LAND-BASED NUCLEAR MISSILES SHOULD BE ELIMINATED ACCORDING TO A WATCHDOG REPORT

The Late Daniel Ellsberg And Norman Solomon Noted That Eliminating ICBMs Was The Easiest And Fastest Way To Reduce “The Overall Danger Of Nuclear War.”

Nuclear weapons are back in style in official Washington. The Pentagon is in the midst of a $2 trillion, three-decade-long effort to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines, and the weapons lobby and its allies in Congress are pressing to spend even more.

Thankfully, a new report from the government watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) offers a refreshing counterpoint to this rush towards a new nuclear arms race, explaining in persuasive detail why the centerpiece of the Pentagon’s new buildup, the Sentinel ICBM, is dangerous, unaffordable, and unnecessary. The late Daniel Ellsberg and Norman Solomon made this point forcefully in an October 2021 piece in The Nation, noting that eliminating ICBMs was the easiest and fastest way to reduce “the overall danger of nuclear war.

Being the good taxpayer protection group that it is, TCS starts by pointing out the immense cost of the Sentinel program, which is now estimated to be at least $315 billion over the lifetime of the system, including an astonishing 37 percent increase in projected acquisition costs over just the past two years. The cost overrun is so large that it has triggered a reevaluation of the program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which serves as a sort of early warning system regarding runaway weapons costs. A Pentagon report on the issue is due early next month. This is a perfect moment to think twice about whether to build a new ICBM, or whether ICBMs are needed at all. The TCS report does just that.

The bottom line of the new analysis is that nuclear warheads deployed on bombers and submarine-based ballistic missiles are more than sufficient to deter any nation from attacking the United States. Steve Ellis, the president of TCS, underscored this point upon the release of the organization’s new report: “We have over 1,300 nuclear warheads deployed on ballistic missile submarines, bombers, and fighters, many of which are more powerful than the warheads planned for deployment on the Sentinel. At a projected cost of $315 billion over its lifecycle, the Sentinel is a redundancy we don’t need at a price we can’t afford.”

Not only are land-based missiles redundant but, as former secretary of defense William Perry has noted, they are “among the most dangerous weapons we have,” because a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them upon warning of attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear conflict based on a false alarm.

Eliminating ICBMs makes good sense in terms of the future security of the planet, but it faces a tough political environment in Washington. The ICBM lobby—spearheaded by contractors like Northrop Grumman working with senators from states like North Dakota, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming that have major ICBM bases or substantial work on the Sentinel program—has been a powerful force for decades in shielding land-based missiles from reductions in numbers or funding. Given the serious security challenges facing the United States in the decades to come, many of which do not have military solutions, the time to break the stranglehold of special interests over our nuclear weapons policy is now. Canceling the Sentinel program would be an excellent place to start.

Some arms control advocates, while acknowledging the costs and risks associated with maintaining an ICBM force, have limited their demands, for the moment, to a call for canceling the Sentinel while extending the service lives of existing ICBMs. While this would certainly save many billions of dollars, it would not address the destabilizing effects of ICBMs themselves. By contrast, if the new ICBM is canceled but the old ones remain in place, the risk of an accidental launch would remain, and any possible timeline for substantial reductions in the American arsenal—with the ultimate goal of eliminating nuclear weapons altogether in line with global norms established by the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—would recede far, far into the future.

The question is whether it is possible to generate a potent enough political counterforce to defeat the ICBM lobby and overcome the mythology that holds that a “nuclear triad” of land-, sea-, and air-based nuclear weapons is an essential pillar of American defense. Although many residents of states that host ICBM bases, like North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, welcome the economic benefits they bring, there is a history of opposition to ICBMs going back to the 1980s campaign against the MX missile (officially and ironically named “The Peacekeeper”) that was supported by everyone from conservative ranchers to the Mormon Church. The MX was ultimately deployed for almost two decades until it was deactivated under the administration of George W. Bush, but the opposition to it was part of a larger surge in favor of nuclear arms reductions that led to a sharp scaling back of the American Cold War arsenal. Huge cost growth on the new ICBM, noted above, has brought increased scrutiny in Congress and energized efforts by a wide array of local and national arms control and disarmament organizations to cancel the system and reconsider whether to retain ICBMs at all.

At a time when the country and the Congress are deeply divided about everything from the future of democracy to the appropriate approach to current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and a possible future conflict with China, coming to consensus around a major shift in American nuclear policy and spending will be no small challenge. But the alternative—a nuclear arms race on autopilot, with a rising risk of a nuclear confrontation—is too dangerous to ignore.

Past changes in American nuclear policy, from the end of atmospheric nuclear testing to the sharp reductions in the size of the American arsenal since the end of the Cold War, have had their roots in citizen activism, from the ban-the-bomb movement of the 1950s to the Nuclear Freeze campaign of the 1980s. We are far from a 1980s-level of concern about nuclear weapons at the moment, but the debate over the issue has grown in line with developments like the success of the biopic Oppenheimer, stepped-up activity to compensate the victims of radiation from past nuclear testing, and continued efforts to sound the alarm about the nuclear danger through vehicles like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, which now stands at a frightening 90 seconds to midnight. The Bulletin’s most recent statement about the risks we face could not be more clear:

Ominous trends continue to point the world toward global catastrophe. The war in Ukraine and the widespread and growing reliance on nuclear weapons increase the risk of nuclear escalation. China, Russia, and the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernize their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation.

Bold action is required if we are to avert the worst-case scenario outlined by the Bulletin. Canceling the Sentinel program would be a major step in the right direction—a forceful note of sanity in the midst of a nuclear policy debate in Washington that has been far too skewed toward promoting Cold War–style nuclear buildups instead of implementing measures aimed at reducing the risk of a nuclear conflict. Shifting course will require us to go well beyond business as usual in Washington, but given the stakes, it is well worth the effort, and time is of the essence.

WE ARE GETTING WAY TOO CLOSE TO ARMAGEDDON

As Ukraine Loses And Runs Out Of Manpower We’re Starting To See Some Frantic Flailings Throughout The Western Empire On A Front Where Cool Heads Are Of Existential Importance To The Survival Of Our Species.

