Tag: nuclear war

The Atlantic Is A Shitty Propaganda Rag Run By Elitist Wankers

The Atlantic, which is owned by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and run by neoconservative war propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg, has published a pair of articles that are appalling even by its own standards.

Virulent Russiagater Anne Applebaum argues in “Fear of Nuclear War Has Warped the West’s Ukraine Strategy” that the US and its allies should escalate against Russia with full confidence that Putin won’t respond with nuclear weapons.

“Here is the only thing we know: As long as Putin believes that the use of nuclear weapons won’t win the war—as long as he believes that to do so would call down an unprecedented international and Western response, perhaps including the destruction of his navy, of his communications system, of his economic model—then he won’t use them,” Applebaum writes.

But throughout her own essay Applebaum also acknowledges that she does not actually know the things she is claiming to know.

“We don’t know whether our refusal to transfer sophisticated tanks to Ukraine is preventing nuclear war,” she writes. “We don’t know whether loaning an F-16 would lead to Armageddon. We don’t know whether holding back the longest-range ammunition is stopping Putin from dropping a tactical nuclear weapon or any other kind of weapon.”

“I can’t prove this to be true, of course, because no one can,” says Applebaum after confidently asserting that more western aggression would actually have deterred Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

These are the kinds of things it’s important to have the highest degree of certainty in before taking drastic actions which can, you know, literally end the world. It’s absolutely nuts how western pundits face more scrutiny and accountability when publicly recommending financial investments than when recommending moves that could end all terrestrial life.

On that note it’s probably worth mentioning here that Applebaum’s husband, European Parliament member Radoslaw Sikorski, recently made headlines by publicly thanking the United States for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

The Atlantic has also published an article titled “The Age of Social Media Is Ending,” subtitled “It never should have begun.” Its author, Ian Bogost, argues that the recent management failures in Twitter and Facebook mean the days of just any old schmuck having access to their own personal broadcasting network are over, and that this is a good thing.

Bogost’s piece contains what has got to be the single most elitist sentence that I have ever read:

“A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset.”

Nothing enrages the official authorized commentariat like the common riff raff having access to platforms and audiences. That’s why the official authorized commentariat have been the most vocal voices calling for internet censorship and complaining about the rise of a more democratized information environment. These elitist wankers have been fuming for years about the way the uninitiated rabble have been granted the ability to not just talk, but to talk back.

Keep reading

Let’s Be Clear: If WW3 Happens It Will Be The Result Of Choices Made By The US Empire

The commander of the US nuclear arsenal has stated unequivocally that the war in Ukraine is just a warmup exercise for a much larger conflict that’s already in the mail.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp reports:

The commander that oversees US nuclear forces delivered an ominous warning at a naval conference last week by calling the war in Ukraine a “warmup” for the “big one” that is to come.

“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” said Navy Adm. Charles Richard, the commander of US Strategic command. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.”

Richard’s warning came after the US released its new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which reaffirms that the US doctrine allows for the first use of nuclear weapons. The review says that the purpose of the US nuclear arsenal is to “deter strategic attacks, assure allies and partners, and achieve US objectives if deterrence fails.”

Not only does Richard appear to believe that a hot war between major world powers is a foregone conclusion, he has also previously stated that a nuclear war with Russia or China is now “a very real possibility.”

Again, this is not some armchair warrior opining from his desk at a corporate newspaper or DC think tank, this is the head of STRATCOM. Richard would be personally overseeing the very warfare he is talking about.

What I find most striking about remarks like these is how passive they always make it sound. Richard talks about “The Big One” like other people talk about California earthquakes, as though a hot war with China would be some kind of natural disaster that just happened out of nowhere.

This type of rhetoric is becoming more and more common. Describing an Atomic Age world war as something that would happen to the US empire, rather than the direct result of concrete A-or-B decisions made by the empire, is becoming its own genre of foreign policy punditry.

Keep reading

Stop Worrying & Love the Bomb

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?

Keep reading

Schrödinger’s Bomb: False Flags Over Ukraine

Remember way back in January of this year when I predicted that geopolitical strife—”the element of the global calculation that has been excluded from the equation” during the scamdemic—would “come back with a vengeance” in 2022?

Well, if the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February and the ramping up of tensions with China over Taiwan this past summer hadn’t yet convinced you that the struggle for control of the grand (3D) chessboard has indeed “come back with a vengeance” this year, the events of this past week should be more than enough to dispel your doubts.

First we had the news that Russia is ringing the alarm over a false flag dirty bomb attack that (they assert) the Ukrainians are planning to stage in Ukraine in order to blame on Russia. Then we had the US counter-warning that it’s actually Russia that is planning to release nukes in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s false flag warning is a trick to make everyone believe that the Ukrainians are going to do it.

Is your head spinning yet? Mine, too. In fact, I think that’s the point.

Accusation. Counter-accusation. Bluffs and double-bluffs in an ever-crazier game of nuclear chicken. What the hell is going on here? And—regardless of what results from this latest kerfuffle—what does the normalization of false flag accusations portend for the future of geopolitics?

Let’s find out.

Keep reading

In Stunning Strategy Reversal, Pentagon Will No Longer Rule Out Use Of Nuclear Weapons Against Non-Nuclear Threat

Well, we’re finally there: stocks are officially trading off nuclear war headlines.

Moments ago, as part of his closely-watched speech, Vladimir Putin appeared to talk down the likelihood of a nuclear attack in Ukraine:

  • *PUTIN: NO POLITICAL, MILITARY REASON IN NUKE STRIKE IN UKRAINE

Which, however, is more than can be said about the US.

As Bloomberg just reported, the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy rejects limits on using nuclear weapons long championed by arms control advocates (and, in the not too distant past, by Joe Biden) citing burgeoning threats from Russia and China.

“By the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries,” the Defense Department said in the long-awaited document issued Thursday. In response, the US will “maintain a very high bar for nuclear employment” without ruling out using the weapons in retaliation to a non-nuclear strategic threat to the homeland, US forces abroad or allies.

In yet another stark reversal for the senile occupant of the White House basement, in his 2020 presidential campaign Biden had pledged to declare that the US nuclear arsenal should be used only to deter or retaliate against a nuclear attack, a position blessed by progressive Democrats and reviled by defense hawks. But, like with every other position held by the pathological liar who even trumps Trump in the untruth department, this one has just been reversed as well as “the threat environment has changed dramatically since then” and the Pentagon strategy was forged in cooperation with the flip-flopping White House.

In a stunning move that should – or rather “should” – spark outrage among the so-called progressives but will at best prompt some very sternly retracted letters, the nuclear report that’s part of the broader strategy said the Biden administration reviewed its nuclear policy and concluded that “No First Use” and “Sole Purpose” policies “would result in an unacceptable level of risk in light of the range of non-nuclear capabilities being developed and fielded by competitors that could inflict strategic-level damage” to the US and allies.

Keep reading

Rhetoric in Ukraine has reinforced the fallacy of limited nuclear exchange

Since the end of the Cold War, Russia, the United States, France, and China have continued to possess and develop nuclear weapons below the strategic level of land-based and submarine-launched intercontinental-range ballistic missiles. The long-touted rationale for this was simple: non-strategic (or tactical) nuclear weapons are necessary to give the decision-maker more options and provide a credible proportionate deterrence response to the use of similar weapons by an adversary.

The rationale continues by implying that such nuclear weapons use would occupy a third and separate strategic conflict space between conventional war and all-out strategic nuclear exchange. It is necessary, it has been argued, to occupy that space to deter at all levels.

The profound implication of this line of reasoning is that this “limited nuclear exchange” space is both distinct and separate from conventional war below and nuclear Armageddon above, and that transitions between the spaces can be controlled. This is at best unproven conjecture.

For many years, opponents to the continued existence of such tactical weapons in nuclear arsenals—including these authors—have argued to the contrary. Rather than being controlled, these transitions are simultaneously enabled, increased in probability, and accelerated by the very existence of such weapons.

Keep reading

The Profoundly Stupid Narrative That Nuclear Brinkmanship Is Safety And De-Escalation Is Danger

Of all the face-meltingly stupid narratives that have been circulated about the US proxy war in Ukraine, the dumbest so far has got to be the increasingly common claim that aggressively escalating nuclear brinkmanship is safety and de-escalation is danger.

We see a prime example of this self-evidently idiotic narrative in a new Business Insider article titled “Putin’s nuclear threats are pushing people like Trump and Elon Musk to press for a Ukraine peace deal. A nuclear expert warns that’s ‘dangerous.’”

“An understandable desire to avoid a nuclear war could actually make the world more dangerous if it means rushing to implement a ‘peace’ in Ukraine that serves Russian interests,” writes reliable empire apologist Charles Davis.

“Such a move, which some influential figures have called for, risks setting a precedent that atomic blackmail is the way to win wars and take territory troops can’t otherwise hold, a model that could be copycatted by even the weakest nuclear-armed states, and may only succeed at delaying another war.”

Davis’ sole source for his article is the UN Institute for Disarmament Research’s Pavel Podvig, who is very openly biased against Russia.

“The West supports Ukraine with weapons and financial and moral and political support. Giving that up and saying that, ‘Well, you know, we are too afraid of nuclear threats and so we just want to make a deal’ — that would certainly set a precedent that would not be very positive,” says Podvig. “If you yield to this nuclear threat once, then what would prevent Russia in the future — or others — to do the same thing again?”

Like other empire apologists currently pushing the ridiculous “de-escalation actually causes escalation” line, Davis and Podvig argue as though nuclear weapons just showed up on the scene a few days ago, as if there haven’t been generations of western policies toward Moscow which have indeed involved backing down and making compromises at times because doing so was seen as preferable to risking a nuclear attack. We survived the Cuban Missile Crisis because Kennedy secretly acquiesced to Khrushchev’s demands that the US remove the Jupiter missiles it had placed in Turkey and Italy, which was what provoked Moscow to move nukes to Cuba in the first place.

Throughout the cold war the Soviet Union insisted on a sphere of influence that US strategists granted a wide berth to, exactly because it was a nuclear superpower. Even as recently as the Obama administration the US president maintained that “Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Nevertheless we’re seeing this new “escalation is safety and de-escalation is danger” narrative pushed with increasing forcefulness by imperial spinmeisters, because it would take a lot of force indeed to get people to accept something so self-evidently backwards and nonsensical.

Keep reading

Are We on the Verge of World War 3? Here Are Some Facts We Know for Sure.

Sometimes it is best to take a step back and look at the facts that we know without a doubt so that we can then take a look at the bigger picture. Within the context of World War 3, here is a bit of what we have seen.

Draw your own conclusions.

Does Washington’s opinion here matter?

Out of the blue, New York City recently released a PSA instructing New Yorkers on what they needed to do in order to survive a nuclear strike on American soil. This hasn’t been done since the Cold War. If you want information about nuclear survival that isn’t glossed over by the government, you should check out our live nuclear survival webinar that is coming up with Army Ranger NBC Specialist Chuck Hudson. Go here to learn more.

The United States is now stockpiling anti-radiation medicine. Washington recently ordered $290 million worth of the drug Nplate, a drug used to treat “blood cell injuries that accompany acute radiation syndrome in adult and pediatric patients (ARS).”

Biden recently said that Putin was “not joking” about a potential Russian attack with “tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons.” Anybody who has read Soviet defector Ken Alibek’s Biohazard is well-familiar with what some of these biological weapons are.

Does the market speak?

Potassium iodide pills are out of stock just about everywhere you check now.

Sales of gas masks, Geiger counters, and dosimeters have absolutely exploded.

Keep reading

Biden: We’re Trying To Figure Out How Putin Can Exit This War

The president of the United States made headlines the other day by just casually mentioning “Armageddon” as a possible outcome of the rapidly escalating war in Ukraine.

“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” President Biden said, adding the false claim that Vladimir Putin “talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons” in this conflict.

“First time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have the threat of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going,” the president said in the same speech. “We are trying to figure out what is Putin’s off-ramp? Where does he find a way out? Where does he find himself where he does not only lose face but significant power?”

As though the US government itself has not played a major role in both provoking and sustaining this extremely dangerous conflict.

Keep reading

US Buying $290M Worth Of Anti-Radiation Drugs for Use In “Nuclear Emergency”

The Biden regime is buying up $290 million in anti-radiation drugs for use in “nuclear emergencies” amid escalating tensions with Russia and heightened threats of a nuclear war.

From Health and Human Services:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 4, 2022

Contact HHS Press Office
202-821-9446
asprmedia@hhs.gov
www.hhs.gov/news
Twitter: @HHSgov

HHS purchases drug for use in radiological and nuclear emergencies

As part of long-standing, ongoing efforts to be better prepared to save lives following radiological and nuclear emergencies, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is purchasing a supply of the drug Nplate from Amgen USA Inc; Nplate is approved to treat blood cell injuries that accompany acute radiation syndrome in adult and pediatric patients (ARS).

Amgen, based in Thousands Oaks, California, developed Nplate for ARS with support from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), as well as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.

BARDA is using its authority provided under the 2004 Project Bioshield Act and $290 million in Project BioShield designated funding to purchase this supply of the drug. Amgen will maintain this supply in vendor-managed inventory. This approach decreases life-cycle management costs for taxpayers because doses that near expiration can be rotated into the commercial market for rapid use prior to expiry and new doses can be added to the government supply.

ARS, also known as radiation sickness, occurs when a person’s entire body is exposed to a high dose of penetrating radiation, reaching internal organs in a matter of seconds. Symptoms of ARS injuries include impaired blood clotting as a result of low platelet counts, which can lead to uncontrolled and life-threatening bleeding.

To reduce radiation-induced bleeding, Nplate stimulates the body’s production of platelets. The drug can be used to treat adults and children.

Nplate is also approved for adult and pediatric patients with immune thrombocytopenia, a blood disorder resulting in low platelet counts. Repurposing drugs for acute radiation syndrome that also are approved for a commercial indication helps to sustain availability of the product and improves healthcare provider familiarity with the drug.

“The US government said the procurement of Nplate was not in response to the war in Ukraine,” The Telegraph reported.

“An HSS spokesman told The Telegraph: ‘This is part of our ongoing work for preparedness and radiological security. It has not been accelerated by the situation in Ukraine.'”

Keep reading