[Peace] The threat of Nuclear War by Caitlin Johnstone
Karen
karenaram at hotmail.com
Wed Apr 21 16:12:18 UTC 2021
US Strategic Command, the branch of the US military responsible for
America's nuclear arsenal, tweeted
<https://twitter.com/US_Stratcom/status/1384343498825027584?s=20> the
following on Tuesday:
"The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We
must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which
could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their
least bad option."
The statement, which STRATCOM called a "preview" of the Posture
Statement it submits to US Congress every year, was a bit intense for
Twitter and sparked a lot of alarmed responses
<https://www.newsweek.com/us-strategic-command-tweet-nuclear-war-1584909>.
This alarm was due not to any inaccuracy in STRATCOM's frank statement,
but due to the bizarre fact that our world's increasing risk of nuclear
war barely features in mainstream discourse.
#USSTRATCOM
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/USSTRATCOM?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither
linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of
conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an
adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.
pic.twitter.com/4Oe7xkl05L <https://t.co/4Oe7xkl05L>
— US Strategic Command (@US_Stratcom) April 20, 2021
<https://twitter.com/US_Stratcom/status/1384343498825027584?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
STRATCOM has been preparing not just to use its nuclear arsenal for
deterrence but also to "win" a nuclear war
<https://original.antiwar.com/danny_sjursen/2020/10/29/americas-still-strangelovian-schemes-to-win-nuclear-wars/>
should one arise from the (entirely US-created) "conditions" which are
"neither linear nor predictable". And it's looking increasingly likely
<https://news.antiwar.com/2021/02/03/us-admiral-warns-nuclear-war-with-russia-china-is-a-real-possibility/>
that one will as the prevailing orthodoxy
<https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/us-foreign-policy-is-a-war-on-disobedience-ae4e7e75ce02>
among western imperialists that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved
at all cost rushes headlong toward America's plunge into post-primacy
<https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/the-us-empire-is-acting-like-a-desperate-cornered-animal-because-thats-what-it-is-25308ee10221>.
The US has been ramping up aggressions with Russia in a way that has
terrified experts
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/09/19/stephen-cohen-has-died-remember-his-urgent-warnings-against-the-new-cold-war/>,
and it looks likely to continue
<https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/04/why-the-anti-russian-policies-are-likey-to-stay.html>
doing so. These aggressions are further complicated on increasingly
tense
<https://news.antiwar.com/2021/04/07/us-delivers-military-cargo-to-ukraine-as-it-hypes-russian-military-movements/>
fronts like Ukraine, which is threatening to obtain nuclear weapons
<https://au.news.yahoo.com/ukraine-ponders-nuclear-arms-102813639.html> if
it isn't granted membership to NATO, either of which
<https://original.antiwar.com/daniel_larison/2021/04/13/keep-ukraine-out-of-nato/>
would increase the risk of conflict. Aggressions
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/03/19/what-were-really-seeing-with-all-these-anti-china-narratives/>
against nuclear-armed China are escalating on what seems like a daily
basis
<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aantiwar.com+china&t=hy&va=z&df=y&ia=web>
at this point, with potential flashpoints in the China Seas, Taiwan,
Xinjiang, Hong Kong, India, and any number of other possible fronts.
STRATCOM commander Charles Richard told the Senate Armed Services
Committee
<https://www.stripes.com/news/us/stratcom-commander-calls-on-congress-to-update-us-triad-as-china-s-nuclear-program-advances-weekly-1.670518>
on Tuesday that China's nuclear capabilities are advancing so rapidly
that they're not even bothering with intelligence vetted more than a
month ago in their briefings because it's probably already out of date,
urging an upgrade in America's nuclear infrastructure. Richard
reportedly
<https://twitter.com/barbarastarrcnn/status/1384504363125813254?s=20>
testified that a portion of China's nuclear arsenal has been recently
primed for ready use.
The fact that those in charge of US nuclear weapons now see both Russia
and China as a major nuclear threat, and the fact that US cold warriors
are escalating against both of them, is horrifying. This is to say
nothing of tensions between nuclear-armed Pakistan and nuclear-armed
India, between nuclear-armed Israel and its neighbors, and between
nuclear-armed North Korea and the western empire.
