The Lead

Nuclear War? When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going

by David Shavin (EIRNS) — Aug. 30, 2024

There are financial and military factions in the West committed to submitting the world to the austerity necessary to extend the impossible financial bubble and to submitting to thermonuclear blackmail with a first-strike nuclear war doctrine. It has everything to do with why London and Washington “dance with the devil,” using their proxy warmongers, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The fact that this is not pleasant news does not chase away the problem.

At today’s International Peace Coalition meeting, the Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-Larouche opened the difficult discussion: “Ted Postol just wrote an article in which he commented on the debate which was coming into the public with an article in the New York Times published on August 26th, where they wrote that already in March President Biden signed on to modification of the U.S. nuclear doctrine. While this is a top-secret doctrine, no electronic copies supposedly exist, only very few printed ones for very classified people; nevertheless, it talks about the U.S. preparing to fight a nuclear war on three fronts against Russia, China, and North Korea. What Ted Postol wrote in this article in Responsible Statecraft is that this is not at all about ‘slight modernization,’ but a dramatic stepping up of the capabilities to fight and win a nuclear war with both China and Russia….. It leaves Russian and Chinese leaders no choice but to take countermeasures which will increase the already dangerously high readiness of their nuclear forces, and it will force them to increase their worst-case planning, and in this way, increase the chance of a nuclear response to a false warning of attack.”

Postol described the U.S. “super fuse” program, as Zepp-LaRouche put it, “to drastically increase the killing power of the ballistic missile-delivered warheads.” The accuracy and yield of the U.S.’s 1,600 so-called W-76 warheads would be greatly increased, “enabling Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles to destroy Russian and Chinese ICBMs in hardened silos before they are launched.” The idea is to launch and “win” a nuclear war.

Zepp-LaRouche: “This has been known by the Russians for a long time, so they have developed against that the ultimate doomsday weapon, the Poseidon robot submarine which can carry 100-megaton warheads into the harbors of the United States, Europe, and Asian cities with a radius of 50 miles from underwater detonation points.” The central reality is that “this idea to win a nuclear war has entered the strategic thinking. The U.S. still has a preemptive first-strike doctrine….”

The subsequent deliberations should be studied on their own, but suffice it to say that a lot of anger, a lot of worry, a lot of concern over the amount of evil in the hearts of some sick people are lawful reactions. Of note, in the discussion period, Zepp-LaRouche offered the tough, optimistic road out of the potential tragedy: “But also, I think we absolutely have to convince the people in the West—in the United States, in Europe—to join with the Global South in a new economic system. A win-win cooperation, which obviously would mean that the United States in particular would accept the fact that the unipolar world cannot be retrieved because it is already gone. But I think the only way I can think of how we get out of this danger is the New Paradigm, the new security and development architecture with heavy emphasis on development. Because only if we design a new system which overcomes the danger of a blow-out of the financial system and creates a new system, can we eliminate the war danger. In that, the perspective of the Oasis Plan fits in completely, because we are talking about the extended Belt and Road Initiative to Southwest Asia. So, the solution is so easy in terms of the actual feasibility. The only thing we have to mobilize is the political will to enact it in time.”

There was an echo of this hard-core optimism at the UN Security Council two days ago. Russia’s Chargé d’Affaires to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy, after reviewing the desperate Western provocations on Russia’s border and the dangers involved, in his own way found grounds for an optimistic turn for the world. He concluded: “Please, look at the example of unfortunate Ukraine and you will understand what such policies can lead to. Ukraine used to be the wealthiest of the post-Soviet republics with impressive industrial potential, but it almost suddenly became one of the poorest states of the former U.S.S.R. Its economy is destroyed, its industry is collapsed, its land is sold off to greedy Western corporations, Ukraine has become a testing ground for American bio-laboratories, and now it is also a testing ground for new Western weapons and utilization of old one.… I do hope that the bloody Ukrainian tragedy provoked by the United States and its NATO allies will teach a lesson to all those who may end up in a similar situation.”

America’s too-little-appreciated Founding Father Gottfried Leibniz argued that the Creator would not allow evil into His created world, unless its solution could lead to a higher good. The trick is not to praise the evil, but to find what has been missing in those created in the image of a creative God, and summon the energy and will to do the good.