While the antiwar movement has been quite understandably focused on the genocide in Gaza, over the past few weeks we’ve been seeing some very disturbing reports about empire managers ramping up nuclear brinkmanship escalations in Ukraine that are worth going over.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp has been doing a great job covering these developments, as usual. Here are a few recent stories from Antiwar which deserve some attention today.

In an article titled “Blinken Pushing To Let Ukraine Hit Russian Territory With US Weapons,” DeCamp goes over a New York Times report about a “vigorous debate” within the Biden administration over whether to let Ukraine use American supplied war machinery to attack targets in the Russian Federation itself. This would risk direct hot war between Russia and NATO, as Moscow already made explicitly clear recently with regard to similar developments in the UK.

“Moscow recently warned the UK that if Ukraine used British weapons on Russian territory, Russian forces would target UK military sites in Ukraine ‘and beyond’,” DeCamp writes. “The warning came after British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said Ukraine had the ‘right’ to use British arms in attacks on Russia.”

Obviously Ukraine has the “right” to attack Russia since Russia is attacking Ukraine; nobody disputes this. What is of course disputed is that it is wise or moral to risk the life of every terrestrial organism by tempting hot warfare between Russia and NATO over who controls Kharkiv.

In “Speaker Johnson Thinks Ukraine Should Use US Weapons on Russian Territory,” DeCamp reports on a letter sent by a bipartisan group of House representatives urging the president to lift any restrictions on the Ukrainians using American supplied weapons to strike Russian territory “in the way they see fit.” Which means pressure is mounting both within the White House and on Capitol Hill to escalate nuclear tensions in this way.

In “Estonia Says NATO Countries Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Sending Troops to Ukraine for Training,” we learn of Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas’ casual support for openly sending large numbers of NATO forces into Ukraine for training purposes. Small, unofficial special operations forces from NATO powers have long been active in Ukraine, but what the Estonian PM is advocating would be a significant escalation from there. DeCamp notes that “Estonia, Lithuania, and France have all expressed interest in deploying troops” in Ukraine.

All this insanely hawkish rhetoric is already drawing a response from Moscow. In “Russia Begins Nuclear Weapons Drills Near Ukrainian Border,” The Libertarian Institute’s Kyle Anzalone reports on new war games which were announced by the Russian government “in response to Western leaders suggesting NATO troops could enter Ukraine.”

There was a lull in nuclear brinkmanship between NATO and Russia as the uncertainties of the Ukraine war and the influence the hawks would have over it got clearer, and things reached a cruel and bloody semblance of stability. But as Ukraine loses ground and runs out of manpower we’re starting to see some frantic flailings throughout the western empire on a front where cool heads are of existential importance to the survival of our species.

It would feel so unbelievably idiotic if we woke up to learn that nuclear war has begun after a series of reckless escalations and unpredictable developments led to a rapid sequence of events from which there could be no return. But that’s not an unreasonable fear at this point in history, and we are moving much, much too close to that ledge.

AS MORE WARMONGERS TAKE CONTROL IN AMERICA THE WORLD IS HEADING TOWARDS WW3

It’s Hardly Breaking News That There Are Numerous Warhawks Among The Political Elites In Washington DC.

These people have been behind every instance of (geo)political instability initiated by the United States, be it illegal coups, civil wars, invasions, etc, all of which resulted in an exponential exacerbation of the supposed “problem” they were seemingly designed to “resolve”. Such warhawks are oftentimes so shamelessly belligerent that they don’t even bother concealing their openly planned war crimes under the guise of the mythical “moral high ground” used by other more subtle Washington DC warmongers.

It’s important to note that their style has always been preying on the weak, as these warmongers mostly focus on bringing the wanton “freedom and democracy” to those unable to retaliate or at least defend themselves. Direct attacks are unmistakably preceded by economic warfare (primarily sanctions) and “isolation” by the so-called “international community”, that is, the political West and its vassals and satellite states. After all, those are the countries “that matter”, the much-touted “garden”, while the rest of the world (or better said, the actual world) is “simply a jungle”, as EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell (in)famously stated.

And yet, in recent years, the warhawks have become so overconfident that they don’t even consider the possibility of engaging in actual diplomacy (unless arm-twisting is considered “diplomatic”), not even with countries that have the means of bringing all the “freedom and democracy” America “exports” back to it. This includes not only “pocket superpowers” such as North Korea, but also geopolitical giants wielding unprecedented military and/or economic might, such as Russia and China, the two only near-peer adversaries to the United States. Such dangerous trends in American politics are only getting worse.

Namely, as if there weren’t enough war criminals in Washington DC, the American government is becoming a virtual hive of such power circles. Infamous neoconservatives such as John Bolton, Michael McCaul and Lindsey Graham, whose political influence has become dangerously powerful, are now getting significant backup that includes rabid Russophobes and Sinophobes such as Victoria Nuland and USAF General Charles Brown. Such warhawks are now gaining even more influence, meaning that America’s foreign policy is set to become more belligerent than ever before (if that’s even imaginable to most people).

In early October last year, John Bolton, former American National Security Advisor, infamous for his insistence on invading Venezuela, Iran and North Korea or escalating the ongoing war of aggression against Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc, openly stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin is on the American target list and threatened he might be assassinated. And while his directly visible political influence may seem to be dwindling, Bolton’s close associates are grabbing more power than ever. Namely, he was one of the most prominent members of the infamous Washington DC-based think tank known as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

PNAC’s main focus was making the already extremely belligerent American foreign policy even more aggressive. One of the original founders of the now-defunct think tank was Robert Kagan, notorious for being one of the strongest proponents of America’s aggression against the world. There’s not a single war Kagan hasn’t supported. Worse yet, he regularly and deliberately spreads disinformation in order to speed up wars, as evidenced by his unadulterated lies in years before the illegal American invasion of Iraq. Kagan is the husband of Victoria Nuland, who was directly involved in the illegal Maidan coup that resulted in the war in Donbass that killed upwards of 15,000 people by early 2022.

