Several events took place at the end of last week in Berlin, which emphasized the danger to Germany posed by the stationing of medium-range missiles and handing over of these weapons to Ukraine, as a potential stepping stone toward the outbreak of World War III. One of these events was a three-hour Berlin presentation by world-renowned weapons expert MIT Prof. Ted Postol on Oct. 10th, co-organized by the Schiller Institute and the Eurasian Society. The topic was the threat of positioning medium-range missiles in Germany, including a sober analysis of what a nuclear war would mean were it to break out. Postol explained the incredible destructive potential of modern nuclear weapons, which are today orders of magnitude more powerful than the weapons used that killed 200,000 to 250,000 people in Japan in 1945. He exposed the absurd idea of winning a nuclear war, showing that what is called winning is turned into an absurdity when the country that “wins” has nobody left alive after the war.
Postol debunked the myth of victory in a tactical nuclear war, and demonstrated that with the use of only one nuclear weapon, a resultant war would escalate within five days, approximately, into a global war ending all life on Earth. Postol recounted his own experience in nuclear war-planning, especially with the problem of reduced early warning time, which comes with missile forward positioning, and the danger of a fast escalation to nuclear weapons usage, in the case of war, for both sides, because of the “use it or lose it” dilemma. He explained:
“In 1983, there was a war game called Able Archer. In that war game, top American leadership was involved in playing and simulating from a social, psychological, military perspective a confrontation between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, where nuclear weapons are used…. Now, it’s important to understand that much of what happened in this game was driven by military imperatives. And the problem, again, in this case, comes from the nature of nuclear weapons. They are so powerful that once one side starts to use them against the other, each side feels compelled to strike back and to destroy as much of the enemy’s strike power as possible. You don’t have a choice once you’re in this game. You can’t say, ‘let’s stop.’ Because you don’t know (that) the adversary isn’t going to escalate before you stop. And this gives the adversary a chance to escalate in a way that causes you even more damage. So you get forced into a cycle where you have to strike the enemy, where you feel you need to strike the enemy to keep the enemy under control. Now, this strike/counter-strike situation is fundamental to the military thinking (about nuclear war fighting) because the thinking is, you can fight and win. There is no winning, as we’ll see. (That idea) has to do with the structure that falsely creates the idea that a war with nuclear weapons is not very different from a war with conventional weapons. And that’s not true, because the levels of damage are so great, that both sides get destroyed. So there is no winning in any sense. “
