The US has won the Ukraine war, assuring a nuclear exchange with Russia
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The US has won the Ukraine war, assuring a nuclear exchange with Russia
Putin's antiquated military can't win, so the Russian public is being prepared for nuclear war
As US and NATO propagandists celebrate Ukraine’s long awaited June “counter offensive” against Russia in the eastern provinces around Bakhmut and Zaporizhzhia, retired US Brigadier General Kevin Ryan now sees the likelihood of the war going nuclear as nearly irreversible.
Ryan is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He served as U.S. defense attaché to Moscow and deputy director for strategy, plans and policy on the Army Staff. He believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine is now a near certainty, and that jejune assurances by US officials to the contrary are delusional.
US-led Western powers have given Ukraine weapons and matériel worth twice the annual Russian military budget in just over one year. The West has already “won.” Russia’s antiquated military has been reduced to “B” movie status. Their depleted forces are now using WW2 vintage tanks to fight Ukraine’s shiny hi-tech Western-led “counter offensive.” Ukraine, on the other hand, is bristling with the most advanced weapons on the planet. Experts are calling Ukraine’s military the most “hi-tech the world has ever seen” and a “field day” for US military contractors.
Russia cannot compete in a traditional war. It will soon have no other options besides nuclear weapons. Putin is not bluffing. He has seen the necessity of going nuclear almost from the beginning.
In a lengthy, meticulously argued and heavily documented May 17, 2023, article for the Belfer Center, Ryan says that Putin has been preparing the Russian people psychologically for the certainty of nuclear war for many months. Lengthy, but highly relevant excerpts from Ryan’s analysis follow.
Putin has now placed in direct control of the war the three senior-most officers who have the authority to employ tactical nuclear weapons when he gives the order. When these developments are coupled with the impending deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, nearer Ukraine, we can no longer pretend there are no tangible signs of intent.
[W]hat will trigger Putin’s decision to launch? Most likely it will be the inability of the Russian military to escalate the war by conventional means when Putin demands. [Putin] declared, “If the territorial unity of our country is threatened, in order to protect Russia and our nation, we will unquestionably use all the weapons we have. This is no bluff.”
[W]e should anticipate a nuclear weapon will be used and develop our possible responses accordingly. As soon as Russia uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, the “fallout” will begin and spread. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians will be dead, suffering or dealing with the effects of the nuclear explosion. Hundreds of millions of Europeans will be bracing for war. But 7 billion others around the globe will go about their business, alarmed to be sure, but physically unaffected by a nuclear explosion in Ukraine.
This last outcome of a Russian tactical nuclear strike may ultimately be the most dangerous to the international order. The image that many people have of nuclear arms as civilization-ending weapons will be erased. In its place, people will see these weapons as normal and, although tragic, acceptable in war. Just a “bigger bullet.” It is in this dramatically changed context that the United States will have to decide how to respond.
None of the extraordinary preparations for nuclear war that have been taking place inside Russia have been covered by Western media, which are overwhelmingly propaganda shills for the Biden regime’s “for as long as it takes” blank check Ukraine war policy.
And leaving aside for a moment General Ryan’s very optimistic assumption that the war will not escalate after a Russian demonstration bombing, the Biden regime’s foreign policy is being managed by a claque of warmongering neoliberals whose profiles stretch back to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s secretive Iraq war planning operation. These are people who have played pivotal roles in formulating policy for disastrous US regime change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, as well as the bloody debacle of the August 2021, withdrawal from Afghanistan.
US-LED NATO UNBOUND
The cover story in the June 2023 issue of Harper’s Magazine asks, “Why are we in Ukraine – On the dangers of American hubris.” The authors argue that NATO’s WW2 mandate is outdated and needs to be replaced by a new diplomatic framework focused on economic cooperation. They offer a much needed historical perspective on the manifold dangers of the hubristic, post-WW2 transformation of the United States into a heedlessly aggressive nuclear hegemon standing astride the NATO alliance in what the US foreign policy establishment sees as a unipolar world.
Through its dominance of NATO, the US has perpetuated and made permanent the paradigm of a Cold War standoff with Russia to the exclusion of all other options, exacerbating and deliberately provoking Russia’s most bellicose tendencies. Under the sway of its self-appointed role as the world’s “indispensible nation,” the only acceptable end game for the US is the toppling of the Russian government.
Meanwhile, as the Harper’s article points out, the US has achieved massive nuclear superiority over Russia. The outdated metric of counting numbers of warheads obscures the fact that the US nuclear arsenal has become “immensely more precise and powerful even as it declined in size.”
Ironically, the authors believe this weapons dominance has made nuclear war even more likely.
These improvements didn’t fit with the aim of deterring an adversary’s nuclear attack. “What the planned force appears best suited to provide,” as a 2003 RAND report on the U.S. nuclear arsenal concluded, “is a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China. Otherwise, the numbers and the operating procedures simply do not add up.”
The policies that Washington has pursued toward Moscow and Kyiv, often under the banner of righteousness and duty, have created conditions that make the risk of nuclear war between the United States and Russia greater than it has ever been. Far from making the world safer by setting it in order, we have made it all the more dangerous.
TRYING TO AVOID NUCLEAR WAR
Links follow for organizations lobbying to prevent nuclear war from starting in Ukraine and/or ending the US “blank check” policy of bankrolling the corrupt Zelenskyy government.
My many previous articles probing the darker social-pyschological and spiritual undercurrents driving today’s nuclear madness are linked in this article.
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