She was recently promoted to acting Deputy Secretary of State by President Biden, placing her in one of the most influential positions in the State Department, second only to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. It should be noted that while Nuland was serving in the Obama administration, one of her phone calls with the then American ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked. In February 2014, she told Pyatt that Arseniy Yatsenyuk will become the new prime minister of Ukraine, which he did that same month. During the call, she also clearly expressed her stance on the significance of the European Union in decision-making when it comes to the political West’s foreign policy.

Nuland was one of the architects of the Neo-Nazi junta’s seizure of power in Ukraine, making her directly responsible for the ongoing hostilities. She also supported both American terrorist attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines and the setting up of military biolabs in Ukraine. Her no less aggressive ally Lindsey Graham also actively took part in pushing Ukraine into a bloodbath, while also calling it the “best money we’ve ever spent” because “Russians are dying”. He is also notorious for actively calling for American aggression in Mexico. The strong influence of such warhawks exponentially raises the possibility of a world-ending thermonuclear confrontation.

Unfortunately, this isn’t only limited to the political establishment.

Namely, the Senate Arms Services Committee recently voted to confirm General Charles Brown as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing Mark Milley.

He is adamant that the American confrontation with China in the Asia-Pacific is inevitable and that Washington DC should further militarize the area. Coupled with resurgent Neo-McCarthyism that also includes congressman McCaul’s insistence on direct confrontation for semiconductors, as well as calls for placing Taiwan under the American nuclear umbrella, this is bound to put America on a collision course with China.

BIDEN APPROVES WEAPONS FOR UKRAINE TO ATTACK CRIMEA INCLUDING SENDING THEM F16s

Both Of These Moves Have Drawn Dire Warnings From Nuclear-Armed Russia, And Both Would Have Been Unthinkable A Year Ago.

In a Sunday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper from the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan made it clear that Washington would approve of American weapons being used in an offensive to recapture Crimea, a horrifying prospect that many experts have agreed is the most likely scenario to lead to nuclear warfare in this conflict. Sullivan told Tapper that while America has forbidden the use of American weapons to attack Russia, America considers Crimea to be part of Ukraine, not Russia.

Here’s CNN’s transcript of the exchange:

TAPPER: In February on this show, you would not say whether the U.S. would support Ukrainian efforts to recapture Crimea. That’s one of the concerns that has been expressed about whether or not the Ukrainians are given the ability to hit Russian targets in Crimea. Do you think that Crimea is part of Ukraine?

SULLIVAN: Of course.

TAPPER: So, what would be the objection of giving…

SULLIVAN: Crimea is Ukraine.

TAPPER: Right.

SULLIVAN: I mean, that’s a very straightforward thing.

TAPPER: Well, yes you answered it directly. I mean, Russia doesn’t think so, obviously. But do you think that Ukraine should have weapons that can reach Russian targets in Crimea?

SULLIVAN: Yes. We have not placed limitations on Ukraine being able to strike on its territory within its internationally recognized borders. What we have said is that we will not enable Ukraine with U.S. systems, Western systems, to attack Russia. And we believe Crimea is Ukraine.

TAPPER: OK.

Moscow has considered Crimea a part of the Russian Federation since its annexation in 2014, meaning efforts to recapture it would — at least in theory — be treated the same as an invasion of any other part of Russia. It was only by way of an arbitrary bureaucratic fluke that Crimea wound up a part of Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Crimeans overwhelmingly prefer to be a part of the Russian Federation. That we may soon be staring down the barrel of a nuclear third world war over something so pedantic is a very dark shade of absurd.

In the same interview, Tapper questioned Sullivan about the Biden administration’s policy shift toward approving F-16 fighter jets to be sent to Ukraine, demanding to know why the war planes weren’t approved sooner.

“President Biden told the G7 leaders that the United States is going to support this joint effort to train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 fighter jets,” said Tapper. “As you know, just a few months ago, the president said there was no basis militarily for giving Ukraine jets and that Ukraine didn’t need them at all. What changed? And would these jets not have been more effective if Ukraine had been trained and had them in time for the upcoming counteroffensive?”

It’s so obnoxious how the only time you ever see these mass media propagandists challenging the American government on its warmongering is when they’re pushing it to be more warlike and demanding answers on why it isn’t warmongering more. This creates the illusion of brave adversarial journalism, when in reality these empire cronies are just manufacturing consent for the increased aggressions the American regime wants to wage anyway.

These escalations have drawn stern warnings from Moscow, which have just been casually hand-waved away by Biden like he’s rejecting jello for dessert. In an article titled “Russia Says West Providing F-16s to Ukraine a ‘Colossal Risk’”, Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:

“A Russian official said Saturday that the Western plans to provide Ukraine with American-made F-16 fighter jets bring “colossal risks” after the US announced it would sign off on European countries delivering the aircraft.

“We see that Western countries are still adhering to the escalation scenario. It involves colossal risks for themselves,” said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko, according to TASS.

“In any case, this will be taken into account in all our plans, and we have all the necessary means to achieve the goals we have set,” Grushko added.

During the last day of the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, President Biden was asked about Russia calling the F-16 plan a “colossal risk.” He replied, “It is for them.””

As Tapper noted, both the F-16 decision and the Crimea decision marked a sharp policy shift by the Biden administration in just a few months. This proxy war just keeps escalating and escalating, with aggressions once deemed unthinkable due to their likelihood of sparking a nuclear exchange now becoming commonplace. Every time a new once-unthinkable escalation is enacted, the hawks are already pushing for the next one.

As we’ve discussed previously, this pattern of continually escalating nuclear brinkmanship in Ukraine has built-in incentives for Russia to ramp up its own aggressions against NATO itself. Every time the west ramps up its brinkmanship and crosses another once-taboo line in the sand without Moscow responding with direct military confrontation, the west takes this as a sign that it can ramp up the escalations again. This has put things on a trajectory toward more and more direct western-backed attacks on the Russian Federation unless Russia lashes out at NATO powers in some way to show them it’s not worth it. Which would be about as dangerous an occurrence as you could possibly imagine.

