Western Powers in Pursuit of Nuclear Apocalypse?
David Hartsough & Eric Arnow

Dear Friends,
(May 30, 2024) — Below is a message I received from a Russian friend of mine warning of the danger of nuclear war between our countries and my response to him about what is needed to stop the escalation of the war between the US and Russia into nuclear war. There has never been a more crucial moment for our work to end all war and abolish all nuclear weapons before they abolish us.
Peace,
David Hartsough
[Co-founder of World BEYOND War and author of Waging Peace]

Letter from a Russian Friend
(May 30, 2024) — Владимир Шестаков Volodya Shestakov wrote:
To my mind, this [See Eric Arnow’s commentary below] is a fair description of the history of the post-WW2 relations and the possibilities. What do you think?

The Western Desire to Attack Russia
Eric Arnow / Substack
(May 30, 2024) — In May, 1945, after the Soviet Union saved Churchill’s ass and the UK from a Nazi invasion, Churchill got the idea that it was ‘back to business as usual’ — perennial hostility and plotting against Russia. In this video, I do a simple track of the West’s duplicity and hostility towards Russia, culminating in the current replay of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We are as close as ever to nuclear war, with Ukraine, acting on behalf of its Western sponsors, attacking Russian nuclear-warning radars. Fortunately, several experts from the USA, Germany and France are sounding the alarm. Can the public force the crazed leaders back to sanity? [See Eric Arnow’s complete commentary below]

Response from David Hartsough
Dear Volodya,
Thanks for sending this. Very true and scary analysis of US-Soviet/Russian relations. As I understand it, there have now been three drone attacks on Russian radar stations, which makes the situation even more dangerous. The question I have is why leaders in both the US and Russia are willing to play a game of nuclear chicken with one another endangering the lives of billions of people.

In order to show the other side that we are right, each side is willing to initiate what could so easily become a full-scale nuclear war which could kill all of us. Why would any leader in any country be willing to risk what is essentially the end of human life on our beautiful planet for any reason — even very legitimate concerns? No one will be able to say: “We did it to protect our country.” That is insane — whether said by leaders of the US or Russia or NATO leaders.

In my thinking, what is needed is a massive people’s movement in the US, Europe, Russia, China, etc., to say to our governments this risking nuclear war is insane and the only real security for all of us is to join the International Treaty for the abolition of all nuclear weapons.

The US and Russia could set the example for all nuclear nations. We need another Gorbachev and Reagan who will listen to our people’s demand for an end to this madness.

Volodya, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Sending love and warm greetings and hope that our governments and the people of the world wake up before it is too late.
David

79 Years of Western Obsession to Attack Russia
The Anniversary of Operation Unthinkable–
And the West Still Can’t Stop
Eric Arnow / Substack
[Note: Transcript of a video presentation. May contain errors.]

(May 30, 2024) — Events are really happening now at a quickening pace and it’s pretty, we’re getting into some really hazardous areas. And I want to read an email that I just received from somebody, which cites several US experts about the dangers of a potential nuclear war. But I want to first give you just a little bit of background here.

People ask, you know, how did this come about? What is this Ukraine war about? What has been going on? Why did Russia invade? All those kinds of questions. And so I want to just start off with a very, very brief, truncated story. of what has been going on ever since World War II.

So we know that during World War II the German Nazis basically took over Western Europe. Then they went to Eastern Europe. They attacked Poland and the other Eastern European countries. Then they attacked the Soviet Union. As I pointed out to a good friend of mine, the Soviet Union faced 220 divisions of the German Nazi Wehrmacht versus 11 divisions. That’s right, 11 divisions that the United States and Britain faced when they went in on June 6th on D-Day.

So basically the Soviets did the vast majority of the work. We’re talking about 80% to 90% of the German military work, which was in top condition when it invaded the Soviet Union, was decimated by the Soviet Union over the course of three to four years.

And what was also really very strange is that Churchill had no love for the Soviet Union, but when the Nazis invaded or attempted to invade the British Isles, suddenly Churchill developed a great affection for the Soviet Union and was trying to help them out and even praised the Soviet Union in the Battle of Stalingrad because that was the real turning point of World War II.

