September 22, 2022

Bulletin 309: The moment of maximum danger

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Previously: Bulletin 308: (09/11/22) NNSA "scoping" process at LANL designed to legitimate nuclear weapons, mislead, and distract; best to steer clear, step up real resistance and constructive actions

Dear friends and colleagues --

This is a long Bulletin because it is very serious. Most Westerners are dangerously ignorant of what is going on at the sharp edges of the dying U.S.-led empire.

All of us must urgently do our part to overcome this dangerous ignorance and the ugly chauvinism that goes with it, wherever we find them.

As one of our board members pointed out the other day, the panicked, futile effort to defeat Russia in Ukraine comes from the same place as the crash effort to build and operate a plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory at Los Alamos right now, far ahead of any "need," in what one senior official called "the most inappropriate location imaginable." U.S. leaders, and the public, just cannot be allowed to know that the emperor has no clothes -- that the so-called "American Century" is well and truly over. The alternative narrative -- peace and cooperation, minimizing human suffering and ecological carnage, maximizing human liberation -- cannot be allowed.

I (Greg) have just returned from a week in Washington, DC and there is much to share regarding nuclear weapons politics. That must wait for another Bulletin.

We need firm, effective nonviolent action, as Chris Hedges reminds us ("Strike! Strike! Strike!"). Ordinary channels are shutting down, in case you haven't noticed.

***

Yesterday the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, announced that there would be referenda held in four regions of Ukraine -- Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye -- to decide whether those regions want to become part of the Russian Federation. If they do, the Russian Duma will decide whether to accept them. Assuming that happens, which is very likely, these regions will become part of Russia proper. Attacks on them will be attacks on the Russian homeland. With details added by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Putin also announced a partial mobilization of some 300,000 Russian reservists to augment Russian forces in Ukraine.

Moon of Alabama provides a short precis of these development, with sources.

As Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of the superb Consortium News notes,

Putin did not threaten offensive nuclear war as his remarks in the West are being spun, but warned Russia would defend its own territory with nuclear weapons if necessary. It isn’t known what level of Ukrainian attack against what Russia would now consider its own territory would be needed to bring about such a response. (emphasis added)

Here is a short video of Putin making those remarks: https://youtu.be/e8gZUQMqDAI.

Scott Ritter's essay today is a good place to start for some context ("Reaping the Whirlwind," Consortium News).

....the Russian partial mobilization isn’t designed to defeat the Ukrainian military, but to defeat the forces of NATO and the “collective West” that have been assembled in Ukraine.

And if these NATO resources are configured in a way that is deemed by Russia as constituting a threat to the Russian homeland…

“Of course,” Putin said in his address on partial mobilization, “if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will use all means at our disposal to defend Russia and our people,” a direct reference to Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

“This is not a bluff,” Putin emphasized. “The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our homeland, our independence, and our freedom, I reiterate, will be safeguarded with all the means at our disposal. And those who are trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons need to know that the compass rose can turn in their direction, too.”

This is what the world has come to — a mad rush toward nuclear apocalypse predicated on the irrational expansion of NATO and hubris-laced Russophobic policies seemingly ignorant of the reality that the Ukraine conflict has now become a matter of existential importance to Russia.

The U.S. and its allies in the “collective West” now have to decide if the continued pursuit of a decades-long policy of isolating and destroying Russia is a matter of existential importance to them, and if the continued support of a Ukrainian government that is little more than the modern-day manifestation of the hateful ideology of Stepan Bandera is worth the lives of their respective citizenry, and that of the rest of the world.

The doomsday clock is literally one second to midnight and we in the West have only ourselves to blame.