While China keeps the majority of its forces in a peacetime status,
increasing evidence suggests China has moved a portion of its
nuclear force to a Launch on Warning (LOW) posture and are adopting
a limited “high alert duty” strategy. @US_Stratcom
<https://twitter.com/US_Stratcom?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw> testimony at
SASC right now.
— Barbara Starr (@barbarastarrcnn) April 20, 2021
<https://twitter.com/barbarastarrcnn/status/1384504363125813254?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has the 2021 Doomsday Clock
<https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/> at 100 seconds to
midnight, citing the rising threat of nuclear war:
"Accelerating nuclear programs in multiple countries moved the world
into less stable and manageable territory last year. Development of
hypersonic glide vehicles, ballistic missile defenses, and
weapons-delivery systems that can flexibly use conventional or
nuclear warheads may raise the probability of miscalculation in
times of tension. Events like the deadly assault earlier this month
on the US Capitol renewed legitimate concerns about national leaders
who have sole control of the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear
nations, however, have ignored or undermined practical and available
diplomatic and security tools for managing nuclear risks. By our
estimation, the potential for the world to stumble into nuclear
war—an ever-present danger over the last 75 years—increased in 2020.
An extremely dangerous global failure to address existential
threats—what we called 'the new abnormal' in 2019—tightened its grip
in the nuclear realm in the past year, increasing the likelihood of
catastrophe."
In a recent interview
<https://phoenix.coop/2021/04/the-future-is-bleak-on-the-global-arms-race-according-to-nuclear-expert/>
with /Phoenix Media Co-op/'s Slava Zilber, Quincy Institute for
Responsible Statecraft nuclear policy specialist Joe Cirincione
described a ramp-up in weapons technology among all nuclear-armed
nations in the world, the future of which he described as "bleak":
"We right now have a global nuclear
<https://ploughshares.org/new-arms-race>arms race
<https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-18/this-nuclear-arms-race-is-worse-than-the-last-one>.
Each of the nine
<https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat> nuclear-armed
nations are building new weapons. Some are replacing weapons that
are getting old. Others are expanding their arsenals. But all of
these new weapons represent new capabilities for these countries. So
you’re seeing a qualitative and a quantitative arms race that is
completely unchecked.
"If you look at the data
<https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/> that’s
collected by the Federation of American Scientists, for example, you
see that – since the 1980s at the height of the Cold War – we have
slashed the global nuclear arsenals. We went from a world in 1986
where there were almost 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world down to
where we are now where there’s just about 13,500 nuclear weapons.
Tremendous progress. 85% reduction in the stockpile…
"But it’s flattened out. There really haven’t been significant
reductions for years. The 2010 New START
<https://www.state.gov/new-start/> agreement was the last successful
arms control agreement. That was 11 years ago. There’s been no
reduction agreement since then. There’ve been no talks about new
reductions agreements. Now I think the future of arms control is
bleak. It’s bleak. And I see no interest really in a new round of
arms control either from the United States or from Russia. So I’m
pessimistic about our prospects."
As I all too frequently find myself having to remind people, the primary
risk here is not that anyone will /choose/ to have a nuclear war, it’s
that a nuke will be deployed amid heightening tensions as a result of
miscommunication, miscalculation, misfire, or malfunction, as nearly
happened many times
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls> during the
last cold war, thereby setting off everyone's nukes as per Mutually
Assured Destruction.
The more tense things get, the likelier such an event becomes. This new
cold war is happening along /two/ fronts, with a bunch of proxy
conflicts complicating things even further. There are so very many small
moving parts, and it’s impossible to remain in control of all of them.
People like to think every nuclear-armed country has one “The Button”
with which they can consciously choose to start a nuclear war after
careful deliberation, but it doesn’t work that way. There are
/thousands/ of people in the world
<https://fpif.org/thousands-people-launch-nuclear-war/> controlling
different parts of different nuclear arsenals who could independently
initiate a nuclear war. *Thousands* of “The Buttons”. It only takes one.
The arrogance of believing anyone can control such a conflict safely,
/*for years*/, is astounding.
A 2014 report
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000205/full> published
in the journal /Earth’s Future/ found that it would only take the
detonation of 100 nuclear warheads to throw 5 teragrams of black soot
into the earth’s stratosphere for decades, blocking out the sun and
making the photosynthesis of plants impossible. This could easily starve
every terrestrial organism to death that didn’t die of radiation or
climate chaos first. China has hundreds of nuclear weapons; Russia and
the United States have thousands
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons>.