However, when it was quite clear that the Soviet Union was … just about to win World War II, Churchill suddenly decided, well, okay, that’s taken care of. The immediate threat to the UK is finished now. Let’s get back to business and take out the Soviet Union.

And he cooked up a plan called Operation Unthinkable.

Operation Unthinkable
He was going to use 100,000 former German soldiers, along with British and Allied soldiers from the West, and reinvade the Soviet Union. Patton himself said, well, the Germans lost at Stalingrad, but I’m not going to. Well, Stalin found out about this, and he confronted Churchill, and he said, you know, what the hell is going on here?

And Churchill said, well, I don’t know. I have no idea. I’ll get back to you on that. So that was Operation Unthinkable. Then in 1945, in August 1945, I guess it was July 1945, the Americans tested the atomic bomb. And so the US had this secret weapon that could basically wipe out any city in an instant.

So Truman had succeeded Roosevelt, who had died in April. And Truman was both an ignorant person as well as a very suggestible person. And his minders said, when you go to the next conference with Stalin, you should remind him that we’ve now got this super-duper weapon that can wipe you guys out, and you better straighten up and fly right and not cause us any problems.

However, Stalin also knew about this and, in fact, there were Americans who saw the danger of having just one country creating nuclear weapons, and so they were actually passing on secrets of how to make nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. And by 1945, the Soviets had actually created an atomic bomb, and then they proceeded to make a hydrogen bomb along the course of the United States.

It also developed that.

The Cuban Missile Crisis
And in 1962, the United States had placed what are called Jupiter-C missiles in Turkey, which would have placed nuclear bombs very close to the border of Russia and basically within about 15 to 30 minutes flight time to Moscow when the United States was angry at Cuba for not following orders and getting rid of the the American gangsters who were basically running the country, the Americans were planning to attack them.

And so Cuba appealed to the Soviet Union and said, “Hey, we need some help here. Please help us, protect us from these Americans.” So the Soviets, with the Cubans, decided to put nuclear missiles in Cuba. And that was the cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

John Kennedy saw photos of these missiles in Cuba, and we almost went to nuclear war over that. What they didn’t tell us was that one of the main reasons why the Soviet Union put them there was because the Americans had already put nuclear-capable missiles in Turkey.

Well, we managed to get through that.

And there was a period of detente.

Reagan and the “Evil Empire”
Then during the 1980s, actually in 1980, Ronald Reagan decided to turn up the heat again, calling the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” The Americans are calling the Soviet Union the evil empire after the Americans had caused the Korean War, the Vietnam War.

They’ve invaded numerous countries, overthrown many, many countries in the Third World. For example, Iraq, Iran, they overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. So the hands of the US were hardly clean, and to assert that the Soviet Union was the evil empire is a bit rich.

In any case, there was a negotiation finally because of popular support. The peoples of the West, the United States, I participated in that movement, and people in Europe also were up in arms because the US and the Soviets had put missiles literally 10 minutes flight-time away from each other.

And so the danger of a nuclear war was extremely high. And fortunately, enough public pressure was put on both sides, both the Russians and the Soviets and the United States, to negotiate what was called the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. And what that did was it got rid of all of those weapons.

And so that was a major stabilizing influence.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
Okay. Flash forward to 2002, and the United States had also negotiated another treaty called the ABM Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty limited the ability of both the Soviet Union and the United States to protect against a missile attack.

The idea being that if one launched a nuclear weapon, the other could launch nuclear weapons and we don’t both get wiped out. And so it was basically mutual deterrence. Well, when George W. Bush came into office — illegally, by the way, because that election was stolen in Florida — Bush reneged on that treaty. He said “we don’t really want that treaty anymore so we’re going to put anti-ballistic missiles in Europe to protect us from Iran” — except that Iran didn’t have missiles that could reach The United States. So they were being extremely disingenuous. They were basically targeting Soviet (or now, at this point, Russian) nuclear missiles.

