https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-lethality-of-nuclear-weapons-nuclear-war-has-no-winner/5385611?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles
The Lethality of Nuclear Weapons: Nuclear War has No Winner
Paul Craig Roberts held top security clearances. He has repeatedly warned that a US-Russian nuclear war would wipe out the human race, along with all other complex forms of life. As a scientist with expert knowledge, I wish to echo and explain his warning.
Nuclear war has no winner. Beginning in 2006, several of the world’s leading climatologists (at Rutgers, UCLA, John Hopkins University, and the University of Colorado-Boulder) published a series of studies that evaluated the long-term environmental consequences of a nuclear war, including baseline scenarios fought with merely 1% of the explosive power in the US and/or Russian launch-ready nuclear arsenals. They concluded that the consequences of even a “small” nuclear war would include catastrophic disruptions of global climate[i] and massive destruction of Earth’s protective ozone layer[ii]. These and more recent studies predict that global agriculture would be so negatively affected by such a war, a global famine would result, which would cause up to 2 billion people to starve to death. [iii]
These peer-reviewed studies – which were analyzed by the best scientists in the world and found to be without error – also predict that a war fought with less than half of US or Russian strategic nuclear weapons would destroy the human race.[iv] In other words, a US-Russian nuclear war would create such extreme long-term damage to the global environment that it would leave the Earth uninhabitable for humans and most animal forms of life.
A recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war”,[v] begins by stating:
“A nuclear war between Russia and the United States, even after the arsenal reductions planned under New START, could produce a nuclear winter. Hence, an attack by either side could be suicidal, resulting in self-assured destruction.”
In 2009, I wrote an article[vi] for the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament that summarizes the findings of these studies. It explains that nuclear firestorms would produce millions of tons of smoke, which would rise above cloud level and form a global stratospheric smoke layer that would rapidly encircle the Earth. The smoke layer would remain for at least a decade, and it would act to destroy the protective ozone layer (vastly increasing the UV-B reaching Earth[vii]) as well as block warming sunlight, thus creating Ice Age weather conditions that would last 10 years or longer.
Following a US-Russian nuclear war, temperatures in the central US and Eurasia would fall below freezing every day for one to three years; the intense cold would completely eliminate growing seasons for a decade or longer. No crops could be grown, leading to a famine that would kill most humans and large animal populations.
Electromagnetic pulse from high-altitude nuclear detonations would destroy the integrated circuits in all modern electronic devices[viii], including those in commercial nuclear power plants. Every nuclear reactor would almost instantly meltdown; every nuclear spent fuel pool (which contain many times more radioactivity than found in the reactors) would boil-off, releasing vast amounts of long-lived radioactivity. The fallout would make most of the US and Europe uninhabitable. Of course, the survivors of the nuclear war would be starving to death anyway.
Once nuclear weapons were introduced into a US-Russian conflict, there would be little chance that a nuclear holocaust could be avoided. Theories of “limited nuclear war” and “nuclear de-escalation” are unrealistic.[ix] In 2002 the Bush administration modified US strategic doctrine from a retaliatory role to permit preemptive nuclear attack; in 2010, the Obama administration made only incremental and miniscule changes to this doctrine, leaving it essentially unchanged. Furthermore, Counterforce doctrine – used by both the US and Russian military – emphasizes the need for preemptive strikes once nuclear war begins. Both sides would be under immense pressure to launch a preemptive nuclear first-strike once military hostilities had commenced, especially if nuclear weapons had already been used on the battlefield.
Both the US and Russia each have 400 to 500 launch-ready ballistic missiles armed with a total of at least 1800 strategic nuclear warheads,[xi] which can be launched with only a few minutes warning.[xii] Both the US and Russian Presidents are accompanied 24/7 by military officers carrying a “nuclear briefcase”, which allows them to transmit the permission order to launch in a matter of seconds.
Yet top political leaders and policymakers of both the US and Russia seem to be unaware that their launch-ready nuclear weapons represent a self-destruct mechanism for the human race. For example, in 2010, I was able to publicly question the chief negotiators of the New START treaty, Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov and (then) US Assistant Secretary of State, Rose Gottemoeller, during their joint briefing at the UN (during the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference). I asked them if they were familiar with the recent peer-reviewed studies that predicted the detonation of less than 1% of the explosive power contained in the operational and deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear forces would cause catastrophic changes in the global climate, and that a nuclear war fought with their strategic nuclear weapons would kill most people on Earth. They both answered “no.”