This should be the main thing everyone talks about. There is literally
no more urgent matter on earth than the looming possibility that
everyone might die in a nuclear war.
But people don't see it.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iywKH60NUGg>
On a recent /Tucker Carlson Tonight/ appearance
<https://youtu.be/iywKH60NUGg>, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard did a
solid job describing the horrors of nuclear war and the very real
possibility that it could be inflicted upon us due to America's insane
brinkmanship with Russia. She spoke earnestly about how “such a war
would come at a cost beyond anything we can really imagine,” painting an
entirely accurate picture of "hundreds of millions of people dying and
suffering, seeing their flesh being burned from their bones."
Gabbard is correct, and was right to give such a confrontational account
of what we are looking at right now. But if you read the replies to
Gabbard's tweet
<https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1383022106779267076> in which
she shared a clip from the interview, you'll see a deluge of commenters
accusing her of "hyperbole", saying she's being soft on Putin, and
admonishing her for appearing on Tucker Carlson. It's like they can't
even hear what she's saying, how real it is, how significant it is.
People's failure to wrap their minds around this issue is a testament to
the power of normalcy bias
<https://info.obsglobal.com/blog/the-normalcy-bias#:~:text=The%20assumption%20that%20is%20made,they%20have%20not%20experienced%20before.>,
a cognitive glitch which causes us to assume that because something bad
hasn't happened in the past, it won't happen in the future. We survived
the last cold war by the skin of our teeth, entirely by sheer, dumb luck
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwnPo_A9LJA>; the only reason people
are around to bleat "hyperbole" is because we got lucky. There's no
reason to believe we'll get lucky in this new cold war environment; only
normalcy bias says we will. Believing we'll survive this cold war just
because we survived the last one is as sane as believing Russian
roulette is safe because the guy passing you the gun didn't die.
It's also a testament to the power of plain old psychological
compartmentalization. People can't handle the idea of everything ending,
of everyone they know and love dying, of watching their loved ones die
in flames or from radiation poisoning right in front of them, all
because someone made a mistake at the wrong time after a bunch of
imperialists decided that US planetary domination was worth rolling the
dice on the life of every terrestrial organism for.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwnPo_A9LJA>
But mostly it's a testament to the ubiquitous malpractice of the western
media. It's inconvenient to the agendas of the imperial war machine to
have people protesting these insane cold war games of nuclear
brinkmanship, so their media stenographers barely touch on this issue.
If mainstream journalism actually existed, this flirtation with nuclear
war would be front and center in everyone's awareness and people would
be flooding the streets in protest against their lives being toyed with
as casino chips in an insane all-or-nothing gamble.
This is so much bigger than any of the petty little things we spend our
mental energy on from day to day. It's bigger than whatever your number
one pet issue is. It's bigger than your disdain for Moscow or Beijing.
It's bigger than my disdain for the US empire. It's bigger than our
political opinions. It's bigger than whatever argument we might be
having on the internet. It's bigger than whether or not we've got a
problem with Tulsi Gabbard appearing on Tucker Carlson.
Because once the nukes start flying, none of that will matter. None of
it. All that will matter is the fact that this is all ending. If you
open the door and see a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon, all of
your mental priorities will rearrange themselves real quick.
We should not be in this situation. There is no good reason governments
should be playing these games with these weapons. There is no good
reason we can't just get along with each other and collaborate toward a
healthy world together. Only the psychopathic agendas of power-hungry
imperialists perpetuate this insane balancing act, and it benefits none
of us ordinary people in any way.
The rising threat of nuclear war is the most urgent matter in the world,
and it's absolute madness that we're not talking about it all the time.
Let's do what we can to change that.
_______________________________
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*Caitlin Johnstone <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?author=2>* | April 21,
2021 at 12:29 pm | Tags: china
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=china>, nuclear
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=nuclear>, nuclear
war <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=nuclear-war>,
Russia <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=russia>,
Stratcom <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=stratcom>
| Categories: Article
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=category&term=article>, News
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?taxonomy=category&term=news> | URL:
https://wp.me/p9tj6M-2yp
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?author=2>
The Rising Threat Of Nuclear War Is The Most Urgent Matter In
The World
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/04/21/the-rising-threat-of-nuclear-war-is-the-most-urgent-matter-in-the-world/>
by Caitlin Johnstone <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?author=2>
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