Enter Vladimir Putin
So now Vladimir Putin is the president of the Russian Federation, and he said, “okay, you guys tell us that it’s none of our business and that you’re going to do whatever you want, and you’re telling us we can do whatever we want, and basically we’re going to develop some weapons that can counter the nuclear…”

Actually, the US had decided to put… its missile defense system back in Eastern Europe, specifically Poland and Romania. The problem is that the launch tubes for those defensive missiles were adaptable to any kind of missile, either defensive or any missile that could deliver a nuclear weapon.

So this is basically putting us back into Cuban Missile Crisis again. So that was 2002.

The 2014 US Coup in Ukraine
2014, the United States launched a coup in Ukraine, which was engineered by Victoria Nuland and overseen by then-Vice President Joseph Biden. And they basically used Ukrainian holdover.

These were the, you could say the children and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and committed numerous atrocities. Before I started creating this video, I was just reading a CIA document. This is a CIA document. There’s a website called CIA/Reading Room, and you can search around in there and find out all kinds of interesting things that the CIA has done and is declassified.

But they basically said the CIA was collaborating with Nazis who had committed atrocities. So when 2014 rolled around, they used these violent entities within Ukraine to stage a coup against a democratically elected government.

And then they were attacking Russian speakers in Ukraine. That was the start of this war that really started in 2014.

The Minsk Agreements
The attacks against the Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine was starting to go badly for the new Kiev government, so there was something called the Minsk Agreements, which were negotiated in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

And that agreement said that Ukraine was going to maintain its territorial integrity and that the Russians, the Germans, and the French, along with the people of eastern Ukraine and the Kiev regime all agreed that eastern Ukraine would be stay part of Ukraine but they would have [Russian] language rights and the Kiev government would stop bombing them. Basically that’s what the Minsk agreement was.

However, as later transpired, both Angela Merkel, who had negotiated the agreement, or had been a signatory to it, and Haaland of France, and Poroshenko, who was the president of Ukraine at that time, all subsequently openly admitted — and even seemingly gloated about — the fact that they had no intention of having that agreement be fulfilled.

Their plan was to build up the Ukrainian military to such an extent that it would be able to reinvade eastern Ukraine, conduct an ethnic cleansing operation against these people, kill them or get rid of them. And that was the plan. And also, Zelensky had talked about putting nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

And these were the main reasons why Russia and Vladimir Putin — and it wasn’t just Putin, it was actually the Russian Parliament — passed a resolution saying: “Look, they’re bombing the crap out of these people in eastern Ukraine, and we cannot allow this to continue. We know what they’re planning. We know that they’ve got all kinds of nefarious plans to attack not just the people in Donbass, but to attack Russia itself.” So that was the reason why Russia went into Ukraine in February of 2022. Then what Russia did was they staged an attack, which was a kind of like a test-run on Kiev.

“We Hate Russia”
And that was designed to scare the Kiev government to have a real negotiation and have a real peace deal. And so they negotiated that in Minsk and also in Istanbul. And there was kind of an initial document agreeing to all this. But that went awry when one of the Ukrainian negotiators returned to Kiev and was assassinated because he was too accommodating to Russia.

And then Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said: “Don’t negotiate with the Russians. Don’t worry about… We’ve got your back. We’re going to supply weapons to you, and you’re going to defeat the Russians because that’s the goal. We need to defeat Russia.”

Why do we need to defeat Russia? Because we hate Russia. Why do we hate Russia? Because we hate Russia. That’s our existence. We’ve hated Russia ever since the Crimean War in the 1850s. And so this is the modus operandi of the West.

During World War II, in fact, there was a movie that came out that was by the US government and they raised the question. This is when the US was allied with the Soviet Union. And it’s called “The Battle of Russia.” And you can find it on YouTube. And they say, you know, why is it that Russia keeps getting invaded? They get invaded by the Germans in the 12th century and the Swedes.

The Swedes invaded them. The Poles invaded them. Then Napoleon invaded them. Then Hitler invaded them.

