{"id":17074,"date":"2025-10-31T23:08:35","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T06:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=17074"},"modified":"2025-11-15T22:50:28","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T06:50:28","slug":"issue-of-the-week-war-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=17074","title":{"rendered":"Issue of the Week: War"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back to News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Soviet thermonuclear ICBM, Pobuzke, Ukraine, museum of strategic missile forces<\/em>, (c) 2025 Planet Earth Foundation, all rights reserved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today is All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween in the US, the day before D\u00eda de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, also All Saints Day and All Souls Day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Usually a celebration of the eternal spirit beyond death of all things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But today, a potentially more ominous foreshadowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Have you heard the news today?”–A day In The Life, The Beatles.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, yesterday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Global thermonuclear war is almost certainly coming<\/a>. Maybe starting in a single incident, maybe the whole shebang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not today, probably (but the trick of it on trick-or-treat day is that it absolutely could happen at any moment for numerous predictable and unpredictable reasons<\/a><\/em>). Along with other increasing dangers of more nations seeking a nuclear arsenal, the news below is gasoline on a fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday, President Trump announced that the US would resume testing nuclear weapons for the first time time since 1992, just after the Cold War was won.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because others were, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is one hundred percent absolutely untrue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So either he actually lives in a psychotic delusionary world and of course is surrounded by automaton sycophants who do whatever the cult leader says, or is playing a game with the collusion of above said devotees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if this ends up being a political stunt delusionally thought of as strategy and is backed off from in various possible ways, it has an unerasable impact on the rest of the world, and real-world dangerous consequences. Only Trump it seems, in the most powerful trigger-pulling position on the planet (Russia has more nukes barely, but not the overall components of the US arsenal much less the other aspects of military, political and economic power of the US), could blurt the words that trashed decades of international policy, and it was thought, a certainty finally attained about nuclear sanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1992, the US imposed its own moritorium on testing. In the wake of the end of the Cold War, dissolution of the Soviet Union and the overwhelming US victory in the Gulf War, backed by the UN and all security council members to prevent aggression across borders as the new normal (until Russia invaded Ukraine exactly 30 years later), the global dynamic was democracy, stability and peace. Not completely by any means, but as an anchor and a promise based on rules followed more than not on the largest scale and most crucial ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

George H. W. Bush stopped all testing much as had JFK (much more below) which had started the arms control process. Then in 1996, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) was passed by the United Nations. It banned all nuclear test explosions anywhere in the atmosphere, in the ocean or underground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, Russia tested a nuclear-powered missile, but did not detonate an actual bomb. There’s a long list of tests other than nuclear explosions that have occurred over the years and that have been both military and political in intended impact. But the three decades of the world abiding by test ban treaty (with one exception, ended in 2017) has been critical to global stability on nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump was on his way to China when he did this, so the thought occurs he was trying to impress them or the Russians or both or everyone with his bombast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting nuclear testing again by the US will lead to a spiral back down to hell in the arms race–the lack of testing by anyone<\/em> (the North Koreans last did it in 2017) has been the rule, a treaty not signed by everyone but agreed to, has held virtually since the US stopped after the end of the Cold War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asking why is asking why the man who would be king wants to look like the king of the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It may be bluster that won’t happen. But just saying it has unparalleled dangers. Everybody games up. The energy behind more nukes and more nations and groups getting them and testing them is fueled by the US indicating it will be lighting such a stunning match based on a transparent lie. And from a source demonstrable in changing positions back and forth, which is itself a cause of instability on an issue in which instability is the definition of danger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no rational strategy here. This is not Ronald Reagan building the nuclear arsenal, mainly short range in Europe, in the early eighties to counter the Soviets doing so and in a larger strategic move to spend them into oblivion. As much as the nuclear freeze