Countdown to a global nuclear conflict?

“The United States is baiting China and Russia, and the final nail in the coffin will be Iran, which is, of course, the main target of Israel,” 88-year-old Henry Kissinger, the 56^th US Secretary of State (1973-77), said in an extraordinary interview with Alfred Heinz of the The Daily Squib (published November 27, 2011).

    “We have allowed China to increase their military strength and Russia to recover from Sovietization, to give them a false sense of bravado, this will create an all-together faster demise for them.

     “We’re like the sharp shooter daring the noob to pick up the gun, and when they try, it’s bang bang.”

     Continued the former top American diplomat and world-renowned statesman: “The coming war will be so severe that only one superpower can win, and that’s us folks...”

     That hopeful prognosis of total victory appears to be the answer to the question posed by Kissinger himself at a press conference in Moscow early July 1974, a month before Nixon was forced out of his presidency, when the then secretary of state asked: “What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What do you do with it?” Yes; to conquer the world.

      On the imminent big showdown (“wargasm” in the terminology of the late Herman Kahn, a leading nuclear theorist), Kissinger, despite his advanced age, enthused with a hint of demoniac glee: “O how I have dreamed of this delightful moment.”

     Then he described his dream, saying: “Out of the ashes we shall build a new society, a new world order; there will be only one superpower left, and that one will be the global government that wins.”

       World-conqueror wannabes like Adolf Hitler (German chancellor 1933-45) and Baron Tanaka (Japanese premier 1927-29) pale in comparison – in the apocalyptic light of Kissinger’s envisioned global conquest and domination in the nuclear era.

       Alexander the Great, who conquered Greece (336 BC), Egypt (331 BC) and the Persian Empire (328 BC), would look like a minor, with all his chariots and crossbows.

      “Don’t forget, the United States has the best weapons, we have stuff that no other nation has, and we will introduce those weapons to the world when the time is right,” Kissinger reminded the world, shortly before he ended his dictation and the reporter Alfred Heinz was ushered out of the room in the luxurious Manhattan apartment.

      “We cannot go around threatening to blow up a major portion of the world, or attempt to get our way by looking insane and dauntless. These strategies might be available to a totalitarian nation. They are not available to us, a democratic nation in a democratic alliance,” wrote an American contemporary of Kissinger’s half a century earlier, Herman Kahn (1922-83), in his 1962 book Thinking About the Unthinkable (p. 132), when the US had overwhelming nuclear power and military superiority vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

     “A world armed with nuclear weapons would provide a fertile field for paranoiacs, megalomaniacs, and indeed all kinds of fanatics,” Kahn warned (p. 223).

      Reflecting on the hard lessons of the Vietnam War that exacted a heavy death toll of three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans, and describing war as “terribly wrong”, Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense for seven years (1961-68), said poignantly: “You can’t change human nature...”

     He also recalled that 160 million people were killed in human conflicts during the 20^th century. He added: “We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image.”

     At the crucial period of the Cuban missile crisis in late October 1962, President Kennedy wisely tried to prevent going into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, although the US then had a very substantial strategic nuclear superiority as well as a hugely superior conventional force in the Caribbean region.

     He had two main options: to quarantine or to invade Cuba where the Soviets had secretly deployed both medium-range and intermediate range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads, capable of hitting the major cities on the American east coast and killing over 90 million Americans.

      When Kennedy asked General Walter Sweeney who was chief of the US Air Force if he was confident that his bombers could destroy all the Soviet missiles in Cuba, Sweeney said there was a chance that one or two missiles and nuclear warheads would remain operational after the attack. McNamara said he could have kissed Sweeney for his reply.

      McNamara said: “What responsible president would have accepted the risk of even one nuclear warhead exploding over a U.S. city, killing unprecedented numbers of American citizens?”

      In the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary film Fog of War, then 85-year-old McNamara also commented on the Vietnam war. He said: “...People did not understand at that time there were recommendations and pressures that would carry the risk of war with China and carry the risk of nuclear war. And he (President Johnson) was determined to prevent it...”

      A week before both the US and Russian presidents signed their agreement for further reductions of their deployed nuclear arms (known as the new START) in Prague on 8 April 2010, the Defense Department in Washington released its new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) with its plan to relegate (not replace) its nuclear sword and shield with new-fangled conventional counterparts for a devastating first strike.

      The US is developing what it has termed a Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS) capacity, to deploy conventional warheads on ballistic missiles capable of striking any target in the world within 60 minutes.

     “The Prompt Global Strike concept envisages a concentrated strike using several thousand precision conventional weapons in 2-4 hours that would completely destroy the critical infrastructures of the target country and then force it to capitulate,” former Joint Chief of Russian Armed Forces General Leonid Ivashov has commented in an editorial entitled “Obama’s Nuclear Surprise”.

