helpt om de speciale geestelijke atmosfeer in stand te houden, die een hiërarchische maatschappij nodig heeft. De oorlog, zo zal men zien, is nu een zuiver binnenlandse aangelegenheid. In het verleden bestreden de heersende groepen van alle landen elkaar ook echt, al mochten zij inzien, dat zij een gemeenschappelijk belang hadden en daarom de vernietigende werking van de oorlog zouden moeten beperken, en de overwinnaar altijd de overwonnene plunderde. In onze eigen tijd vechten zij helemaal niet tegen elkaar. De oorlog wordt door iedere heersende groep gevoerd tegen de eigen onderdanen en het doel van de oorlog is niet om gebiedsoverwinningen te maken of te voorkomen, maar om de structuur van de samenleving is stand te houden.
Orwell stelde bovendien dat ‘op de lange duur een hiërarchische maatschappij alleen mogelijk’ was ‘op een basis van armoede en onwetendheid,’ aangezien de vraag is:
hoe de wielen van de industrie draaiende te houden zonder de feitelijke rijkdom van de wereld te vermeerderen. Er moesten goederen geproduceerd worden, maar zij moesten niet worden gedistribueerd. En in de praktijk was de enige manier om dit te bereiken een voortdurende oorlog... Oorlog is een methode tot het verbrijzelen, of tot het in de lucht laten vliegen, of tot het laten zinken in de diepte der zee van materialen, die anders gebruikt zouden kunnen worden om de massa's te veel gemak te verschaffen en daardoor op de lange duur te intelligent te maken.
A new study by the RAND Corporation titled ‘War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable’ is just the latest think tank paper devoted to assessing a US war against China. The study, commissioned by the US Army, provides further evidence that a war with China is being planned and prepared in the upper echelons of the American military-intelligence apparatus.
That the paper emerges from the RAND Corporation has a particular and sinister significance. Throughout the Cold War, RAND was the premier think tank for ‘thinking the unthinkable’ — a phrase made notorious by RAND’s chief strategist in the 1950s, Herman Kahn. Kahn devoted his macabre book On Thermonuclear War to elaborating a strategy for a ‘winnable’ nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
According to the preface of the new study, released last week, ‘This research was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of the Army and conducted within the RAND Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program. RAND Arroyo Center, part of the RAND Corporation, is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the United States Army.’
The paper is a war-gaming exercise in the Kahn tradition: weighing the possible outcomes of a war between two nuclear powers with utter indifference to the catastrophic consequences for people in the United States, China and the rest of the world.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/08/05/pers-a05.html
Hoewel de Amerikaanse militairen en in hun voetspoor de NAVO uitgaan van zelfs een ‘winnable nuclear war,’ blijft de vraag wie de grote vijand moet worden? Immers,
despite frequently voiced fears — Vladimir Putin has never threatened to re-absorb the Baltic countries or to claim any of their territories, though he has criticized some that denied ethnic Russians the full rights of citizenship, a principle that the European Union is pledged to enforce.
Since Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.
Was this crisis predictable?
Absolutely. NATO expansion was the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. In 1997, when the question of adding more NATO members arose, I was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC. svh). In my introductory remarks, I made the following statement:
‘I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.’ Indeed, our nuclear arsenals were capable of ending the possibility of civilization on Earth.’
But that was not the only reason I cited for including rather than excluding Russia from European security. As I explained to the SFRC:
‘The plan to increase the membership of NATO fails to take account of the real international situation following the end of the Cold War, and proceeds in accord with a logic that made sense only during the Cold War. The division of Europe ended before there was any thought of taking new members into NATO. No one is threatening to re-divide Europe. It is therefore absurd to claim, as some have, that it is necessary to take new members into NATO to avoid a future division of Europe; if NATO is to be the principal instrument for unifying the continent, then logically the only way it can do so is by expanding to include all European countries. But that does not appear to be the aim of the administration, and even if it is, the way to reach it is not by admitting new members piecemeal.’ […]
President Bush also assured Gorbachev during their meeting in Malta in December, 1989, that if the countries of Eastern Europe were allowed to choose their future orientation by democratic processes, the United States would not ‘take advantage’ of that process. (Obviously, bringing countries into NATO that were then in the Warsaw Pact would be ‘taking advantage.’) The following year, Gorbachev was assured, though not in a formal treaty, that if a unified Germany was allowed to remain in NATO, there would be no movement of NATO jurisdiction to the east, ‘not one inch.’
Was this crisis willfully precipitated?
