Italian gen. (ret.) Fabio Mini, who gave a long interview to EIR (see above) has recently written a preface to a reprint of Herman Kahn’s famous book “On Nuclear War,” in which he rejects Kahn’s acceptance of a limited nuclear war, at the same time warning that western leaders are today so insane that nuclear war becomes again a possibility.
Kahn, who was the model for Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” “had legitimated tactical nuclear warfare, making it a possible, probable, and lawful means of warfare. The term tactical is deviant, it is very relative because for our continent or any other continent, tactical nuclear use corresponds to the same degree of destruction as the strategic use, that would involve several continents,” Mini wrote.
However, “the coolness and rationality which, according to Kahn, should characterize decisions, do not exist any longer.” Today, the political leadership is totally prey to emotion, fear and irrationality” and “The current war between Ukraine and Russia is not at all a local issue. Indeed, it is the visible part of an open and bloody conflict with such a manifold of players, actors and extras against Russia today, against China tomorrow and against the rest of the world the day after tomorrow.”
“In Kahn’s mind, war was never a simple show, a show for use and consumption by a ‘paying’ audience. Today, instead, the war show provides the largest satisfactions. Kahn’s scheme envisioned the end or a control of conflicts; today, every war is started to be continued without aims and without end.” European “bureaucratic minds (…), in a fully confusional state, on one side launch the alarm for an imminent Russian threat and on the other side they get ready for launching a decisive pre-emptive attack within 2029 and for a conventional-nuclear defense (which includes a preemptive attack) within 2035.”