More recently, on April 20, 2014, I asked the same question and received the same answer from the US officials sent to brief representatives of the NGOS at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee meeting at the UN. None of the US officials at the briefing were aware of the studies. Those present included top officials of the National Security Council.
It is frightening that President Obama and his administration appear unaware that the world’s leading scientists have for years predicted that a nuclear war fought with the US and/or Russian strategic nuclear arsenal means the end of human history. Do they not know of the existential threat these arsenals pose to the human race . . . or do they choose to remain silent because this fact doesn’t fit into their official narratives? We hear only about terrorist threats that could destroy a city with an atomic bomb, while the threat of human extinction from nuclear war is never mentioned – even when the US and Russia are each running huge nuclear war games in preparation for a US-Russian war.
Even more frightening is the fact that the neocons running US foreign policy believe that the US has “nuclear primacy” over Russia; that is, the US could successfully launch a nuclear sneak attack against Russian (and Chinese) nuclear forces and completely destroy them. This theory was articulated in 2006 in “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy”, which was published in Foreign Affairs by the Council on Foreign Relations.[xiii] By concluding that the Russians and Chinese would be unable to retaliate, or if some small part of their forces remained, would not risk a second US attack by retaliating, the article invites nuclear war.
Colonel Valery Yarynich (who was in charge of security of the Soviet/Russian nuclear command and control systems for 7 years) asked me to help him write a rebuttal, which was titled “Nuclear Primacy is a Fallacy”.[xiv] Colonel Yarynich, who was on the Soviet General Staff and did war planning for the USSR, concluded that the “Primacy” article used faulty methodology and erroneous assumptions, thus invalidating its conclusions. My contribution lay in my knowledge of the recently published (in 2006) studies, which predicted even a “successful” nuclear first-strike, which destroyed 100% of the opposing sides nuclear weapons, would cause the citizens of the side that “won” the nuclear war to perish from nuclear famine, just as would the rest of humanity.
Although the nuclear primacy article created quite a backlash in Russia, leading to a public speech by the Russian Foreign Minister, the story was essentially not covered in the US press. We were unable to get our rebuttal published by US media. The question remains as to whether the US nuclear primacy asserted in the article has been accepted as a fact by the US political and military establishment. Such acceptance would explain the recklessness of US policy toward Russia and China.
Thus we find ourselves in a situation in which those who are in charge of our nuclear arsenal seem not to understand that they can end human history if they choose to push the button. Most of the American public also remains completely unaware of this deadly threat. The uninformed are leading the uninformed toward the abyss of extinction.
US public schools have not taught students about nuclear weapons for more than 20 years. The last time nuclear war was discussed or debated in a US Presidential election was sometime in the last century. Thus, most people do not know that a single strategic nuclear weapon can easily ignite a massive firestorm over 100 square miles, and that the US and Russia each have many thousands of these weapons ready for immediate use.
Meanwhile, neoconservative ideology has kept the US at war during the entire 21st century. It has led to the expansion of US/NATO forces to the very borders of Russia, a huge mistake that has consequently revived the Cold War. A hallmark of neconservatism is that America is the “indispensable nation”, as evidenced by the neoconservative belief in “American exceptionalism”, which essentially asserts that Americans are superior to all other peoples, that American interests and values should reign supreme in the world.
At his West Point speech on May 28, President Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” Obama stated his bottom line is that “America must always lead on the world stage,” and “the backbone of that leadership always will be the military.” American exceptionalism based on might, not diplomacy, on hard power, not soft, is precisely the hubris and arrogance that could lead to the termination of human life. Washington’s determination to prevent the rise of Russia and China, as set out in the Brzezinski and Wolfowitz doctrines, is a recipe for nuclear war.
The need is dire for the president of the US, Russia, or China to state in a highly public forum that the existence of nuclear weapons creates the possibility of their use and that their use in war would likely mean human extinction. As nuclear war has no winners, the weapons should be banned and destroyed before they destroy all of us.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/16/murdoch-propaganda-pushes-australia-to-double-its-military-budget-for-war-with-china/
Murdoch Propaganda Pushes Australia To Double Its Military Budget For War With China
In the latest escalation in Australia’s increasingly forceful campaign to manufacture consent for war with China, the Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia has aired a jaw-droppingly propagandistic hour-long special which advocates a dramatic increase in the nation’s military spending.
Australians are uniquely vulnerable to propaganda because our nation has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, the lion’s share of it by Rupert Murdoch, who has well-documented ties to US government agencies going back decades. The propaganda campaign against China has gotten so aggressive here in recent years that I’ve repeatedly had complete strangers start babbling at me about the Chinese threat in casual conversation, completely out of the blue, within minutes of our first meeting each other.