It is not okay for our rulers to play games with our lives like this. It is not okay for them to keep rolling the dice on nuclear escalation more and more often in the name of securing American unipolar hegemony. These people are making it abundantly clear that sanity and level-headedness are not in the driver’s seat here. Everyone on earth should be shouting a loud, unequivocal “no” to this at the top of their lungs.

AMERICA IS PUSHING THE RUSSIA BEAR INTO THE NUCLEAR CORNER

American Officials Who Want To Inflict A Decisive, Humiliating Defeat On Russia In Its War With Ukraine Remain Oblivious To The Dangers Entailed In Doing That.

Russian leaders consider Ukraine to be the most vital of vital national security interests and they are likely to adopt whatever measures are necessary to prevent such a defeat. Not even the option of using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine is off the table.

So far, the danger of such a potentially catastrophic escalation has remained modest. Deficiencies in Moscow’s lumbering military, combined with recklessly expansive NATO military assistance to Kyiv, have caused the Kremlin’s war effort to be much slower and more costly in blood and treasure than Vladimir Putin and his colleagues anticipated. Nevertheless, Russian forces have seized and retained significant chunks of Ukraine’s territory and inflicted massive casualties on Ukrainian forces. As long as that situation continues, the danger of Moscow resorting to the use of tactical nuclear weapons is not great.

Recent developments, though, indicate that the risk is growing. In an important May 17, 2023, article in Russia Matters, retired Brigadier Gen. Kevin Ryan, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, lists a number of troubling signs. Among them were Putin’s announcement in late March that he would station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus – closer to the territory of several NATO members. Ryan notes that “Putin has also made clear to the Russian people that Moscow’s red lines for the use of nuclear weapons, spelled out in its official documents, have all been crossed in the conflict in Ukraine. These include “aggression with conventional weapons against the Russian Federation, when the very existence of the state is threatened.”

Recent changes in Russia’s military command are another alarming sign. Ryan emphasizes that “under Russian doctrine, the chief of the general staff and the heads of the ground and aerospace forces are the three officers who control all tactical nuclear weapons use in ground operations. Putin has now placed in direct control of the [Ukraine] war the three senior-most officers who have the authority to employ tactical nuclear weapons when he gives the order.”

America’s strategy has been to use Ukraine as a military proxy against Russia while refraining from directly involving NATO forces in the fighting. Unfortunately, the quantity and potency of the weapons systems being transferred to Kyiv have reached the point of posing a major threat not only to Russian forces in occupied Ukraine, but to the Russian homeland itself. There are now reports that the Biden administration has approved the transfer of F-16 fighters from it’s puppet regimes in NATO to Ukraine. If true, such a step would signify yet another dramatic escalation of support. That move comes on the heels of the shipment of heavy battle tanks from the United States and other NATO members and the deployment of Patriot missile batteries around Kyiv. In addition to sending such weapons, British and American intelligence agencies continue to provide Kyiv with vital intelligence data to make Ukrainian forces far more effective than they would be otherwise.

Such actions make a mockery of the official “nonbelligerent” status of the NATO powers. Russian leaders increasingly contend that their country is at war not only – or even primarily – with Ukraine. Instead, Putin and his associates contend that NATO itself is waging war against Russia – and doing so with the goal of eliminating Russia as a relevant power in the international system. Putin has warned repeatedly that the very survival of Russia is now at stake in the Ukraine conflict. At this most recent Victory Day parade marking the end of World War II in Europe, he claimed that the West’s goal is to achieve nothing less than “the collapse and destruction of our country.”

Russian leaders are not wrong. In late April 2022, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted that the Alliance’s goal was not merely to help Ukraine blunt and reverse Russia’s aggression, but to weaken Russia to the point that it could no longer pose a threat to any neighboring state. The West’s goals, both explicit and implicit, have escalated steadily. One objective now includes putting Putin on trial at The Hague for war crimes – a development that could take place only after full-fledged regime change in Moscow. The usual flock of neocon hawks continues to push the goal of inflicting a massive defeat on Russia. Such a maximalist stance gives Putin and other Russian leaders little incentive to avoid using tactical nuclear weapons, if the alternative is Russia’s total defeat and their own fall from power – with prison cells awaiting them.

The surprisingly limited success of Russia’s winter military offensive in Ukraine has intensified the danger. The conquest of the city of Bakhmut, which most Western military experts thought would take only days, is just now concluding after more than two months. Ukraine appears on the brink of launching a counteroffensive that NATO is heavily supporting. An advance that dislodges Russian forces from major portions of southern Ukraine could bring the problems with Russia’s conventional military strategy to a culmination.

An important principle of foreign policy 101 is to leave an adversary a dignified exit from a faltering or failed venture. American and it’s puppep NATO leaders are violating that fundamental requirement. Seeking to inflict an existential defeat on Russia is not only a myopic strategy, it is reckless. Cornered bears are very dangerous, yet Western officials are forcing Russian leaders to choose between utter humiliation for their nation and themselves or using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine despite the obvious, horrific risks. The West’s egregious mismanagement of relations with Russia threatens to culminate in nuclear catastrophe.

YOU ARE DANCING ON THE VERY EDGE OF HELL

Humanity Can Kill Itself Or It Can Learn To Survive. Is It Possible For Humanity To Evolve Beyond This?

Then Congress passes another military budget. And once again, there’s the New Yorker cartoon.

“An emerging compromise on annual defense policy legislation will endorse a $45 billion increase to President Joe Biden’s defense spending plans,” Politico reports. “. . . The deal would set the budget topline of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act at $847 billion for national defense.”

You know, more than the world’s next nine defense budgets combined. We have more than 750 military bases around the world. We’re sending billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine to keep the war going, in the wake of our two decades of war in the Middle East to rid the world of terrorism . . . excuse me, evil. As a result, the planet is bleeding to death. Not to worry, though. We still have nukes.

How safe and secure can we get?

And here’s Northrop Grumman, presenting to the world the B-21 Raider, an updated nuclear bomber, a.k.a., the future of Armageddon. No need to worry. When Armageddon is ready to happen, it will happen smoothly, at the bargain cost of $750 million per aircraft.

