Home » Posts tagged 'nuclear war' (Page 4)

Tag Archives: nuclear war

Consider it a marriage made in hell. Start with the groom, Donald Trump, the man who once wondered why in the world we make nuclear weapons if we can’t use them; who wouldn’t rule out using nukes, even in Europe; who insisted that a president should be “unpredictable” on the subject; who suggested that it might not be “a bad thing for us” if Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea all became nuclear powers; who threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” before he became a chummy correspondent with its dictator; and who called for a nearly 10-fold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal (among many other, often contradictory, comments he’s made on nuclear matters).

Now, think about the bride, National Security Advisor John Bolton, a “statesman” who never saw a nuclear agreement he didn’t want to nuke. Those included President Richard Nixon’s Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, President Bill Clinton’s Agreed Framework with North Korea, President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (all of which he helped to deep-six), and most recently President Ronald Reagan’s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, Treaty (a pact that had actually resulted in thousands of ready-to-use nuclear weapons being scrapped). With the help of his neocon bro, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Bolton recently succeeded in sticking a knife directly in the back of that treaty. He’s undoubtedly now eying the New START treaty, which put limits on long-range nukes and is up for renewal in 2021. (The president has already called it “one of several bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration.”)

As TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll points out today, the first new member of Trump’s and Bolton’s nuclear family, a “low-yield” nuke, was only recently born and given the less-than-apocalyptic name, W76-2.

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

What are the chances of a war that would exterminate most of humankind? It could be more likely than you may think

January 19, 2019

What are the chances of a war that would exterminate most of humankind? It could be more likely than you may think

Recently, together with my coworkers I have been engaged in a statistical analysis of war over the past 600 years. The results were sobering: war, it seems, is a statistical phenomenon similar to earthquakes and forest fires. It strikes according to well defined statistical patterns and there is very little that can be done about it. Aaron Clauset is another scientist who has been working on the same subject and, in a sobering analysis of his, he calculates the probablities of future wars. According to his calculations, a war as large as the Second World War has more than 40% chances to occur within 100 years from now. Then, a war causing more than billion battle deaths, that is exterminating most of humankind, has a probability of 5% to occur in less than 4 centuries from now. That doesn’t mean we can relax for 4 centuries, not at all. It means we can expect it at any moment in the future.

From Aaron Clauset, 2018. (highlighting mine)

…. a stationary model may be used to estimate the likelihood of a very large war occurring over 100 years, one like the Second World War, which produced x_* = 16,634,907 battle deaths. Using the ensemble of semiparametric models for the sizes of wars and assuming a new war onset every 1.91 years on average (43), the probability of observing at least one war with x_* or more deaths is p_* = 0.43 ± 0.01 (Monte Carlo), and the expected number of these events over the next 100 years is 0.62 ± 0.01. Hence, under stationarity, the likelihood of a very large war over the next 100 years is not particularly small.

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

War Essay- The consequences of nuclear war on US society

January 14, 2019

War Essay- The consequences of nuclear war on US society

Summary

The US emerged from WWII as the world’s leading economic and military power. Since that time US hegemony has been predicated on: 1) unrivaled military strength, 2) control of world’s energy reserves and 3) primacy of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. All of the pillars supporting US global dominance are now being threatened by continuing US economic decline coupled with ongoing economic development of China and other Asian countries, who are increasingly using currencies other than the US dollar, for international trade. US economic decline is fueling global instability and increasing the possibility of conflicts erupting between global powers. Thus the threat of nuclear war hangs over the world.

How did we get here?

The US emerged from WWII, with its manufacturing base intact and was the world’s dominant economic power. This began to change in the mid-1970s, as US corporate profits began to stagnate/decline, a consequence of increasing competition from rebuilt economies in Europe- primarily Germany (Marshall Plan), Japan and Korea (US wars in Korea and Vietnam) and later China (1). To deal with these structural economic problems confronting US capitalism, the directors of economic policy in the government and large corporations faced a decision that would play a major role in shaping global geopolitics for the next 5 decades. They could make large investments in the domestic economy, developing state of the art manufacturing facilities and equipment that would enable US corporations to effectively compete with those in newly emerging economies, or abandon manufacturing and change the structure of the US economy. As we now know, policy makers chose the latter route. This policy was based on economic attacks on poor people and labor, financial deregulation, increased spending on the military and war and rampant financial speculation.

