By Eric Zuesse:
On Wednesday, June 11th, CNN headlined “U.S. Sends B-2 Stealth Bombers to Europe,” and reported that “they arrived in Europe this week for training.” Wikipedia notes that B-2s were “originally designed primarily as a nuclear bomber,” and that “The B-2 is the only aircraft that can carry large air-to-surface standoff weapons in a stealth configuration.”
In other words, the primary advantage of the newer, “Stealth,” version of B-2, is its first-strike (or surprise-attack) nuclear capability. That’s the upgrade: the weapon’s ability to sneak upon the target-country and destroy it before it has a chance to fire off any of its own nuclear weapons in response to that “first-strike” attack. The advantage of Stealth is creating and stationing a nuclear arsenal for the purpose of winning a nuclear war, instead of for the goal of having continued peace via “Mutually Assured Destruction,” or MAD.
Some historical background is necessary here, so that a reader can understand why this is happening — the switch to an objective of actually winning a nuclear war (as opposed to deterring one). One cannot understand what’s happening now in Ukraine without knowing this bigger picture.
(This account is written under the assumption that the reader already knows some of the allegations it contains, but not all of them, and that the reader will click on the link wherever a given allegation requires docuмentation and support.)
I have previously reported about “How and Why the U.S. Has Re-Started the Cold War (The Backstory that Precipitated Ukraine’s cινιℓ ωαr),” and, “Do We Really Need to Re-Start the Cold War?” I pointed out there that we don’t really need to re-start the Cold War, at all, since communism (against which the Cold War was, at least allegedly, fought) clearly lost to capitalism (we actually won the Cold War, and peacefully) but that America’s aristocracy very much does need to re-start a war with Russia — and why it does. (It has to do with maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, something that benefits America’s aristocrats enormously.)
Consequently, for example, a recent CNN Poll has found that Americans’ fear of Russia has soared within just the past two years. Our news media present a type of news “reporting” that places Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, into a very bad light, even when it’s unjustified by the facts.
The situation now is thus rather similar to that right before World War I, when the aristocracy in America decided that a pretext had to be created for our going to war against Germany. That War had already started in Europe on 28 July 1914, and President Wilson wanted to keep the U.S. out of it, but we ultimately joined it on the side of J.P. Morgan and Company. This was docuмented in detail in an important 1985 book, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914-1918, which was well summarized in Business History Review, by noting that: “J.P. Morgan & Co. served as Britain’s financial and purchasing agent, and the author makes especially good use of the Morgan Grenfell & Co. papers in London to probe that relationship. Expanding British demand for U.S. dollars to pay for North American imports made the politics of foreign exchange absolutely central to Anglo-American relations. How to manage those politics became the chief preoccupation of Her Majesty’s representatives in the United States,” and most especially of Britain’s financial and purchasing agent in the U.S.
In 1917, after almost two years of heavy anti-German propaganda in the U.S. press that built an overwhelming public support for our joining that war against Germany, Congress found that, in March 1915, “J.P. Morgan interests had bought 25 of America’s leading newspapers, and inserted their own editors, in order to control the media” so that we’d join the war on England’s side. Whereas back then, it was Germany’s leader who was being goaded into providing a pretext for us to declare war against his country, this time it’s Russia’s leader (Putin) who is being demonized and goaded into providing such a pretext, though Putin (unlike Germany’s Kaiser) has thus far refrained from providing the pretext that Obama constantly warns us that he will (a Russian invasion of Ukraine). Consequently, Obama’s people are stepping up the pressure upon Putin by bombing the areas of neighboring Ukraine where Russian speakers live, who have family across the border inside Russia itself. Just a few more weeks of this, and Putin’s public support inside Russia could palpably erode if Putin simply lets the slaughter proceed without his sending troops in to defend them and to fight back against Kiev’s (Washington’s surrogate’s) bombing-campaign. This would provide the pretext that Obama has been warning about.
I also have reported on “Why Ukraine’s cινιℓ ωαr Is of Global Historical Importance.” The article argued that “This cινιℓ ωαr is of massive historical importance, because it re-starts the global Cold War, this time no longer under the fig-leaf rationalization of an ideological battle between ‘capitalism’ versus ‘communism,’ but instead more raw, as a struggle between, on the one hand, the U.S. and West European aristocracies; and, on the other hand, the newly emerging aristocracies of Russia and of China.” The conflict’s origin, as recounted there, was told in its highest detail in an article in the scholarly journal Diplomatic History, about how U.S. President George H.W. Bush in 1990 fooled the Soviet Union’s leader Mikhail Gorbachev into Gorbachev’s allowing the Cold War to be ended without any assurance being given to the remaining rump country, his own Russia, that NATO and its missiles and bombers won’t expand right up to Russia’s doorstep and surround Russia with a first-strike ability to destroy Russia before Russia will even have a chance to get its own nuclear weapons into the air in order to destroy the U.S. right back in retaliation.