David Stockman's take is blunt, focusing as we do on the gross incompetence in the Biden Administration ("What In the Hell Was Washington Thinking?," Antiwar.com, 9/22/22):

What in the hell were those bloody-minded Washington/NATO neocons thinking? At any time in the last nine months they could have had a diplomatic settlement with Russia that would have:

• Avoided/ended the war in Ukraine, thereby saving tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives and hundreds of billion of economic cost and destruction;
  
• Allowed the Russian speaking population of the Donbas a substantial degree of self-governance and autonomy from the hostile government in Kiev;
  
• Permitted the historic Russian territory of Crimea to remain under Russian control per the wishes of the overwhelming share of its Russian-speaking population;
  
• Kept NATO out of Ukraine and its missiles away from Russia’s doorstep;
  
• Removed NATO missile bases from the the old Warsaw Pact countries, where NATO had expanded in breach of Washington’s solemn promise made at the time of the German reunification to not extend NATO "one inch to the east" .

Former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern emphasizes some of the critical facts that the U.S. public does not know, thanks to media brainwashing ("Brainwashed for War With Russia," Antiwar.com, 9/22/22).

We at the Study Group cannot emphasize enough that a) this is an extremely dangerous situation, one which b) nearly all Western NGOs, including most arms control and antinuclear organizations, and apparently all congressional Democrats (and most Republicans) do not understand.

Lest anyone pooh-pooh the danger, STRATCOM Commander-in-Chief Admiral Charles Richard said yesterday that for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the US faces the possibility of nuclear war. Got that?

Why is this situation so dangerous? Take a look at these remarks from William Schryver two days ago, which encapsulate the dangers we also see.

Western media and puppet politicians can scream “Russian aggression” and “sham election” all they want, but the unadorned fact is that these regions are overwhelmingly ethnic Russians whose collective desire is to be reunited with what they view as a powerful and ascendant Russia.

In conjunction with this shrewd maneuver, Vladimir Putin will almost certainly announce in his September 21st address a major escalation of Russian military action in Ukraine – thereby making available a significant amount of Russia’s as yet untapped military strength and capabilities.

This will result in a rapid acceleration in the ongoing process of annihilation of the Ukrainian military, its mountains of NATO weaponry, and its numerous “foreign volunteers”.

This, of course, presents the empire with an existential dilemma. The defeat of NATO’s proxy army, weapons, and leadership in Ukraine at the hands of the Russians will be viewed all around the world as an unprecedented defeat of American hegemony; a watershed moment that will carry with it profound geopolitical consequences.

As I have argued for months now, it will mean the end of NATO as a credible military alliance. It will mean the end of the European Union as presently constituted.

In other words, a decisive defeat of the empire’s aspirations in Ukraine will be viewed in Washington, London, and Brussels as an existential threat – which it is. And, as such, it is difficult for me to envision them submissively acquiescing to the outcome.

Therefore we have, as I wrote a few weeks back, now well and truly arrived at The Moment of Greatest Danger. (emphasis added)

This is truly a pivot in history.

Oddly, at this moment, many U.S. and Western NGOs, and academics of course, are ignoring the context and history of this conflict in order to align themselves with Western propaganda, hysterically screaming about how bad Russia and Putin are, when they should be working for peace, acceptance of reality (including the partition of Ukraine), and reconciliation.

Caitlin Johnstone, today ("The US Empire Is Accelerating Toward Global Conflict On Two Fronts"):

Putin also issued a stern nuclear warning that's being hysterically spun by empire managers as a shocking and unprecedentedly bellicose threat, but if you read what he actually said it's clear that he's really reminding the west of the same principles of Mutually Assured Destruction that have been in place for generations, and isn't expressing any position that western nuclear powers don't also hold:

"Nuclear blackmail was also launched. We are talking not only about the shelling of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which is encouraged by the West, which threatens a nuclear catastrophe, but also about the statements of some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction against Russia – nuclear weapons.

"To those who allow themselves to make such statements about Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries. And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.

The citizens of Russia can be sure that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be ensured, I emphasize this again, with all the means at our disposal. And those who are trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the wind [NATO's logo is a compass rose] can also turn in their direction."

So while this war is indeed insanely dangerous, it's not because of any of the words coming out of Vladimir Putin's mouth.

