Nukes, Kooks and Spiteful Rebukes
"The chickens have come home to roost." -Malcolm X
Many Americans, when the Iron Curtain fell, when the Cold War (supposedly) came to an end, and as we rubbed our hands together in eager anticipation of the (supposed) “peace dividend,” naturally hoped that we would never again have to live under the Damocletian sword of imminent nuclear war that had been hung over our heads ever since the Russkies got the bomb. No sooner did the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists relax their “Doomsday Clock” back seventeen minutes, then its minute hand began impetuously creeping and soon leaping forward again, until this year it reads “90 seconds to midnight.” A clear effort is being made today by some in the chattering classes to normalize the prospect of nuclear war, as though such a conflict were “winnable” or its outcome somehow confidently predictable. We thought we had left this madness with the old Cold War, but we find it reappearing in our midst, like a phoenix bird rising from its own ashes. Today we appear to be engaged in a new Cold War that is actually becoming hotter and hotter as we speak. Let’s take a look at a few of the factors behind this resurgence of nuclear threat-mongering that may soon put an end to civilization as we know it if we Americans don’t wake up and smell the coffee ASAP.
Let’s be frank: the end of the Cold War, which appeared to take the US government by surprise, was not celebrated by NATO. I recall an ad posted in a subway station near the Pentagon in the early 1990’s which read something like “NATO: out of area or out of mission.” It was a NATO-sponsored poster that was provoking its commuting apparatchiks to seek out a new areas of operations and new missions, as it was feeling the pinch of the loss of its bête noir, the USSR, and therefore of its raison d´ếtre (ergo of its funding). History shows that NATO soon enough found other justifications for its existence, but all proved, alas, only too ephemeral. The War on Terror reached the end of its shelf life, Libya was left in a shambles, Yugoslavia dismembered, etc., etc. No, nothing could provide that cradle-to-grave security like good old, bad old, Russia. Well guess what? They got their wish, and their beloved bogeyman is back! And for two decades they’ve been teasing and poking the Russian bear on all fronts until they were finally able to provoke a defensive military response, and they have been exploiting that for all its worth. They are not going to stop milking this cash cow again as long as they can help it. Communism or no Communism, Russia is the eternal,ominous enemy, and that’s that!
And then there’s the nuclear arms industry itself: The poor thing, it’s the only enterprise in the world whose product is manufactured in order never to be used! Just ask them and they’ll tell you: “Oh no, we don’t ever want to see our nuclear missiles launched, they are just there for deterrence, to make sure that no one fires one at us! “ We know this old routine: MAD, mutually assured destruction…mad indeed! So we can certainly sympathize with an industry stuck with a business model that sells something no one likes and no one ever wants to see used, but somehow (thanks to magic of marketing and effective lobbying) practically everyone believes is onerously necessary (at least, our engrafted politicians think so). Yes, there stands the nuclear missile silo, modern man’s monument to “Necessary Evil.” Problem is, once you have enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the world several times over, the market is saturated, and overkill is very hard to sell. Of course, there’s always the prospect of built-in obsolescence, but too much of that might draw attention from the Government Accounting Office, especially in an era of arms control treaties. Well, Donald Trump helped put an end to that problem by unilaterally withdrawing the US from in the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty soon after he came to office, which opened the way to a new arms race, in addition to destabilizing Eastern Europe and setting the stage for the Ukraine War (you’re welcome, NATO!). But even so, it was still a hard sell to an America that really wanted peace, and didn’t feel imminently threatened by any nuclear superpowers.
So perhaps we can understand why some ambitious upstart in the business may have come up with this bright idea: “Say, how about selling the public on the idea of ’limited nuclear war?’ After all, it’s the next and really only logical escalation for Ukraine, since one wunderwaffe (wonder weapon) after another, from Abrams Tanks to Himars, has failed to reverse the downward trajectory of NATO’s prospects there.” (Make no mistake, the real antagonists here are ultimately NATO and the Russian Federation, with NATO doing the provoking). “We’ll get the talking heads on our media to treat it like a panacea to save Ukraine’s (read: NATO’s) bacon, and before you know it, Congress will be begging us to trot out a whole new line of tactical nuclear weapons. Indeed, the camel’s nose is already under the tent with our deployment of depleted uranium munitions there.” You get the picture.
And on the diplomatic front, things have been even worse. Right there is where we can find the “kooks,” the Russophobic Neocons whose influence seems to wax stronger with every new administration. And the “rebukes” are theirs too. Here are seeral examples from recent history: Vladimir Putin mentioned the first in his interview earlier this year with Tucker Carlson. He related that right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he naively asked then-president Bill Clinton whether Russia could join NATO, thhereby putting a coffin nail on the military conflict generated by the Cold War. Clinton told him he’d ask around. He came back with a negative reply. (No wonder Putin wonders who really runs this country!) We can just imagine the horror on the faces of the NATO chiefs when he broached this prospect of a pan-European peace, as they groaned: No-o-o-o-o! Then we had the Minsk Agreement, which it turns out, according to none other than former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was simply a temporizing maneuver to which no good faith was attached on the part of the West. Then, in the advent of the current Ukrainian conflict, Russia openly and repeatedly called for an international security architecture which would assure all participants, including Russia and Ukraine, of indivisible sovereignty and security, but to this the NATO countries turned up their noses with a loud “Hrrmmph!” So, soon after Russia began its Special Military Operation in Ukraine, she negotiated a peace agreement which was tentatively initialed by both sides (Russia and Ukraine), but peremptorily quashed by the intervention of the Necons’ point man, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Every effort made by Russia for peaceful resolution of this NATO-induced conflict has been spurned by the West, and NATO couldn’t be happier.
"Standing armies [are] inconsistent with [a people's] freedom” and “completely adverse” to the “spirit of this country.” -Thomas Jefferson
This is the sorry state of our world, dear friends. But before concluding on this unhappy note, I want to share a reflection from my youth. I grew up in the Cold War era and like most schoolchildren I accepted without question the narrative that was the style at the time: Russia bad, America good. However, the one thing that even then I could never wrap my mind around was this idea that in wartime America, while it is the job of some Americans to fight and die for the cause if necessary, it was the patriotic duty of the war industry to make money. Somehow this never sat well with me as a communal sharing of the burden of war. And that contradiction remains clearer today than ever before.
The military-industrial complex got its start in the Truman administration, and festered and bourgeoned under Eisenhower while he was busy playing golf. Too late, the latter realized the threat to our democratic way of life it represented and warned Americans in his iconic Farewell Address to the nation. Kennedy, to his credit, did what he could to put the genie back in the bottle, but it was too late and, sad to say, they got the jump on him. At this point Truman expressed his regrets about creating the CIA, but that too was too late. No president since has dared to challenge the unconstitutional power of the Deep State….the lesson of Dealey Plaza is as plain as the daylight in which it transpired. None of the major candidates for this year’s presidential election has a platform plank which reads: End the Shadow Government. The America of today bears little if any resemblance to that envisioned by its Founders. They stood up to tyranny and world empire, whereas we now promote them, from sea to shining sea, and then some. But the hegemonic power of Pax Americana is waning fast, and the multipolarism that is destined to replace it is mushrooming the world over. You can be sure that in the final throes of desperation the failing Empire will consider resorting to the most lethal of all weapons (if we let them), but the alternative is to restore America to her true greatness, to her humble but noble calling of agricultural breadbasket and honest scientific endeavors (not necessarily connected with high tech). This future is still available …for a limited time. Speak now, or forever hold your PEACE, because the military-industrial complex wants none of it. God bless America!