movement, one of the largest protest and policy movements in American history (captured in our film aired on PBS stations, Target Seattle, Target Earth<\/em>), was understandably freaked out, intellectual integrity required recognition in the wake of the intersecting events that ended the Cold War that there was rationality to what Reagan did, agree or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing is for certain. Trump is no Reagan. He is the opposite of Reagan in nearly every way (except in cutting taxes and deregulation for the rich which began the new age of inequality, but it turns out he was a lightweight in this compared to Trump–and regardless of rhetoric, often not acted on, worked collegially with legendary Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill despite partisan differences, saving Social Security together in 1983, and operated within constitutional boundaries). Reagan is more than rolling in the grave because of Trump. With a big picture of Reagan in the Oval Office trying to use his legacy as an image adding insult to injury. Reagan’s words on immigration being compared to Trump’s actions by Canada, driving another tarriff rage by Trump, underlining the most recent example of the utter difference between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of the Cold War, Reagan and Gorbachev came close to negotiating taking their nuclear arsenals on a trajectory to zero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump is not only no Reagan, but Putin is the antithesis of Gorbachev, who he hated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intelectually and morally antithetical. Engaging in various nuclear and other related provocative moves. Not to be confused with what happened just before Gorbachev began reform in the Soviet Union and Reagan saw the opportunity to negotiate presented by Gorbachev, who was democratizing Russia and the USSR by degrees, opening up free speech and so on. He had terrible moments in the midst of this process, such as trying to use force to stop the independence of Lithuania, which the courage of the Lithuanian people thwarted. He ended up overseeing the dissolving of the Soviet Union with all the former nations in the USSR and controlled by it in Eastern Europe voting for independence and democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ukraine was at the top of the list, the second largest nation after Russia in the USSR, dominated by centuries of Russian imperialsim, voting for independence in 1991.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Russia too was a democracy for a minute, even looking at joining NATO, with Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin in a dialogue<\/a> that would have changed history (and would have ended the nonsense about Russia being cornered by NATO enlargement which treats history as a Stalinist show trial–the nations which joined had every historical reason to fear Russia, which Putin has since proven in spades, and none of them had been or were a threat to Russia, just impediments to Putin’s commitment to a restoration of the USSR\/Russian empire).<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Putin took over, after a brief appearance of pro-liberal democracry leaning, he became increasingly the dictator who kills (literally) any threat to replace his reign with democracy, calling the end of the Soviet Union the worst catastrophe of the 20th century and creating butchery in numerous places. The Ukrainian revolution that overthrew a Putin puppet (twice, in 2004 and 2013) with the Ukrainians demanding democracy independent of Russian influence and alignment with the liberal democracies of the EU, led to Putin invading, first Crimea in 2014, then ongoing denied fueling and backing of the separatist conflict in western Ukraine, then full invasion in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More on that to come. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the nuclear scenario, and the real international struggle between freedom and dictatorship (unless liberal democracy in the US actually crumbled with no way back in the short term, in which case the world is done) is more centered between Washington and Beijing than Moscow per se, although as allies of dictatorship, at the moment it becomes indistinguishable. North Korea and Iran are also loose cannons, although the former still is under formidable Chinese influence and the latter for now has lost the war with Israel and the US and the Arab gulf states, with its imminent nuclear threat vastly diminished (although a nuke could still be in the dark there.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump did the right thing in hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities. But the context of seeming manipulated into it by Israel and the larger policy of not recognizing the moral and strategic horror of Gaza until a cease-fire thousands of innocent lives too late and unnecessary in Israels’ necessary destruction of Hamas (and really the blunting of their masters in Iran) was odious and ominous for the future in the Middle East and the spread of nuclear weapons there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A more detailed commentary on this is for another post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we pointed out on the 80th anniversary of the first and only use of an atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end Word War Two in 1945, the pace of new nuclear powers is moving at breakneck speed.