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

The Self-Genocide of the West

December 27, 2018

The Self-Genocide of the West

Stephen Cohen and I are branded “Russian dupes” and “Putin agents,” because we object to the highly orchestrated and false portrayal of Russia as a threat to the West, a portrayal that is leading to war. The purpose of this orchestration is to prevent President Trump or any future president from reducing the dangerous tensions between nuclear powers that have accumulated since the Clinton regime. The military/security complex has resurrected its Cold War enemy so necessary for its outsized budget and power and intends to keep Russia as The Enemy. The Democrats have an interest in the villification of Russia as “Russiagate” explains Hillary’s loss of the 2016 Presidential election and gives Democrats hope of removing President Trump from office. The media lacks independence, knowledge, and integrity and is the tool used by the military/security complex to control explanations, a prostitution of the media that has made the term “presstitutes” an accurate description. As strategic and Russian studies are largely funded by the military/security complex, the universities are also complicit in the march toward nuclear war. Republicans are as dependent as Democrats on funding from the military/security complex and the Israel Lobby.

All of this self-serving is driving America and its vassals to war with Russia, which might also mean with China. The war would be nuclear and be the end of the West, an act of self-genocide. The US national security establishment is so crazed that Trump’s efforts to get off the war track and onto a peace track are characterized as treason and a threat to US national security. See for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/opinion/trump-mattis-syria-afghanistan.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion

The Russians are aware that the accusations and demonization that they experience are fabrications. They no longer see the problem as one of misunderstandings that diplomacy can overcome.

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

If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed

December 23, 2018

If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed

Throughout the long Cold War Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University was a voice of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to blind him to Washington’s contribution to the confict and to criticize only the Soviet contribution. Cohen’s interest was not to blame the enemy but to work toward a mutual understanding that would remove the threat of nuclear war. Although a Democrat and left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in the Reagan administration, as Reagan’s first priority was to end the Cold War. I know this because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan will tell you the same thing.

In 1974 a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter, absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat. As the CIA had every incentive for reasons of budget and power to overestimate the Soviet threat, and today the “Russian threat,” Wohlstetter’s accusation made no sense on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up enough concern that CIA director George H.W. Bush, later Vice President and President, agreed to a Team B to investigate the CIA’s assessment, headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets thought they could win a nuclear war and were building the forces with which to attack the US.

The report was mainly nonsense, and it must have have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the setback to negotiations that Team B caused.

Today Cohen is stressed that it is the United States that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington speaks openly of using “low yield” nuclear weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace negotiations with Russia with a propaganda campaign against Russia of demonization, villification, and transparant lies, while installing missile bases on Russia’s borders and while talking of incorporating former parts of Russia into NATO.

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

Russophobia and the Specter of War

December 19, 2018

Russophobia and the Specter of War

Could global warming pose the greatest threat to the future of life on the planet? Quite possibly, if we believe the international (and scientific) consensus, despite a widening stratum of debunkers, deniers, and skeptics. What about the prospects of thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia, two countries armed to the max and seemingly moving toward the brink of military conflict? Where does that rate? If the question is asked of most any Beltway denizen, the response might be something along lines of “sounds frightening, but right now we have other priorities, and we can’t lose sight of the Russian threat”.

As American political life continues to deteriorate, matters of war and peace rarely merit attention amidst the sound and fury of manufactured news, moral posturing, personal scandals, and tweeting exchanges. Good for TV ratings and maybe partisan advantage, decidedly less so for addressing issues of political relevance. Now we have two years of frenzied Russiagate and its attendant neo-McCarthyism. That the intensifying hostility directed by one nuclear power toward another might bring the world closer to a war that could end all wars seems bizarrely remote to a political class obsessed with little beyond its own power and wealth, faintly camouflaged by identity politics; the “unthinkable” remains, well, unthinkable.

