NUCLEAR SECURITY 2018

TRIPWIRES FOR WAR

It is the year 2018. One hundred years after the end of one of the two most disastrous wars in history, World War I. Why are we talking about World War I? We are talking about World War I because this total disaster was not wanted by any of the countries that got into it. All the major powers of Europe in 1914 understood that a war would be a complete disaster. Yet they blundered into this disaster and bled themselves to death. The only real winner from World War I was America, who came in at the end of the war and kind of cleaned up the spoils. The center of world finance shifted from London to New York.

THE EXPANSION OF NATO

Now today we also have tripwires as we had in 1914. After the Cold War it would’ve been logical to dissolve NATO since the whole purpose of NATO was to stand up to the Soviet Union and since the Soviet Union had ceased to exist logically NATO would have no logic to exist, but that did not happen. As we document on our website, totally contrary to solemn promises made by America to Russia, NATO was expanded to the east in two stages. The first stage took in the nations of central Europe. There was very little debate about this even though this was a total violation of US promises to the former Soviet Union. Now a second stage of expansion of NATO was even less discussed and was even more of a threat indeed far more of a threat than the original expansion of NATO and that was the integration of the Baltic states into NATO which brought Western military forces, particularly vis-à-vis Estonia, directly up to some of the most sensitive parts of Russia from a military point of view. The Baltic states in Russian history have been an invasion route from the West starting with the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century. After that, it was an invasion route for the Swedish Empire into Russia. After that, it was the invasion route for two German invasions of Russia, one in World War I, one in World War II. In the case of World War II you had one of the most horrific moments in Russian history where then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, was cut off and at least a million people died in an absolutely horrible situation. So the presence of any hostile power in Estonia is logically seen by Russia as an extremely threatening act. Estonia is a mere hours away from St. Petersburg, one of the two main cities of Russia.

HOSTILE ACTIONS UNDER PRESIDENT BUSH

Hostile actions by America towards Russia don’t end there. Under the Bush administration America pulled out of the ballistic missile treaty enabling America to potentially develop a nuclear first strike against Russia. At the same time America has begun construction of ABM, anti-ballistic missile bases in Poland. Supposedly against Iranian missiles, but since Iran signed a nuclear agreement which the US now seems determined to violate, there logically wasn’t any reason to build the thing. But they went ahead with it because it really never was designed against Iranian missiles, it was all was designed as a nuclear threat against Russia.

HOSTILE ACTIONS UNDER PRESIDENT OBAMA

Under Barack Obama, America took further actions extremely hostile to Russia and began a new Cold War. In 2014, America supported the overthrow of the legally elected government of the Ukraine. We're not going to get into a detailed discussion of Ukrainian politics but we do need to make some major points. Ukraine is one of many states created in the legacy of World War I and the end of the Cold War that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Crimea has been a part of Russia for ages. Due to internal Soviet politics it was stuck in the Russian province of Ukraine. No one obviously ever thought Ukraine under those borders would become an independent country. The state of Ukraine is an ethnically divided area where you have Russian speakers in the East and Ukrainians in the West and because of Stalin’s atrocities against the Ukrainians this huge animosity to Russia. But you see American TV viewers see people demonstrating against the government in Kiev and they think, Oh my goodness it must be like the end of the Cold War. No. This is an ethnic conflict. In other words, Kiev the capital is in the Ukrainian area so if you elect a government that comes from the eastern area it's going to be very unpopular in Kiev. Likewise, if you elect the government that represents the Ukrainian parts of the Ukraine it’s going to be very unpopular in the eastern areas. And the overthrow backed by America and the notorious Ms. Nuland in the US State Department was seen as a great threat to the Russian speaking populations in the East and they joined with Russia to seek their independence. This is a struggle that did not in any way affect America’s national security interests but had a huge impact on Russian security interests. in other words this was a war started by America, and we're not going to get into all the ins and outs of all the sanctions and hostile actions put through by America and foolishly supported by the Europeans but is very important understand that this is a threat directed against Russia by America. You have to get your facts straight. and the whole cavalcade of whether Putin did or did not intervene in the US election, America’s intervened in a zillion elections so that’s hardly an issue, and whether he did or he didn’t, the initiative for the new Cold War came from America it did not come from Putin. So that’s that’s just a point to understand.

