{"id":277252,"date":"2016-11-04T03:45:04","date_gmt":"2016-11-04T02:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=277252"},"modified":"2016-11-04T11:35:09","modified_gmt":"2016-11-04T10:35:09","slug":"no-cold-war-far-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/no-cold-war-far-worse\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is No ‘Cold War’; It’s Far Worse Than That."},"content":{"rendered":"

World War III \u2014 the first (and final) nuclear war \u2014 has never been so likely as it is now.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Here is the reason why we are currently even closer to a civilization-ending nuclear war than was the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962:<\/span><\/p>\n

During the Cold War, the two sides agreed that any war between the capitalist side and the communist side would escalate to nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR and constitute Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.). Therefore, because of this mutual acceptance of M.A.D., hot war didn\u2019t develop during that entire period, from 1945 till the Soviet Union dissolved and ended its military alliance the Warsaw Pact, both of which ended in 1991. Throughout that 45-year period, called \u201cthe Cold War,” there was no hot war between the two nuclear superpowers, because both sides believed that any hot war would end in M.A.D. \u2014 mutual annihilation, and the end of civilization. It would end that way because any hot war between the two sides would terminate either in one side surrendering to the other, or else in at least one of the two sides (presumably to be started by the one that\u2019s on the brink of defeat<\/i> in the traditional hot war) nuclear-attacking the other (as being its only alternative<\/i> to defeat). In other words, M.A.D. recognized and accepted the fact that for a nuclear power to attack a nuclear power with non-nuclear weaponry will almost certainly provoke a nuclear war at the moment when one of the two is losing (or about to lose) the conventional conflict to the other. Nuclear weapons are weapons of last resort, but they exist in order to prevent defeat. That\u2019s what they exist for. If Japan had had deliverable nuclear weapons, then the end of World War II would have been considerably delayed. Japan would have lost because it had no allies, but the end of WW II would have been very different than it was.<\/span><\/p>\n

Only M.A.D. avoided the Cold War becoming a hot war. <\/span><\/p>\n

But M.A.D. is not just a physical reality but equally importantly a mutually-shared belief-system<\/i>, a belief-system that becomes no longer operative if one of the two sides switches to believe that a way exists actually to win a nuclear war \u2014 in other words, to believe that conquest of a nuclear power by another nuclear power is a real possibility. During the years prior to 2006, there was an increasing though unspoken belief at the top of the U.S. aristocracy (the people who control the U.S. government \u2014 or at least have controlled it since 1981<\/span><\/a>), that the United States would be able to win a nuclear war against Russia; and, suddenly, in 2006, the belief was published, and virtually no one who possessed power or influence challenged it; and, from that time forward, M.A.D. was ended on the American side, and nuclear weapons became, in the U.S., strategized within a new framework (called \u201cnuclear primacy\u201d<\/span><\/a>) \u2014 the framework of nuclear weapons as constituting the ultimate weapons of conquest by the U.S. government.<\/span><\/p>\n

After 1991, when the Warsaw Pact no longer existed, the U.S. military alliance NATO invited into its membership all of the former states of the USSR except Russia (thereby indicating NATO\u2019s continuing hostility toward that particular nation and the fraudulence<\/span><\/a> of NATO\u2019s peace with it), and also invited in all of the USSR’s former Warsaw Pact allies, and so NATO (a now clearly anti-Russian, no longer at all anti-communist, alliance) has come to extend right up to Russia\u2019s own borders \u2014 something that the U.S. had refused to allow the USSR to do to the U.S. in 1962, when the Soviet dictator Khrushchev wanted to place nuclear missiles in Cuba just 90 miles from America\u2019s border. <\/span><\/p>\n

In the new era during which the U.S. government and its allies believe that nuclear primacy is about to be achieved, the framework in which the use of \u2018nuclear primacy\u2019 would be \u2018justified\u2019 is that, as soon as such \u2018primacy\u2019 is believed to have been obtained (such as by means of anti-ballistic missiles having been installed that would supposedly annihilate Russia\u2019s nuclear arsenal before their warheads could even be released to retaliate against the U.S.-and-allied nuclear invasion), the U.S. side\u2019s \u2018defensive\u2019 traditional-weapons invasion of Russia is being defeated by the Russians, and so the only way available to prevent the defeat of the U.S.-and-allied forces is by the use of nuclear weapons (the \u2018taking-advantage\u2019 of America\u2019s \u2018nuclear primacy\u2019). That\u2019s how the nuclear attack would be \u2019justified\u2019, as a \u2018necessary defensive response\u2019 against Russia. <\/span><\/p>\n

