The longer the proxy war in Ukraine continues, the closer the U.S. comes to a direct confrontation with Russia. Once that happens, the Dr. Strangeloves running the show will reach for the nukes.
Bombs Away – by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com
I have covered enough wars to know that once you open that Pandora’s box, the many evils that pour out are beyond anyone’s control. War accelerates the whirlwind of industrial killing. The longer any war continues, the closer and closer each side comes to self-annihilation. Unless it is stopped, the proxy war between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine all but guarantees direct confrontation with Russia and, with it, the very real possibility of nuclear war.
U.S. President Joe Biden, who doesn’t always seem to be quite sure where he is or what he is supposed to be saying, is being propped up in the I-am-a-bigger-man-than-you contest with Russian President Vladimir Putin by a coterie of rabid warmongers who have orchestrated over 20 years of military fiascos. They are salivating at the prospect of taking on Russia, and then, if there is any habitation left on the globe, China.
Trapped in the polarizing mindset of the Cold War — where any effort to de-escalate conflicts through diplomacy is considered appeasement, a perfidious Munich moment — they smugly push the human species closer and closer toward obliteration. Unfortunately for us, one of these true believers is Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“Putin is saying he is not bluffing. Well, he cannot afford bluffing, and it has to be clear that the people supporting Ukraine and the European Union and the Member States, and the United States and NATO are not bluffing neither,” E.U. foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned. “Any nuclear attack against Ukraine will create an answer, not a nuclear answer but such a powerful answer from the military side that the Russian Army will be annihilated.”
Annihilated. Are these people insane?
Josep Borrell in 2019. (European Parliament, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
You know we are in trouble when former Donald Trump is the voice of reason.
“We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in world war three” the former U.S. president said. “And there will be nothing left of our planet — all because stupid people didn’t have a clue … They don’t understand what they’re dealing with, the power of nuclear.”
I dealt with many of these ideologues — David Petraeus, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland — as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Once you strip away their chest full of medals or fancy degrees, you find shallow men and women, craven careerists who obsequiously serve the war industry that ensures their promotions, pays the budgets of their think tanks and showers them with money as board members of military contractors.
They are the pimps of war. If you reported on them, as I did, you would not sleep well at night. They are vain enough and stupid enough to blow up the world long before we go extinct because of the climate crisis, which they have also dutifully accelerated.
If, as Joe Biden says, Putin is “not joking” about using nuclear weapons and we risk nuclear “Armageddon,” why isn’t Biden on the phone to Putin? Why doesn’t he follow the example of John F. Kennedy, who repeatedly communicated with Nikita Khrushchev to negotiate an end to the Cuban missile crisis?
Kennedy, who unlike Biden served in the military, knew the obtuseness of generals. He had the good sense to ignore Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff and head of the Strategic Air Command, as well as the model for General Jack D. Ripper in “Dr. Strangelove,” who urged Kennedy to bomb the Cuban missile bases, an act that would have probably ignited a nuclear war. Biden is not made of the same stuff.
Retired General Curtis LeMay in 1987. (U.S. National Archives, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Why is Washington sending $50 billion in arms and assistance to sustain the conflict in Ukraine and promising billions more for “as long as it takes”? Why did Washington and Whitehall dissuade Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky, a former stand-up comic who has been magically transformed by these war lovers into the new Winston Churchill, from pursuing negotiations with Moscow, set up by Turkey? Why do they believe that militarily humiliating Putin, whom they are also determined to remove from power, won’t lead him to do the unthinkable in a final act of desperation?
Moscow strongly implied it would use nuclear weapons in response to a “threat” to its “territorial integrity” and the pimps of war shouted down anyone who expressed concern that we all might go up in mushroom clouds, labeling them traitors who are weakening Ukrainian and Western resolve.
Giddy at the battlefield losses suffered by Russia, they poke the Russian bear with ever greater ferocity. The Pentagon helped plan Ukraine’s latest counteroffensive, and the C.I.A. passes on battlefield intelligence. The U.S. is slipping, as we did in Vietnam, from advising, arming, funding and supporting, into fighting.
U.S. President Joe Biden during a briefing by his national security team, Aug. 18, 2021. (Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)
None of this is helped by Zelensky’s suggestion that, to deter the use of nuclear weapons by Russia, NATO should launch “preventive strikes.”
