June 16, 2024

Bulletin 346: Momentous events, and two op-eds

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    Previously: Bulletin 345: (05/25/2024) Ukraine strikes Russian early-warning radar against nuclear attack

    (Look for a letter to our local "activist leaders" list in a day or two. This Bulletin goes to our main, larger list.)

Dear friends and colleagues -- Happy Father's Day to all --

We living in very dangerous times. The U.S. has become a non-stop war machine that runs a government. Europe's leaders talk as if the Continent were also a "Europe of war."

Voices calling for peace are weak to nonexistent -- including in nuclear disarmament circles.

An email today from eminent legal and foreign policy scholar Francis Boyle provides this simple summary of what the U.S. under the present administration is doing:

The United States is using Taiwan as its Attack Dog and Cat's Paw against China. The United States is using Ukraine as its Attack Dog and Cat’s Paw against Russia.  And the United States is using Israel as its Attack Dog and Cat's Paw against the Middle East.

Boyle continues:

This current bout of U.S. imperialism is what Hans Morgenthau denominated “unlimited imperialism” in his seminal work Politics Among Nations (4th ed. 1968, at 52-53):

"The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination–a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror’s lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind…"

It is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign policy. The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.

Diana Johnstone, in an excellent short historical review, points out that the basis for today's Russophobia should by now be "crashingly clear:"

In retrospect, it becomes crashingly clear that the “communist threat” was indeed only a pretext for great powers seeking more power. More land, more resources.

The Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, like the Anglo-American liberals, looked at Russia in the way mountain-climbers proverbially look at mountains. Why must you climb that mountain? Because it’s there. Because it’s too big, it has all that space and all those resources. And oh yes, we must defend “our values”.

It’s nothing new. The dynamic is deeply institutionalized. It’s just the same old war, based on illusions, lies and manufactured hatred, leading us to greater disaster.

Her final question:

Is it too late to stop?

On Friday, Russian President Putin delivered a 10,000 word speech (full text) outlining Russia's proposals for peace in Ukraine (summary). For the Zelensky regime, these terms are not as favorable as those available in April 2022. In fact, had Ukraine abided by the Minsk II agreements, or France and Germany made Ukraine do so, the Donbass still be part of Ukraine, Ukrainian energy and other infrastructure would still be intact, and about 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers would still be alive.

Various Western leaders wasted little time rejecting Putin's proposal, unpopular as many of them are. Some (e.g. Biden) are by now short-timers. For now, their unpopularity and short expected tenure appear not to matter to them or their parties, as far as this bellicosity is concerned. Sooner or later it will matter, one way or another.

We urge you to catch up on some of these events as best you can from the sources provided on our Ukraine page. We are putting them there every day for your use. Read, write, join with others, in any of a thousand ways.

We are in, as Pepe Escobar put it in a recent over-the-top but nonetheless well-informed article, "the summer of living dangerously." (This excellent interview with Escobar by Napolitano covers much of the same ground.)

We hope you understand that nuclear disarmament is by now "off the table" and not happening, for a generation. "We" muffed it. Meanwhile old-style arms control, invented and practiced to undercut disarmament efforts, is dead. (I am not grieving, are you?) It will never be revived, because like it or not the world has changed in momentous ways.

Calling for nuclear disarmament or arms control absent a central effort to find peace with Russia in particular, a country with which the U.S. is now waging a hot war, is politically irresponsible and just plain foolish.

The momentous events we are living through are carrying us all along like a flood in a great river. How can we find our bearings in the new world toward which we are being taken?

Here is an op-ed, which we expect to be published soon, that attempts to summarize some relevant aspects of this new world in a short 600 words:

"There is no way to peace, peace is the way"

Muste was right, of course. Today, these timeless words could light for us the path through what William Schryver has called “the bitterness of strategic defeat” in Ukraine and beyond, if we can accept them. Accept peace and prosper, for a change.

These words also contain a prescription for a new arms control paradigm – and possibly, someday in the distant future but alas not before, nuclear disarmament.

Old-style arms control is dead and will never be revived, because the world has changed. Core arms control assumptions included a U.S. that would continue to “lead” the world economically and militarily, and a U.S. society that would remain more or less unchanged in its prosperity and its façade of democracy.

All that is fading. We are in a whole new world.

Suddenly, nuclear war is a real possibility again. If there is a silver lining to this, it lies in the widening realization that the U.S. cannot go on trying to dictate terms to the world from its “exceptional” position atop an arbitrary, “rules-based international order.”

In the old world order, a vast military establishment, coupled with financial control and threats of “regime change,” have been the “hardware.” The “software” has been a messianic, increasingly “woke” liberalism. Most of the world, including more and more people in the U.S., now see this for what it is: neocolonialism and cultural destruction.

