EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, MARCH 24, 2022
British Send Biden Off to Europe To Pronounce: Nuclear War Is No Longer Unthinkable, but a ‘Potential Contingency’
March 23, 2022 (EIRNS)—Today is the 39th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s historic 1983 announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the policy of joint U.S.-Soviet cooperation on ballistic missile defense systems based on “new physical principles,” which Lyndon LaRouche designed and then discussed with Soviet representatives through back-channel talks sanctioned by the Reagan White House. That policy nearly succeeded in ringing in a new international security and economic architecture that would have put an end to British geopolitics, and British speculation and looting, once and for all.
Ironically, it is on the anniversary of the SDI that a fully maddened British Empire is driving the conflict between the U.S./U.K./NATO and Russia to the point of nuclear confrontation—on both the military and economic fronts. Briefing journalists about President Joe Biden’s trip to Europe to meet with NATO and EU leaders, which begins March 24, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan informed the media yesterday that, “given the specter of the potential use of nuclear weapons” around the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the United States has “not changed our nuclear posture to date,” but that President Biden “will be consulting with Allies and partners on that potential contingency.”
What ever happened, one wonders, to the joint statement issued by Presidents Biden and Putin after their June 16, 2021 summit meeting, that “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”—echoing a 1985 agreement between former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev? Or the identical statements, organized principally by Russian diplomats, adopted by a June 28, 2021 Putin-Xi Jinping summit, and on January 3, 2022 by the UN’s P5 nuclear powers?
Secretary of State Tony Blinken further locked in a collision course with Russia by announcing today, on the eve of Biden’s trip, that, “based on information currently available, the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine.” He added menacingly that “We are committed to pursuing accountability using every tool available, including criminal prosecutions.” Will they next try to arrest the Russian ambassador to Washington or London on such spurious charges?
The economic and financial warfare that London and Wall Street have unleashed against Russia is no less a threat to mankind’s continued existence than their nuclear brinkmanship. They have embarked on a policy of using unending “sanctions” to radically decouple the world economy into two bitterly antagonistic blocs—a militarized NATO-dollar bloc, and the Belt and Road bloc—both of which are being plunged into an inferno of economic collapse and depopulation.
Russia, however, will defend itself from intended annihilation—on both the military and economic fronts. Over the last three weeks, President Putin has shifted Russia onto a war economy footing, aggressively defending its domestic productive capabilities and using protective measures, such as exchange controls, to fend off external financial warfare. Today Putin announced that Russia would only accept payments from exported natural gas going to “unfriendly states” (i.e., those participating in the sanctions) in rubles, not dollars. This will further buffer Russia from speculative dollar assaults on its banking system, and create quite a conundrum for Germany and other European countries which are deeply dependent on imported Russian natural gas, oil, wheat and other products.
And yet there is a way back from the brink for mankind, even at this late hour. The Schiller Institute’s April 9 conference calling for a new international security and development architecture, will detail the needed policies to reverse this seemingly inexorable plunge into hell. Those policies follow the same fundamental approach applied by Lyndon LaRouche for his 1983 SDI, which LaRouche himself restated in an article published in the July 19, 1996 issue of EIR, “SDI: The Technical Side of ‘Grand Strategy.’ ” In that document, LaRouche stated:
“Both superpowers, and others, needed desperately, a stimulant to technology-driven growth analogous to the economic impact of the Kennedy ‘crash program’ for the manned Moon landing. Cooperation in development of the technologies needed for strategic ballistic missile defense, would provide that needed technological stimulant to all participating economies, if the policy of fostering ‘spillovers’ into the civilian economy were adopted, too.
“To shift from an adversarial, to a cooperative relationship, in those instances a prolonged, deeply embedded hostility has been previously inculcated, a powerful incentive of deep-going self-interest must be provided. Outwardly, effective incentives for such purposes place the emphasis on physical-economic benefits (as distinct from relatively superficial, financial ones). The physical-economic benefits are important, but the materialists and empiricists greatly overrate such incentives” as such. The essential thing is not the material reward, as such; the essential thing is the activation of agape; the public identification of a needed material gain with the activation of the cognitive processes on which scientific and technological progress depends absolutely, is the key to achieving the desired strategic effect.”