<\/a> Even Japan, and Japanese public opinion, is heading for it, along with South Korea because of China, North Korea, the lack of a sense of continued US protection and the concern that if the Russian invasion of Uraine is successful, all sense of US protection and respect for national sovereignty will be gone and the Chinese will take the long-awaited leap to invade Taiwan, along with other aggressive moves already having occured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The number one movie globally on Netfix today is a new film, A House Full of Dynamite<\/em>, a dramatic depiction by the gifted Academy Award-winning director, Kathryn Bigelow, of a completely mysterious, unknown, unpredictable launch of a thermonuclear missile on the US. Regardless of any technicality inaccuracy (debatable and irrelevant to the point), the irrefutable reality of the shock and chaos and unpredictability of the event is palpable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New York Times is the apex of reviewers. Here’s some excerpts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kathryn Bigelow wastes no time getting \u201cA House of Dynamite\u201d moving \u2014 it\u2019s just go, go, go. A propulsive thriller, her latest movie hinges on a potential nuclear catastrophe of such annihilating magnitude that it seems almost inconceivable, despite being altogether credible. Ordinary life, after all, is tough enough without contemplating the truth that at any second someone, somewhere \u2014 in North Korea, say, or in France, Russia or the United States \u2014 could set off a nuclear strike. It\u2019s no wonder that the specter of the world\u2019s end has inspired so few memorable films. The reality is unspeakably grim and unbearably absurd.<\/em> …<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One minute, everyone is slurping coffee and exchanging pleasantries while revving up for another day of maintaining national security. The tempo and texture of their chatter seems routine, whether someone is joking about a colleague\u2019s marriage proposal or name-checking Iran and North Korea. The next minute, though, someone announces that the missile is about to go suborbital and will hit the United States, and the world shifts on its axis. Everything \u2014 the chatter, gestures, movements and the movie\u2019s pacing \u2014 accelerates as the ordinary gives way to the extraordinary. It\u2019s tense and eerie, and then the story stops, only to restart from another vantage point.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The best documentary series ever made on the entire history of the threat of nuclear war and all the political, historical issues surrounding this, centered around the Russian aggression in Ukraine and exploring every aspect of what has occurred from 1945 to today, is Turning Point: The Bomb and The Cold War,<\/em> also on Netflix. It shows how in reality the Cold War has not ended, has become hotter, with the threat of dictatorship against democracy and the threat of nuclear war both reaching an apex. It is remarkable in a sweep of history showing all sides of the issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most useful place to start with the the bookends of nuclear arms testing is President John F. Kennedy at the starting end. The bookends are not surprisingly the same as with the US being the humanitarian glue on the planet, the man who started USAID and the man who ended it<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the author was a child, the world came closer to ending by thermonuclear obliteration than it ever has in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it was very<\/em> close. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you weren’t there you really don’t have a clue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All odds were that it would happen, and could only be prevented by a wing and a prayer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When President Kennedy addressed the nation on all channels on National TV about the nuclear missiles snuck into Cuba by the Soviets and aimed at the US, everyone was certian that nuclear war was guaranteed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getting under the desks at school as we had through endless drills for years was very different when the real thing was pending. About to be “kindling” in the nuclear fire as Lewis Black put it, reminding with ferocious seriousness during an unforgettable comedy sketch, that no one before or since (in the wake of 9\/11) had any reason to be constantly toxically traumatized compared to this generation of children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every day during the 13 days in October, all the children in America went to school. Kennedy told us all that the best thing to do was go on as normal–as necessary for our national fortitude and sanity (and as nothing else would matter anyway–the nukes could not be escaped) and as a message of both commitment to resolve the crisis and fearlessness if need be in defense of the nation and freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JFK and his brother (and virtually co-president as advisor), Attorney General Robert F. Kenedy, (whose son “Jr” has comitted sacrilege against the name as one who may have killed or debilitated hundreds of millions had he been in his current position just a few decades back, by questioning vaccines, for polio and small pox, and now covid and measles and on and on)–resisted the irresistable impulse and seeming strategic logic of taking out the missiles and Cuba. All deserved–the world’s superpower dictatorship and it’s puppet dictatorship threatening nuclear war (hello unthinking “but the US…fill in the blank” equalled global nuclear annihilation risk ready to rock) while denying the missiles were there (only to be busted in front of the world by US photos shown to the UN by ambassador Adlai Stevenson, twice democratic presidential nominee who lost to Eisenhower before JFK).