US missile treaty withdrawal: “Prepare for nuclear war”
24 October 2018
On Saturday, US President Donald Trump announced that the United States will withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which prohibited Washington and Moscow from developing short- and medium-range missiles.
It is difficult to overstate the criminality and recklessness of this action. The lives of billions of people in Europe and East Asia have been deliberately placed in the crossfire of Washington’s nuclear buildup against Beijing and Moscow.
American military planners are intent on not only building, but using, nuclear weapons in combat. They aim to demonstrate to their potential adversaries that no humanitarian or moral constraints exist for them, and that Washington out-does its rivals not just in weapons, but in bloodlust.
These plans are being laid in secret. The New York Times has treated the US withdrawal from the treaty as a non-issue. It was not even front-page news, and the newspaper published no editorial or columns about it. Nor was it discussed on the Sunday talk shows.
The Democrats have been almost entirely silent on the consequences, and the danger of global war—or any opposition to war—has been excluded as an issue from the 2018 midterm elections, just two weeks away.
In the foreign policy press and the publications of think tanks, however, nuclear war is a preeminent issue. Even before the White House’s announcement, Foreign Affairs dedicated its current issue to a discussion of nuclear war, with its cover featuring a missile launch.
The issue features a column by Elbridge A. Colby, one of the principal authors of the National Defense Strategy published by the Pentagon in January, which proclaimed the effective end of the “war on terror” and…