That old system — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD, but actually very rational from the public’s perspective on both sides — is gone. The U.S. increasingly is getting nuclear primacy. Russia, surrounded by NATO nations and U.S. nuclear weapons, would be able to be wiped out before its rusty and comparatively puny military force could be mustered to respond. Whereas we are not surrounded by their weapons, they are surrounded by ours. Whereas they don’t have the ability to wipe us out before we can respond, we have the ability to wipe them out before they’ll be able to respond. This is the reason why America’s aristocracy argue that MAD is dead. An article, “Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War” was published in the December 2008 Physics Today, and it concluded that, “the indirect effects ['nuclear winter'] would likely eliminate the majority of the human population.” (It would be even worse, and far faster, than the expected harms from global warming.) However, aristocrats separate themselves from the public, and so their perspective is not necessarily the same as the public’s. The perspective that J.P. Morgan and Co. had in 1915 wasn’t the perspective that the U.S. public had back then, and it also wasn’t the perspective that our President, Woodrow Wilson, did back then, when we were a democracy. But it’s even less clear today that we are a democracy than it was in 1915. In that regard, things have only gotten worse in America.
So, President Obama is now trying to persuade EU leaders to join with him to complete this plan to replace MAD with a first-strike nuclear capability that will eliminate Russia altogether from the world stage.
As I also docuмented, the IMF is thoroughly supportive of this plan to remove Russia, and announced on May 1st, just a day prior to our massacre of independence-supporters in the south Ukrainian city of Odessa on May 2nd, that unless all of the independence supporters in south and eastern Ukraine can be defeated and/or killed, the IMF will pull the plug on Ukraine and force it into receivership.
Obama clearly means business here, and so the government that we have installed in Kiev is bombing throughout southeastern Ukraine, in order to convince the residents there that resistance will be futile. Part of the short-term goal here is to get Russia to absorb the losses of all of Ukraine’s unpaid debts to Russia, so that far less of Ukraine’s unpaid debts to the IMF, U.S. and E.U., will remain unpaid. It’s basically an international bankruptcy proceeding, but without an international bankruptcy court, using instead military means. It’s like creditors going to a bankrupt for repayment, and the one with the most gunmen gets paid, while the others do not. This is the reason why the IMF ordered the leaders in Kiev to put down the rebellion in Ukraine’s southeast. What’s important to the IMF is not land, it’s the Kiev government’s continued control over the assets in the rebelling part of Ukraine — assets that will be worth something in a privatization or sell-off to repay that debt. However, for Obama, what is even more important than repaid debts is the continued dominance of the U.S. dollar. Wall Street needs that.
Among other indications that the U.S. is now preparing a nuclear attack against Russia is an article on May 23rd, “U.S. Tests Advanced Missile For NATO Interceptor System,” and also a June 10th report from a website with good sources in Russian intelligence, which alleges that Ukrainian President Petro “Poroshenko secretly met with … [an] American delegation headed by the Director of … the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Frank Archibald, which also included former CIA chief in Ukraine Jeffrey Egan, the current – Raymond Mark Davidson, Mark Buggy (CIA, Istanbul), Andrzej Derlatka, a CIA agent in the Polish intelligence Agency, and member of CIA Kevin Duffin who is working as senior Vice President of the insurance company Brower. Poroshenko and Archibald signed a paper entitled an ‘Agreement on Military Cooperation between the U.S. and Ukraine’”
Furthermore, barely a month before the CIA and State Department overthrew the previous, the pro-Russian, President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, the government of Netherlands decided, after 18 years of “dithering,” to allow the U.S. to arm our F-35 bombers there with nuclear weapons. And this was already after Holland’s “Parliament in November signed off on a government plan to purchase 37 F-35As to replace the Dutch air force’s aging fleet of nuclear-capable F-16s. The Netherlands is widely understood to host about two dozen U.S. B-61 gravity bombs at the Volkel air base, as part of NATO’s policy of nuclear burden-sharing.”
Moreover, Obama isn’t only beefing up our first-strike nuclear capability, but is also building something new, called “Prompt Global Strike,” to supplement that nuclear force, by means of “a precision conventional weapon strike” that, if launched against Russia from next-door Ukraine, could wipe out Russia’s nuclear weapons within just a minute or so. That might be a fallback position, for Obama, in case the EU’s leaders (other than Netherlands and perhaps one or two others) might happen to decide that they won’t participate in our planned nuclear invasion of Russia.
Certainly, Obama means business here, but the big question is whether he’ll be able to get the leaders of other “democratic” nations to go along with his first-strike plan.
The two likeliest things that can stop him, at this stage, would be either NATO’s breaking up, or else Putin’s deciding to take a political beating among his own public for simply not responding to our increasing provocations. Perhaps Putin will decide that a temporary embarrassment for him at home (for being “wimpy”) will be better, even for just himself, than the annihilation of his entire country would be. And maybe, if Obama pushes his indubitable Superpower card too hard, he’ll be even more embarrassed by this conflict than Putin will be. After all, things like this and this aren’t going to burnish Obama’s reputation in the history books, if he cares about that. But maybe he’s satisfied to be considered to have been George W. Bush II, just a far better-spoken version: a more charming liar than the original. However, if things come to a nuclear invasion, even a U.S. “victory” won’t do much more for Obama’s reputation than Bush’s “victory” in Iraq did for his. In fact, perhaps Americans will then come to feel that George W. Bush wasn’t America’s worst President, after all. Maybe the second half of the Bush-Obama Presidency will be even worse than the first.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
Topic: How USA is planning first-strike nuke attack on Russia (Read 1261 times)