THE POISONED RUSSIAN DIPLOMAT

Now in the most recent situation a Russian diplomat was poisoned in London. The British government promptly accused Russia of having done this. We find the evidence scanty at best fraudulent at worst. Russia would have no incentive for doing such an action and there are plenty of people who would have the capability to carry this out. We think the most likely actors in this would be Ukraine or Georgia, the state of Georgia, which wants to drag the West into getting it into NATO. They would have a huge incentive for doing this, as would possibly all the so-called moderates translate terrorists in Syria that America had been backing. So the most likely scenario in our view is possibly semi-state actors in Ukraine. What we mean by semi state actors. The history of American imperialism even before the Cold War is the use of local proxies who supposedly pop up and are independent such as the independent forces that crushed the native Hawaiian people and suddenly discovered that everybody in Hawaii wanted to join United States or the independent forces "independent forces" in Panama who suddenly discovered they didn’t want to be part of Columbia but wanted to join with American build the Panama Canal. So this goes back a long time and the whole history of American foreign policy since the Cold War, during the Cold War and afterwards is the use of proxies. These proxies are a terrific deal because America could then deny responsibility for whatever atrocities they committed and so on and so forth. This was a basic standard operating procedure of American imperialism. In Ukraine and in Georgia but particularly in Ukraine you have a lot of semi state actors, neofascist militias, neo Nazis and so on working with the corrupt and incompetent Ukrainian government. It's virtual certainty in both these countries you have people trained in the use of Soviet chemical weapons. It’s just an absolute fact. Those people would have a huge incentive for creating an incident like this and because that would lead to a further demonization of Russia further likelihood of Western support for them. We don’t know this. But the British government has not provided any independent verification for this. And the incompetent and really disgusting government of Teresa May is in big trouble at home. This would be perfect to have a foreign distraction to burnish their reputation, let’s rally around Teresa now we got this big threat so on and so forth and the British government as a long history of lying and cheating on behalf of war going back to all the lies peddled by the British government in World War I that Germans were chopping off the hands of the Belgian children all sorts of nonsense like that that they peddled and so on and so forth. So Britain and America involved in a detailed conspiracy about weapons of mass destruction to justify their invasion of Iraq. So these are the most likely of people who were involved

EDGING CLOSER TO WAR

But the larger issue here is that with Estonia joining NATO you have for the first time of American and Western troops face-to-face with Russia and some of the most sensitive parts of Russia. This is a very dangerous tripwire. NATO means what it says. NATO means an attack on one is an attack on all. War with one is a war with all. If we continue to escalate tensions which seem certain. Russia would have very logical reasons to launch a lightning war to seize at a minimum Estonia possibly all the Baltic states. Now there is another factor here which the average American citizen is probably totally unaware of and that is Kaliningrad. The average person would say, "What?" Kaliningrad is the old German Königsberg the capital of East Prussia and that is a Russian enclave inside Poland and Lithuania which almost certainly has nuclear weapons. So that’s another issue of what would happen in a conflict there and the fact that Kaliningrad could be used as a distribution point for nuclear weapons aimed at Europe and so on and so forth. Meanwhile America has launched a huge expansion of its nuclear weapons plans including the deployment of mini nukes. Now the nifty thing about mini nukes is that they can be deployed from weapons that look conventional. So this creates an even more dangerous tripwire for nuclear war since the Russians would not know whether a cruise missile coming at them was nuclear or nonnuclear until obviously it was too late. All this creates an even greater incentive to strike first.

Meanwhile in Syria today for the first time since World War II Russian and American military forces are maneuvering backing competing factions there. As in the Ukraine you have a lot of nonstate actors you have a lot of crazy militias all sorts of other people whose allegiance and connection is very dubious. In Syria as in Iraq there’s been a huge bunko act campaign of claiming that the Russians or the Syrians are using weapons of mass destruction. No reliable evidence has been provided of this. You have propaganda campaigns funded by Saudi Arabia such as the disgusting white helmets and people such as that. But there is no evidence that has been actually provided that this is in fact true. Huge amount propaganda has been generated but no evidence has been provided. All this leads to a dangerous incentive where major powers could collide.

The main point here is both Russia and America need to step back. We have to have some tough questions here in the West. Is it worth having a nuclear war that will kill everybody on the planet over Crimea? The answer is no. Is it worth having a nuclear war that would kill everybody on the planet over Estonia? The answer is no. So these are not only not essential American interests, these are all crazy imperialist campaigns provoking the Russian bear. Very unwise. So we need to conclude in thinking about the fact that Russia can destroy America within about 40 minutes. And Russia has announced new improvements to its nuclear weapons. Russian submarines by the way could also hit America in about five or 10 minutes off the coast with nuclear weapons. So this is a situation where everybody needs to back off. There needs to be a reduction in tensions. There needs to be some solution to Ukraine and Syria, the two most dangerous places, and we have discussed ideas for that such as a plebiscite in Ukraine supervised by the UN. We are not here to defend Mr. Putin or Mr. Trump. We are not. We are simply pointing out that a nuclear holocaust will end life on this planet and that needs to be avoided.

That’s the end of this lecture.