The Sky News special is one of the most brazenly propagandistic things I have ever witnessed in any news media, with its opening minutes featuring footage of bayonet-wielding Chinese troops marching while ominous cinematic Bad Guy music plays loudly over the sound of the marching. In its promotional clip for the special, Sky News Australia tinged all footage pertaining to China in red to show how dangerous and communist they are. These are not decisions that are made with the intention of informing the public, these are decisions that are made with the intention of administering war propaganda.
The first expert Sky News brings on to tell viewers about the Chinese menace is Mick Ryan, an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is funded by military-industrial complex entities like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and is also directly funded by the US government and its client states, including Australia and Taiwan. Sky News of course makes no mention of this immense conflict of interest while manufacturing consent for increased military spending, calling Ryan simply a “former major general.” This is on the same level of journalistic malpractice as running an article by Colonel Sanders on the health benefits of fried chicken but calling him “Harland David Sanders, former fry cook.”
The next expert Sky News presents us with is Australian former major general Jim “The Butcher of Fallujah” Molan, who oh-so-sadly passed away last month. I’ve written about Molan previously specifically because the Australian media love citing him in their propaganda campaign against China, last time when he was pushing the ridiculous claim that China is poised to launch an invasion of Australia.
The other experts Sky News brings in are former CIA Director and US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s Director of Chinese Affairs Dr Lai Chung, Japan’s ambassador to Australia Yamagami Shingo, Australian Shadow Defense Minister Andrew Hastie, and John Coyne of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a virulent propaganda firm which is once again funded by US-aligned governments and military-industrial complex war profiteers.
So it’s about as balanced and impartial a punditry lineup as you’d expect.
At the 8:15 mark of the special, Sky News repeats the unevidenced propaganda claim that former Chinese president Hu Jintao was politically purged during the 20th Communist Party Congress last year.
At 19:15 Jim Molan talks about the need to fight and die with our allies the Americans while patriotic cello music plays in the background.
At 21:30 we are shown images of Australia being bombed alongside the Chinese flag (very subtle, guys).
At 24:25 Sky News accidentally does a version of the “look how close they put their country to our military bases” meme with a graphic display of all the US war machinery that surrounds China. The US would never tolerate being encircled by the Chinese military like that and would immediately wage war if China tried; it’s clear that the US is the aggressor in this conflict and China is reacting defensively.
“The United States plays a major strategic role in the Indo-Pacific,” says Sky News anchor Peter Stefanovic as the screen lights up with graphics showing the military presence surrounding China. “With 375,000 personnel, there’s a vast network of operations that extend from Hawaii all the way to India.”
At 26:30 we are shown a digital representation of China’s satellite systems in space, with the Chinese satellites colored red to help us all appreciate how evil and communist they are.
At 27:45 we are shown illustrations of how much smaller Australia’s military is than China’s or America’s to help us understand how important it is to increase the size of our nation’s war machine, ignoring the fact that Australia’s total population is a tiny fraction of either of those countries.
At 32:45 we are told that the AUKUS pact will “beef up America’s military presence in the north of Australia,” and that “America has long used Australia as a key strategic outpost,” showing images of Pine Gap and other parts of the US war machine which dot this continent. “Now, there’s more to come,” says Stefanovic, with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin describing the surge in US military presence we’re to expect in Australia.
At 34:10 the Australian Strategic Policy Institute guy explains why the US is so keen to use Australia in its planned confrontation with China, saying the continent’s geography puts it in “the Goldilocks location” of being close enough to China to be meaningful but far enough away that its war machinery can’t be easily struck.
At 35:15 Stefanovic warns that “our nation could quite literally be brought to its knees” if a war to the north sees shipping lanes cut off since Australia is so heavily dependent of imports. You would think this is an argument about the importance of maintaining a peaceful relationship with China, but instead it’s used to foment fear of China and argue for the need to be able to defeat it in a war.
And at 45:50 we finally get to the real purpose of this Sky News special: the need to “dramatically increase” the Australian military budget, and the need to manufacture consent for that increase. Australia currently has a military budget of $48.7 billion, a little less than two percent of the nation’s GDP. The late Butcher of Fallujah tells Sky News that “we need to at least double our defense expenditure” to four percent, and the special’s pundits openly discuss the need for Australians to be persuaded to accept this using narrative management.
“The Australian government needs to talk to the Australian people about the kinds of threats it faces,” says Mick Ryan. “It needs a more compelling narrative to convince the Australian people that they need to spend more on defense.”
