Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
(RINF<\/a>) – The U.S. government\u2019s plan to conquer Russia is based upon a belief in, and the fundamental plan to establish, \u201cNuclear Primacy\u201d against Russia \u2014 an American ability to win a nuclear war against, and so conquer, Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n This concept became respectable in U.S. academic and governmental policymaking circles when virtually simultaneously in 2006 a short-form and a long-form version of an article endorsing the concept, which the article\u2019s two co-authors there named \u201cnuclear primacy,\u201d were published respectively in the world\u2019s two most influential journals of international affairs, Foreign Affairs<\/i> from the Council on Foreign Relations, and\u00a0International Security<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0from Harvard. (CFR got the more popular short version, titled\u00a0\u201cThe Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0Harvard got the more scholarly long version, which was titled\u00a0\u201cThe End of MAD?\u201d<\/span><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n This article claimed that the central geostrategic concept during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Mutually Assured Destruction or \u201cMAD\u201d \u2014 in which there is no such thing as the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. conquering the other, because the first of the two to attack will itself also be destroyed by the surviving nuclear forces of the one responding to that attack \u2014 will soon be merely past history (like the Soviet Union itself already is); and, so, as the short form of the article said, \u201cnuclear primacy remains a goal of the United States\u201d; and, as the long form said, \u201cthe United States now stands on the cusp of nuclear primacy.\u201d In other words: arms-control or no, the U.S. should, and soon will, be able to grab Russia (the largest land-mass of any country, and also the one richest in natural resources).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Neither version of this article mentioned the key reason why nuclear victory is exceedingly dangerous even under the most favorable conditions, which reason is the concept (and the likely reality in the event of nuclear war between the two superpowers)\u00a0\u201cnuclear winter\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the scientific studies showing that a resulting sudden sharp cooling of the atmosphere after all those enormous explosions would produce a global die-off. America\u2019s aristocracy and its vassal-aristocracies controlling the U.S.-allied nations (billionaires, centi-millionaires, and their top agents in both the public and private sectors) are buying<\/span><\/a> and building<\/span><\/a> deep-underground nuclear shelters<\/span><\/a> for themselves, but they wouldn\u2019t be able to stay underground and survive on stored feedstuffs forever. (As for everybody else, those other people are not involved in geostrategic decisionmaking, and so are being ignored.) However, many of America\u2019s (and associated) elite are paying those bomb-shelter expenses, but none of the West\u2019s elite are condemning the path toward nuclear war that their governments are on. So: buying or building nuclear-war shelters is more acceptable to them than is stopping America\u2019s planned conquest of Russia.\u00a0The higher priority is to conquer Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n A far less influential scholarly journal, China Policy<\/i>, published later in 2006 a critical article arguing against nuclear supremacy, but that article has had no impact upon policymaking. Its title was\u00a0\u201cThe Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and it argued that, \u201cAmerican nuclear supremacy removes the root source of stability from the nuclear equation: mutual vulnerability.\u201d It presented a moral argument: \u201cU.S. leaders might try to exploit its nuclear superiority \u2026 by\u00a0actually launching a cold-blooded nuclear attack against its nuclear rival in the\u00a0midst of an intense crisis. The professors discount significantly the power\u00a0of\u00a0the nuclear taboo to restrain U.S. leaders from crossing the fateful threshold.\u00a0If crisis circumstances grow dire enough, the temptation to try to disarm their\u00a0nuclear adversaries through a nuclear first-strike may be too strong to\u00a0resist, they argue.\u201d The concept of \u201cnuclear winter\u201d wasn\u2019t even so much as just mentioned (much less dealt with<\/i>) in this article, just as it was ignored in the two that it was arguing against.