As anti-Russia hysteria spreads, speech taboos harden; any discourse at odds with tightening official political/media consensus brings immediate blowback, smear-mongering, and (where possible) silencing. It is so obvious that Vladimir Putin is a ruthless, aggressive monster that any dissenting view must be the product of either insanity or Russian propaganda.

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

The U.S. Government’s Plan Is to Conquer Russia by a Surprise Invasion

December 13, 2018

The U.S. Government’s Plan Is to Conquer Russia by a Surprise Invasion

The following combination of articles explains — and they link to conclusive evidence proving — that the United States Government is actually designing its nuclear forces now with the intention to win a nuclear war against Russia (World War III), and no longer (if they ever really were) adhering to the idea (“Mutually Assured Destruction”) that WW III would produce unacceptable catastrophe for both sides, and must therefore be prevented. The U.S. Government is definitely set upon winning WW III, not avoiding WW III. Nuclear weapons are thus being built and deployed by the U.S. Government with the intention to conquer Russia, and this goal has become NATO’s mission, and its only remaining core function, though this fact is not publicly acknowledged. Here are these articles, and their key quotes, showing this:

1: https://fas.org/blogs/

“Back in 2011, before the B61-12 development program had progressed to the point of no return, FAS sent a letter to the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Defense pointing out the contradiction with the administration’s policy and implications for nuclear strategy. They never responded.”

2: http://www.voltairenet.org/

“As from March 2020, the United States will begin to deploy in Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Holland (where B-61 nuclear bombs are already based), and probably also in other European countries, the first nuclear bomb with precision guidance in their arsenal, the B61-12. Its function is primarily anti-Russian. This new bomb is designed with penetrating capacity, enabling it to explode underground in order to destroy the central command bunkers with its first strike. How would the United States react if Russia deployed nuclear bombs in Mexico, right next to their territory?”

3: http://www.unz.com/article/

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

Assorted Thoughts On Politics, Humanity, And The World

December 12, 2018

Assorted Thoughts On Politics, Humanity, And The World

The problem isn’t just that we are ruled by tyrants, it’s that our minds are full of propaganda and cultural mind viruses which cause us to consent to it.

Russophobia and an uncritical emphasis on Trump has been used to scaremonger an annoyingly large percentage of American progressives from focusing on wanting change to focusing on wanting things to go back to how they used to be. Wanting things to go back to how they used to be is wanting the conditions which created Trump.

Patriotism is like the blue pill in The Matrix. You take it and you get to feel good about your country, but you don’t get to know the truth about it.

If everyone suddenly deeply understood on a gut level exactly how horrific war is, all military actions the US and its allies are currently engaged in would be forced to end due to popular revolt.

Under-discussed: secretive government agencies provide support to Silicon Valley corporations, support which they could easily have threatened to give to those corporations’ competitors instead if certain agreements weren’t made.

Anyone who says Russia is about to invade Ukraine or the Baltic states is either lying or ignorant. A nation with an economy the size of Spain which has been gutting its military budget is not gearing up for World War Three.

Russia’s military personality is a lot like the personality of the stereotypical Russian military veteran: stoic and reserved when left unprovoked, but willing and able to put you in a wheelchair if you invade his personal space. It should be treated accordingly.

People who don’t believe that these idiotic escalations against Russia can lead to nuclear war have simply compartmentalized away from fully considering all the possibilities. They have done this out of intellectual cowardice.

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

Smear Slander Rinse and Repeat

December 3, 2018

Smear Slander Rinse and Repeat

Frans Masereel Montmartre 1925

The way ‘news’ is reported through known outlets changes so fast hardly a soul notices that news as we once knew it no longer exists. This is due to a large extent to the advent of the internet in general, and social media in particular. On the one hand this has led to an absolute overkill in ‘news’, forcing people to pick between sources once they find they can’t read or view it all, on the other hand it has allowed news outlets to flood the former news waves with so much of the same that nobody can compare one source with the other anymore.

