A Time for Peace in Europe and Asia

Nuclear war is being risked by craven leaders who care more about power than human survival

Minuteman III missile silo in North Dakota near farmland (D0D phofo)

Cambridge, UK—The US has a long history of not knowing how to end or peacefully resolve vexing international crises and conflicts with less powerful nations.

A triumphalist attitude in the national character is partly to blame, but in part, at least, it is also likely the result of our history.

The country was founded through an act of violence — a long war of independence which the rebels ultimately won. The new country was then enlarged through further acts of violence and the genocidal destruction of indigenous inhabitants. The new United States then established itself as a global industrial power by first a civil war that the Union won through application of overwhelming force and the destruction of a rival economy based upon slavery.

Finally, there was the USA’a participation in two global wars in the 20th century in which the nation emerged unscathed itself, leaving rival powers, including its erstwhile allies, all battered and weakened,

Through all that time the United States has had little experience with or interest in the art of negotiation.

This preference for war and for the use of force to have its way around the world was only reinforced when both World Wars ended with the unconditional surrender of the losing side. These two unusual conclusions to wars led to an assumption in Washington and among the broader public that all conflicts should end that way.

The Korean War should have disabused America of that notion. In that incredibly bloody conflict, three million Koreans — mostly civilians — and 38,000 US soldiers died and yet there was never any peace treaty. This was thanks to the stubbornness by the US, Rather than seek peace once US and UN forces had pushed North Korean Forces out of the South, America instead pressed on toward the Chinese border, leading the new Chinese Communist government to send its own war-tested People’s Liberation Army flooding into battle, which led to a stalemate on the Korean Peninsula that has endured now for three-quarters of a century.

Vietnam is another example of where the US slaughtered millions of civilians because it was unwilling to allow the people of a small country, Vietnam, that had struggled to free itself of French colonial rule, to be an independent country. Even though, during WWII, Vietnam’s Viet Minh peasant army had helped the US and its wartime allies defeat the Japanese in the Indochina theater of WWII. they were prevented from choosing their own path to independence.

The world thankfully has changed significantly since Wold War II. Not only is the US no longer the pre-eminent military power in the world, losing its war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but unable to win the war in Afghanistan, but the proliferation of nuclear weapons to eight other nations means that even a relatively small power like North Korea can stand up against US or international pressure by simply threatening to use its nuclear weapons.

And when It comes to the big powers — those with large military forces and nuclear stockpiles that could totally wipe out a rival or lead to global destruction — the idea that military force is the answer to conflicts, and that negotiation is weakness is nothing short of madness.

Far too many of our leaders in the US and of late in Europe, don’t get this though (They are, that is to say, certifiably mad.)

In the US, the country with the most powerful and globe-encircling military the world has ever known, promotes the idea of itself as a noble nation of Spartan “warriors” able to defeat any enemy (despite all the contrary evidence that no amount of military might can defeat even a ragtag irregular force of fighters armed with assault rifles, homemade mines and a willingness to die for a cause). They also dream that American technology will eventually create a military so overpowering and perhaps automated, that Washington will be able to dictate the terms of its rivals’ submission.

And so we have Donald Trump’s upcoming $50-million military parade spectacle in front of the White House next week to celebrate his 79th birthday and America’s military might, and we also have his hair-brained call for a hugely expensive “Golden Dome” of orbiting anti-missile weapons, to protect America from any and all nuclear threats.

At the same time, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is boasting about his country’s development of new hypersonic nuclear missiles. Instead of flying to targets thousands of miles away following easily predictable and perhaps intercept-able ballistic arcs, his new missiles autonomously hug the ground and are able to maneuver to avoid defenses or even switch to different targets, all while moving at speeds in excess of 15,000 miles per hour.

As the risk of big-power nuclear war rises to a level not seen since the darkest days of the Cold War in the late 1950s to 1970s, NATO countries, including the US, are providing Ukraine with long-range missiles made by NATO nations, missiles capable of striking deep inside Russia, perhaps eventually even hitting targets in Moscow and other large cities. That is something that never happened in the last 80 years since the wartime detonation of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Sanity seems to be in short supply. This is a problem in governments and among the public at large.

