The ’logic’ of war has been destroyed

Eisenhower's ’thermonuclear revolution’ at work between Russia and the US in Ukraine

“With such weapons, war has become, not just tragic, but preposterous.” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower on nuclear arms, August 23, 1956

Image titled “Experimental” courtesy of Kajetan Sumila

In 1956, three years into his first term, President Dwight Eisenhower, citing what he called a “thermonuclear revolution,” declared that “War no longer has any logic whatsoever.” In his now famous “Atoms for Peace” speech before the United Nations on December 8, 1953, Eisenhower said:

“The United States pledges before you, and therefore before the world, its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma—to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”

In his final years as president, Eisenhower turned his full attention to transforming nuclear technology into a force for peace and the advancement of civilization.

By contrast, Joe Biden, in a little reported action March 25, 2022, following a months long nuclear posture review by US military and weapons experts, discarded a campaign promise to forego both a first strike nuclear option and the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear threats.

The next day, March 26, in Warsaw, during a European visit with NATO ally Poland, in front of an audience of 1,000 people, Biden called for “regime change” in Russia during what the White House billed as a “major speech.” Biden’s handlers spent the next week trying to walk back his comments, but it was a rare moment of unintentional honesty by a habitually corrupt political hack.

Expressing disappointment at Biden’s policy reversal, Shannon Bugos, a senior policy analyst at the Arms Control Association, said (ibid):

“The sobering reality is that it would take just a few hundred U.S. or Russian strategic nuclear weapons to destroy each other’s military capacity, kill hundreds of millions of innocent people, and produce a planetary climate catastrophe.”

Now, seven months later, Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened the US with the use of tactical nuclear weapons over Ukraine, citing a nuclear weapons “precedent” set by the US bombing of Japan at the end of WW II.