     “...Combined with the deployment of missile defense supposed to keep the US immune to retaliatory strikes from Russia and China, the Prompt Global Strike initiative (first announced in 2006) is going to turn Washington into a modern era global dictator...

     “At the same time, Washington (Obama) is talking about a completely nuclear-free world...”

     On the latest US Nuclear War Plan (the 18^th), the eminent nuclear archivist Hans M. Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) blogged on 4 April 2013 that the new guidelines reaffirm the Cold War practice of nuclear counterforce (to destroy enemy missile silos, bomber bases and other military targets), officially designated “preemptive or offensively reactive”.

     Moreover, the US military has long-term plans to deploy nuclear weapons well beyond 2040, up to 2080 or indefinitely.

     In a letter attached to the new defense strategy guidance on 5 January 2012, President Obama stated that the US will maintain American global leadership as well as its military superiority in the world.

     At a press briefing on the same day, Obama said that “the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats...”

   Less than one human generation earlier, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan had signed a landmark joint communiqué at the end of their first summit meeting in Geneva on 18-21 November 1985.

      “In this truly historic document the leaders of the two superpowers declared that ‘nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’. Admitting this and implementing it in practice made meaningless the arms race and the stockpiling and modernizing of nuclear weapons,” Gorbachev wrote in his Memoirs (Bantam, 1997, pp. 529-530).

     “’The (two) parties will not seek military superiority.’ This fundamental statement was not just a general phrase to soothe the public. The American President and I have already committed ourselves to giving the necessary instructions to the negotiating teams at the nuclear arms talks in Geneva...”

       In Professor Michel Chossudovsky’s timely and highly significant book TOWARDS A WORLD WAR III SCENARIO: The Dangers of Nuclear War, many salient points are highlighted, of which several are cited as follows:

·        The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace.

·        The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously.

·        Breaking the “big lie”, which upholds war as a humanitarian undertaking, means a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.

·         of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful lobby groups which support them.

To quote Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law, University of

Illinois College of Law: “Professor Chossudovsky’s hard-hitting and compelling book explains why and how we must immediately undertake a concerted and committed campaign to head off this impending cataclysmic demise of the human race and planet earth...”

  

     To quote excerpts from the late Khrushchev’s remarkable letter to Kennedy, received late evening of Friday 26 October 1962, on the eve of “the most dangerous day” of the Cuban missile crisis:

     “Everyone needs peace; both capitalists, if they have not lost their reason, and still more, communists.

     “War is our enemy and a calamity for all people.

     “If indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars (World War I and World War II) and I know that war ends only when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.

     “I should like you to agree that one cannot give way to pressures; it is necessary to control them.

     “If people do not show wisdom, then in the final analysis they will come to a clash, like blind moles, and the reciprocal extermination will begin...”

      

    To quote Albert Einstein, generally recognized as the greatest scientist of the 20^th century: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former...”

     And, to quote again McNamara, once known as the super hawk of the US: “All the evidence of history suggests that man (homo sapiens) is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly...”

    According to a recent opinion poll conducted by Win/Gallup International and released on New Year’s Day 2014, 24% of about 68,000 respondents in 65 countries said that the US is the biggest threat to world peace. 54% in Russia and 49% in China said the US is the greatest threat to peace.

    In late 1968, three American astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders became the first humans to orbit the moon in the Apollo 8 spacecraft. On the fourth of 10 orbits, just as the earth was coming over the moon’s horizon, Anders took colour photographs of Earth.

     A few days later, after their return home, NASA published the iconic photo of a blue planet.

     “...It became a symbol of the fragility of earth, as well as reminding us how pitifully small and insignificant our place in the universe really is,” Rick Moran wrote in American Thinker, December 26, 2013.

     Millions tuned in on Christmas Eve 1968 when the American trio circled the moon. On the tenth and last orbit, they began reading from the Book of Genesis, the Bible verses describing the creation of Earth.

     In a Christmas eve address 2013 at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Pope Francis called on the people in the world to cast aside hatred. He said: “If we love God and our brothers and sisters, we walk in the light. But if our heart is closed, if we are dominated by pride, deceit, self-seeking, then darkness falls within us, and around us...”

     In his first Christmas Urbi et Orbi message before an estimated 150,000 people in St. Peter’s Square, the 77-year-old pontiff asked Jesus to inspire peace among the warring factions around the world: “Prince of Peace, in every place turn hearts aside from violence and inspire them to lay down arms and undertake the path of dialogue...”

     At the 2014 New Year mass in St. Peter’s Bsailica, Pope Francis prayed in his homily for people “who hunger and thirst for justice and peace” in the world. Then in his first New Year blessing in St. Peter’s Square, he called for greater human solidarity in the world. Not global conflict with nukes.