The Source of Western Wealth
Why are they doing it? It’s because Russia is a big country. It’s got a lot of resources. And the thing that people in the West need to understand is that the source of Western wealth is, to a degree, innovation and technology, especially military technology. But the main thing is they’re really good at is stealing other countries’ resources. And they go into a country. They take over the government. In the 19th century, they basically forced the Chinese to import large amounts of opium, which addicted the population, drove China into the ground. They treated India terribly.

They looted apparently trillions of dollars of wealth from India. And of course, they invaded or attacked iraq to get its oil. They overthrew the government in iran to get their oil. So this is this is what has been going on for for literally decades or centuries.

The Current Situation
Okay, that brings us to today and i just got an email from someone who i don’t know but I’m going to read this because it cites several experts who are people that you really need to listen to. It turns out that some Ukrainian drones, these are pilotless airplanes, struck the Armavir radar station in Russia’s south central Krasnodar Krai region, a part of Russia’s early warning radar system designed to detect an incoming ICBM — that is an intercontinental ballistic missile, attack.

This radar is one of the pillars in Russia’s nuclear posture system, which, along with other such installations, plays an existential role in the strategic security of the Russian Federation.

Far beyond escalating tensions with Ukraine alone, this attack has now brought the world another step closer to the verge of a thermonuclear war. A Russian senator and head of a former major Russian corporation called Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, responded to this development by noting that, while one could imagine Ukraine’s war was behind this, in reality, it is Washington that has hired an irresponsible bandit to carry out the dirty work.

Thus we stand not only on the precipice, but on the very edge beyond which — if the enemy is not stopped in such actions — “an irreversible collapse of the strategic security of nuclear powers will begin,” Rogozin said.

So moving forward in this article, a notable peace activist named Helga Zepp-LaRouche, addressing a meeting of the International Peace Coalition on May 24th, drew people’s attention to the solutions to the crisis. She insisted, we must end the West’s belief in geopolitics, which has made people believe that Russia and China are our enemies, and instead, establish a new security and development architecture that respects the interests of all nations.

I want to just flash back a little bit because in December 2021, Russia put draft treaties on the table to NATO and to the United States with that specific goal. NATO… promised when the Soviet Union fell apart that it would “not expand one inch” to the east of Germany and instead it completely violated that promise and has got NATO members not only on the borders of the former Soviet Union but but constituents republics of the Soviet Union — Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia — they were part of the Soviet Union and they are now NATO members and they’re they’re completely rabid Russophobes in any case.

Russia’s Early Warning System
“She goes on to say, this email goes on to say, numerous military and intelligence specialists consulted by the Schiller Institute (which is what Helga Zepp-LaRouche is involved with) expressed their grave concern over the meaning of the Armavir attack and its consequences. So I’m going to quote here, these are American scientists, American specialists. “The Russian satellite-based early warning system is very limited. It cannot be used to cover the blind spots created by damage to the radar. The Atlantic, Pacific, and northern radar warning corridors are more important, and the Russians also have radars in Moscow. However, the radars in Moscow will only see threats at a later time, resulting in yet shorter warning and decision-making time, thereby increasing the chances of a catastrophic accident.”
The commanders of the Strategic Rocket Forces — those are the Russian forces, who serve the political leaders — will be really concerned and they will have no choice but to treat this situation as quite serious.

They will almost certainly choose to operate their nuclear strike forces at a higher level of alert which will further increase the chances of accidents that could lead to an unintended global nuclear war [says] Dr. Theodore Postel, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a nuclear weapons expert.

I might also add that, during the Syrian crisis, when Obama was threatening to attack Syria, Theodore Postol got involved in that and he proved that the charges of chemical weapons against Syria were false. It was cooked up as an excuse to try to overthrow another country.

But because of people like Theodore Postol, he was able to provide the evidence to say: “Don’t do that, because you’re attacking a country on the basis of false information, just like Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction,” which was false information. Just like the Gulf of Tonkin, which got us into the Vietnam War, which was based on false information.

You see the pattern here? Okay, here’s the next quote. “The US has begun directing missile attacks on the Russian nuclear-early-warning system, which is made up of a series of ground-based radars and satellites. Any such attacks against these EWS — that’s early warning system — could trigger the Russian nuclear response system.”