Consequently, in the current U.S.-NATO operation on and near Russia\u2019s borders<\/span><\/a>, the Alliance is starting the buildup of its traditional invasion forces. This includes even some U.S. allies that aren\u2019t in NATO<\/span><\/a>. The supposed \u2018justification\u2019 for this amassing of invasion-forces on Russia\u2019s borders is to \u2018defend\u2019 against \u2018Russia\u2019s aggression\u2019<\/span><\/a> when (in March 2014 just weeks after the bloody U.S. coup in Ukraine<\/span><\/a>) Russia enabled the residents of Crimea to rejoin Crimea as part of Russia, of which Crimea had been until the Soviet dictator Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954<\/span><\/a>. That disagreement about Crimea is the supposed root-cause for NATO\u2019s involvement, even though Ukraine still isn\u2019t (and previously didn\u2019t want to be) a member of the NATO alliance. Anyway: this<\/span><\/a> is the rationalization for NATO\u2019s buildup toward what could become WW III.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ever since 19 February 2016, the U.S. has been storing tanks and artillery<\/a><\/span>, sufficient \u201cto support 15,000 Marines\u201d in undisclosed \u201cconfidential\u201d Norwegian caves. Norway has a 200-mile border with Russia. CNN\u2019s news-report on that was accompanied by a video headlined \u201cRussia Reveals Aggressive Military Plans\u201d<\/span><\/a>. It reported that Russia\u2019s (democratically elected, though not mentioned as such) President, Vladimir Putin, was moving troops and weapons toward Norway\u2019s border. (How would the U.S. respond if Russia were to be storing invasion-equipment and troops in Mexico near the U.S. border? Would the U.S. be moving troops and weapons near the Mexican border to protect against an invasion of America; and, if so, then how accurate would it be if Russia\u2019s media then headlined \u201cAmerica Reveals Aggressive Military Plans\u201d? Hitler\u2019s Germany used those sorts of media-tactics, but this time Obama\u2019s America is doing that.) Marine Corps Times<\/i> headlined on October 24th, \u201cMore than 300 Marines heading to Norway in January”<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. President Barack Obama means business: he\u2019s getting things set up for Hillary Clinton to finish as his successor. This kind of boldness exceeds anything during the Cold War.<\/span><\/p>\n

America, and its greatly expanded NATO, thus now surrounds Russia not just with its tanks etc., but with its missiles and bombers, on and near Russia\u2019s borders, and so the flight-time from launch to the nuclear-bombing (if the ground-invasion of Russia encounters defeat) will be less than ten minutes, sometimes even less than the time for Russia to get its own missiles launched in retaliation against ours; and so a U.S. blitz nuclear attack against Russia could conceivably be an entirely one-sided war. Here is how that scenario \u2014 the end of physical M.A.D. \u2014 has actually become the objective sought by the U.S. government (and the necessary backstory for America\u2019s war-drills on Russia\u2019s borders):<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2006, the U.S. aristocracy published in the journal Foreign Affairs,<\/i> from their Council on Foreign Relations, the first article which said that the U.S. goal should no longer be a continuation of M.A.D., but instead \u201cThe Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy\u201d<\/span><\/a>, by which the U.S. aristocracy meant the rise of America\u2019s ability to win a nuclear war against Russia. It established this stunning goal merely by saying that such an objective could be achieved and that it should be achieved, and by the article’s being published by the U.S. aristocracy itself (the people who control this country), and by furthermore the U.S. aristocracy not condemning and rejecting and repudiating it but simply letting that article stand with little to no public discussion (and no public debate) about it, much less with the chorus of public condemnations of it in the U.S. press, such as would have happened if America were a democracy \u2014 but this nation no longer is a democracy, it has become an aristocracy<\/span><\/a>, and this aristocracy had now published the \u201cNuclear Primacy\u201d article. (By contrast, in the obscure journal China Security<\/i> was published in the Autumn 2006 issue the main critique against it, \u201cThe Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy\u201d<\/span><\/a>. That article had no impact.) The Foreign Affairs<\/i> article even was so bold as to assert that \u201cU.S. leaders have always aspired to this goal\u201d (nuclear primacy) \u2014 a wild and unsupported allegation that\u2019s not much different from alleging that not only George W. Bush but all U.S. Presidents after World War II were aspiring to have the ability to conquer Russia (and the authors were asserting that only now was this supposedly terrific ability coming within reach). It was explicit about G.W. Bush\u2019s having this desire: \u201cThe intentional pursuit of nuclear primacy is, moreover, entirely consistent with the United States’ declared policy of expanding its global dominance. The Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy explicitly states that the United States aims to establish military primacy.\u201d That allegation was tragically true, which is one of the reasons why Bush (like his father, who actually started<\/span><\/a> the determined policy to achieve nuclear primacy) was so dangerous and harmful a President. His invasion of Iraq was merely a sympton of that deeper disease. <\/span><\/p>\n