Alas, the policies pursued by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all contributed to bringing us to this point.
aldus Jack F. Matlock, Jr. 'a career diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991.'
Het gevaar voor Moskou is dat als Oekraïne NAVO-lid wordt Amerikaanse en Britse nucleaire raketten, 5 minuten na lancering, Moskou kunnen vernietigen. Bovendien blijft het gevaar niet beperkt tot Oekraïense lanceerplaatsen. Maandag 28 januari 2019, drie jaar voordat de VS en zijn NAVO ‘Poetin’ begon uit te lokken de Russische strijdkrachten opdracht te geven voor een invasie van Oekraïne, om zo te voorkomen dat het land lid kan worden van de NAVO, berichtte The Guardian onder de kop ‘US nuclear weapons: first low-yield warheads roll off the production line’ dat een:
New type of weapon, ordered by Trump’s nuclear posture review, could make conflict more likely, say experts.
https://fas.org/blogs/security/2011/06/b61-12/
Aan het ontwerp van deze, volgens Amerikaanse generaals, ‘usable nuclear bombs,’ werd al onder president Obama begonnen, waarmee wordt aangetoond dat tijdens de inmiddels gestarte Tweede Koude Oorlog zowel de radicale Republikeinen als de zogenaamde gematigde Democraten niet langer terugschrikken voor een nucleaire oorlog, die de hele mensheid kan vernietigen. Nogmaals The Guardian:
Stephen Young, a senior Washington representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said its yield had most likely been cut by taking away one stage from the original two-stage, W76 thermonuclear (waterstofbom. svh) device.
‘As best we can tell, the only requirement is to replace the existing secondary, or second stage, with a dummy version, which is what they do every time they test fly a missile,’ Young said, adding that the amount of tritium, a hydrogen isotope, may also be adjusted. The result would be to reduce its explosive power from 100 kilotons of TNT, to about five — approximately a third of the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
De betrokken Amerikaanse autoriteiten stellen dat:
the development of a low-yield weapon would make nuclear war less likely, by giving the US a more flexible deterrent. It would counter any enemy (particularly Russian) perception that the US would balk at using its own fearsome arsenal in response to a limited nuclear attack because its missiles were all in the hundreds of kilotons range and ‘too big to use,’ because they would cause untold civilian casualties.
Low-yield weapons ‘help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear employment less likely,’ the 2018 nuclear posture review said.
Many critics say that is an optimistic scenario that assumes there will be no miscalculation on the US side.
‘There are many other scenarios, especially with a president who takes pride in his unpredictability and has literally asked: “Why can’t we use our nuclear weapons?”’ Young said.
Melissa Hanham of the One Earth Future foundation pointed out that adversaries would have no way of knowing if a full-force Trident was being fired at them, or its low-yield cousin.
‘Hey all you nuclear powers out there. We’re just going to trust that you recognize this is “just a little nuclear weapon” and won’t retaliate with all you’ve got,’ Hanham wrote in a tweet. ‘Remember! The US only intends to nuke you “a little bit.”’
Bekend is dat:
George W. Bush’s 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which was adopted by the US Senate in late 2002. envisaged the development of ‘a generation of more useable nuclear weapons.’ namely tactical nuclear weapons (B61-11 mini-nukes) with an explosive capacity between one third and 6 times times a Hiroshima bomb.
The term ‘more usable’ emanates from the debate surrounding the 2001 NPR, which justified the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the conventional war theater on the grounds that tactical nuclear weapons, namely bunker buster bombs with a nuclear warhead are, according to scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon ‘harmless to the surrounding population because the explosion is underground.’
De Amerikaanse voormalige Nationale Veiligheidsadviseur:
Charles Kupperman, once argued a nuclear war could be won ‘in the classical sense’ if one side emerged the stronger, even if there were tens of millions of casualties.
Speaking to reporters last week, former defence secretary William Perry, an arms control advocate (en voormalige amerikaanse minister van Defensie. svh), said he was less worried about the number of nuclear warheads left in the world than by the return of cold war talk about such weapons being ‘usable.’
‘The belief that there might be tactical advantage using nuclear weapons — which I haven’t heard that being openly discussed in the United States or in Russia for a good many years — is happening now in those countries which I think is extremely distressing,’ Perry said. ‘That’s a very dangerous belief.’