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The co-authors of (both versions of) the article that had proposed and endorsed nuclear primacy, then published in 2007 (this one also in International Security<\/i>), a response to that critical article. This reply\u2019s title was\u00a0\u201cU.S. Nuclear Primacy and the Future of the Chinese Deterrent\u201d<\/span><\/a>. But it had no more impact than did the obscure article it was arguing against.<\/span><\/p>\n Thus, nuclear primacy has become<\/i> U.S. policy, and MAD no longer is<\/i> U.S. policy (though it remains Russian policy). The U.S. government is planning to take over Russia (basically, to install a puppet-regime there). That\u2019s the reality.<\/span><\/p>\n Central to the nuclear-primacy concept is that of what\u2019s variously called a \u201cBallistic Missile Defense\u201d (BMD) or \u201cAnti Ballistic Missile\u201d (ABM) system: a system to disable or knock out Russia\u2019s retaliatory nuclear weapons so that a U.S. blitz nuclear attack won\u2019t be able to be met by any nuclear counter-attack.<\/span><\/p>\n As \u201cThe End of MAD?\u201d put it: \u201cRussia has approximately 3,500 strategic nuclear warheads today, but if the United States struck before Russian forces were alerted, Russia would be\u00a0lucky if a half-dozen warheads survived.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In other words: America\u2019s aristocracy aren\u2019t necessarily hoping to protect all<\/i> of the U.S. population from a counter-attack, but are willing to sacrifice perhaps a few million Americans here and there, in order to achieve the intended result: conquest of Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n That article then says that a BMD-ABM system wouldn\u2019t necessarily indicate America\u2019s determination to pursue nuclear primacy against Russia, because it could instead be intended purely and authentically defensively, to protect against nuclear attack from Iran, North Korea or some other country. However: \u201cOther U.S. nuclear programs are hard to explain with any mission other than a nuclear first strike on a major power adversary. For example, the decision\u00a0to upgrade the fuse of many SLBM warheads (the W76s) to permit\u00a0ground bursts makes sense only if the mission is destroying hundreds of hardened\u00a0silos. One might argue that ground bursts could be useful for a variety of\u00a0other missions, such as destroying North Korean WMD bunkers or remote\u00a0cave complexes housing terrorist leaders. The United States, however, already\u00a0has a large number of highly accurate, similar-yield warheads that would be\u00a0ideal for these purposes.\u201d The article even notes that: \u201cOther analysts have noted that the current U.S. nuclear force looks surprisingly like an arsenal designed for a nuclear first strike against Russia or China.\u201d And, \u201cA group of RAND analysts agrees: \u2018What the planned force appears best suited to provide beyond the needs of traditional deterrence is a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China. Otherwise, the numbers and the operating procedures simply do not add up.\u2019\u201d So: the co-authors here are claiming to be merely giving a name<\/i>, \u201cnuclear primacy,\u201d to America\u2019s existing<\/i> strategic military policy \u2014 not to be inventing or creating it. They are, above all, saying that this is the reality now in U.S. policy-making circles; that MAD no longer is.<\/span><\/p>\n And their article has, indeed, described the guiding strategic-planning objective not only of the George W. Bush Administration, but also of Barack Obama\u2019s \u2014 as will now be documented.<\/span><\/p>\n U.S. President Obama has always been saying that the reason why America is installing anti-ballistic missiles (\u201cABM\u201ds, otherwise known as ballistic-missile defense or \u201cBMD\u201d) in Romania, Poland, and other nations that border (or are near to) Russia, is in order to protect Europe against Iranian missiles that might be aimed against Europe. He says that this is purely defensive, not aggressive, and that what it\u2019s defending from<\/i> is Iran, not Russia \u2014 so, Russia has no reason for complaint about it.<\/span><\/p>\n But then, Obama reached his nuclear deal with Iran; and this deal ended, for at least ten years, any realistic possibility that Iran would develop any nuclear-weapons capability \u2014 Obama himself emphasized that this was the case; he wasn\u2019t denying it.<\/span><\/p>\n So: Obama\u2019s claimed reason for installing ABMs in Europe was now, quite simply, gone<\/i>. (Not that it had been credible anyway, since Iran didn\u2019t have any nuclear weapons. It was merely a pretext, not honestly a reason<\/i>.)