Westerners who are expressing shock and astonishment at Putin's frank acknowledgement of what's at stake in Russia's increasingly direct confrontation with the US empire are really just admitting that they haven't been paying attention. The risk of nuclear war is why sensible people have spent years calling for de-escalation and detente between the US and Russia while tensions have been steadily building since long before the invasion of Ukraine. Now there are western officials who say the world is actually at greater risk of nuclear war than it ever was during the last cold war. (emphasis added)

I want to share, with minimal edits, a long letter I wrote very quickly (thus, with warts) to fellow members of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which had put out what we thought was an highly inappropriate and unbalanced criticism of Russia (and per the usual reflex, Putin in particular). We strongly felt that ICAN's stance in this matter was not conducive either to peace or to nuclear disarmament. We love ICAN and have worked hard in it. The reason we are sharing this (besides the requests we've gotten), is that we are well and truly sick of the ignorant Russophobia that has poisoned the political atmosphere in the West these past years, a cancer which is now very dangerous. It needs to be dealt with firmly.

Dear ______ and all --
This is so one-sided as to be little more than the worst kind of war-supporting propaganda. Some is is factually untrue, or else no different than what my own country thinks and does all the time. It is unworthy of ICAN.

The drums of war are getting louder by the day here in the West and we should be criticizing them. Joining the shrill voices demonizing Russia has a cowardly ring to it as well.

The U.S. and its NATO allies are now bombing [shelling] Russia. Let that sink in. Not every day, but often enough. This, after scuttling peace talks in March. The U.S. and its NATO allies are running a war against Ukrainian provinces with millions of ethnic Russians who look to Russia for protection and safety from years of persecution and mass murder -- over 10,000 have died, certainly; the usual estimate is 14,000 -- by neo-Nazi formations and genocidal national laws that outlaw the Russian language and culture. A U.S. artillery shell was aimed at a busy spot in Donetsk this week, with this result. (It's what Nazis do, and have been doing all these years.) The U.S. and its NATO allies have sunk a Russian warship, aging but still the flagship of the Black Sea fleet, and would love to sink more. Let that sink in, so to speak. The U.S. and its NATO allies are shelling the grounds of a large nuclear power plant and have conducted terrorist operations in Russia proper. With NATO training and assistance, Ukraine launched an amphibious operation against a nuclear power plant while IAEA inspectors were present. Total U.S. aid to Ukraine, in dollars, looks like it exceeds the total military budgets of all but two countries in the world.

This is a major war effort by NATO. It is not defensive. It is NOT aimed at protecting "Ukraine" or the dragooned, poorly-trained and equipped cannon fodder that the [corrupt murderer] coke-head porn actor Zelensky is sending to be chewed up on the front lines. "We supply the arms, Ukraine supplies the bodies."

NATO worked hard to widen the 8-year conflict in Ukraine, building up Ukraine as a kind of "anti-Russia" -- a conflict which the Minsk guarantor states [France and Germany] did nothing to stop, for years. NATO continued to expand -- why?. Missile launchers were installed a few minutes from Moscow. What did anybody think would happen? Well lots of people, like us, knew more or less exactly what would come of this -- war. Western leaders, and many NGOs like the useless Arms Control Association, were blinded by chauvinism and group-think [and of course careerism]. Finally the U.S. neocons, which now control U.S. foreign policy, succeeded in getting the war they have worked toward and have said all along that they wanted.

What Putin and Shoigu said today was is nothing more than what is implied, or stated, in Washington, DC every day. You have not been in the conferences when nuclear weapons executives and Air Force generals start spontaneous war whoops at the stirring patriotic videos of the day when U.S. nuclear missiles are finally launched at their targets. There have been countless nuclear threats made in congressional hearings, all the way down to speeches at Chambers of Commerce and everywhere. Everybody involved in the enterprise understands that if conventional means of deterrence fail, the nuclear triad can and will be used. That's the nature of the beast, in every country that has these weapons. That's why nuclear weapons are built -- and why ICAN was founded.

