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Are We in Cuban Missile Crisis II, or Worse?

Note: For purposes of this discussion, the terms, “Soviet Union, USSR, Soviet Russia” and related terms all relate to the forerunner of today’s Russian Federation.  The Doomsday Clock was created by a group of atomic scientists who wanted to warn the public of the danger of nuclear war. More on that below.

Cover of the 1947 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists issue, featuring the Doomsday Clock at “seven minutes to midnight” By [1], Fair use, Wikipedia

<<The First Issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, June, 1947.

The Roots of the Cuban Missile Crisis

The atomic bomb was created by the United States during the Manhattan Project. It was believed that the Germans were working on such a weapon during WWII. Albert Einstein, whom I consider to be a pretty smart guy, was a professor in Germany, and in 1932, he left Germany, just before the Nazis took power through electoral and political manipulation in 1933. However, their hateful and dangerous ideology was all too apparent to anyone paying attention.

It’s for that reason that Einstein, who was on the Nazi ‘hit list’ wisely left Germany, came to the US. In 1939, Einstein warned President Roosevelt of the danger of a possible Nazi nuclear weapon. That is how the US nuclear program got started, which Einstein later regretted.

Soviet Union and The Bomb

President Harry Truman bombed two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, utterly destroying them, and killing several hundred thousand people. One reason was to intimidate the USSR. However, the USSR got hold of plans and built its own nuclear weapon in 1949, followed by a far more powerful Hydrogen bomb.

In 1962, the Soviet Union, which was quite powerful following its crushing of the Nazi war machine in WWII, found out that the US had positioned Jupiter C missiles with nuclear warheads in Turkey, just a 1000 miles (1800 KM) from Moscow, making possible a surprise “First Strike” attack on the USSR. Moscow could be wiped off the map in 30 minutes or less.

The Cuban Revolution’s Role in the Cuban Missile Crisis

Meanwhile, the Cuban Revolution had kicked the US and its gangster brothels, casinos and US corporate interests out of Cuba. The CIA had tried and failed to overthrow the Cuban government in the Bay of Pigs attack, without getting authorization from President John F. Kennedy. Allen Dulles, CIA founder and Director, had thought he could drag the US into invading Cuba.

The result was that Cuba felt directly threatened by the United States. And the Soviet Union felt –indeed was—directly threatened by the United States. For that reason, Cuba and the USSR agreed that Russia would reciprocate the ‘favor’ of having nuclear weapons in striking distance of the United States, by placing missiles and Soviet troops in Cuba.

When President Kennedy found out by spy planes flying over Cuba, that there were nuclear missiles there, the Cuban Missile Crisis ensued. We came within a hair of a nuclear war. At the time, a US ship had discovered a Russian submarine nearby Cuba. It was dropping depth charges to force it to surface. The Soviet submarine was cut off from communication with headquarters, and assumed that a nuclear war had started.

It was only because the three officers on the Soviet submarines did not reach consensus-one opposed launching a nuclear torpedo against the US ship—that nuclear war was averted.

JFK and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, negotiated an agreement that the US would not invade Cuba, and that the USSR would withdraw its missiles. What we “American mushrooms”—fed bullsh*t and kept in the dark—didn’t know was that the Soviets graciously allowed the US to secretly withdraw its missiles from Turkey.  Since then the US has replaced nuclear weapons, not only in Turkey, but also in Belgium, Germany and Italy.

What Is the Doomsday Clock?

At that time, the socalled Doomsday Clock, which is a measure of the danger of nuclear war, was set at 7 minutes to midnight.

Doomsday Clock graph, 1947–2023. The lower points on the graph represent a higher probability of technologically or environmentally-induced catastrophe, and the higher points represent a lower probability, in the opinion of the Bulletin.

Source: Wikipedia 

Following that crisis, several nuclear arms control treaties were negotiated, and by 1972, with the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Doomsday Clock fell back to 12 minutes.

However, in 1980, President Reagan ramped up the arms race and by 1984, placed Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, basically putting the world back into a situation similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In response, the USSR placed similar missiles which could strike back against Europe, and both countries massively increased their nuclear arsenals.

