On Wednesday, October 2, the Schiller Institute sponsored an emergency online conference titled “Another Step Closer to Nuclear Armageddon—Germany Needs a New Security Architecture.” Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, reviewed the “cascading events which are spinning out of control,” and posed the question: If it comes to an escalation against Iran, what will Russia and China do? She reminded the viewers that Russia recently announced possible changes to its nuclear doctrine, so that if there is a significant air attack on Russia that is backed by a nuclear power, Russia could resort to first use of nuclear weapons. Comparing this dire situation to the optimistic picture that emerged after the dissolution of the COMECON bloc, she said, “It turns my stomach to see how in only 34 years, that has been forgotten completely.”
Ambassador Jack Matlock is former United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union during 1987-1991. He began his remarks by praising Zepp-LaRouche’s presentation, “which so thoroughly and accurately” painted the picture he was intimately familiar with as an active participant at the time. He further addressed the failures of US policies following the fall of the Soviet Union. At the end of the Cold War, we should have insisted that an architecture be built that took into account the security needs of all nations. Instead, we expanded NATO, “a huge mistake…when there was no threat from the East.”
Dr. Ted Postol, Professor Emeritus of MIT, a leading expert on nuclear weapons, warned that the proposed introduction of missiles to Germany by the US would be a hair-trigger for nuclear war, because those missiles of necessity would carry nuclear warheads and because of the extremely short warning times for Russian detection. Hypersonic delivery vehicles don’t have an arc trajectory like conventional missiles, and they would be much more difficult to detect after launch. In 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken told Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the US reserves the right to put nuclear missiles in Ukraine. Imagine if Khrushchev had taken a similar stance regarding Cuba—the U.S. would surely have invaded Cuba.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity co-founder Ray McGovern reported that in December 2021, Russian President Putin called Biden, who promised Putin that the US would not place hypersonic missiles in Ukraine. Then on January 21, 2022, Secretary of State Blinken contradicted Biden and refused to give guarantees that hypersonic missiles would not be placed in Ukraine. A few weeks later, Russia launched their Special Military Operation in Ukraine.
Additional comments were presented by Rainer Rupp, a German military and intelligence expert, and Col. (ret,) Alain Corvez, a French international strategy consultant. Rupp warned that Europe’s new military doctrine lowers the threshold for nuclear war. He said that the “old neocon madness of the 1980s” has resurfaced, which involves ordering a “decapitation” nuclear first strike.
Corvez lamented that since WWII, the European countries have been subordinated, or conquered without war by the US. He advocated the restoration of sovereignty to European nations in order to avoid war. The US is pursuing an extremist policy in Ukraine and the Middle East, and we should not forget that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, which they could use because they are in a dead-end situation.
German author Wolfgang Effenberger further explored this topic, reminding the viewers that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was already promoting his “Wolfowitz Doctrine” one year after the collapse of the USSR, transforming NATO into an offensive alliance. The US must reconcile itself with the world and abandon its quest for a unipolar world order.
Zepp-LaRouche expressed her deep gratitude to the speakers for helping to educate Germans and others to stop the dangerous policy of accepting the placement of U.S. missiles on German territory. She said she would get their reports out far and wide; and, contrary to Defense Secretary Pistorius’s policy of making Germany “war-ready” in the next few years, she vowed that she would do everything in her power to “make Germany peace-ready!”
During the discussion period, viewers were urged to participate in the peace demonstrations slated to be held in Germany on October 3, and there was general discussion of the need to distribute up to 100,000 leaflets reporting on this event.