And, so, this article about \u201cThe Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy\u201d and \u201cThe End of\u201d M.A.D., was now \u2014 since it was published by the CFR and not rejected by any influential group \u2014 accepted within the U.S. as a goal, \u201cNuclear Primacy,\u201d which the U.S. government could and should strive for. That idea, of a winnable nuclear war (winnable by the U.S., of course), was no longer heretical, no longer viewed as repugnant. In fact, this article had been introduced and accepted by Harvard University simultaneously in its longer form and simultaneously published by their scholarly journal International Security<\/i>, which is the leading (it\u2019s the world\u2019s most influential) scholarly journal dealing with that subject, and its title there was \u201cThe End of MAD?\u201d<\/span><\/a>. (The periods are customarily removed from the acronym \u201cM.A.D.\u201d, perhaps in order to associate the M.A.D. concept with the pejorative term, insanity. So \u2014 at least in the United States \u2014 the termination of M.A.D. has always had a favorable ring to it, even before that goal became effectively U.S. policy, which it has been at least ever since 2006.) And no one was saying that Harvard and its journal and the CFR were the ones who were at all \u201cmad\u201d or anything similar, such as \u201cinsane.\u201d The aristocracy\u2019s stamp of approval upon the concept of nuclear primacy was clear, from at least 2006 on. Although M.A.D. continued as regards Russia\u2019s side, it no longer remained operative thinking on America\u2019s side. That\u2019s now clear, and this is Russia\u2019s predicament \u2014 and the world\u2019s (because a nuclear war involving even just one of the two nuclear superpowers would destroy the world<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. President Barack Obama is putting the goal of nuclear primacy into place, starting with implementation of Ronald Reagan\u2019s proposed \u201cStar Wars\u201d Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense system, now called the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system, and technically called by the name of its current embodiment: Lockheed Martin\u2019s, Boeing\u2019s, and Raytheon\u2019s, Aegis Ashore system, which Obama first made operational in Romania on 12 May 2016<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0It\u2019s designed so as to enable a surprise nuclear attack against Russia in which any missiles that Russia might be able to launch in retaliation will supposedly (if the system works 100%) be annihilated during their launch-phase. Officially<\/span><\/a>, however, its purpose is to defend Europe from being attacked by Iranian missiles. Any public U.S. admission that this \u2018defensive\u2019 system is actually preparation for a blitz U.S. nuclear assault on Russia is obviously out of the question. And, obviously, Russians know that Obama is lying and that this is preparation by the U.S. for a blitz nuclear attack against Russia. The West\u2019s \u2018news\u2019 media might be such \u2018fools\u2019 as not to be aware of that fact, but Putin has made quite clear that he is not, and he is preparing Russia to deal with it. <\/span><\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s action here was made possible by U.S. President George W. Bush\u2019s 2002 unilateral termination of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty<\/span><\/a><\/span> with Russia\u2019s predecessor, the Soviet Union. Bush rushed forward with Reagan\u2019s \u201cStar Wars\u201d program even despite there having been no successful tests of the necessary technology: the existing technology consistently failed but Bush decided to invest $53 billion of U.S. taxpayers\u2019 money in it<\/span><\/a>. Bush in 2004 received British Prime Minister Tony Blair\u2019s participation and provisioning of locations and facilities to implement the plan<\/span><\/a>, and Bush was also pressing both Poland and the Czech Republic to allow the U.S. to position ABMs there<\/span><\/a>. Obama came into office criticizing the ABM plan and pretending not to be hostile toward Russia. He deceived Vladimir Putin into thinking that Obama sincerely wanted to pursue peace and cooperation with Russia.<\/span><\/a> As soon as Obama became re-elected, his verbal smiling teeth immediately became actual glaring fangs. Then, soon after his regime overthrew in a bloody February 2014 coup the Moscow-friendly democratically elected President of Ukraine, bordering Russia<\/span><\/a>, Russia started in the summer of 2014<\/span><\/a> to ignore the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, because for Washington the next step (beyond Ukraine) clearly now would be Moscow and so all bets were off. The installation of the Aegis Ashore in Romania likewise violates that Treaty<\/span><\/a>, which is one important reason why Obama lies to say that all of the Aegis Ashore facilities will be targeted against Iran \u2014 and maybe also North Korea \u2014 but never against Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n