“Waiting for the nuclear strikes first and then to say ‘what’s going to happen to them.’ No! There is a need to review the way the pressure is being exerted. So there is a need to review this procedure,” he said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the remarks, which Zelensky tried to roll back, were “nothing else than a call to start a world war.”
The West has been baiting Moscow for decades. I reported from Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. I watched these militarists set out to build what they called a unipolar world — a world where they alone ruled.
First, they broke promises not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany. Then they broke promises not to “permanently station substantial combat forces” in the new NATO member countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Then they broke promises not to station missile systems along Russia’s border. Then they broke promises not to interfere in the internal affairs of border states such as Ukraine, orchestrating the 2014 coup that ousted the elected government of Victor Yanukovich, replacing it with an anti-Russian — fascist aligned — government, which, in turn, led to an eight-year-long civil war, as the Russian populated regions in the east sought independence from Kiev.
Ukrainian government tanks in eastern Ukraine, 2015. (OSCE)
They armed Ukraine with NATO weapons and trained 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers after the coup. Then they recruited neutral Finland and Sweden into NATO. Now the U.S. is being asked to send advanced long-range missile systems to Ukraine, which Russia says would make the U.S. “a direct party to the conflict.” But blinded by hubris and lacking any understanding of geopolitics, they push us, like the hapless generals in the Austro-Hungarian empire, towards catastrophe.
The West calls for total victory. Russia annexes four Ukrainian provinces. The Westhelps Ukraine bomb the Kerch Bridge. Russia rains missiles down on Ukrainian cities. The West gives Ukraine sophisticated air defense systems. The West gloats over Russian losses. Russia introduces conscription. Now Russia carries out drone and cruise missile attacks on power, sewage and water treatment plants. Where does it end?
“Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia?” a New York Times editorial asks. “Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war — and if so, how does crowing about providing U.S. intelligence to kill Russians and sink one of their ships achieve this?”
No one has any answers.
The Times editorial ridicules the folly of attempting to recapture all of Ukrainian territory, especially those territories populated by ethnic Russians.
“A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal,” it reads. “Though Russia’s planning and fighting have been surprisingly sloppy, Russia remains too strong, and Mr. Putin has invested too much personal prestige in the invasion to back down.”
But common sense, along with realistic military objectives and an equitable peace, is overpowered by the intoxication of war.
On Oct. 17, NATO countries began a two-week-long exercise in Europe, called Steadfast Noon, in which 60 aircraft, including fighter jets and long-range bombers flown in from Minot Air Base in North Dakota are simulating dropping thermonuclear bombs on European targets. This exercise happens annually. But the timing is nevertheless ominous. The U.S. has some 150 “tactical” nuclear warheads stationed in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.
Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of NATO Military Committee, during a meeting of NATO defence ministers on Oct. 13. (NATO)
Ukraine will be a long and costly war of attrition, one that will leave much of Ukraine in ruins and hundreds of thousands of families convulsed by lifelong grief. If NATO prevails and Putin feels his hold on power is in jeopardy, what will stop him from lashing out in desperation? Russia has the world’s largest arsenal of tactical nukes, weapons that can kill tens of thousands if used on a city. It also possesses nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads. Putin does not want to end up, like his Serbian allies Slobodan Miloševic and Ratko Mladic, as a convicted war criminal in the Hague. Nor does he want to go the way of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. What will stop him from upping the ante if he feels cornered?
Russian President Vladimir Putin puts nuclear forces on high alert, Feb. 27. (Kremlin)
There is something grimly cavalier about how political, military and intelligence chiefs, including C.I.A. Director William Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, agree about the danger of humiliating and defeating Putin and the specter of nuclear war.
“Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” Burns said in remarks at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
Former C.I.A. Director Leon Panetta, who also served as defense secretary under President Barack Obama, wrote this month that U.S. intelligence agencies believe the odds of the war in Ukraine spiraling into a nuclear war are as high as 1-in-4.
The director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, echoed this warning, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in May that if Putin believed there was an existential threat to Russia, he could resort to nuclear weapons.
“We do think that [Putin’s perception of an existential threat] could be the case in the event that he perceives that he is losing the war in Ukraine, and that NATO in effect is either intervening or about to intervene in that context, which would obviously contribute to a perception that he is about to lose the war in Ukraine,” Haines said.
“As this war and its consequences slowly weaken Russian conventional strength … Russia likely will increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength to its internal and external audiences,” Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier wrote in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s threat assessment submitted to the same Armed Services Committee at the end of April.