Playing Nuclear Chicken
So this US directed attack is insanely dangerous. Washington is playing nuclear chicken with Russia. The site attacked was within range of the US ATACMS. That’s a type of rocket that the US has been using and attacking Russia with. I don’t know if any other similar Russian facilities are within range of the ATACMS or possibly even the German Taurus missiles.

Remember, if you’re not aware of this, there are a couple of German generals that are saying, “Hey, why don’t we launch a couple of German rockets at Russia? Wouldn’t that be a great idea?”

This is Germany that launched a major attack killing 27 million people during World War II, and these stupid German generals are thinking about attacking Russia again. These are the kinds of people who are running our country. Our countries.

Unfortunately, we may soon find out, as the madmen in Washington, Kiev, and Brussels seemed determined to start World War III. Stephen Starr, professor, University of Missouri, expert on nuclear war, has a third quote.

“There are obviously forces in Ukraine and also in NATO that are prepared to take the risk of a direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia. German politicians would be well advised to take Russia’s warnings of a new world war seriously and ensure that the final red lines are not crossed.”

“As a modern industrialized country at the heart of Europe, Germany is unfit for war in a major European conflict, even without nuclear weapons. German politicians must do everything in their power to de-escalate the increasing military confrontation and commit themselves to a diplomatic solution to the conflict.” This is a quote by retired Colonel Professor Dr. Wilfried Schreiber, Senior Research Fellow at the Weltkerns Institute for International Politics in Potsdam, Germany. And Finally, this is another quote. This is from Richard Black, who was a former state senator for the state of, I believe it’s Virginia. Here’s what he has to say. “This is a continuation of the pattern in which the NATO forces recognize they are losing the war in Ukraine with the fragile lines of defense breaking and the NATO response is to escalate. This is not accidental, but very deliberate. It is not the first attack on the Russian nuclear triad. The ideological folks are seeing their world crumbling after flying the rainbow flag over conservative countries and waging perpetual wars.”

They are frantic and could escalate to nuclear war to get out of the bind. They are taking a series of baby steps and respond that they don’t do anything in response. And so they keep taking baby steps until one of them lands on a landmine, and we are in World War III. I have said it.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche has said it. Putin is very aware of the disconnect in the West, who keeps saying he is just sable-rattling, but he is not. He is informing the West of the dangerous reality. Colonel Richard Black, former state senator. And here’s another expert from France: “I expect that the US military, faced with a vital situation, are going to behave more reasonably and consciously than the civilians.” Well, we hope so. And this is by Graham Fuller, a former diplomat and CIA officer and former vice chair of the National Intelligence Council: “The attack on this radar station, clearly could not have happened without full US support.”

I can’t comment adequately until I learn more, but it’s obviously escalatory, and I will look into it. And this is another quote by Professor Richard Sakwa, who is an emeritus professor of Russian and European politics: “They are on an escalating treadmill, especially after what Blinken told Ukraine. They could, quote, ‘do what they want with their missiles.'”

Heading for the Nuclear Escalator
It demonstrates the irresponsible American leadership. We’re headed for the nuclear escalator. The West is facing defeat in Ukraine, and therefore they’re escalating to avoid defeat. So there you have it. You’ve got a number of real experts, and there are others that I follow who are telling you that we are very, very close to a major accident which could result in a nuclear war. It may not even be an accident because there are some certain people in the United States who are just so disconnected from reality that they think that they could actually win a nuclear war. They’ll go to their bunkers and we’ll all be blown to smithereens.

I suppose that’s what they think. If you haven’t watched the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” you can see the kind of mentality of the people who are running our country and people in the West. The situation is really veering out of control. So I wanted to bring this letter to your attention so that you will give it some serious thought and what you really need to do is talk to your friends and relatives and start calling Congress. We need to build a new anti-nuclear movement like we had in the 1980s and get these crazy people who are trying to foment a nuclear war back under control because they’re disconnected from reality and the whole planet could blow up. So that’s what I wanted to talk about. Thank you.