The US began this new nuclear brinksmanship back when the Bush-Cheney administration pulled the US out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which banned the stationing of missiles located just minutes’ flight time from the borders of each others’ borders. Obama later made things worse by approving a $1-trillion (now $2-trillion), 30-year program to refurbish, modernize and add new versions to its strategic nuclear stockpile. That program includes developing new delivery systems too. It was that program that has led to the Russians developing as a counter-measure almost impossible-to-stop hypersonic missiles that zip to their targets at close to grand level. (Note: these are not first-strike weapons as they would take far too long, coming all the way from Russia, to catch the US unawares with its ICBM missiles still in their silos.)

Now, we are hearing many of the world’s nuclear nations’ government leaders and military strategists talking as if war between nuclear powers is likely or unavoidable! There’s Russia’s Vladimir Putin musing about nuclear weapons and saying “I hope they will not be required.” He says this even as the US and Nato nations like Britain and Germany provide ever longer-range missiles that the Ukraine military is using to strike targets within Russia (something that never happened throughout the whole Cold War!).

Last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that Britain must be put on a “war footing” because of Russia’s hypersonic missiles and increasingly long-range and powerful drones. Meanwhile, General Sir Roly Walker, new head of the UK Army, is warning that because of “converging geopolitical threats” of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, the British army has three years to “prepare for war.”

Starmer’s response to that terrifying prediction, instead of looking for a way lower the temperature, is proposing that the UK purchase 36 US F-35A Lightning stealth fighter bombers, each adapted to carry two B61-12A thermonuclear bombs that can be set to explode with an explosive power ranging anywhere between 0.3 kilotons (300 tons of TNT), and 50 kilotons, which is three times the power of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

As if that weren’t terrible enough, some US military leaders are similarly predicting that China and the US could be at war over Taiwan by 2027 — a war that would likely spiral to a full-scale strategic nuclear war within days once started, especially if the US decided to honor its commitment to defunct Taiwan.

Then too, there are US experts saying that if the US and Iran don’t succeed I renewing the agreement the Obama administration reached for Iran to stop further enrichment of uranium to a point where it could be used to quite quickly produce a simple nuclear bomb, Israel would likely attack Iran to destroy its nuclear facilities, and probably much of its military and industrial sites — a development that could also spread, given Russia’s and China’s support for Iran.

(Trump dropped out of that deal, refusing to lift sanctions on Iran late in his first term of office.)

War fever is getting so crazy that when a spy satellite took a photo of several rows of large tents numbering several dozen in a snowy field in Russia about 20 miles distant from the Finnish border north of the Arctic Circle, papers like the NY Times and the right-wing British Telegraph speculated about whether it means that a Russian invasion of the newest NATO member state (which during the Cold War had remained neutral) is imminent. Not mentioned is the fact that the US has long been conducting joint military exercises with new “front line” NATO countries — not just Finland, but Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia etc.—all of which share borders borders with Russia.

Nobody in the West or in the western media is suggesting that perhaps the US and NATO might be preparing to launch a war against Russia, but it’s worth considering that possibility, or looking at such joint exercises through Russian eyes. After all, the US is the country with first-strike weapons like the 400 super-accurate Minuteman missiles in hardened silos in North Dakota and other states, and the hundreds of Trident missiles in giant Trident nuclear subs off the coast of Russia. There is no purpose swerved by pinpoint accuracy for nuclear delivery systems except destroying unlaunched weapons in a surprise first strike.

The same war fever is evident in the Asia, whereUS military and political leaders meanwhile say that a war with China is “inevitable” within a few years. Why inevitable? Because China is building an imposing modern military that could rival the US, at least in the western Pacific and South China Sea. Okay but why should that make war with the US inevitable?

One might reasonably ask such question, since the US has had nuclear missiles and aircraft ringing China and Russia since almost since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, but hasn’t launched a war. However as I document in my book Spy for No Country (Prometheus Books, 2024), US nuclear war plans as early as 1950 for launching a first-strike on the USSR also included nuclear targets in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and other major metropolises.

