Will members of all Canadian political parties soon demand that we halt the TMX pipeline expansion project? I ask because, with the current great power tension in Ukraine likely to reach some kind of a climax soon, we are already hearing fierce calls in Canada for severe and even warlike
Continue readingTag: nuclear war
Writings of J. Todd Ring: Chomsky On The Coronavirus: Perspective Is Urgently Needed
Chomsky clarifies the situation with the coronavirus, saying: it’s serious enough, but it represents not even a fraction of the biggest dangers we are facing, which are nuclear war, global warming, and the rising plague of neoliberal fascism. (Exactly what I have been saying since January, and before.) He began
Continue readingPolitical Potshots: A Ten Year Old’s Angst-Ridden Journey Through The Nuclear Fall of 1983 (And Why The Day After Still Terrifies Me)
It happens to me every fall. The leaves change colour and fall, the trees take on an ominous look, and once again I am filled with an existential dread that has followed me from the nuclear fall of 1983 to adulthood. That was the year that I learned there could
Continue readingTattered Sleeve: Preying on Me
I was living in the Mile End Lovely place to find a friend Course you know no one there Is just like me English, French, Greeks Indigenous and artists Lots of folks I call the blister-hearted And that includes the Hasids They’re always doing lots of prayin’ They gotta do
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: “Cool Even Handed Statesmanship”
We’re playing with nuclear fire. Hell, we’re doing a fire dance with twirling batons ablaze in a fireworks factory. This all started after the US nuked Japan in 1945. Since then, we’ve just been piling more fireworks around the fire dancers and giving the dancers bigger batons to twirl. There
Continue readingMontreal Simon: How Might A Nuclear War With North Korea Unfold?
Well I'm glad to see that the U.S. and South Korea have ended a massive military exercise without the North Koreans declaring war on them.The US doubled down on provocative bomber flights near the border with North Korea this week, at the same time as Pyongyang asked when, not if,
Continue readingMontreal Simon: Is Donald Trump Losing His Marbles Again?
It's really good to know that the U.S. nuclear commander says he would resist an illegal order from Donald Trump.The US armed forces could refuse an order from the President to launch a nuclear strike if is deemed illegal, the country's top defence officer has said. Air Force General John Hyten, commander of
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Well, We Know How They Feel About Trump
Donald Trump has nations a bit on edge, even America’s friends. Take the Swedes for example. Sweden is a country with Cold War memories. During those dark years when the Soviet Union vied with the United States, Sweden constructed 65,000 nuclear bomb shelters. That’s a lot. Today, of course, the
Continue readingMontreal Simon: Donald Trump and the Holy Apocalypse
As we all know, Donald Trump is now posing as a pious man, instead of a grubby pervert.A man who now prefers to read the Bible instead of Hitler's speeches.But still, this tweet late yesterday seemed to come out of nowhere. And it couldn't be more disturbing.Read more »
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: What a Week
The week started out strange and got a whole lot stranger. Derek Fildebrandt’s Bev Oda moment This week we learned that Derek Fildebrandt Airbnb-ed his taxpayer subsidized apartment, pocketed the cash and claimed the full rental expense in his housing allowance. Most people would call it double dipping but Mr
Continue readingMontreal Simon: Donald Trump and the Doomsday Clock
This is what every American with an IQ greater than a fruit fly should have seen coming.This is why the grubby clown Donald Trump should never have been elected president.He didn't know what he was doing. He was all hot air. And of course, he had no moral compass. So now
Continue readingMontreal Simon: Has Donald Trump Made War Unavoidable?
Well now we know that Donald Trump's verbal blast at North Korea was totally improvised. President Trump’s aides knew he planned to deliver a tough message to North Korea on Tuesday, but they did not expect a threat that rivaled the apocalyptic taunts often used by his target, Kim Jong-un.And now we
Continue readingMontreal Simon: Donald Trump and the Road to Armageddon
Almost four years ago Donald Trump tweeted this: And yesterday he did his best to turn that into a self fulfilling prophesy. Read more »
Continue readingMontreal Simon: Donald Trump and the Coming War With China
I'm sure we all remember the horrified look on Angela Merkel's face, when she came face to face with the madness of Donald Trump, two weeks ago.Or the rude way he refused to shake her hand.And that's before we found out that Trump reportedly handed Merkel a fake bill for more than
Continue readingMontreal Simon: Donald Trump and the Road To Nuclear War
It was one of the worst and most depressing sights I have ever seen. Donald Trump and his ghastly family standing there in the shadow of the great Lincoln, who appears to be looking down on them in disbelief.While a military band played, a military choir sang the Battle Hymn
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Obama Comes Clean. Putin Didn’t Plot to Seize Crimea.