More specifically, Putin and Shoigu said they were responding to U.S. nuclear threats with their own nuclear deterrence. What happens when or if NATO loses this war? What will NATO do? I have no idea. I have seen plenty of U.S. nuclear threats, including at the U.N.

Why was the W76-2 low-yield Trident warhead just built and deployed? What is the B61-12 for? People on this list should know that there is now a 24/7 rush to build nuclear weapons here in the U.S., with plants in Missouri, Texas, and New Mexico among those with regular graveyard shifts, at the risk of safety. Why do German and Dutch and Italian and Belgian pilots train to drop those tactical weapons? Why were nuclear-capable B-52s just brought to RAF Fairford in the UK? What do you think that was? Fun and games? Where was the outcry then, or now? Why isn't ICAN all over the enduring problem of U.S. nuclear weapons deployments in Europe, as Europeans were in the 1980s? Or is NATO a "good" nuclear alliance? Where are the nuclear umbrella relationships today? How many, with which countries? It's a bit one-sided, isn't it? What about the "missile defense" installations in Poland and Romania? All these are very real nuclear threats.

If you want to oppose nuclear weapons, you have to oppose them in your own country, not join in your country's propaganda against other countries.

Putin and Shoigu are absolutely right in noting that the objective of the West, since long before the current conflict and as a cause of it, is to "break" Russia, as the aged Kissinger put it. It's a real threat, now voiced from many sources in the West, with hundreds of billions of dollars invested in it, and it's visibly ramping up week by week. You can see the blood lust in the mainstream press. Something has to be done to cool that lust, and in the absence of opposition in the West we are going to get nuclear warnings from those being targeted.

Russia, like any other country, would not have launched such a high-risk, high-cost operation unless its ruling political elites were sufficiently united in understanding that there was an existential threat to the Russian Federation. If a hostile army, by 2022 the most potent in Europe, was being groomed on the U.S. border my country would not have waited 8 years to act, that's for sure.

The broader point is that nuclear weapons cannot be seen in a narrow silo. For disarmament, peace is needed. You can't existentially threaten a country from a position of enormous military and hybrid war advantage (NATO spends more on armaments than the entire rest of the world combined, plus all the economic power and soft power) and then expect to have fruitful nuclear disarmament talks. If you threaten any creature and their offspring, or any country, with annihilation, which is what has been going on, you will see teeth and claws. Don't go there.

I would go further to say that what we seeing is a reawakening of an aggressive form of European colonialism. NATO, which the U.S. leads by the nose, or wallet, or whatever, is an aggressive alliance that has been bombing here and there for far too long, serving as cover for a U.S. imperial project that is now meeting resistance in Ukraine and many other places and ways. The dying U.S. empire is dangerous, as dying empires always are. When the purpose of NATO was expanded a few years back to include gaining or protecting access to energy resources, it was an important admission.

With the likely annexation of parts of Ukraine -- which perhaps should have been done in 2014 -- the war there is entering a new phase. Again Russia is drawing a line. "Ukraine" as an independent state ended in the 2014 coup; now it will shrink further territoriality from the boundaries that Lenin and others negotiated back in the day.

If the West can stop fanning the flames of war, and shipping more and more weapons into Ukraine, providing targeting services etc., there could be peace. That would be more likely if there was a peace movement.

Europe is now going to be much poorer, permanently, thanks to the war fever that has gripped its elites, which masks a growing global energy scarcity.

ICAN needs to get its feet on firmer ground and work for peace, not just join the chorus condemning Russia.

Now go back to the beginning. The U.S. and NATO are bombing Russia and sinking Russian ships. Let the implications of that sink in.

Thank you for your attention,

That is all for now.

Meanwhile, our fundraising drive continues; please help with outreach especially if you can!

You will hear more about this shortly. Meanwhile, see recent bulletins for details. Ways to contribute. And thank you -- everyone.

Stay well,

Greg Mello, for the Study Group