Nuclear war: ‘we never expected that!’ by Sackerson

Ukraine is part of a wider struggle: the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT on 18 March that the United States wishes to return to a ‘unipolar’ world http://thesaker.is/foreign-minister-sergey-lavrovs-interview-with-rt-moscow-march-18-2022/ , under which the US would aim to remain the world’s sole superpower, which was Paul Wolfowitz’s 1992 ‘doctrine’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfowitz_Doctrine . Former Carter administration adviser Zbigniev Brzezinski’s 1997 ‘Grand Chessboard’ https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzezinski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf analysis continued the theme of containment, calling for ‘perches’ all around the world to hem in Russia.

This policy seems inconsistent. It has maintained its focus on a State that is no longer officially Communist at the same time that hardline Communist China has been developing her own ‘perches’ in the Pacific, Africa and South America as part, we assume, of a plan to displace the US as Top Nation. John Mearsheimer, who in 2015 judged the West responsible for the crisis in Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 , now says that the US partnership with China was a huge blunder and we should settle with Russia in order to ‘pivot’ and deal with the Middle Kingdom instead https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/U.S.-engagement-with-China-a-strategic-blunder-Mearsheimer . Seeing how the US has fed the Chinese dragon for decades and thereby weakened its own economy, it may be too late.

Nevertheless, the signs are that the unipolar (and monocular) ambition has not been abandoned, even though it is and has long been insanely dangerous. Next October will mark sixty years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, which all over a certain age will remember, yet many will not connect this confrontation with the fifteen Russia-targeted US nuclear missiles set up and made operational at Izmir, Turkey in the preceding February; which was a factor in Khrushchev’s decision to assent to Castro’s request to position US-targeted missiles in Cuba. From Izmir to Moscow is about 1,500 miles; from Kyiv, merely 500; no wonder Russia has become so nervous about NATO’s creeping-up game of ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ Had it not been for the restraining hand of a Russian naval officer in 1962 https://web.archive.org/web/20210710213948/https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cold-war/sovietsbomb.htm most of us would have died long ago, or never been born.

When two parties get into a fight, at least one has miscalculated. In a timely and startling article on Substack https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/people-ideas-machines-ii-catastrophic?s=r , Dominic Cummings shows that the West’s assumption that Russia would not dare to escalate from conventional to nuclear war was mistaken:

‘After the 1991 collapse some scholars went to talk to those actually in charge in Russia. They read documents. They discovered that we’d been wrong in crucial ways all along.

‘Actually the Soviets planned early and heavy use of nuclear weapons in many scenarios including outbreak of conventional war in Europe.’

In 1963, on the night President Kennedy was shot, British tank transporters rumbled past our front door (literally) in North Germany, on their way to what we now know would have been nuclear obliteration. Today, Russia and the US have between them over 11,000 nuclear warheads, some 3,000 of which are ready to be deployed. https://sofrep.com/news/100-seconds-to-midnight-a-glance-at-the-worlds-nuclear-weapons/

Cummings claims that our decision makers do not take the danger seriously. After he was grudgingly allowed three hours to elaborate on our military unpreparedness, the Prime Minister told him ‘What a waste of my time.’

Western war planners think they are dealing with rational actors and know all the play variations, but seem not to understand the romance of death. CD says that as Japan faced defeat in 1945 their General Anami was proposing to see his nation destroyed ‘like a beautiful flower.’ Churchill himself stiffened the spines of his Cabinet in 1940 with a moving speech that had them beating the table with their fists: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’ The old soldier was utterly serious – I remember reading how his wife handed their daughter a large knife against the day the Germans invaded.

So far, awful as they are, the more reliable statistics for the Ukraine conflict https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/ukraine-civilian-casualty-update-20-march-2022 show a policy of limited aggression with the possibility of negotiated peace. We can do without a Fourth Estate fanning the flames of hysteria and a leadership more engaged in winning the next election – probably soon, once the Fixed Term Parliaments Act is abolished https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-fulfil-manifesto-commitment-and-scrap-fixed-term-parliaments-act - than heeding the dreadful warning. https://www.flashlyrics.com/lyrics/the-watersons/christmas-is-now-drawing-near-at-hand-50

So proud and lofty is some sort of sin

Which many take delight and pleasure in

Whose conversation God doth much dislike

And yet He shakes His sword before He strike