Oud minister William Perry waarschuwt voor dit slag Amerikaanse extremisten die Europa trachten mee te slepen in een, desnoods, nucleaire holocaust, zonder dat de polderpers hierover durft te berichten. Evenals in het geval van Perry worden ook de waarschuwingen van de Canadese emeritus hoogleraar Michel Chossudovsky door mijn collega's genegeerd. Op de goed geïnformeerde website Global Research publiceerde hij op 6 augustus 2011 het volgende:
Towards a World War Three Scenario, The Dangers of Nuclear War.
At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable – a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread in terms of radioactive fallout over a large part of the Middle East.
All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as ‘a weapon of last resort,’ have been scrapped. ‘Offensive’ military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of ‘self-defense.’
The casualties from the direct effects of blast, radioactivity, and fires resulting from the massive use of nuclear weapons by the superpowers [of the Cold War era] would be so catastrophic that we avoided such a tragedy for the first four decades after the invention of nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevailed, namely that the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union would result in ‘the destruction of both the attacker and the defender.’ In the post Cold war era, US nuclear doctrine was redefined.
The dangers of nuclear weapons have been obfuscated. Tactical weapons have been upheld as distinct, in terms of their impact, from the strategic thermonuclear bombs of the Cold War era. Tactical nuclear weapons are identical to the strategic nuclear bombs. The only things that differentiates these two categories of nuclear bombs are:
1) their delivery system;
2) their explosive yield (measured in mass of trinitrotoluene (TNT), in kilotons or megatons.
The tactical nuclear weapon or low yield mini-nuke is described as a small nuclear bomb, delivered in the same way as the earth penetrating bunker buster bombs. Tactical nuclear weapons, in terms of in-theater delivery systems are comparable to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
The Pentagon’s 2001 Nuclear Posture Review envisaged so-called ‘contingency plans’ for an offensive ‘first strike use’ of nuclear weapons, not only against ‘axis of evil’ countries (including Iran and North Korea) but also against Russia and China.
Remember Hiroshima: No Danger of Nuclear War? The Pentagon’s Plan to Blow up the Planet
The adoption of the NPR by the US Congress in late 2002 provided a green light for carrying out the Pentagon’s preemptive (preventieve. svh) nuclear war doctrine, both in terms of military planning as well as defense procurement and production. Congress not only rolled back its prohibition on low yield nuclear weapons, it also provided funding ‘to pursue work on so-called mini-nukes.’ The financing was allocated to bunker buster (earth penetrator) tactical nuclear weapons as well as to the development of new nuclear weapons.
Hiroshima Day 2003: Secret Meeting at Strategic Command Headquarters
On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, commemorating when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex were in attendance. This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima. The meeting was intended to set the stage for the development of a new generation of ‘smaller,’ ‘safer’ and ‘more usable’ nuclear weapons, to be used in the ‘in-theater nuclear wars’ of the 21st Century.
In a cruel irony, the participants to this secret meeting, which excluded members of Congress, arrived on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and departed on the anniversary of the attack on Nagasaki. More than 150 military contractors, scientists from the weapons labs, and other government officials gathered at the headquarters of the US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska to plot and plan for the possibility of ‘full-scale nuclear war,’ calling for the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons — more ‘usable’ so-called ‘mini-nukes’ and earth penetrating ‘bunker busters’ armed with atomic warheads.
According to a leaked draft of the agenda, the secret meeting included discussions on ‘mini-nukes’ and ‘bunker-buster’ bombs with nuclear war heads ‘for possible use against rogue states’:
We need to change our nuclear strategy from the Cold War to one that can deal with emerging threats… The meeting will give some thought to how we guarantee the efficacy of the (nuclear) stockpile.
The Privatization of Nuclear War: US Military Contractors Set the Stage
The post 9/11 nuclear weapons doctrine was in the making, with America’s major defense contractors directly involved in the decision-making process.
The Hiroshima Day 2003 meetings had set the stage for the ‘privatization of nuclear war.’ Corporations not only reap multibillion-dollar profits from the production of nuclear bombs, they also have a direct voice in setting the agenda regarding the use and deployment of nuclear weapons.
The nuclear weapons industry, which includes the production of nuclear devices as well as the missile delivery systems, etc., is controlled by a handful of defense contractors with Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grunman, Raytheon and Boeing in the lead. It is worth noting that barely a week prior to the historic August 6, 2003 meeting, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) disbanded its advisory committee which provided an ‘independent oversight’ on the US nuclear arsenal, including the testing and/or use of new nuclear devices.
Wij, ‘gewone burgers’ zijn niet in staat om in termen van vele honderden miljoenen doden te denken, maar juist de militaire- en politieke elite bezit dit vermogen wel. Daarover volgende keer meer.
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