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Jack and Bobby, while knowing they may have been forced to risk potential armageddon, who knew more and more knawingly that the chain of events after the first shot was almost certainly going to be the last shot ever fired on earth, kept finding the next brilliant chess move to get to resolution. We’ve told that story before but it merits revisiting, in detail, which we will do in future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The short story is that JFK and RFK decided to respond to a more diplomatic message from Khrushchev and not a subsequent fiery one (he was under pressure, as was JFK, to take military action), to start with a blockade solely, to ignore serious Soviet errors that normally would have triggered a military response, and to trade US missiles in Turkey (no longer judged useful in any event, so a face-saving mechanism for the Soviets–and they agreed to keep this part of the bargain secret for a short time because JFK was not allowing any ambiguity about who had committed the world-threatening action) and a pledge not to invade Cuba (which with the Soviet missiles gone was an easy call).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, the Soviets removed the missiles, World War Three was averted and JFK was a global hero. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next most important move was JFK’s next most brilliant, and planet saving move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He gave an historic speech at American University in DC about the unthinkability of nuclear war while announcing that the US would, unilaterally, stop testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, while calling for an international treaty to ban testing in the atmosphere. The Soviets immediately accepted. All nuclear arms treaties from that point forward started with this treaty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is the link to President Kennedy’s speech on nuclear war and nuclear weapons<\/a>. It is one of the greatest speeches in American, and world history. It’s importance is impossible to overemphasize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(The momentous impact of JFK’s presidency is underlined by the implausible fact that the next day he gave a stirring speech on national TV calling out historical racism in the US and calling for civil rights legislation<\/a>–which passed soon after his assassination five months later. Look at the unimaginable bookends of either of these speeches compared with any speech ever given by the current occupant of the oval office.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We now know what may have happened if the first treaty had not been implemented. The entire atmosphere could have been so badly polluted by radioactivity and its other impacts as to have environmentally destroyed the planet and at best the damage, famine and disease would have been unprecedented by now, over 60 years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The announcement by President Trump of resumed nuclear testing, damage done whether it proceeds or not, was made by the man who renamed the Department of Defense (still the correct statutory name), the Department of War, for no rational reason. It was changed from this to “defense” after World War Two precisely to signal that war, in the nuclear age especially, could only be for defense of vital interets and values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The signals to the world, whatever the motives, are perilous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

29 days ago, the author of this post and colleague had the incomparable experience of going to the former Soviet nuclear missile complex near Pobuzke, the Ukaine museum of strategic missile forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes words are so woefully inadequate it seems sacreligious to use them at all. But use them we must.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one had been there for many months because of the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We climbed down the claustrophobic cylinder on metal steps for many stories to arrive at the command bunker deep underground. You could see from the top how far down it was–you could barely see to the bottom of an endless pit, as the pit in your stomach shattered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The launch center was designed to withstand a direct thermonuclear strike from the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside were the silo openings from which the missiles exited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the missiles themselves, including the most powerful in the Soviet arsenal, along with many others, now without warheads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The writer of this post was transported back to being a little child under a school desk, from the present to the past and back, immersed in a far more terrifying and darkly empty place than ever before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The missile complex had been taken over by Ukraine at independence in 1991 and one of the most momentous processes in history ensued with Ukraine eventually giving up all nuclear arms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ukrainians were the last of the former Soviet republics that possesed nuclear weapons to give them up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They knew that the chance that Russian imperialism would come for them again was high, if not certian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They had suffered through centuries of Russian control and barbarity. In 1932-33 alone Stalin had killed between 5 and 10 million Ukrainians through the Holodomor<\/em>, the famine created by forced collectivization of agriculture. The explosion of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine at Chernobyl in 1983 came within an inch of destroying all of Ukraine, most if not all of Europe, killing millions, and making these lands, other Soviet republics, and part of Russia itself uninhabitable for 500,000 years. This was a real-life symbol of the ongoing brutality and suffocation of the communist big lie that the Soviets imposed, enabled and were in a worldwide conflict with