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Nervousness Grows over Danger of Nuclear War

Jan. 25, 2022 (EIRNS)—With the media now beating the war drums against Russia, and U.S. troops on high alert for deployment to Europe, the reality that the world is on the edge of war is finally reaching into American homes. Likewise, several articles published in the last week warn that this talk of “war in Europe” could unleash thermonuclear war. The authors lack solutions, some are geopolitical in outlook, but they raise well-justified fears. Among those articles:

• Ira Helfand, co-Founder and Past President of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Daryl G. Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, warned in a Jan. 18 piece posted on the Just Security website, titled “The U.S.-Russia Crisis Over Ukraine: All Options Should Not Be on the Table”:

“In the nuclear age, ‘all options on the table’ in a conflict involving nuclear powers could be understood to mean the potential use of nuclear weapons.... U.S. and Russian leaders must consider the use of such weapons off the table—there are no winners in a nuclear war. Once nuclear weapons are used in a conflict involving nuclear-armed adversaries, even on a so-called ‘limited scale’ involving a handful of ‘smaller’ Hiroshima-sized bombs, there is no guarantee the conflict would not escalate and become a global nuclear conflagration.” The authors cited Air Force Gen. John Hyten, then-head of U.S. Strategic Command, who said in 2018 after the annual Global Thunder wargame: “It ends bad. And the bad meaning it ends with global nuclear war.”

Notably, given that two former members of the Advisory Board of this very Establishment website were Jake Sullivan and Avril Haines, now respectively National Security Adviser and Director of National Intelligence, the co-authors went on: “We should not need to remind ourselves of the terrible danger that these weapons pose, but, clearly, we do. If our leaders truly understood this danger, they could not possibly engage in the kind of nuclear saber-rattling that we have seen in recent years.”

• The Eurasian Review today published an alarmed piece, “We Are Militarism’s Hostages,” by John Scales Avery, chairman of Denmark’s National Pugwash Group. “We urgently need new political structures and new ethics to match our advanced technology,” he writes. “Recently the United States has made provocative moves that seriously risk starting a war with Russia that might develop into a nuclear war.... At the same time, the United States is making aggressive moves in an attempt to ‘contain China.’ Thus Washington’s power-holders are threatening war with both Russia and China.... What can be the reason for these actions, which seem to border on insanity?” He suggests that the answer lies in the “power-drunk thinking of the ‘Project for a New American Century,’ ” of Paul Wolfowitz, whose doctrine is that “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” in the post-Soviet world.

• “Invite Russia To Join NATO,” Boston University Professor Laurence Kotlikoff wrote in The Hill, on Jan. 24. “Few Americans or Russians appear to realize that a Russian invasion of Ukraine and the NATO response we are starting to observe could devolve into World War III. In short, the U.S. and Russia are once again navigating on the edge of insanity. Presidents Biden and Putin need to find a way off this desperate precipice. Russia needs assurances that it is not being encircled by an ever-growing coalition of nations that view it as their enemy. And NATO members, particularly those bordering Russia, need assurances that Russia is not trying to restore the Soviet Union,” he argues.

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