Northrop Grumman itself puts it this way: “When it comes to delivering America’s resolve, the B-21 Raider will be standing by, silent and ready. We are providing America’s warfighters with an advanced aircraft offering a combination of range, payload, and survivability. The B-21 Raider will be capable of penetrating the toughest defenses to deliver precision strikes anywhere in the world. The B-21 is the future of deterrence.”

We’re dancing on the edge of hell.

Is it possible for humanity to evolve beyond this? Prior to Armageddon? Advocating that humanity’s collective consciousness must transcend militarism and an us-vs.-them attitude toward the planet means lying on a bed of nails. Consider the weird and mysterious act of violence that took place recently in Moore County, North Carolina, which may — or may not — have been triggered by a drag show.

Somebody opened gunfire at two electric substations in the central North Carolina county over the weekend, causing multi-million-dollar damage to the power grid and leaving some 40,000 households without power for half a week. While the perpetrator and motive remain a mystery to law enforcement officials, one person wrote on Facebook: “The power is out in Moore County and I know why.” She then posted a photo of the Sunrise Theater, in downtown Southern Pines, along with the words “God will not be mocked.”

The theater had a drag show scheduled that night, which, prior to the power grid attack, had been vehemently opposed by many right-wingers.

The Facebook claim that the power outage was meant to stop the drag show may have been totally bogus (and also a failure, by the way, with spectators lighting the show with their cell phones so it could go on). Maybe we’ll never know for sure. But even if the poster, furious about the scheduled show, had simply co-opted a motive for the criminal act, essentially ascribing it to God, it’s still indicative that there’s a lot of poison in the air. If you hate something, don’t try to understand it. Go to war. There was, after all, a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs several weeks ago — indeed, mass shootings directed at multiple targets are, good God, commonplace.

We fear that war remains the logical terminus of collective human consciousness. Indeed, war is sacred, or so surmises Kelly Denton-Borhaug, citing as an example a speech delivered by George W. Bush on Easter weekend in 2008. She noted that W “milked” the Easter story to glorify the hell the country was in the process of wreaking in Iraq and Afghanistan, throwing a bit of Gospel into his war on evil: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

She writes: “The abusive exploitation of religion to bless violence covered the reality of war’s hideous destructiveness with a sacred sheen.”

But perhaps even worse than war’s pseudo-sacredness is its normalcy, a la that never-questioned trillion-dollar budget that Congress tosses at the Pentagon every year without fail. And the total pushes up, up, up every year, bequeathing us, for instance, that Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider, ready to deliver Armageddon on command.

Short of Armageddon, we simply have armed hate-spewers, ready and ever so willing to kill an enemy at the grocery store or a school classroom or a nightclub.

Understand, love, heal . . . these are not simple words. Will we ever learn what they mean? Will we ever give them a budget?

AMERICANS DON’T HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN NUCLEAR MADMEN

There’s Always Seems To Be An Excuse For Nuclear Madness, And The United States Has Certainly Provided Ample Rationales For The Russian Leader’s Display Of It.

The announcement by Vladimir Putin over the weekend that Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus marked a further escalation of potentially cataclysmic tensions over the war in neighboring Ukraine. As the Associated Press reported, “Putin said the move was triggered by Britain’s decision this past week to provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium.”

There’s always an excuse for nuclear madness, and the United States has certainly provided ample rationales for the Russian leader’s display of it. American nuclear warheads have been deployed in Europe since the mid-1950s, and current best estimates say 100 are there now – in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

Count on the American corporate media to condemn Putin’s announcement while dodging key realities of how the USA, for decades, has been pushing the nuclear envelope toward conflagration. The American government’s breaking of its pledge not to expand NATO eastward after the fall of the Berlin Wall – instead expanding into 10 Eastern European countries – was only one aspect of official Washington’s reckless approach.

During this century, the runaway motor of nuclear irresponsibility has been mostly revved by the United States. In 2002, President George W. Bush withdrew America from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a vital agreement that had been in effect for 30 years. Negotiated by the Nixon administration and the Soviet Union, the treaty declared that its limits would be a “substantial factor in curbing the race in strategic offensive arms.”

His lofty rhetoric aside, President Obama launched a $1.7 trillion program for further developing American nuclear forces under the euphemism of “modernization.” To make matters worse, President Trump pulled the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a crucial pact between Washington and Moscow that had eliminated an entire category of missiles from Europe since 1988.

The madness has remained resolutely bipartisan. Joe Biden quickly dashed hopes that he would be a more enlightened president about nuclear weapons. Far from pushing to reinstate the cancelled treaties, from the outset of his presidency Biden boosted measures like placing ABM systems in Poland and Romania. Calling them “defensive” does not change the fact that those systems can be retrofitted with offensive cruise missiles. A quick look at a map would underscore why such moves were so ominous when viewed through Kremlin windows.

Contrary to his 2020 campaign platform, President Biden has insisted that the United States must retain the option of first use of nuclear weapons. His administration’s landmark Nuclear Posture Review, issued a year ago, reaffirmed rather than renounced that option. A leader of the organization Global Zero put it this way: “Instead of distancing himself from the nuclear coercion and brinkmanship of thugs like Putin and Trump, Biden is following their lead. There’s no plausible scenario in which a nuclear first strike by the U.S. makes any sense whatsoever. We need smarter strategies.”

Daniel Ellsberg – whose book The Doomsday Machine truly should be required reading in the White House and the Kremlin – summed up humanity’s extremely dire predicament and imperative when he told the New York Times days ago: “For 70 years, the U.S. has frequently made the kind of wrongful first-use threats of nuclear weapons that Putin is making now in Ukraine. We should never have done that, nor should Putin be doing it now. I’m worried that his monstrous threat of nuclear war to retain Russian control of Crimea is not a bluff. President Biden campaigned in 2020 on a promise to declare a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. He should keep that promise, and the world should demand the same commitment from Putin.”

