Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
Like too many people, I sometimes make the mistake of talking about nuclear war, when it’s really annihilation and genocide we’re talking about.
Wars have winners and losers. In nuclear “war,” everyone loses. The planet loses. Life loses and death triumphs on a scale we simply can’t imagine.
Language is so important here. I grew up learning about nuclear exchanges. EXCHANGES! The U.S. military talks of nuclear modernization and “investing” in nukes when the only dividend of this “investment” is mass death.
One of the few honest acronyms is MAD, or mutually assured destruction. Lately, it’s an acronym that’s largely disappeared from American discourse.
More than anything, though, realistic images of a nuclear attack are perhaps the most compelling evidence against building more nukes, as in this powerful and unforgettable scene from Terminator 2:
To me, nothing beats that scene. That is nuclear “war.”
The U.S. has over 5000 nuclear weapons; the Russians close to 6000. That’s more than enough to destroy the earth and a few other earth-sized planets. Imagine the scene above repeated eleven thousand times on our planet.
The insanity, the immorality of spending another $2 trillion on new nukes… well, it boggles my mind. We’ve become like the mutants in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, worshiping the bomb, acolytes of death and destruction.
If we all don’t end up killing ourselves and the planet in “an exchange,” we’ll likely degenerate into utter barbarism, as depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And even that grim novel has a life-affirming ending that is most unlikely.
Amazingly, after I wrote the above passages about nuclear “war” and “exchanges,” I came across Admiral TR Buchanan’s recent keynote address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he uses the word “exchange” in a remarkably banal (and frightening!) way.
Here’s an excerpt from the transcript with emphasis added.
BUCHANAN: Yeah, so it’s certainly complex because we go down a lot of different avenues to talk about what is the condition of the United States in a post-nuclear exchange environment. And that is a place that’s a place we’d like to avoid, right? And so when we talk about non-nuclear and nuclear capabilities, we certainly don’t want to have an exchange, right?
I think everybody would agree if we have to have an exchange, then we want to do it in terms that are most acceptable to the United States. So it’s terms that are most acceptable to the United States that puts us in a position to continue to lead the world, right? So we’re largely viewed as the world leader.
And do we lead the world in an area where we’ve considered loss? The answer is no, right? And so it would be to a point where we would maintain sufficient – we’d have to have sufficient capability.
We’d have to have reserve capacity. You wouldn’t expend all of your resources to gain winning, right? Because then you have nothing to deter from at that point.
So very complex problem, of course. And as I think many people understand, nuclear weapons are political weapons. I think Susan Rice said that at one point.
The motto of Admiral Buchanan might be: We had to destroy the world in order to lead it. Buchanan here is less sane than General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove.
This admiral thinks we might have to have “an exchange” with Russia, and that, if we do, we could do so “in terms that are most acceptable to the United States,” and that even after “an exchange,” the U.S. can still “continue to lead the world.”
Truly this is the banality of evil. I like how even after “the exchange,” we need to have a “reserve capacity” so that we can nuke the world again.
This is madness – sheer madness – but it’s received as probity and sane “strategic” thinking by the national security blob.
This guy was promoted to admiral precisely because he thinks this way. He thinks without thinking. With no humanity.
Well, as General Turgidson says in Dr. Strangelove, we might just get our hair mussed during a nuclear “exchange,” but does it really matter as long as we can kill more of them than us?
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), professor of history, and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal substack is Bracing Views. His video testimony for the Merchants of Death Tribunal is available at this link.
Excellent commentary, spot on!!!
“National Security Blob”!!!
”How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?!
The answer my friend is blowing in the wind! The answer is blowing in the wind!”
The ultimate classic and will forever be that!!!
Kisssoff!!! LOL!
I hate to have to keep pointing this out, but 11,000 nukes are irrelevant. Why?
Because ninety percent of them will be destroyed in the first hour. Obviously.
In a war between two nuclear powers, what do you think is the first target? The other sides's nukes, of course.
Basically a nuclear war will look like this:
1) Submarines fire several hundred missiles with multiple independently targetable warheads (MIRVS).
2) Everything inside both countries is wiped out – modified by how well the air defenses are in each country. (Hint: The US does not do well, Russia significantly better.) Both sides, however, will use enough missiles to overwhelm the other's air defenses to a significant degree.
3) No missiles are fired AT ANY OTHER COUNTRY except direct allies of the warring parties, i.e., Russia fires at NATO countries with nuclear weapons (France and the UK) and possibly a couple others with large militaries that might take advaantage of the carnage. The US will fire almost entirely at Russia. The point: NO ONE ELSE IS INVOLVED. Billions of people are NOT involved.
4) After the first exchange, most nuclear weapons systems are destroyed, except for submarines at sea and aircraft already in the air. Aircraft is easily destroyed by air defenses, so are mostly irrelevant – since airborne radar and interceptors will be up on both sides to shoot them down. So further exchanges will be limited.
5) Everything else negative about the war which can be proven is derived from the damage to civilian infrastructure on both sides: medical availability, electrical power collapse, etc., etc. Those will again also only effect those countries directly involved. Billions of people will NOT be directly involved, except to the degree that global commerce and shipping are involved. Many countries will reduce their economic situation as a result, but most will survive that.
6) Everything else negative about the war which might affect the global population not directly involved in the war will be the result of what is claimed to be "nuclear winter" – for which the evidence can only be established if one is a climatologist.
As I like to say about the global warning controversy: "I am not a climatologist or computer modeling expert – and neither are you." The models establishing the probability of "nuclear winter" aare complex and difficult science and unless you are an expert in those fields, you have no clue whether any of it is correct. Models that assume widespread dispersal of nuclear detonations are probably incorrect as I indicated above. Much depends on what ACTUALLY happens during an ACTUAL nuclear war.
In short, we do NOT know whether "nuclear winter" is a real thing – until it happens.
So people need to stop with the "end of the world" bullshit for which there is no proof.
This is not to say that ANY nuclear war is a Good Thing. It obviously is not. And morons who think it can be "won" – especially when their air defenses are pathetically bad against current missile systems – need to STFU.
If a full scale nuclear war happens between U.S. and Russia, China will lead post-nuclear-war world ("nuclear winter" or no "nuclear winter"). China has a lot of bunkers well prepared for such an event.
Indeed. China can lose the entire population of the US and still have over a billion people left. Even allowing for subsidiary losses from economic and environmental issues, they'll likely come out way ahead of anyone else.
I think it'll be more disastrous than that. If a half million of the most important people (for Chinese state) survive, that is good enough. Most likely the damage to the environment would be such that for some years the surface of Earth remains uninhabitable.
And by uninhabitable, we mean, a global winter, deprivation of sunlight and loss of species, of ability for plants to reproduce, of animals as well, radioactive fallout blanketing the world's arable lands?
I mean, hey what's not to like about total, nihilistic destruction of everything we even imagine makes up our world?
Well to me there's every reason in the world to oppose thinking "it's all good."
April 23, 2024 Video: The Use of Nuclear Weapons Threatens the Future of Humanity
While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day conventional wars, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using nuclear weapons until it occurs and becomes a reality.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-the-use-of-nuclear-weapons-threatens-the-future-of-humanity/5855492
https://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/us-russia-nuclear-war.jpg
“We don’t like ‘um anyhow! Let’s drop the big one and see what happens!!!”
Most of us know exactly what will happen to the human race!
The main motivation of all those hawks is their private financial interest. MIC and Satanic oligarchy are rewarding them generously.