“I think it is important that we are having a conversation with the Australian people which makes it clear that we live in a world which is more fragile than we have for a very long period of time,” Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles tells Sky News. “And what that is going to require is a defense posture and a defense force which is in truth gonna cost more than it has in the past. We’re gonna need to increase our defense spending.”
To be clear, this is not just a call to increase military spending, this is a call to propagandize Australians into consenting to more military spending. It’s not very often that the propaganda comes right out and explains to you why it is propagandizing you.
I always get people complaining that I focus too much on the US war machine when I live in Australia, but anyone who’s paying attention knows the behavior of the US war machine is as relevant to Australians as it is to Americans. They are beating the drums for a future war of unfathomable horror all to please a dark god known as unipolarism, and it threatens to destroy us all.
The time to start resisting is now.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/16/australians-arent-allowed-to-know-if-there-are-american-nukes-in-australia/
Australians Aren’t Allowed To Know If There Are American Nukes In Australia
The US government is permitted to have nuclear weapons in Australia. What’s more, Australians are not permitted to know whether or not this is happening. What’s more, not even Australia’s elected senators are permitted to know whether this is happening. It’s assumed to be none of Australia’s business whether there are foreign nuclear weapons in Australia.
This was clarified during a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday, when Greens senators were condescendingly admonished by the Australian foreign minister for the very normal and appropriate attempt to clarify the government’s policy regarding the presence of US armageddon weapons on Australian soil.
ABC News reports:
During a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday Greens senators sought details on whether visiting American aircraft such as the B-52s operating out of the Top End are ever nuclear armed.
The committee was told the United States had a longstanding policy of “neither confirming or denying” the presence of nuclear weapons under its practice of maintaining global operational unpredictability.
US bomber aircraft have been visiting Australia since the early 1980s, with nuclear-capable B-52s and B2 Sprits regularly operating out of northern Australia.
Defence Department secretary Greg Moriarty said the “stationing of nuclear weapons” in Australia was prohibited under the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, but the treaty did not prevent visits by the US bombers.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong was bizarrely hostile toward Senator David Shoebridge’s line of questioning on US nuclear weapons in Australia, angrily accusing him of trying to “make a political point” and acting in a way that is not “responsible or fair to the Australian community,” just for seeking answers beyond stock “the US can neither confirm nor deny” responses on this extremely important matter.
So there you have it. The US does indeed have permission to bring weapons into Australia which can turn the nation into a nuclear target, and Australians not only have no say in the matter but are also not allowed to know anything about it. It’s actually kind of rude and offensive for you to even ask.
Can you imagine if another country tried to do this to the US? Can you imagine how quickly a nation like India or France would be laughed out of the room if they told Washington they want the right to bring nuclear weapons in and out of the continental United States, but it’s none of the US’s business if they do? Nobody would give it a single thought, because it’s understood that the United States is the rightful ruler of this planet.
The Greens delivered a strong response to this whole ordeal, correctly accusing the Australian government of subverting Australian interests to advance US interests.
“The decision for the Australian Government to allow American B-52s into Australia is another clear example of successive major party governments selling out Australian interests for the Americans,” said Greens Senator and Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Jordon Steele John said in a statement. “Whether it be the AUKUS pact, the coverup of how Australia became involved in the illegal US invasion of Iraq or this newest escalation in the force posture agreement. When it comes to the US, there is no Australian interest this government has not been willing to sell out.
“Australia needs to deeply reevaluate our relationship with the United States and pursue an independent, peaceful and cooperative foreign policy,” the senator added.
This happens as Australians are being manipulated into consenting to war and militarism against China in a shockingly aggressive propaganda campaign spearheaded by our freakishly consolidated news media and think tanks funded by the US power alliance and military industrial complex war profiteers like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. This propaganda campaign makes no secret of the expectation that Australians should be prepared to pour their wealth and their blood into a future war with China in order to support their good friends the Americans.
Julian Assange — an Australian citizen who has been left to rot in Belmarsh Prison because his own government refuses to back him against the US government’s efforts to extradite him for the crime of journalism — said shortly before his arrest, “I love my birth country Australia but as a state it doesn’t exist.”
As an Australian myself I feel much the same way. We’re not a real country. We’re a US military/intelligence asset run by a puppet regime who the US government changes and stages blatant coups against whenever it sees fit. This whole continent is basically just a giant US military base with kangaroos.
And
now we’re being pushed toward a future military confrontation of
unimaginable horror, and when anyone in our pretend government objects
to this they are chided and dismissed for their lack of loyalty to our
glorious leaders in Washington. It would be funny if it wasn’t so
goddamn terrifying.
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