resident gigolo. But what about Mises? He would have to look for work as the doorman, for what else, Mises asked, would he be qualified to do?

It is worth recalling that in the mid-1920s, Mises had warned of the rise of “national socialism” in Germany, with many Germans, he said, “setting their hopes on the coming of the ‘strong man’ – the tyrant who will think for them and care for them.” He also predicted that if a national socialist regime did come to power in Germany and was determined to reassert German dominance over Europe, it would likely have only one important ally with whom to initially conspire in this new struggle – Soviet Russia. Thus, years before Adolph Hitler came to power, Mises anticipated the Nazi-Soviet Pact to divide up Eastern Europe that set in motion the start of the Second World War in 1939.

Ten years after Mises’s playful 1927 prediction to Fritz Machlup, reality was not that far from what he said. By 1938, many of the Austrian economists had, indeed, emigrated and left their native country.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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