In its place, a diverse, multipolar world is rising. The U.S. will become one nation among others. We can’t afford to control the world, and why should we? The arrogance and futility of our 700 or so military bases worldwide will become more apparent, as will the folly of spending more than half of all federal discretionary funds on a sprawling national security state.

These vast sums have created what amounts to a “second government,” and it’s in control. As Michael Glennon writes, the Constitutional (“Madisonian”) institutions of the Executive, Congress, and federal courts no longer control the post-1947 “Trumanite” institutions of the Pentagon, intelligence community, and National Security Council.

This has been a horrible mistake, one to which the crumbling infrastructure, vast inequality, skyrocketing debt, and increasing social failure here in the U.S. testify. Internationally, the rise of the BRICs, the deep alliance between Russia and China, the military defeat of the West in Ukraine and its moral defeat in Gaza add up to a kind of comprehensive defeat for U.S. “old-think.” Week by week, the increasingly senile Biden and the incompetent people around him are making all this worse, doubling down on their failures. Biden has the power to immediately end the war in Ukraine as well as the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Will he? There is no sign of that.

In Ukraine, the people controlling Biden want to continue the war at least through the election, if enough cannon fodder can be found. Meanwhile the deeper the West commits to that war, the greater the war hysteria in Congress and in Europe and the greater the danger of a larger war. “Biden’s” back is against the wall. He has done this to himself and to us, by failing to negotiate in 2021-2022 and then scuttling the Istanbul peace negotiations in the spring of 2022. There was never any way Ukraine could win that war.

Some kind of peace will come to Ukraine, but what about us? Will we accept a new kind of leadership role –  in peace, toward peace – or will the U.S. remain what Martin Luther King called it, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today?”

We will provide a good deal more along these lines by week's end, as we have an important deadline requiring us to do so!

While we are at it here follows another pending opinion piece, this one on pit production:

Plutonium Impatience and the New Arms Race

At eight sites across the U.S., the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) designs, tests, and manufactures nuclear warheads and bombs. The U.S. retains a vast arsenal of about 5,044 such warheads, of which about 1,770 are deployed and another 1,938 are held in reserve. About 1 ,336 are retired. Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base stores many in the latter two categories.

Each warhead has a plutonium core, the “pit.” The U.S. has not made more than a handful of pits since the Rocky Flats Plant stopped making them in 1989. Since then, maintaining and modernizing the vast U.S. arsenal has not required new pits, nor has the U.S. had any place to make them.

Pits slowly age, however, and the stewards of the stockpile believe they must “keep up with the Joneses” with new designs. They point out that if the U.S. wants to keep a nuclear arsenal, there will need to be a pit factory, sooner or later.

"Why stop at one factory?”, said NNSA. “Why not TWO?”

So that’s the plan. First, “expedited delivery” for the first few pits, to be achieved by re-tooling a 50-year-old R&D facility in Los Alamos and then running it 24/7 with more than 4,100 full-time staff supporting the mission. Then, the regular “Amazon Prime” schedule for all the rest of the pits, to be made in a larger facility at the Savannah River Site (SRS), using half as many staff. NNSA must build that project anyway given the advanced age, inadequate size, safety problems, and enormous operating costs at Los Alamos.

Construction in both places is expected to be done in 2032. Los Alamos expects to complete its first new pit late this year. Then next year, maybe 5 will be built. By 2032 NNSA expects LANL to be reliably making at least 30 pits each year. We’ll see.

At SRS, NNSA won't make pits until 2035. But that plant will be able to make all the pits needed. When it opens, LANL can scale back – or may have to scale back, as problems accumulate. NNSA does not expect the LANL facility to last beyond about 2045 – sooner than existing pits are expected to last.

What will this cost? At LANL, NNSA will spend at least $22 billion on this project through 2032. The total cost will be more because some parts of the project haven’t been costed or submitted to Congress for approval.

At SRS the latest project estimates lie between $18 to $25 billion. However, that bigger, more-optimized factory will be able to make a great many more pits, with only half as many people as LANL. Per-pit costs at SRS will be about one-fifth as much as at LANL, where pits will cost a cool $100 million each, assuming total success.

For pits as for packages, expedited delivery can cost a fortune.

All the LANL pits are for a new warhead (the “W87-1”) that is only “necessary” if the number of warheads on each U.S. silo-based missile is increased from one to three. Right now, the U.S. already has enough safe-to-handle, long-lasting, highly-accurate warheads for the new “Sentinel” silo-based missile system, if that system were deployed with just one warhead per missile, as today’s silo-based missiles are. In that case, LANL pit production would not be needed.

But where’s the fun in that? The additional nuclear waste and accidents? What’s $22-plus billion among friends? Surely plenty of tax dollars will be left over for rebuilding infrastructure and educating our children. If not, we can raise taxes and parents can hold bake sales. If we survive that long.

Thank you for your attention and best wishes,

Greg