Given these assessments, why don’t Burns, Panetta, Haines and Berrier, urgently advocate diplomacy with Russia to de-escalate the nuclear threat?
This war should never have happened. The U.S. was well aware it was provoking Russia. But it was drunk on its own power, especially as it emerged as the world’s sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, and besides, there were billions in profits to be made in arms sales to new NATO members.
In 2008, when Burns was serving as the ambassador to Moscow, he wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:
“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Sixty-six U.N. members, most from the Global South, have called for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine, as required by the U.N. Charter. But few of the big power players are listening.
If you think nuclear war can’t happen, pay a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These Japanese cities had no military value. They were wiped out because most of the rest of Japan’s urban centers had already been destroyed by saturation bombing campaigns directed by LeMay. The U.S. knew Japan was crippled and ready to surrender, but it wanted to send a message to the Soviet Union that with its new atomic weapons it was going to dominate the world.
We saw how that turned out.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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If it was true that the motivation for nukeing an already crippled Japan was to send a message to the Soviet Union than we can all rest easy that there will not be a nuclear attack now days because there is now other superior power to send a message to by nukeing now Russia. But for this to stick the American political elites have to be rational and sane, Are they ? Even the US publics are divided on this !
How can Ralph Nader support the Democratic Party? Or doesn’t he worry about nuclear war. Indeed we are in trouble when trump is the voice of sanity. Biden rushes to support the neonazis in Ukraine and does his best to destroy Julian Assange. Is this senility or just stupidity. Perhaps both.
Looking (for example) at his sons activities in Ukraine, certainly being assisted by daddy, one might also take into consideration that is simply very evil intention.
Rather than “just” senility or/ and stupidity ;)
Not “only” concerning U.S. politicians, I find it difficult to believe that they are really as stupid as they make themselves look like. If it is about their bank account, I am pretty sure that they are up to date without any doubt.
What a weird reality we’re in. Send just enough military aid to Ukraine doesn’t go over some edge where Putin retaliates. The game of war and the rules of war — very weird since aggressors aren’t prone to follow rules and the thought of war as a game is beyond the pale. We are so past the time when war should still be an elemental part of our reality, where they are no longer local affairs but threaten the survival of humanity. Our insanity is clear. What to do is not. On “our” side, we are just gadflies, like Chris, laying out how we got where we are, and stopping there. How about you and your fellow pundits have some conversation among yourselves to stop lamenting and start being creative? We will do something. What could it be?
Washington DC and it’s creatures set the precedent for the use of Nuclear weapons wether you like it or not, the precedent was set by the worlds largest collection of certified nut cases, surrogates and other merchants of death for fun and profits.
Chris writes, ” Given these assessments, why don’t Burns, Panetta, Haines and Berrier, urgently advocate diplomacy with Russia to de-escalate the nuclear threat. ” Well Chris maybe we are missing something.
Given what we know about the JFK, Khrushchev, a sub captain and Cuban situation one would generally think a more measured approach in dealing with Putin might have been called for.
The U.S. might benefit from holding u[ a mirror and taking a long look at just how insane the U.S. current stand appears to others, 66 members of the UN for instance.
Seems simple enough, at some point serious thought must be addressed to the why so much opposition. Right?
Things do not seems to be adding up. What is it that the so called smartest people in the room know that we don’t?
Chris Hedges makes a perfect challenge to the U.S. authorities to re-evaluate their stance. I’m not naive enough to think even if they examine their actions they would admit any errors or even notify the4 rest of us. Equally if they know something the rest of us don’t I suspect we might ever know what it is, that said something seems “off” or “odd’ about this episode in Ukraine. Hopefully it isn’t that Washington has made a gross error in judgement pursuing this undertaking. Something that must be considered.
Clue: The current stance by our government claiming that to pursue negotiations or otherwise soften the US stance is a cowardly action that might lead to nuclear conflict is only a valid claim if some pieces are missing from this puzzle.
Thanks to Chris Hedges tenacious abilities and thanks to CN organization’s deep caring for the rest of us.
Think Peace!