The full Aegis Ashore system, which will require several such sites, isn\u2019t yet operational. NATO\u2019s PR-arm the Atlantic Council, has mentioned<\/span><\/a> among the Aegis Ashore\u2019s benefits, that for the next such site, in Poland, \u201cPoland announced in late April that it would buy eight Patriot missile batteries from Virginia-based Raytheon Co. in a deal that could generate at least $2.5 billion in US export content.\u201d The U.S. government officials and their friends who have invested in Raytheon and the other \u2018defense\u2019 firms didn\u2019t need to be informed of this by any PR person. They already knew of it from more reliable sources, and perhaps they even have invested in nuclear bunkers<\/span><\/a> for themselves<\/span><\/a> and their friends and their friends\u2019 friends<\/span><\/a>. Lots of money is changing hands during this build-up.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also in 2006, later in that year, specifically on 18 November 2006, was published at Global Research, which is an independent Canadian online international site dealing with geostrategy, a superb summary of the connection that this plan has to America\u2019s string of invasions in the Middle East. It\u2019s titled \u201cPlans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a \u2018New Middle East\u2019,\u201d<\/span><\/a> by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, who explains:<\/span><\/p>\n

It should be noted that in his book, \u201cThe Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives,\u201d Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. National Security Advisor, alluded to the modern Middle East as a control lever of an area he, Brzezinski, calls the Eurasian Balkans. The Eurasian Balkans consists of the Caucasus (Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Armenia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan) and to some extent both Iran and Turkey. Iran and Turkey both form the northernmost tiers of the Middle East (excluding the Caucasus4) that edge into Europe and the former Soviet Union.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The Map of the \u201cNew Middle East\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

A relatively unknown map of the Middle East, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been circulating around strategic, governmental, NATO, policy and military circles since mid-2006. It has been casually allowed to surface in public, maybe in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the general public for possible, maybe even cataclysmic, changes in the Middle East. This is a map of a redrawn and restructured Middle East identified as the \u201cNew Middle East.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Note: The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006).<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO\u2019s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Brzezinski\u2019s advocacy of \u201cAmerican Primacy\u201d fits perfectly with the aristocracy\u2019s support of \u201cNuclear Primacy,\u201d and appeared eight years before it. His 1998 book was seminal also in many other ways. And, as that Nazemroaya article made clear, Brzezinski\u2019s plan was already being put into effect by the U.S. government, even before 2006.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the person who actually made the seminal decision behind all of this, the decision to conquer Russia, was U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush, on the night of 24 February 1990, just before the Soviet Union ended.<\/a><\/span> He was the person who decided that after the USSR and its Warsaw Pact terminated, NATO would continue that cold war until Russia has been surrounded by U.S. allies, who are Russia\u2019s enemies, when Russia will ultimately either surrender or else be destroyed by the U.S. and its friends. <\/span><\/p>\n

Even if Russia assumes that any such nuclear war would be M.A.D., the government of the U.S. no longer does. That\u2019s<\/i> Russia\u2019s predicament \u2014 and the world\u2019s<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, military planners in the U.S. and its vassal nations, do not include in their calculations the world: the impacts that such nuclear winter and all the rest will have if their dream of \u2018nuclear primacy\u2019 amounts to anything more than merely the vicious hoax that it is. This fact, of their ignoring the world, is scandalous \u2014 against our military planners. They are so obsessed with \u2018victory\u2019, that they are willing to participate in this false and potentially mega-catastrophic dream, of \u2018nuclear primacy\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unless and until nuclear weapons are totally eliminated (which might never happen), their constructive function, of preventing WW III, must continue, not end as a result of \u2018nuclear primacy\u2019 and other such lies and delusions. However, the \u2018news\u2019 media, especially in \u2018The West\u2019, are not pointing out those lies and distortions, but instead reinforcing them.<\/span><\/p>\n

If there is to be a WW III, it will end the world<\/span><\/a>. That is the key fact, which is ignored by \u2018The West\u2019s\u2019 military planners.<\/span><\/p>\n

NATO needs to end now, just as the Warsaw Pact did in 1991 \u2014 when an indecent, oligarchic<\/span><\/a>, \u2018The West\u2019 continued the Cold War despite the Warsaw Pact\u2019s end, and now is making it hot.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

World War III \u2014 the first (and final) nuclear war \u2014 has never been so likely as it is now. Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org Here is the reason why we are currently even closer to a civilization-ending nuclear war than was the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: During the Cold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":276039,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[115,30,27,32,96,93,64,698,59,524,754,523,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-277252","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"tag-barack-obama","9":"tag-big-brother","10":"tag-bush","11":"tag-cia","12":"tag-cover-up","13":"tag-eu","14":"tag-world-news","15":"tag-hillary-clinton","16":"tag-military","17":"tag-russia","18":"tag-syria","19":"tag-ukraine","20":"tag-white-house","21":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}