On 9 August 2017 President Trump tweeted “My first
order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now
far stronger and more powerful than ever before.”
This
statement of US achievement and nuclear policy was apparently intended to
intimidate the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, who tested a nuclear-capable
ballistic missile three months later, following which the US president issued
an insulting tweet that
referred to him as “Little Rocket Man.” The level of international dialogue and
diplomacy sank to yet a new low which was enthusiastically reciprocated by Kim,
but Trump gave a rare exhibition of common sense on 11 November 2017 by asking “When will
all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with
Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. There [meaning they’re] always
playing politics — bad for our country . . .”
How very
true, and how much better for the world had such a positive attitude been
allowed to flourish along with dialogue. But then everything went screaming
downhill. Along came Washington’s aggressive Nuclear Posture Review which
emphasised enlargement of nuclear weapons’ capabilities and followed from the
US National Defence Strategy which
strongly advocates massive military expansion, naming Russia specifically no
less than 127 times, compared with 62 references to North Korea, 47 to China
and 39 to Iran.
The
antagonistic muscle of the US military-industrial complex has been nourished by
the circus of the “Russiagate” investigations in Washington which attempted to
prove that Moscow had organised the 2016 election results by persuading
countless millions of people on social media sites that red was blue and
Democratic donkeys were really Republican elephants. Or the other way round. It
was all rubbish, but the US-European anti-Russia campaign was then given
enormous impetus by the collapse in England from apparent poisoning of a
retired, BMW-driving British spy, a former Russian citizen.
The poisoning
was effected by a chemical agent, and blame for the event was immediately laid
at Russia’s door. The British foreign minister Boris Johnson is a sad joke, but
he’s politically powerful and a threat to the prime minister, Theresa May, so
he continues in his post and makes statements such as “Russia
is the only country known to have developed this type of agent. I’m afraid the
evidence is overwhelming that it is Russia.” The fact that there is no evidence
whatever that Russia was involved is ignored, because the western world has
been convinced that Russia is guilty of this poisoning — and of countless other
things.
The
heightened anti-Russia feeling is most welcome to the US-NATO military
alliance, which has been energetic in developing its ‘Enhanced Forward
Presence’ along Russia’s borders. Its belligerent posture has been hardening
since NATO began to expand in 1997, which was entirely
contrary to what had been agreed seven years previously. As recorded by the Los Angeles Times,
“In early February 1990, US leaders made the Soviets an offer. According to
transcripts of meetings in Moscow on February 9, then-Secretary of State
James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, US could
make "iron-clad guarantees" that NATO would not expand "one inch
eastward." Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev
agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all
the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany's
western alignment and the US would limit NATO's expansion. Nevertheless, great
powers rarely tie their own hands. In internal memorandums and notes, US
policymakers soon realized that ruling out NATO's expansion might not be in the
best interests of the United States. By late February, Bush and his advisers
had decided to leave the door open.”
The doors
towards Russia’s borders were not only open: they had on the other side a
welcoming galaxy of nations anxious to enjoy all the financial benefits that
would descend upon them from the deep and generous pockets of the
Washington-Brussels military machine. The US and other NATO members pitched
forward with missile-armed ships in the Baltic and the Black Sea, with
electronic surveillance and command aircraft flying as close as they could to
Russian airspace, along with deployment of nuclear-capable combat aircraft and
more ground troops in expansion of the Enhanced Forward Presence.
The recent
surge in anti-Russia news and comment in almost all US and UK media is a boon
and a blessing for the rickety and incompetent NATO alliance, but in
responsible circles there is concern about its nuclear posture — and especially
that of the United States.
The nuclear
threat from Washington is growing, and in spite of the fact that analysts such
as Bruno Tertrais of the Fondation pour la Recherche
Stratégique note that Russia’s stance has been misinterpreted,
the tide of anti-Russian western opinion cannot now be stopped or even reduced.
The requirement for provision of evidence is disregarded and in no sphere is
this more marked than in western pronouncements about Russian nuclear policy.
As Dr
Tertrais points out, “The
dominant narrative about Russia’s nuclear weapons in Western strategic
literature since the beginning of the century has been something like this:
Russia’s doctrine of ‘escalate-to-de-escalate’ and its large-scale military
exercises show that Moscow is getting ready to use low-yield, theatre nuclear
weapons to stop NATO from defeating Russia’s forces, or to coerce the Atlantic
Alliance and end a conflict on terms favourable to Russia. All the elements of
this narrative, however, rely on weak evidence — and there is strong evidence to
counter most of them.”
One of the
most disturbing things is the attitude to the Nuclear Posture Review of many
nuclear experts in the West. But some of these nuclear war enthusiasts might
strike people as bizarre in their approach. As reported by Defence News “Rebeccah
Heinrichs, a nuclear analyst with the Hudson Institute, thinks the Pentagon is
on the right path, noting that “if the Russians have a weapon delivery option,
they’re putting a nuke on it” at the moment. “Clearly the Russians believe that
they could possibly pop off a low yield nuke and we would not have an
appropriate response, and our only option would essentially be to end the war
rather than go all-in with strategic nuclear weapons. . . “
It may be
because I have had some association with nuclear delivery systems and their
hideous effects that I take offence at clever little analysts referring to
despatch and detonation of nuclear weapons as “popping off.” The weapon that
would be “popped off” — whatever it might be — would kill hundreds, perhaps
thousands of people, and would contaminate vast areas of land. A “low yield
nuke” as it is so lightly dismissed, is not an inconsequential weapon.
A long time
ago in Germany I commanded a troop of rocket launchers that were tasked to fire
“low yield” Honest John missiles in the event of war in Europe. We knew that
these things would cause immense damage because the W7 warhead had a variable
yield of up to 20 kilotonnes — just about that of the Nagasaki bomb that killed about 75,000 human beings. Sure, our
warheads might only have been a fraction of that (we’ll never know), but even
then I object to intellectuals saying they might have been “popped off” like
modern-day “low-yield nukes,” because we would have died within a few minutes
of firing these things, not long after we had killed our thousands of victims,
most likely from retaliation but also because the maximum range of our rockets
was about 25 kilometres and the fall-out effects would have been pretty swift.
Then
you read the pronouncements of
such important people as Air Force General John Hyten, the senior US nuclear
deliveryman, commanding US Strategic Command, who said on February 28 that
“Russia is the most significant threat just because they pose the only
existential threat to the country right now. So we have to look at that from
that perspective.”
He should get
together with Rebeccah Heinrichs. They could discuss where and how to pop off a
weapon that would lead to world destruction. The nuclear threat looms large.