Are US Legislators Nuts? You Be the Judge

In 1984, some US legislators visited San Francisco. One of them ate at a restaurant where I was waiting tables. I asked the guy, “We’ve got enough weapons to blow up the world 40 times, so why do we need more weapons?” He smiled, shrugged and said that since the USSR could blow up the world 20 times we needed to blow up the world 40 times…I’m paraphrasing, but you get the point: Our ‘leaders’ are out of their minds.

How the 1980’s Peace Movement Put the Brakes on

Well, by the 1980’s a robust peace movement arose to stop the madness. I personally wrote letters to both Reagan and the Soviet leader, Gorbachev, to cool their heels before they vaporize us.  My friend, John Bailes and I visited the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco (incidentally now closed by a vindictive USA as part of its sanctions against Russia). We were honored with a visit with the Consul General –two citizens of the USA, seeking peace and understanding with the Soviet Union.

Americans engaged in ‘Citizen Diplomacy’, visited their Russian counterparts in the USSR, and the resulting public pressure, brought both sides together to get rid of those weapons in the INF, or Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_Forces_Treaty

At that point, the Doomsday Clock receded to 6 minutes before midnight, and in 1991, they signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, which resulted in 17 minutes before midnight. Still a lot of nukes in missiles, but at least there were fewer of them. And things were moving in the right direction.

Peace Dividend? Forget About It!

With the end of the USSR, many of us were looking forward to the end of the Cold War, and a “peace dividend”, where the people would see the war budget directed towards the needs of the people.

It was not to be. In the year 2000, George Bush, the younger, came to power through a politically manipulated ‘win’, facilitated by a compliant Supreme Court decision that stopped a recount of the vote which would have resulted in Bush’s loss.

In 2002 the US dumped the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Russia urged the US not to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, since the purpose of the treaty was to prevent each country from intercepting missiles launched in response to a ‘First Strike’, to destroy it while eliminating counter attacks. This was the MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction plan to prevent a nuclear war. At the time, the Russia response was in effect, “OK, if that’s what you want, to plan a preemptive First Strike, we’ll have to take countermeasures.”

And indeed, in 2018, President Putin put the US on notice. It developed missiles and delivery systems that the US simply cannot intercept, either because they are ‘hypersonic’—too fast to catch by a missile defense system, or are maneuverable, or can fly from a direction that can’t be intercepted. There is even a nuclear powered torpedo, that can be set off near the coast. It would create a massive tsunami that can literally wipe large areas of the East or West Coasts away. There is no defense against that, either.

NATO Expansion: Its Dangers, and Russia’s Response

The expansion of NATO violated agreements made with the USSR following the end of the USSR, and its counterpart to NATO, the Warsaw Treaty. The USSR allowed the Berlin Wall to come down, and unilaterally and peacefully withdrew its troops from those countries.

Worse yet, the US is violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, by allowing US nuclear weapons not just back into Turkey, but also into Belgium, Germany and Italy to station nukes on their soil.

Since the 1950s, the United States has engaged in nuclear sharing with its NATO allies. Today, about 100 US tactical nuclear weapons remain on European soil. However, the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) prohibits the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear-weapon states

In 1991, Ukraine was no longer the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and became totally independent from Russia. As did other former Soviet Republics, such as Georgia, in the Caucasus Mountain area.

In 2008, the US announced that both Ukraine and Georgia would be candidates for NATO membership, despite then US ambassador to Russia, William Burns (now CIA director) reporting that having NATO right on Russia’s borders was a red line—unacceptable—and would lead to war.

The trend of the Doomsday Clock has been down ever since, from 6 minutes to midnight in 2010, to 100 seconds in 2020. In 2018, Donald Trump exited several key arms and climate control treaties. The critical Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Paris Agreement treaty on reducing the problem of Climate Change, the “Iran Nuclear Deal”, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Open Skies Treaty.

Ukraine’s Role in this Looming Catastrophe

The Prime Directive of US foreign policy is the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine, which makes ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ by the US military a means to create US dominance over the entire world. It demands that no other country rival the US either militarily or economically.

To this end, following the US failure to control the Middle East through its failure to control Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, it decided to change focus in two areas:

The Pivot to Asia is meant to dominate the ‘Western American Ocean’…err, I mean the Pacific Ocean and the American Pacific Sea,…err the South China Sea and the East China Sea. See, everything belongs to the USA, even if the rest of the world doesn’t know or accept that. The US considers China its number one rival and enemy. With Russia a close second.