British Philosopher Bertram Russell, back in the dark days of the Cold War, sparked a mass international anti-nuclear movement by declaring “Better Red than Dead!” I remember back then, as a pre-teen thinking that it sounded like a pretty self-evident concept, but many Americans — and the politicians they elected, rather incredibly saw the saying as outrageous. “Better dead than Red!” they’d boldly counter, perhaps not realizing their braggadocio was condemning their children and grandchildren to death, not just themselves.

Looking back at the history of wars back to the beginning of the global war era, when mass killing on a heretofore unimaginable industrial scale became a feature of all wars, it’s hard to justify any conflict that has occurred.

Let’s start with WWI. Europe stumbled into that war because of a network of bi-lateral mutual assistance pacts in which countries promised to come to the aid of each other. In the event, one lone Croatian student anarchist assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, heir-apparent to the Austrian-Hungarian empire throne, and that web of promises caused most of Europe to end up going to war lest their credibility be lost.

There was no real purpose or clash of ideologies involved. Some15-22 million people died in that war, 9-15 million of them civilians. Many more were severely injured. That conflict had nothing to do with defending democracy — there were democracies and autocracies and even monarchies among the combatants on both sides. Could a better alternative have been found than a five-year war that left Europe in ruins and that dragged in a lot of other parts of the world too? Certainly!

Then there’s World War II. There, the monstrosity of Hitler’s Third Reich with its elevation of the Aryan race and oppression and hatred of the Jews, the Roma people, Communists and Socialists and the disabled, is often cited as a reason the war was necessary or at least justified. But consider this: The allies did almost nothing to save those millions of oppressed minorities who were tossed into concentration camps, shot in mass killings on the streets or burned in their shtetls during the Wehrmacht’s march into the Soviet Union. Even the US turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees during the war, and rejected pleas to bomb the dead-end rail lines that brought more doomed Jews to the camps and crematoriums. Japan for its part committed mass murder in its invasion of the Korean Peninsula, Manchuria,Nanjing and later Southeast Asia and the Philippines, but the US did nothing about it until the Japanese made the mistake of attacking the US Pacific fleet docked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was three years into the war before the US even began to fight, and not until the last 11 months that D-Day in Europe was launched.

By the time that six-year war was over, including the incineration of two entire Japanese cities by America’s two new atomic bombs in three days in early August 1945, between 60-85 million people — civilians and military personnel — but the vast majority ordinary men, women and children, had died of bullets, bombs execution, starvation or disease. As for the over six-million Jews and Roma people who were killed by the Nazis, does anyone really believe that Hitler — even HItler! — could have carried out such a massive genocide had he not been able to conduct it inside of a police state that was entirely cut off from the outside world during the war? Could many of those people, and many of the millions of civilian victims and military draftees who died, as well as the millions who died in the Pacific Theater, have been spared had the world taken collective action to prevent Hitler’s rise in the first place — for example by denying Germany’s industry and government credit as soon as Hitler set out to begin rebuilding Germany’s arms industry and military?

Of Course it could have been done! But there was money to be made in Germany. So US industrialists like Henry Ford, George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush, and many other of the of America’s financiers and banks, all through the 1930s until the Nazi invasion of Poland were happy to help with Hitler’s efforts by investing in the growing German economy and in making profitable loans to German arms-makers. And no politicians in the US wanted to allow millions of poor Jews into the as refugees.

Honestly confronting these difficult questions becomes more than just a debating point and gains urgency because in a world of nuclear weapons, the scale of slaughter in any major war will dwarf what happened in the last bloody century. As Einstein once said , when asked what he thought of the future for a nuclear world, replied, “I don’t know how a World War III will be fought, but I do know how World War IV will be fought: with sticks and stones.”

My view is that my country, the United States, as clearly the most powerful nation in the world militarily, and for the moment at least, economically, and its people, have to assume the responsibility of making the first bold move of stepping back from disaster. What the world needs is not more and ever deadlier arms, not an endless cycle of one-upmanship in new weapons and new counter-weapons, but rather fewer weapons, better treaties, a revitalized world government with enforcement powers and no Security Council vetoes.

When a weaker country tries to stop a war by trying to appease a strong aggressor, it only invites more aggression. It is only when a strong nation, confident in its power, calls for negotiations to achieve more peaceful relations, that a climb-down from hostilities can happen.