We can make a difference – maybe even the difference – to avert global nuclear annihilation. This week, TV viewers will be reminded of such possibilities by the new documentary The Movement and the “Madman” on PBS. The film “shows how two antiwar protests in the fall of 1969 – the largest the country had ever seen – pressured President Nixon to cancel what he called his ‘madman’ plans for a massive escalation of the American war in Vietnam, including a threat to use nuclear weapons. At the time, protestors had no idea how influential they could be and how many lives they may have saved.”

In 2023, we have no idea how influential we can be and how many lives we might save – if we’re really willing to try.

EVEN THE SADISTIC WARMONGER HENRY KISSINGER IS NOW WORRIED ABOUT THERMONUCLEAR WAR

Kissinger, The “Advisor” To Presidents, And A Notorious War Criminal Realizes The Current American Insanity In Regard To Ukraine May Very Well Get All Of Us Killed.

According to Zero Hedge:

“Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has again called for urgently finding a path of negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine, warning that the entire world is in danger as nuclear-armed superpowers inch closer toward disastrous direct confrontation,”.

Kissinger believes the objective declared by Biden’s neocons and “humanitarian interventionists” to dissolve Russia will create far larger and more ominous problems.

“A peace process should link Ukraine to NATO, however expressed. The alternative of neutrality is no longer meaningful,” he emphasized. He warned that continued attempts to render Russia “impotent” could result in an uncontrollable and unpredictable spiral. He laid out that along with the sought after “dissolution” of Russia would come a massive power vacuum out of which new threats to the whole world would emerge as bigger powers rush in.

Despite Kissinger’s call for a negotiated peace settlement, the American regime—under Biden, his Secretary of State, and Secretary of “Defense”—has decided there will be no negotiated peace deal until Zelensky and Ukraine decide to do so.

Zelensky will not negotiate unless Russia removes its troops and relinquishes Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, in addition to compensation for war damages. During internationally monitored referenda in these territories, the respective populations voted to separate from Ukraine. Although Ukraine is described as a democracy in the west, the government does not respect the wishes of the people. It is a cardinal rule for the state: any move toward secession of territory must be violently opposed. In response to separatist demands, following the American-orchestrated coup of 2014, the new Nazi-tinged government began bombarding Donbas.

The Russians are frustrated by Zelensky’s obstinate and absolutist demands, thus making a negotiated settlement impossible. Not even the American government, if it decides to do so, can get Zelensky to the negotiating table. In November, Vladimir Dzhabarov of Russia’s Federation Council remarked on the trustworthiness of Zelensky.

“Even if they [the Americans] order Zelensky to begin talks, how can we hold talks with him, with Mr. Zelensky, who says one thing in the morning and quite a different thing in the evening, sending contradictory messages,” Vladimir Dzhabarov, first deputy chairman of the international committee of Russia’s Federation Council (upper parliament house), told a news conference.

Zelensky demands a return to Ukraine’s 1991 borders when the Soviet Union collapsed.

In short, the problem is not Russia. It is Zelensky, the Biden administration, and its state department. They have created a situation where a negotiated settlement is impossible, thus leaving Russia little choice short of turning Ukraine into an uninhabitable wasteland, a dystopian landscape devoid of water, food, heated shelter, electricity, and the other necessities of civilized life.

So long as the west refuses to consider Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine and the encroachment of NATO, the war will continue, thus increasing the possibility of nuclear brinkmanship.

The idea has long been to initiate ethnic and religious conflict on the periphery of the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation. An example of this was the use of the Afghan Mujahideen in the Tajikistani Civil War. It is well-known the Mujahideen, an austere Sunni Wahhabi sect, received assistance, weapons, and training from the CIA and Pakistani intelligence.

The long-running effort to destabilize, neutralize, and dismember Russia from its southern periphery is a cause célèbre for the neocons. The American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, founded in 1999, is a who’s who of notorious and criminal neocons, including Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Midge Decter, Frank Gaffney, Michal Leeden, and former CIA boss James Woolsey.

Following 9/11 and the Bush invasions, a few people became suspicious. John Laughland wrote in 2004, two years after the invasion of Iraq:

“Allegations are even being made in Russia that the west itself is somehow behind the Chechen rebellion, and that the purpose of such support is to weaken Russia, and to drive her out of the Caucasus. The fact that the Chechens are believed to use as a base the Pankisi gorge in neighbouring Georgia—a country which aspires to join Nato, has an extremely pro-American government, and where the US already has a significant military presence—only encourages such speculation. Putin himself even seemed to lend credence to the idea in his interview with foreign journalists on Monday.”

And now there is a national-tribal crisis brewing in the Balkans, an aftershock of the American regime’s direct involvement in Serbia, then Yugoslavia, most pointedly its 78-day bombing of that country in 1998, many aspects of which constitute unpunished war crimes (including but not limited to the use of internationally outlawed cluster munitions).

It is important to remember the first president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci—a former Kosovo Liberation Army commander, organized crime boss, indicted war criminal, and protégé of Madeleine Albright—was warmly received by the Clinton Administration.

“US-NATO covert support the KLA goes back to the mid-1990s. In the year preceding the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, the KLA was quite openly supported by the Clinton administration,” writes Prof Michel Chossudovsky.

The “elder statesman” Kissinger understands what is at risk in the current standoff in Ukraine. In 1970, aware Vietnam had become a quagmire dividing America, Kissinger entered into secret negotiations (without Nixon’s knowledge) with Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, a high-ranking member of the Hanoi Politburo. And while these negotiations did not result in a peace deal, it can be said they were held, never mind the true intentions of the parties involved.

The American regime’s act of diplomatic stonewalling—and instructing Kyiv to do likewise—is making the Ukraine conflict in Europe more dangerous by the day. It is devolving into a humanitarian disaster for the Ukrainian people and soldiers alike, the latter killed in droves every week as the Kyiv government forces them into the shredding machine of Russian artillery. The Big Lie is that Ukraine can win this war.

The war criminal Kissinger is one year shy of 100. It is possible he may not make it as the war in Ukraine grinds onward, consuming precious human life, inflicting untold misery, and threatening a thermonuclear planetary extinction before Kissinger’s next birthday.