<\/span><\/p>\n Here is how Russia\u2019s President, Vladimir Putin, stated the matter<\/span><\/a>, at that time, during the meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, on 22 October 2015:<\/span><\/p>\n The use of the threat of a nuclear missile attack from Iran as an excuse, as we know, has\u00a0destroyed the fundamental basis of modern international security \u2013 the Anti-Ballistic\u00a0Missile Treaty. The United States has unilaterally seceded from the treaty. Incidentally,\u00a0today we have resolved the Iranian issue and there is no threat from Iran and never has\u00a0been, just as we said.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The thing that seemed to have led our American partners to build an anti-missile defence\u00a0system is gone. It would be reasonable to expect work to develop the US anti-missile\u00a0defence system to come to an end as well. <\/i>[But] What is actually happening? Nothing of the\u00a0kind, or actually the opposite \u2013 everything continues.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Recently the United States conducted the first test of the anti-missile defence system in\u00a0Europe. What does this mean? It means we were right when we argued with <\/i>our American\u00a0partners. They were simply trying yet again to mislead us and the whole world. To put it\u00a0plainly, they were lying. It was not about the hypothetical Iranian threat, which never\u00a0existed. It was about an attempt to destroy the strategic balance, to change the balance of\u00a0forces in their favour not only to dominate, but to have the opportunity to dictate their will\u00a0to all:<\/i><\/b> to their geopolitical competition and, I believe, to their allies as well. This is a very\u00a0dangerous scenario, harmful to all, including, in my opinion, to the United States.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The nuclear deterrent lost its value. Some probably even had the illusion that victory of\u00a0one party in a world conflict was again possible \u2013 without irreversible, unacceptable, as\u00a0experts say, consequences for the winner, if there ever is one<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n He called Obama there a \u201cliar,\u201d and that\u2019s a blatantly truthful characterization of the situation. But Putin missed there saying what\u2019s even more basic for an understanding of what Obama was doing in this matter \u2014 and which makes that \u201clie\u201d from Obama particularly heinous: Putin missed saying that an anti-missile system can be at least as important as an aggressive weapon as it is as a defensive one, because if a first-strike attacker wants to eliminate the defender\u2019s ability to strike back from the attacker\u2019s first-strike attack, then an anti-missile system is the weapon to do that, by eliminating the defender\u2019s missiles before those strike-back missiles can reach their targets. It nullifies the other side\u2019s defense \u2014 and to do this is enormously aggressive; it strips the victim\u2019s retaliation. The whole distinction between offensive and defensive can thus be pure propaganda, nothing having to do actually<\/i> with aggressive and defensive. Whether the use will be defensive, or instead offensive, won\u2019t be known until the system is in actual battlefield use. Only the propaganda is clear; the weapon\u2019s use<\/i> is not.<\/span><\/p>\n So, Putin understated the heinousness, and the danger to Russians, that was actually involved in Obama\u2019s tricks. All that Putin did was to vaguely suggest an aggressive possibility: \u201cIt was about an attempt to destroy the strategic balance, to change the balance of\u00a0forces in their favour not only to dominate, but to have the opportunity to dictate their will\u00a0to all.\u201d Most people don\u2019t relate to such abstractions as \u201cstrategic balance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Obama and other agents of the U.S. aristocracy know that their public have been trained for decades, to hate, fear, and despise, Russians, and especially the Russian government, as if it were the Soviet Union, and as if its Warsaw Pact and communism still existed and Russia hadn\u2019t ended its hostility to the U.S. in 1991 (though the U.S. continued its hostility to Russia \u2014 that rump remaining country from the former communist empire<\/span><\/a> \u2014 and during Obama\u2019s second term the hostility soared<\/span><\/a>). So, for example, at the conservative website Breitbart, when that statement quoted here from Putin was posted as part of an honestly written and presented article titled \u201cVladimir Putin: U.S. Missile Defense System Threatens Russia\u201d<\/span><\/a>, almost none of the reader-comments indicated any ability or inclination of the readers to sympathize with the plight for Russians that Putin had just expressed. Instead, to the extent that the comments there were relevant, they were generally hostile, such as:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cRussian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he has concerns that the<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n U.S. ballistic missile defense system threatens Russia\u2019s nuclear<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n capability.