Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat, gave a harrowing interview “How the West Must Change” on the Judge Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom” broadcast June 3, about the possibility of nuclear war. Crooke, who spent nearly 30 years in British intelligence, played an important role in trying to bring about peace to Palestine and Israel.
Crooke pointed out the absurdity of U.S. President Biden’s statement that he had authorized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to deploy U.S. missiles against Russian territory only for short-term purposes, since the U.S. had been allowing the Ukrainians to use U.S. missiles for short-term targets for a year already.
“Now for the moment, just to be clear what the Russian position is. They’ve said, ‘Okay, we’re engaged in a conflict just over the border with Kharkov … and there will be cross-border fire.’ In fact, this [cross-border fire] has been going on. Again, this is another piece of show—this great statement from NATO and from the President of the United States, that: ‘we’re going to allow non-long-range missiles to be used by the Ukrainians to defend themselves from attacks that are coming from just over the Russian border.’ [The Ukrainians] have been doing this for a year. They have been using Storm Shadow and HIMARS and firing them into Russia on the border area.”
Crooke then took the listener step-by-step into what President Vladimir Putin is actually saying, and how, were NATO to continue not to listen to Putin, and mis-deploy missiles, there will be nuclear war. He stated:
“What is so important that Putin has said, and must be understood, is that: ‘we can probably assimilate that [short-term missiles], and can live with that. But, if you use long-range missiles, cruise missiles, to attack deep inside Russia, and against strategic targets of ours, then there will be a strong response against it, and that response will not be confined to Ukraine, but can take place in any other part of the world, from which we determine that that attack originated, i.e., the missile attack. And he made it clear that this is not just where someone actually pushed the button, and sent the missile off, but the whole panoply of support for missile attacks into Russia, i.e.., the engineers, the NATO technicians that set up the missile, the NATO infrastructure of satellites, of AWACS planes that provide the data and do the targeting and send the coordinates, and that the whole process is done by NATO.
“And then [Putin] says: ‘you can’t say that you’re not party to this war. I mean, you are deeply, deeply involved with it.’ And the warning is: ‘you do this, and there may be a response.’ Let me translate this. He is saying, we are prepared to risk, if you like, an Article 5. If you do this, we might for example—he has not threatened this, I’m not saying this will happen, but it’s talked about—there is this big Western logistics base just over the border in Poland. Huge logistics, that’s where a lot of the logistics and a lot of the training is. Something, for example, something like that might be hit with conventional forces. And then [Putin] poses the question: ‘what then does the United States do?’ Does it escalate further? And that’s when we get to the point of people worrying about tactical nuclear weapons. Because then Russia or someone, certainly one Russian official who is not part of the government, but has high standing, has suggested that that’s the point—and the West will be warned—that if they want to take the next step up the ladder, then it will risk the use of tactical nuclear weapons against them.
“This is a very serious moment in our relationship with Russia. And people don’t seem to notice it.”