Once you achieve that situation, you’re more or less free to make the news, rather than just report on it. The rise of Donald Trump has made the existing mass media realize that one-sided negative reporting on the man sells better than anything objective can. The MSM have sort of won the battle versus the interwebs, albeit only in that regard, and only for this moment, but that is enough for them for now; just like their readers, they don’t have the scope or the energy to look any further or deeper.

This is in a nutshell, and we really should take a much more profound look but that’s another chapter, what has changed the news, and what will keep on changing it until the truth sets us all free. This is what drives outlets like CNN, the New York Times and the Guardian today, because it provides them with readers and viewers. Which they would not have if they didn’t conduct a 24/7 war on a set list of topics they know their audience can’t get enough of.

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

Russia And China Are Apparently Both Under The Impression That War With The United States Is Coming…

November 2, 2018

Russia And China Are Apparently Both Under The Impression That War With The United States Is Coming…

Could it be possible that the U.S. is heading for a major war? If you ask most Americans that question, they will look at you like you are crazy. For most people in this country, war with either Russia or China is not something to even be remotely concerned about. But the Russians and the Chinese both see things very differently. As you will see below, Russia and China both seem to be under the impression that war with the United States is coming, and they are both rapidly preparing for such a conflict.

Let’s start with Russia. After repeatedly slapping them with sanctions, endlessly demonizing their leaders and blaming them for just about every problem that you can imagine, our relationship with Russia is about the worst that it has ever been.

And when the Trump administration announced that it was withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that pushed things to a new low. In the aftermath of that announcement, Russian official Andrei Belousov boldly declared that “Russia is preparing for war”…

He said: “Here recently at the meeting, the United States said that Russia is preparing for war.

“Yes, Russia is preparing for war, I have confirmed it.

“We are preparing to defend our homeland, our territorial integrity, our principles, our values, our people – we are preparing for such a war.”

Here in the United States, there is very little talk of a potential war with Russia in the mainstream media, but in Russia things are very different. Russian news outlets are constantly addressing escalating tensions with the United States, and the Russian government has been adding fuel to that fire. For example, the Russian government recently released a video of a mock nuclear strike against their “enemies”…

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

Regulating Apocalypse

October 31, 2018

Regulating Apocalypse

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!”
“Don’t be such a purist!”
“Be strategic!”
“Do what’s possible!”
“You can’t deny reality / human nature / religious text.”

The phrases used to oppose proposals for major change haven’t changed much for centuries, in both meanings of that phrase. No doubt these sayings sound better in certain circumstances than others, depending on the details. But in general, I find that they sound worse since the status quo locked in the climate collapse, and since the risk of nuclear catastrophe reached it’s current record high and rapidly climbing position.

I’ve just read a new book called War, Law, and Humanity by James Crossland that looks at efforts to regulate or end war from the 1850s up through the beginning of the 1900s. One strain of thought was that war needed to be eliminated and replaced with nonviolent arbitration. Another was that war needed to be regulated, doctors and nurses admitted onto battlefields, standards upheld for the treatment of prisoners, particular weapons banned, etc. The peace advocates were mocked as dreamers. The humanizers were the “realists.”

One must now write history from a nonexistent future. History cannot actually judge anything or anyone because it will not exist any longer in the brains of any living homo sapiens. But we can, pre-extinction, imagine our way forward and look back. If we end in nuclear holocaust, will those who tried to end war still have been silly dreamers? Or will world government or mandatory arbitration or disarmament sound slightly less goofy if the alternative that peace advocates identified for many decades as apocalypse turns out to be apocalypse?

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

America’s Nuclear Death Wish – Europe Must Rebel

October 29, 2018

America’s Nuclear Death Wish – Europe Must Rebel

The Trump administration’s declared scrapping of a crucial arms control treaty is putting the world on notice of a nuclear war, sooner or later.