the US to control the globe with. The US committed its share of atrocities, but to compare systems and responsibility for destroying human life in any relative way (ask the thousands of young progessive women and men Ukrainian refugees and activists in Berlin, a number of whom we interviewed for a documentary in 2022<\/a>) who were pacifists before the invasion) is demonstrably empty of intellectual and moral integrity. Do you want democracry and freedom with all its flaws or dictatorship without human rights if sometimes with short term benefit. Stalin eventually killed more than Hitler and Mao more than both. As the saying goes, people vote with their feet. The Berlin Wall was built because millions were fleeing the oppressive communist regimes controlled by the Soviets, not the other way around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many Ukrainians, none of whom wanted nuclear weapons, were afraid to give them up. Hundreds of years of Russian oppression until 1991 were fresh and they foresaw the Rusian invasions of 2014 and 2022, the largest since World War Two, not as prophecy, but as certainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, in solidarity with a global movement toward ridding the world of these weapons, and under pressure from the US who in effect had liberated them, they did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Budapest Memorandum in 1994 agreed that in trade for giving up nuclear weapons, the US, UK and Russia would assure Ukrainian sovereignty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did that go?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One US veteran volunteering to fight for Ukraine told us he went because America agreed to defend Ukraine and wasn’t doing nearly enough to make certian of this and live up to its agreement. He had lost an arm. It was blown off by the Russians on the front. He said he would either die in Ukraine or the Russians would “F” off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former President Bill Clinton, who made the agreement and who pressured the Ukrainians, understandably, to give up the weapons, in a post Cold War world where the reduction and elimination of these planet killers seemed possible, recently said he now regretted that the Ukrainians had not kept nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This from one of the more intelligent people around, whatever flaws he may have. From a president of the US, who is the one person with a world view that is singular in exposure to such issues. Someone who was conflict-averse and understands the horror of nuclear weapons and the primacy of the need to control them from ever being used. And who concluded that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a fuse far more likely to lead to nuclear war than if Ukraine, in 1991 the third largest nuclear power in the world after the US and Russia, had kept its nuclear arsenal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Putin never would have considered invading. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And his attempted nuclear blackmail threats are absurd on their face even now because it would lead to his own obliteration. If you can’t do the various equations on that math, we can’t help you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the lesson of not having your own nukes is not lost on the rest of the world, which continues to nuke up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turning Point<\/em> ends with the moving scenes from the annual anniversary in Hiroshima of the bombing. It was finished in early 2024. Now, Japan is considering rearming with nuclear weapons. Polls have shown that a majority of Japanese don’t see Hiroshima as it once did, as a reason never to have nuclear weapons. It has receded in importance in the way it had been seen in the national psyche and if anything is a reminder of a reason to have nuclear weapons in the face of an aggressive China and North Korea who do, as they watch missile tests nearly hit Japan, and wonder where the US will be when push comes to shove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is happening everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s possible that President Trump understands his rhetoric at the UN that using nuclear weapons could end everything. And that the US and Russia will at least extend the only remaining nuclear arms control treaty between them. That the maxim that even if you’re fighting a war, and even if you see the only sane policy of a democracy versus a dictatorhsip of what world you will be in and the odds of greater war if you don’t fully support the democracy invaded by the dictatorship, nuclear weapons are not allowed and talking about this must continue under any circumstances. But this treaty only involves two countries, which are amping up nuclear rhetoric and weapons creation in other ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the rest of the world follows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be continued …<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following are three articles from The New York Times today and yesterday, on Trump’s nuclear tests announcement, the impact with China, and the modernizing of the US nuclear arsenal with a history of what has happened since the creation of the atomic bomb including the status with Russia, China and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEWS ANALYSIS<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump\u2019s Call to Resume Nuclear Testing After Decades Revives a Cold War Debate<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

President Trump explained the order by saying other, unnamed nations were testing their own nuclear weapons, even though no country has tested since 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listen to this article \u00b7 8:52 min Learn more<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n