I realize that it is difficult to find common ground from which to argue these points, and so you may feel obliged to make certain concessions to the MSM/MIC portrayal of the war in order to maintain reader confidence. However, there is a substantial risk in going along with the “Russia has suffered heavy losses” line peddled by the MSM/MIC. Russian losses have been substantially lower than those of the AUK, and this is what one would expect given their tremendous superiority in artillery and control of the air. But the point is not just a question of accuracy. If you confirm the heavy losses lie then you implicitly offer support for the current corollary: that a “wounded and desperate Russia” will go nuclear.
Thank you.
A very important somewhat hidden aspect!
Chris Hedges explains the situation very clearly. I wish we could get him and others like him at least on NPR or something, so people could hear the reality of the situation and the consequences of various options. Sigh, not going to happen. I live each day as if it were my last.
Things have not changed much between “smokin” Joe McCarthy and “smokin” Joe Biden
… In fact, it’s much worse. … It’s all of the whole D and R parties.
…… And, it’s spreading rapidly, all over the whole white world now…
“Come Together” is the opening track to Abbey Road, written by John Lennon and to be used as a campaign song for famed LSD enthusiast Timothy Leary, who was running for Governor of California at the time.
John Lennon:
“…The thing was created in the studio. It’s gobbledygook; Come Together was an expression that Leary had come up with for his attempt at being president or whatever he wanted to be, and he asked me to write a campaign song. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t come up with one. But I came up with this, Come Together, which would’ve been no good to him – you couldn’t have a campaign song like that, right?…”
Shoot me
Shoot me
Shoot me
Shoot me
Here come old flat-top, he come grooving up slowly
He got ju-ju eyeball, he one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker, he just do what he please
He wear no shoeshine, he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger, he shoot Coca-Cola
He say, “I know you, you know me”
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together, right now
Over me
He bag production, he got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard, he one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knee
Hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease
Come together, right now
Over me
He roller-coaster, he got early warnin’
He got muddy water, he one mojo filter
He say, “One and one and one is three”
Got to be good-lookin’ ’cause he’s so hard to see
Come together, right now
Over me
Only the US government is to blame for the current Ukraine crisis. If the American people do not force it to sit down at the negotiating table with the Russians, then the world will not avoid nuclear war.
Hedges buys into the propaganda that Russia is “facing setbacks” and they are hence “desperate”, and that that’s what will likely trigger the first use of nuclear weapons. But the reality is that Russia is not losing, they’re not desperate and they’re not the ones most likely to use a nuke. This is all propaganda because western forces are planning some kind of false flag, whether a “dirty bomb” or tactical nuke or something that they can blame on Russia. This nuke will, of course, go off in eastern ukraine – territory which Kiev doesn’t care about (at least, not the people in that territory), but which is now allied with Russia and which Russia has been protecting from ukrainian attack. So it will be perfect for Kiev – destroy people they hate anyway while drawing the U.S./NATO further into the war, which is what they’ve wanted all along. It makes no sense for Russia to launch a first-strike nuke, but it makes all the sense in the world for the west to make it look like they did.
I agree with you.
Apart from the fact, that “the west” anyway has quiet “some” expertise concerning the use of false flag engagement.
As shaming as it is.
The US is eager to take care of Russia before subduing China. The seemingly underlying assumption for such a strategy does not seem tenable — there is nothing that would prevent Russia and China to combine forces to confront the US. In addition to hubris which has been the driving force throughout US history, is it the superiority of the American weaponry that empowers the US to remain oblivious to such a combined confrontation with Russia and China?
Les affidés de la BÊTE IMPÉRIALISTE OCCIDENTALE MENTENT COMME ILS RESPIRENT, Zelensky n’est qu’une Marionnette, c’est Washington qui contrôle”
Washington et l’Otan ont décidé tout simplement d’utiliser l’impensable, l’inimaginable, l’interdiction totale et absolue, c’est-à-dire l’arme nucléaire. Les affidés de la BÊTE IMPÉRIALISTE OCCIDENTALE, dont Washington est l’antre capitale, ne reculeront devant aucune horreur HUMAINE pour imposer leur mondialisation hégémonique dans leur guerre contre la Russie et la Chine.
L’hécatombe est en vue comme solution pour Washington et ses vassaux de l’Otan. La mort ne se présente plus avec une faux, mais avec une bombe sale prête à être délestée de la main au doigt inquisiteur. Pour ces affidés de la BÊTE, une guerre nucléaire est gagnante: totalement PSYCHOPATHE ET BESTIAL.