THE “DOOMSDAY CLOCK” IS NOW AT 90 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT

That’s The Closest Ever To Total Nuclear Doom, The Global Catastrophe. The Clock Had Been Set At 100 Seconds Since 2020.

The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board and a group of sponsors – which includes 10 Nobel laureates – have focused on “Russia’s war on Ukraine” (their terminology) as the main reason.

Yet they did not bother to explain non-stop American rhetoric (America is the only nation that adopts “first strike” in a nuclear confrontation) and the fact that this is an American proxy war against Russia with Ukraine used as cannon fodder.

The Bulletin also attributes malignant designs to China, Iran and North Korea, while mentioning, only in passing, that “the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the United States, New START, stands in jeopardy”.

“Unless the two parties resume negotiations and find a basis for further reductions, the treaty will expire in February 2026.”

As it stands, the prospects of an American-Russian negotiation on New START are less than zero.

Now cue to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov making it very clear that war against Russia is not hybrid anymore, it’s “almost” real.

“Almost” in fact means “90 seconds.”

So why is this all happening?

THE MOTHER OF ALL INTEL FAILURES

Former British diplomat Alastair Crooke has concisely explained how Russian resilience – much in the spirit of Iranian resilience past four decades – completely smashed the assumptions of Anglo-American intelligence.

Talk about the Mother of All Intel Failures – in fact even more astonishing than the non-existent Iraqi WMDs (in the run-up to Shock and Awe in 2003, anyone with a brain knew Baghdad had discontinued its weapons program already in the 1990s.)

Now the collective West “committed the entire weight of its financial resources to crushing Russia (…) in every conceivable way – via financial, cultural and psychological war, and with real military war as the follow-through.”

And yet Russia held its ground. And now reality-based developments prevail over fiction. The Global South “is peeling away into a separate economic model, no longer dependent on the dollar for its trading needs.”

And the accelerated collapse of the American dollar increasingly plunges the Empire into a real existential crisis.

All that hangs over a South Vietnam scenario evolving in Ukraine after a rash government-led political and military purge. The coke comedian – whose only role is to beg non-stop for bags of cash and loads of weapons – is being progressively sidelined by the Americans (beware of traveling CIA directors).

The game in Kiev, according to Russian sources, seems to be that the Americans are taking over the Brits as handlers of the whole operation.

The coke comedian remains – for now – as a sock puppet while military control over what is left of Ukraine is entirely NATO’s.

Well, it already was – but now, formally, Ukraine is the world’s first de facto NATO member without being an actual member, enjoying less than zero national sovereignty, and complete with NATO-Nazi Storm troopers weaponized with American and German tanks in the name of “democracy”.

The meeting last week of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group – totally controlled by the American regime – at the American Air Force base in Ramstein solidified a sort of tawdry remix of Operation Barbarossa.

Here we go again, with German Panzers sent to Ukraine to fight Russia.

Yet the tank coalition seems to have tanked even before it starts. Germany will send 14, Portugal 2, Belgium 0 (sorry, don’t have them). Then there’s Lithuania, whose Defense Minister observed, “Yes, we don’t have tanks, but we have an opinion about tanks.”

No one ever accused German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of being brighter than a light bulb. She finally gave the game away, at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg:

“The crucial part is that we do it together and that we do not do the blame game in Europe because we are fighting a war against Russia.”

So Baerbock agrees with Lavrov. Just don’t ask her what Doomsday Clock means. Or what happened after Operation Barbarossa failed.

THE NATO-EU “GARDEN”

The EU-NATO combo takes matters to a whole new level. The EU essentially has been reduced to the status of P.R. arm of NATO.

It’s all spelled out in their January 10^th joint declaration.

The NATO-EU joint mission consists in using all economic, political and military means to make sure the “jungle” always behaves according to the “rules-based international order” and accepts to be plundered ad infinitum by the “blooming garden”.

Looking at The Big Picture, absolutely nothing changed in the American military/intel apparatus since 9/11: it’s a bipartisan thing, and it means Full Spectrum Dominance of both America and NATO countries. No dissent whatsoever is allowed. And no thinking outside the box.

Plan A is subdivided into two sections.

1. Military intervention in a hollowed-out proxy state shell (see Afghanistan and Ukraine).

2. Inevitable, humiliating military defeat (see Afghanistan and soon Ukraine). Variations include building a wasteland and calling it “peace” (Libya) and extended proxy war leading to future humiliating expulsion (Syria).

There’s no Plan B.

Or is there? 90 seconds to midnight?

Obsessed by Mackinder, the Empire fought for control of the Eurasian landmass in World War I and World War II because that represented control of the world.

Later, Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski had warned: “Potentially the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition between Russia, China and Iran.”

Jump cut to the Raging Twenties when America forced the end of Russian natural gas exports to Germany (and the EU) via Nord Stream 1 and 2.

Once again, Mackinderian opposition to a grand alliance on the Eurasian landmass consisting of Germany, Russia and China.

The Straussian neo-con and neoliberal-con psychos in charge of American foreign policy could even absorb a strategic alliance between Russia and China – as painful as it may be. But never Russia, China and Germany.

With the collapse of the JCPOA, Iran is now being re-targeted with maximum hostility. Yet were Tehran to play hardball, the American Navy or military could never keep the Strait of Hormuz open – by the admission of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Oil price in this case would rise to possibly thousands of dollars a barrel according to Goldman Sachs oil derivative experts – and that would crash the entire world economy.

This is arguably the foremost NATO Achilles Heel. Almost without firing a shot a Russia-Iran alliance could smash NATO to bits and bring down assorted EU governments as socio-economic chaos runs rampant across the collective West.

Meanwhile, to quote Dylan, darkness keeps dawning at the break of noon. Straussian neo-con and neoliberal-con psychos will keep pushing the Doomsday Clock closer and closer to midnight.

ALMOST NOBODY IS THINKING LOGICALLY ABOUT THE RISK OF NUCLEAR WAR WE FACE

The Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists Has Moved Its Symbolic Doomsday Clock To Ninety Seconds To Midnight, The Closest It Has Ever Been.