We had a glimpse of how such a thing might work when President Ronald Reagan, an avowed enemy of Communism and a staunch Cold Warrior, knowing that the US, with its far stronger economy, was winning the competition in terms of weapons development and acquisition, but he was willing to sit down with his counterpart in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to talk about to reduce both countries’ nuclear weapons and delivery systems and the risk of their being used. And the two leaders did make concrete steps in that direction.

The problem is that once that was achieved and once Gorbachev freed the Warsaw Pact countries to to go their own ways, Reagan’s second term ended. He was succeeded by George H.W. Bush, a former CIA Director. Bush didn’t reverse what Reagan had done, but he did nothing to advance the detente either and build on it.

Bush was defeated when he ran for a second term only to be replaced by Bill Clinton, who then undid much of the developing new friendship and sense of trust between the new smaller Russia Federation and the US, by inviting a number of former “frontline” states that before 1990 had been Soviets (states) of the USSR or former captive states of eastern Europe, like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania, to join NATO.

After surviving an attempted military coup, in which he was briefly detained, Gorbachev resigned from politics. He was succeeded as Russia’s leader by former Moscow Mayor Boris Yeltsin, a former Communist who had gained considerable popularity for standing squarely against the attempted coup against Gorbachev, was elected president. He won a second term but his presidency was plagued by corruption and by his alcoholism. He resigned early in his second term and was succeeded by his chosen successor KGB veteran Vladimir Putin who was appointed to replace him.

It’s difficult to guess whether the course of events from that point could have gone differently. Clinton, with his expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, clearly wasn’t interested in seeing Russia become an integral part of Europe. The same is true for the Bush-Cheney administration.

The Obama administration came into office in 2009 looking to develop stronger economic relations with Russia but difficulties arose because his policy towards Ukraine was to leave eventual NATO membership —a non-starter for the Russians—up to popular opinion in Ukraine. And eventually, by 2013-14 his State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton and Undersecretary for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, two Cold Warrior relics who helped foment a coup to oust the elected pro-Russia president of Ukraine in a coup. That pretty much finished any hope of a detente or a restoration of any trust between the US and Russia.

From there things went spiraling downwards in the relationship. Any chance of a friendlier relationship and especially of a denuclearization by the two largest nuclear powers was over.

That of course brings us to Trump’s first election as president in 2016. During that campaign, Trump made no secret of his favorable view of Putin as a ‘strong’ leader who had restored his country after years of economic decline following the collapse of the Communist government and the break-up of the Soviet Union. In his campaign he once famously publicly called on Putin to hack his primary opponent Hillary Clinton’s phone to learn what she was up to in trying to beat him in the coming November election.

The Putin-Trump relationship is certainly warm, but it is very unusual too, because establishment military and national security people in the Washington bureaucracy and in Trump’s first-term cabinet kept him on a short leash in his dealings with the Russian leader.

Trump’s loss to Joe Biden — anther Cold War relic— further chilled relations, as a civil war raged in eastern Ukraine between the coup government in Kiev and ethnic Russian rebels in the Donbas region, who were being supported by Russia.

Once Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, it effectively made the US and Russia enemies, with the US supplying Ukraine with massive amounts of advanced arms.

As Biden Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted during a stealth visit to Ukraine in early May 2022, the US goal, which initially had been to help Ukraine halt the Russian invasion, had just two months later shifted. At that point, the goal became a shameful strategy of actually prolonging the conflict, using Ukrainian soldiers to so “weaken” Russia that it could never again have the power to invade a a border state.

Others in the Washington national security establishment spoke of using the war to “bleed Russia” without involving American troops.

It was and remains an outrageous abuse of Ukrainian draftees who think they are risking death for their country, but are actually risking death for America’s geopolitical benefit. But it’s also a hugely dangerous game Washington is playing. Trump has at this point a much more pliant staff. At the same time, his relationship with Putin is not one between equals: Putin clearly understands Trump’s narcissism and knows how too play him by plying him with compliments, while not giving an inch on his goal of wearing down Ukraine to the point where that country and its people give up any idea of joining Europe and NATO. But if the US and NATO were to push too hard to the point that Putin faced rebellion or palace coup, the possibility of his turning to a ‘tactical “ nuke can not be ruled out.