La gouvernance chaotique mortifère occidentale est un échec total.
hxxps://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=552916183501656&set=a.398443985615544
The U.S. ruling class is psychotic.
Merely look at how they treat the domestic population in which 40% of the population lives very near or below the poverty line in debt bondage due to healthcare, student loan, and housing costs.
Then of course if we take an honest look abroad to see how our elites behave it’s nothing less than astonishing. Their mass media lapdogs run the propaganda and a citizenry too busy working and making ends meet just goes along with the vilification campaigns.
The US ruling class is sociopathic and avaricious to a degree that’s virtually unprecedented in world history.
Sorry to be a party-pooper but there is no way to stop a Russian nuclear attack even if the US gets the first blow. Firstly, Russia has a number of nuclear submarines, patrolling the oceans and armed to the teeth with Sarmat 29 Intercontinental missiles. Each submarine has a number of missiles which in turn have a number of warheads. Unless you can stop everyone of these babies – which seems highly improbable – then its good night Vienna. Next, a number of Russian bombers also armed with the same nuclear hardware will be patrolling airspace both over Russia and even outside of Russia. Thirdly the Russians have a vast area to hide their nukes some in silos and some in fixed position and mobile on trains, or trucks. Finally there is the ‘perimeter defence’ whereby after an incoming US nuclear attack the defensive placement of these Russian missiles will be activated and ready to go.
If the US-NATO fancies its chances of a war against Russia the outcome will be very predictable. Life on earth was great while it lasted chaps.
The notion of actually ‘winning’ a nuclear war seems so insane that it is difficult to surmise the mental machinations of the current powers-that-be. It represents a little more than a collective death-wish. As is already known Russia has nuclear submarines lurking just off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts armed with the latest Sarmat-29s which will lay waste to north America and Europe. That should be enough to concentrate the minds of the war-hawks in the Pentagon; a nuclear war will be definitive, but they will be the victors apparently. Maybe there will be some survivors in Chile or South Africa or the Falkland Islands, but they will be reaching a gruesome end after having been smothered by the oncoming nuclear winter. Why has mankind slipped into some crazed madness; it is an almost biblical apocalypse.
A government such as the one in power in Washington needs to be removed from office before they end all life on the planet. If that calls for a military coup, so be it. They’ve proven their insanity many times over during the past decade when they decided to go after Russia, loaded for bear, for no damned good reason. If they’re doing this just so they are not blamed for the incipient economic collapse they have also master-minded a mere 14 years after their last financial catastrophe, that’s just another reason to question their sanity, to say nothing of competence. If the generals had any wisdom and loyalty to the citizens of this country they would act against the maniacs in the White House and on Capitol Hill. At the least, they should not accept orders from the aforementioned fools to go to war against Russia or China. The Nuremburg Trials prioritized life, peace and justice, not anyone’s chain of command. Free speech is still in effect under the constitution, but I don’t trust those barbarians, so leave my identity out of this in any form.
“The Generals”? What Generals do you suggest? Could it possibly be the present bunch of failures who are pushing us into the brink?
Agree totally. Without a doubt it is an extremely dangerous ‘state sponsor of terrorism’, a rogue state that it out of control and hell bent on destruction.
Chris, your use of annexation and your description of V. Putin gives one the feeling you lack reality. I do respect your writings and believe you to be a thinking individual…. but when they break into your home and threaten your family do you appreciate when the police save the day? These people were bombed for eight years and voted to become part of Russia, rejecting the coup that over-threw their government. If their vote is to be made invalid how about our last presidential vote? I am not spouting Trump but asking what information was hidden from the voters….was it Russian or was it US? Democracy at this point is an over-used slogan, in my opinion.
Russia does not want a nuclear war and have stated this many times. Can the US make such a statement… you mentioned Hiroshima…
Sorry, about my rant, but I do appreciate Chris’s knowledge but he does just miss the point at times.
Spike
What a wonderful essay!! Every word counts and I hope people start realizing that Biden is senile and Blinkin is an idiot. I had to gasp and also laugh at the statement ” You know we are in trouble when former president Donald Trump is the voice of reason”. That is a statement for the ages, or more likely one for the end of the world.
Thank you Chris; your knowledge of foreign affairs is vastly larger than that of our state department, or the joint chiefs and surpasses everyone at the current New York Times and Wa Post. It would be helpful if SOMEONE in any of those areas was smart enough to listen! But we aren’t that lucky.