Any such war is not winnable. It is mutually assured destruction. Yet the arrogant American rulers – some of them at least – seem to be deluded in thinking they can win such a war.

What makes the American position even more execrable is that it is being pushed by people who have never fought a war. Indeed, by people like President Donald Trump and his hawkish national security advisor John Bolton who both dodged military service to their country during the Vietnam War. How’s that for macabre mockery? The world is being pushed to war by a bunch of effete cowards who are clueless about war.

Trump announced last this week that the US was finally pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a move confirmed by Bolton on a follow-up trip to Moscow. That treaty was signed in 1987 by former President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a landmark achievement of cooperation and trust between the nuclear superpowers. Both sides removed short and medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe.

With Trump intending to rip up the INF Treaty, as his predecessor GW Bush had done with the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, Europe is now facing the disastrous prospect of American missiles being reinstalled across its territory as they were in the 1980s. However, a big distinction between then and now is that after years of expansion by NATO, European territory is at an even sharper interface with Russia’s heartland.

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

Western Civilization No Longer Exists

October 16, 2018

Western Civilization No Longer Exists

Societal Collapse awaits in the wings if climate change and nuclear war don’t finish us off first

The Cheney-Bush and Obama regimes destroyed due process, with the result that American citizens were detained in prison indefinitely without evidence and murdered without evidence or trial. In violation of US and international laws, the US government used torture to produce “terrorists,” who were not terrorists, in order to justify Washington’s wars, wars that have nothing whatsoever to do with “fighting terrorism.”

The Democratic Party’s Identity Politics’ successful demonization of white heterosexual males has made American universities unsafe for white heterosexual males. Any woman can accuse them of rape, and despite the absence of any evidence, and even in the face of complete evidence to the contrary, the university, in total violation of all known rules of due process, can convict the accused—indeed, conviction on accusation alone is mandatory in American universities—and destroy the reputation of the accused along with his ability to continue his education.

In the article below federal courts confronted with these mandatory university convictions of white males have overturned them, ruling against the universities’ violations of due process. The corrupt university administrations are serving Identity Politics, not justice.

Just imagine that if the Democrats, who in their glory represented the working class, were to achieve political power and appoint federal judges. No white heterosexual male would be safe. Under the Democrats’ Identity Politics, white heterosexual males are automatically guilty. Due process is not needed. By definition, white heterosexual males are racists, misogynists, and rapists. No evidence is needed.

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

Washington’s Belligerence Can Produce A World Holocaust

September 5, 2018

Washington’s Belligerence Can Produce A World Holocaust

Recently I have been receiving a number of requests for my opinion of the Jewish holocaust. These requests are a puzzle to me as it is a topic unrelated to my commentaries on economics, law, current foreign affairs, and a looming showdown between Washington and Russia in Syria. I don’t know whether to be flattered that readers think that I know everything about everything, or whether these requests are efforts to set me up as a “Holocaust Denier,” a charge that can be used to discredit and close down my website.

The holocaust that I am interested in is the one that Washington’s aggression against Russia, aggression aided by Europe, is preparing for our future. This would not be a holocaust of a few million people but of a few billion and perhaps the entirety of planet Earth. I haven’t the time or energy to investigate the holocaust associated with the Second World War, but Ron Unz, a remarkable person and a Jew, whose website you should daily visit—http://www.unz.com — has, as an objective outsider, had a good look, and you can read it here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/

He has also posted this early work on the subject: http://www.unz.com/book/arthur_r_butz__the-hoax-of-the-twentieth-century/

I am focused on trying to make people aware that Washington’s belligerence toward Russia is driving the world to nuclear war, and that Washington has used various false flag events, dating from September 11, 2001, to destroy the US Constitution and to accumulate all power over the American people in the executive branch.

This task exhausts my time and my energy. I cannot take on more controversies. As I have said in my defense of Noam Chomsky, who many denounce for not disputing the 9/11 official story, no person who has taken on so many controversial issues as Chomsky can afford to take on yet another.

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

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.

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

Tag Archives: nuclear war

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts