David T. Pyne published an article in the Jan. 17 issue of the conservative National Interest under the headline “Biden’s Opportunity for Peace in Eurasia.” In it, Pyne warns that “bilateral U.S.-Russia negotiations broke down this week after the U.S. delegation reportedly refused to offer Russia any concessions or recognize any of its legitimate security concerns, most importantly in Ukraine,” and that as a result, the crisis between the two countries is in danger of spiraling out of control, towards a thermonuclear war. (On Jan. 18, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke by phone, and agreed to a hastily-arranged meeting between them in Geneva on Jan. 21.)
Pyne is a former U.S. Army combat arms and HQ staff officer with an MA in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, whose website describes Pyne as “an authority with regard to the U.S., Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals, U.S. and Russian missile defense systems and the increasing threat posed by Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons.”
We quote the opening section of Pyne’s article, which speaks for itself:
“In late December 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened that the rejection of Russia’s proposed security agreements with the West would be met with `appropriate retaliatory military-technical measures.’ Gilbert Doctorow, a Brussels-based political analyst, has translated this to mean the deployment of additional Russian military equipment including nuclear-armed SS-26 Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles to Belarus and Kaliningrad to threaten NATO’s frontline states and eastern Germany. He also speculated that it might refer to a possible deployment of nuclear-armed Zircon sea-launched hypersonic cruise missiles off the coast of Washington, D.C., which Russia has previously stated could be utilized to destroy the U.S. capital before the President could escape on Air Force One.