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Vlad, its supposed to, its called defense. The only way it could harm your nukes is if they were shot down\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.after you launched them!<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n and<\/span><\/p>\n How can a defense system threaten anything? Like Obama would attack Russia. That is laughable.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Most people\u2019s minds are straightjacketed in bigotries of various sorts, preconceptions such as that a \u201cmissile defense\u201d system, and a \u201cDefense\u201d Department, can\u2019t be aggressive<\/i> \u2014 even extremely<\/i> aggressive and war-mongering. The first thought that comes to mind about anything that\u2019s \u2018defensive\u2019 is that something else<\/i> must be \u2018aggressive\u2019 or \u2018offensive\u2019, and that whatever is \u2018defensive\u2019 (such as an ABM) is therefore good and even necessary. That\u2019s thinking, and receiving the term \u201cdefense,\u201d like thinking just one move ahead in a chess-game, but this is the mental limit for most people, and every propagandist (such as the people who professionally design propaganda or PR slogans and campaigns) do precisely what Obama and the rest of the aristocracy and their agents do in order to deceive their gulls: they phrase things for one-move-ahead-limit thinkers, like that. The cardinal rule in the deception-professions is therefore, first, to find people with the desired prejudices, and then to play them as that, with one-move-ahead-limit sales-pitches, which are directed to precisely those<\/i> prejudices. This report at the Breitbart site was instead<\/i> presenting a high-quality news-report, to a low-quality audience, and so the reader-comments it generated were few, and generally hostile.<\/span><\/p>\n Obama is a master at deception. Another good example of this was 26 March 2012, during Obama\u2019s campaign for re-election, when he confidentially told Dmitry Medvedev<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0\u201cOn all these issues, but\u00a0particularly missile defense, this can be\u00a0solved, but it\u2019s important for him [the\u00a0incoming President Putin] to give me space. \u2026\u00a0This is my last\u00a0election. After my election, I have more\u00a0flexibility.\u201d Obama was privately communicating to Putin (through Medvedev) that Obama was pushing the ABM installations only so as not to be politically vulnerable to charges from the knee-jerk Russia-haters, Republicans, and that Obama\u2019s fakery regarding the supposed ABM-target\u2019s being Iran was only in order to appeal to yet another Republican bigotry (against Iran), and so Obama was intending to back away from supporting the ABM system during his second term.<\/span><\/p>\n But actually, Obama had had Russia in his gunsights even prior to his coming into office. Two specific objects in focus were Moscow-friendly leaders of nations: Assad of Syria, and Yanukovych of Ukraine. America\u2019s strategy, ever since 24 February 1990<\/span><\/a>, has been to strip Russia of allies and friends \u2014 to leave Russia increasingly isolated and surrounded by enemies. When Obama entered the White House on 20 January 2009, there already was a plea in the pipeline from the Syrian government for urgently needed food-aid to address the all-time-record drought there, which had decimated Syrian agriculture.<\/span><\/a> Obama\u2019s Administration never even answered it. Well before the Arab Spring demonstrations in 2011, Obama was hoping for turmoil in Syria and the overthrow of Assad \u2014 lots of starving Syrians would be just the thing.<\/span><\/p>\n Moreover, the planning for the February 2014 coup<\/span><\/a> to overthrow the Moscow-friendly democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, started in the U.S. State Department by no later than 2011<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n So: when Obama told Medvedev and Putin, on 26 March 2012, not to worry about Obama\u2019s intentions toward Russia, he was lying. He wanted his intended victim to be off-guard, unprepared for what was soon to come.