Go Ahead, Pick One. Oh my, my, what comes out of the mouth of that man! The Western narrative we’ve been force fed by liars like Harper and his collaborators on the other side of the aisle, is that Vlad Putin plotted to use the unrest in Ukraine to seize
Continue readingdrive-by planet: Risk of ‘accidental’ nuclear war: Chomsky on the ‘worst case scenario’
It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which any world power would deliberately start a nuclear war given the dire consequence for the planet. Rational thinking and the will to survive prevents us from believing that any nation… any leader… could be crazy enough to intentionally unleash what could wind up being a terminal war of reciprocal destruction. But what is often overlooked is the increasing likelihood that a nuclear war might well be started by accident.
During a recent RT interview Noam Chomsky addressed this possibility:
The worst-case scenario, of course, would be a nuclear war, which would be terrible. Both states that initiate it will be wiped out by the consequences. That’s the worst-case. And it’s come ominously close several times in the past, dramatically close. And it could happen again, but not planned, but just by the accidental interactions that take place – that has almost happened. It’s worth remembering that just one century ago, the First World War broke out through a series of such accidental interchanges. The First World War was horrifying enough, but the current reenactment of it means the end of the human race.
Chomsky’s reference to a nuclear war begun ‘by accident’ makes sense when you look at how this might come about. An escalation factor might be faulty intelligence, leading for example to a mistaken belief that the other side is planning an imminent nuclear strike. The decision may then be taken to use tactical nuclear weapons in order to seize first-strike advantage. Underlying intelligence failure of this sort could be a more general strategic misreading of the enemies’ intent and other communications failures that fuel a pattern of escalation.
A report entitled Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership lays out a new vision for the NATO alliance. It contains a number of statements that confirm the importance of nuclear weapons “in the quiver of escalation”… ostensibly to prevent “existential dangers.” But in fact their use is also clearly about maintaining a winning edge however couched in the language of prevention, as this statement from the report suggests: “What is needed is a policy of deterrence by proactive denial, in which preemption is a form of reaction when a threat is imminent, and prevention is the attempt to regain the initiative in order to end the conflict.” Tactical nuclear weapons are very much a part of any so-called “proportional” response. This scenario opens the door for all kinds of potential disaster.
Tactical or non-strategic nuclear weapons are now part of the toolkit of the world’s major militaries. These weapons can be calibrated to suit the challenges on hand. Variable yield allows operators to set the weapons’ explosive power in consideration of target and conditions. Small-yield tactical nukes might encourage preemptive strikes especially if a conventional force is facing defeat. They may be used in other ways to seize the advantage. Under war conditions the step from tactical to strategic nuclear weapons might not be such a huge leap, especially on the part of a military staring down the barrel of defeat.
Bottom line, our continued use of these weapons raises the ante when it comes to the prospects of large scale nuclear war. Chomsky sums up the stark choice we face in this paragraph:
We can think back as far as 1955, when Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein produced an appeal, a joint appeal to the people of the world, in which they said to all of us, you have a choice that is stark, unavoidable, the question is, will you eliminate war or will you eliminate human race? These are your choices.
Right now we are making bad choices. The provocations of the West in Eastern Europe and the expansion of NATO’s reach to the borders of Russia is fraught with risks that can’t be taken lightly. Chomsky rightly characterizes NATO as a “US-run intervention force.”
The official mission of NATO became to control the international, the global energy system, pipelines. That means, to control the world. Of course, its [a] U.S.-run intervention force, as in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999 – it was a U.S.-run intervention force. That’s the new NATO and it did expand to Russian borders…
The demonization of Russia in Western media and the toxic cold war-like environment that is being whipped up is driven by geopolitical ambitions, energy and resource considerations and a very particular animus toward a major global power that is unwilling to alter its long held values and traditions. This offends some people, who over and above the larger geopolitical considerations, appear willing to risk heightening an already tense situation in the course of pressing a Western-centric rights agenda.
Continue readingdrive-by planet: Risk of ‘accidental’ nuclear war: Chomsky on the ‘worst case scenario’
It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which any world power would deliberately start a nuclear war given the dire consequence for the planet. Rational thinking and the will to survive prevents us from believing that any nation… any leader… could be crazy enough to intentionally unleash what could well
Continue reading