Page 2 of 5 RUSSIA AND
THE NEW COLD WAR When
cowboys don't shoot straight By F William Engdahl
most
awesome military machinery, a shield to protect it
from limited attack is aimed directly at Russia,
the only other nuclear power with anywhere near
the capacity to launch a credible nuclear
counterpunch.
Were the United States able
to shield itself effectively from a potential
Russian response to a US nuclear first strike, the
US
would
be able simply to dictate to the entire world on
its terms, not only to Russia. That would be what
military people term "nuclear primacy". That is
the real meaning of Putin's unusual speech. He
isn't paranoid. He was being starkly realistic.
It's now clear that since the end of the
Cold War in 1991, the US government has never for
a moment stopped its pursuit of nuclear primacy.
For Washington and the US elites, the Cold War
never ended. They just forgot to tell us all.
The quest for global control of oil and
energy pipelines, the quest to establish its
military bases across Eurasia, its attempt to
modernize and upgrade its nuclear-submarine and
B-52 fleets, all make sense only when seen through
the perspective of the relentless pursuit of US
nuclear primacy.
The Bush administration
unilaterally abrogated the US-Russian
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in December
2001. It's in a race to complete a global network
of missile defense as the key to US nuclear
primacy. With even a primitive missile-defense
shield, the US could attack Russian missile silos
and submarine fleets with no fear of effective
retaliation, as the few remaining Russian nuclear
missiles would be unable to launch a response
convincing enough to deter a US first strike.
The ability of both sides - the Warsaw
Pact and NATO - during the Cold War mutually to
annihilate one another led to a nuclear stalemate
dubbed by military strategists "MAD" - mutual
assured destruction. It was scary but, in a
bizarre sense, was more stable that what we have
today with a unilateral US pursuit of nuclear
primacy. The prospect of mutual nuclear
annihilation with no decisive advantage for either
side led to a world in which nuclear war was
"unthinkable".
Now, the US pursues the
possibility of nuclear war as "thinkable". That's
really mad.
The first nation with a
nuclear missile shield would de facto have
first-strike ability. Quite correctly,
Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Bowman, director of the
US Air Force (USAF) missile-defense program,
recently called missile defense "the missing link
to a first strike".
More alarming is the
fact that no one outside a handful of Pentagon
planners or senior intelligence officials in
Washington discusses the implications of
Washington's pursuit of missile defense in Poland
and the Czech Republic or its drive for nuclear
primacy.
It calls to mind "Rebuilding
America's Defenses", the September 2000 report of
the hawkish Project for the New American Century,
of which Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were
members. There they declared, "The United States
must develop and deploy global missile defenses to
defend the American homeland and American allies
and to provide a secure basis for US power
projection around the world."
Before
becoming Bush's defense secretary in January 2001,
Rumsfeld headed a presidential commission
advocating the development of a missile defense
for the United States.
The Bush-Cheney
administration was so eager to advance its
missile-defense plans that the president and
defense secretary ordered the waiving of the usual
operational testing requirements essential to
determining whether the highly complex system of
systems was effective. The Rumsfeld
missile-defense program was strongly opposed
within the US military. On March 26, 2004, no
fewer than 49 generals and admirals signed an Open
Letter to the President appealing for
missile-defense postponement.
They noted,
"US technology, already deployed, can pinpoint the
source of a ballistic-missile launch. It is
therefore highly unlikely that any state would
dare to attack the US or allow a terrorist to do
so from its territory with a missile armed with a
weapon of mass destruction, thereby risking
annihilation from a devastating US retaliatory
strike."
The 49 generals and admirals,
including Admiral William J Crowe, former chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went on to argue to
Bush, "As you have said, Mr President, our highest
priority is to prevent terrorists from acquiring
and employing weapons of mass destruction. We
agree.
"We therefore recommend, as the
militarily responsible course of action, that you
postpone operational deployment of the expensive
and untested GMD [ground-based missile defense]
system and transfer the associated funding to
accelerated programs to secure the multitude of
facilities containing nuclear weapons and
materials, and to protect our ports and borders
against terrorists who may attempt to smuggle
weapons of mass destruction into the United
States."
What the seasoned military
veterans did not say was that Rumsfeld, Vice
President Cheney, Bush and company had quite
another agenda than rogue terror threats. They
were after full-spectrum dominance, the new world
order, and the elimination, once and for all, of
Russia as a potential rival.
The rush to
deploy a missile-defense shield is clearly not
aimed at North Korea or terror attacks. It is
aimed at Russia and, to a lesser extent, the far
smaller nuclear capacities of China. As the
generals and admirals noted in their letter to
Bush in 2004, the US already has more than
sufficient nuclear warheads to hit a thousand
bunkers or caves of a potential rogue state.
Kier Lieber and Daryl Press, two US
military analysts, writing in the influential
Foreign Affairs magazine last March, noted, "If
the United States' nuclear modernization were
really aimed at rogue states or terrorists, the
country's nuclear force would not need the
additional thousand ground-burst warheads it will
gain from the W-76 modernization program. The
current and future US nuclear force, in other
words, seems designed to carry out a preemptive
disarming strike against Russia or China."
Referring to the aggressive new Pentagon
deployment plans for missile defense, Lieber and
Press wrote, "The sort of missile defenses that
the United States might plausibly deploy would be
valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a
defensive one - as an adjunct to a US first-strike
capability, not as a stand-alone shield. If the
United States launched a nuclear attack against
Russia (or China), the targeted country would be
left with a tiny surviving arsenal - if any at
all. At that point, even a relatively modest or
inefficient missile-defense system might well be
enough to protect against any retaliatory
strikes."
This is the real agenda in
Washington's Eurasian Great Game. Naturally, to
state so openly would risk tipping Washington's
hand before the noose had been irreversibly
tightened around Moscow's metaphorical neck. So
the State Department and Defense Secretary Robert
Gates try to make jokes about the recent Russian
remarks, as though they were Putin's paranoid
delusions. This entire US program of
missile-defense and nuclear-first-strike
modernization is hair-raising enough as an idea.
Under the Bush administration, it has been made
operational and airborne, harking back to the
dangerous days of the Cold War with fleets of
nuclear-armed B-52 bombers and Trident
nuclear-missile submarines on ready alert around
the clock.
Global strike: Pentagon
Conplan 8022 The march toward possible
nuclear catastrophe by intent or by
miscalculation, as a consequence of the bold new
Washington policy, took on significant new gravity
in June 2004, only weeks after the 49 generals and
admirals took the highly unusual step of writing
to their president.
That June,
then-defense secretary Rumsfeld approved a
top-secret order for the armed forces of the
United States to
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