<\/span><\/p>\n On Obama\u2019s way out the door, he did two things that significantly advanced America\u2019s ABM-BMD threat against Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n On 10 December 2016, \u2018Defense\u2019 Secretary Ashton Carter stated, burying it in a speech<\/span><\/a> he gave in Bahrain \u2014 site of a major U.S. military base \u2014 \u201cjust this week, we reached an agreement for Qatar to purchase a 5,000-kilometer early-warning radar to enhance its missile defenses,\u201d and he said nothing more about it, as if this announcement weren\u2019t the bombshell it actually was. Alex Gorka headlined about that at Strategic Culture, \u201cUS-Qatar Deal Threatens Russia: Reading News Between the Lines\u201d<\/span><\/a> and he explained that this system \u201cis designed to be used as an early warning system against strategic offensive assets \u2013 something Iran does not possess.\u201d Near the start of Carter\u2019s speech, Carter had said that he would be talking about \u201cchecking Iranian aggression and malign influence, and helping defend our friends and allies,\u201d including Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Gorka noted, \u201cThe announced range of 5,000km (3,100mi) by far exceeds the requirement to counter a missile threat coming from Iran,\u201d and, \u201cThere is no other reasonable explanation for the choice, except the fact that the AN\/FPS-132 can monitor large chunks of Russian territory,\u201d the objective being \u201cto surround the Russian Federation with BMD sites and neutralize its capability to deliver a retaliatory strike if attacked.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n One of Obama\u2019s last actions as the U.S. President was to sign into law a bill that had been quietly passed in Congress, which included a key change in U.S. law that would enable the government to spend unlimited funds on realizing former President Ronald Reagan\u2019s dream of a space-based ABM system, \u201cStar Wars.\u201d On December 22nd, David Willman of the Los Angeles Times<\/i>, headlined \u201cCongress scrapped this one word from the law, opening the door to a space arms race\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and he reported that the eliminated word was \u201climited.\u201d Willman explained that, \u201cThe nation\u2019s homeland missile defense system is designed to thwart a small-scale, or \u2018limited,\u2019 attack by the likes of North Korea or Iran.\u00a0As for the threat of a large-scale strike by China or Russia, the prospect of massive U.S. retaliation is supposed to deter both from ever launching missiles.\u201d He noted: \u201cThe bill awaits action by\u00a0President Obama. The White House has not said what he will do.\u201d Willman also noted that on an earlier occasion, \u201cthe Obama administration criticized the changes in the Senate bill, saying it \u2018strongly objects\u2019 to removing \u2018limited\u2019 and to placing anti-missile weaponry in space. The statement stopped short of threatening a veto.\u201d But then, the next day, on December 23rd, Willman bannered, \u201cPresident Obama signs defense bill that could spur new space-based arms race\u201d<\/span><\/a>. Whereas Obama\u2019s public rhetoric portrayed himself as being the type of person who had deserved to win the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, almost all of his actual decisions in office<\/i> were the exact opposite \u2014 and here was a superb example of that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Whether Obama\u2019s successor, Donald Trump, will continue with that longstanding (ever since 24 February 1990<\/span><\/a>) plan to conquer Russia, or instead finally end the Cold War on the U.S. side (as it already had ended in 1991 on the U.S.S.R.\u2019s), isn\u2019t yet clear<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n This<\/a><\/span> is what happens when what President Eisenhower called \u201cthe military-industrial complex\u201d takes over the country, and everything (including the \u2018news\u2019 media) serves it, rather than the military-industrial complex\u2019s serving the public<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n It fits in with the massive data which indicates that the U.S. government is run by an aristocracy or \u201coligarchy\u201d<\/span><\/a>, instead of run by people who represent the public \u2014 a \u201cdemocracy.\u201d Obama as President fit right in.<\/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>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse (RINF) – The U.S. government\u2019s plan to conquer Russia is based upon a belief in, and the fundamental plan to establish, \u201cNuclear Primacy\u201d against Russia \u2014 an American ability to win a nuclear war against, and so conquer, Russia. This concept became respectable in U.S. academic and governmental policymaking circles when virtually simultaneously […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":183322,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-288234","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288234","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=288234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}