Chief among their reasons for doing so is the increasingly dangerous war in Ukraine.

A statement authored by the Bulletin’s editor John Mecklin is as biased against Russia as any mainstream western punditry today and makes no mention of the American empire’s role in provoking, prolonging and benefiting from this conflict, yet it still provides a fairly reasonable appraisal of the magnitude of the threat we’re staring down the barrel of at this point in history:

“This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

The war in Ukraine may enter a second horrifying year, with both sides convinced they can win. Ukraine’s sovereignty and broader European security arrangements that have largely held since the end of World War II are at stake. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks.

And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.”

Mecklin encourages dialogue between Russia, Ukraine and NATO powers in order to de-escalate tensions in “this time of unprecedented global danger.” He quotes UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who warned last August that the world has entered “a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War.”

We came a hair’s breadth from nuclear annihilation during the chaotic and unpredictable brinkmanship at the height of the last cold war, and in fact had numerous close calls that could have easily wound up going another way. As former Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, humanity survived the Cuban Missile Crisis by “plain dumb luck”.

There’s no logical basis for the belief that we’ll get lucky again. Believing nuclear war won’t happen because it didn’t happen last time is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias; it’s as rational as believing Russian roulette is safe because the man handing you the pistol didn’t blow his head off when he pulled the trigger.

But that’s the kind of sloppy thinking you’ll run into when you try to discuss this subject in public; we always encountering arguments that there’s no risk of nuclear war because we’ve gone all this time without disaster. One of the reasons we engage so much on social media is that we find it’s a good way of keeping tabs on the dominant propaganda narratives in our civilization and understanding what people are thinking and believing about things, and nowhere have we been met with more fuzzbrained comments than the times we have written about the need to prevent an entirely preventable nuclear holocaust.

The most common response we get is something along the lines of “Well if there is a nuclear war it will be Putin’s fault,” as though whose “fault” it is will matter to us while we’re watching the world end, along with the related “Well Russia shouldn’t have invaded then” and “Well Russia should stop threatening to use nukes then.” People genuinely don’t seem to understand that in the event of a full-scale nuclear war, it will really be the end of everyone. They still kind of imagine everyone still being there and shaking their fists at Russia afterward, and themselves sitting there feeling self-righteous and vindicated for correctly saying what a bad, bad man Vladimir Putin is.

They don’t understand that there will be no pundits discussing the nuclear armageddon on Fox and MSNBC, arguing about whose fault it was and which political party is to blame. They don’t get that there won’t be any war crimes tribunals in the radioactive ashes as the biosphere starves to death in nuclear winter. They don’t understand that once the nukes start flying, nobody’s shoulds or shouldn’ts about it will matter at all, and neither will your political opinions about Putin. All that will matter is that it happened, and that it can’t be taken back.

Another common response when we talk about the looming threat of nuclear war is, “Oh so you just don’t care about Ukrainians and you want them all to die.” People sincerely believe that’s a valid response to a discussion about the need to prevent the single worst thing that could possibly happen from happening. It really doesn’t seem to occur to them that they’re not actually engaging the subject at hand in any real way.

Slightly more perceptive interlocutors will argue that if we back down to tyrants just because they have nuclear weapons then everyone will try to get nukes and those who have them will become more belligerent, which will end up making nuclear war more likely in the long run. This response is a straw man fallacy because it misrepresents the argument as “just back down” rather than a call to engage in diplomacy and dialogue to de-escalate and begin sincerely negotiating toward detente, none of which is happening to any meaningful extent in this conflict. More importantly, it pretends that Russia is just invading its neighbor out of the blue instead of the well-documented reality that it is in fact responding to provocations by the American empire. America has a moral obligation to de-escalate a conflict it knowingly provoked to advance its own interests, especially when that conflict could kill everyone in the world.

The whole “We can’t just back down to bullies like Putin” line of argumentation is further invalidated by the fact that it’s one thing to draw a line in the sand that must never be crossed — even if in the face of armageddon — but it’s quite another to say that line should be over something as small as who governs Crimea. This planet is populated with eight billion humans and countless other sentient creatures, very few of whom care one way or another who governs Crimea and almost none of whom would be willing to watch their loved ones die over it. Wanting to draw the line there is obnoxious, arrogant, and absurd.

And that’s just the shoddy brainwork of the rank-and-file public; the thinking of those who actually got us into this situation is surely just as dogshit. From what we can tell standing on this side of the thick veils of government secrecy which separate us from the truth, it appears to arise predominantly from a combination of immense hubris and zealous groupthink; hubris to think they can control all possible outcomes in a game of brinkmanship with so many small, unpredictable moving parts, and zealous groupthink in mindlessly adhering to the imperial doctrine that American unipolar planetary hegemony must be secured at all cost. They’re playing games with the life of every creature on this planet, and anyone who thinks that’s smart or wise should be as far from such decisions as possible.

The logical faceplants we are describing here seem to arise partly from the fact that our civilization is completely inundated with empire propaganda about this conflict, and partly from the fact that people just haven’t thought terribly hard about nuclear war and what it would mean. The latter is probably because the prospect of everyone dying horrifically is such a huge, heavy, uncomfortable subject to sit down and deeply grapple with to the extent that it demands. For most people it’s just this vague, blurry mass in the periphery of their awareness, because they’ve been doing all these weird mental gymnastics to squirm and compartmentalize away from this thing rather than facing it.

But if ever there was a time to start doing some rigorous independent thinking and stop trusting the authorities to sort things out, it would be now. They’re showing us every sign that they’re just going to keep ramping up these games of nuclear chicken until they either fill their bottomless need for more complete global control or get us all killed trying. People need to start waking up to what’s going on and start making things uncomfortable for the people who are driving our world toward total destruction.

It does not need to be this way. Peace talks are possible. Diplomacy, de-escalation and detente are possible. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. We need to start building some public pressure to end this madness, because if the mushroom clouds ever show up, there is not one person alive who in that moment will believe that it was worth it.