Likewise, NATO, and the EU and indeed all of Europe is in the US sphere of influence, according to the Wolfowitz Doctrine. In 2014, after a long period of US meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine, the US engineered a coup—an illegal takeover of a democratically elected government in Ukraine. Imagine Russia overthrowing the government of Mexico, using locals funded, armed and trained by Russia. It declares the US and indeed English speakers Mexico’s enemy, English speakers as ‘subhuman’ ‘cockroaches’. And plans a war to destroy the United States.

That is what the US planned for Ukraine.

The Destructive Role of Zbigniew Brzezinski

“According to Brzezinski [who passed away in May 2017], independent since 1991, Ukraine is an “important space on the Eurasian chessboard”, the control of which is supposed to make a domination over the world possible^[4]. In a post-Cold War world under the United States’ (US) geostrategic domination, Brzezinski identifies Ukraine …”

https://www.open-diplomacy.eu/blog/the-ukraine-crisis-or-the-revival-of-the-grand-chessboard-s-geopolitics

As a ‘sign of respect for the EU’, Victoria Nuland, then a top US diplomat who was handing out cookies to the opposition in Kiev, while John McCain and Lindsay Graham, both Senators were encouraging the coup, shared her plans for the post coup government with the US ambassador to Ukraine, all she needed was the go ahead from then Vice President Joseph Biden, who was overseeing the operation. Nuland’s view of the role of the EU in Ukraine, which borders several European countries. “F*ck the EU”.

Can you imagine what the US response would be if a Russian or Chinese person, in a similar position gave speeches at anti US government demonstrations in Washington DC? To avoid violence, the Ukraine president withdrew the police, and in violation of the agreement, the US sponsored violent demonstrators overthrew the government and attempted to kill the president of Ukraine. Using far right, Nazi descendants of the same people who collaborated with Nazis in WWII, and brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles, Jew, Russians and other Ukrainians.

Reckless Acts Against Russia

Since 2014, the US has engaged in several reckless acts.

• Armed Ukraine to the teeth with weapons, making Ukraine in effect, a NATO proxy
• Set up several dozen ‘Biological Research facilities’. Victoria Nuland testified in Congress that the US doesn’t want Russia to find out what’s going on there. (The Ukraine government even stonewalled and jailed a Ukrainian opposition leader who likewise demanded to know what was going on in those labs). Given the long history of US development and use of biological weapons, Russia can only expect the worst.
• The coup regime attacks against the Donetsk and Lugansk areas that rebelled against the coup, killing and injuring thousands of innocent civilians increased from 40/day to over 1000/day in February 2023. (The total victims are now put at 14,000 to 16,000, by various credible observers.—Ed)
• Kiev also announced its intention to make / use nuclear weapons. Just ten minutes by missile from Moscow.

When my friends say how bad Russia is for launching an attack to stop the shelling, I ask them, “How would you like it and what would you do if your own government was shelling YOUR neighborhood for 8 years?” Recently, Putin admitted that Russia should have intervened far earlier.

Is this not a clearcut case of intervening under the “Responsibility to Protect” Doctrine, promulgated by the USA itself?

How the West Became “Incapable of Keeping Agreements”

In December, 2021, President Putin put forth proposals to create conditions–or more accurately—put NATO back in compliance with the agreements it made not to expand, post USSR. Both the US and NATO imperiously rejected negotiations.

It was in response to all of this, that Russia acted as William Burns predicted—by making Ukraine a de facto part of NATO, while slaughtering Russian speakers who opposed the coup government, the Russian parliament passed a resolution to put a stop to all that.

Since February 24, 2022, a Lot Has Happened

Arestovych

On February, 24, 2022, Russia invaded but ‘went in soft’.  Scott Ritter, the noted US weapons inspector and peace activist, said then that Russia didn’t want to crush Ukraine militarily, nor cause damage. This has recently been corroborated by former advisor to Zelensky, Oleksiy Arestovych.

“”They (Russians) didn’t want to kill anyone,” – Ukrainian president’s former top aide, Arestovych.

“They tried to wage a smart war… Such an elegant, beautiful, lightning-fast special operation, where polite people, without causing any damage to either a kitten or a child, eliminated the few who resisted.

And they didn’t even eliminate them, but offered to surrender, switch sides, understand and etc. They didn’t want to kill anyone. Just sign the renunciation.” said Arestovich.  Here’s more:

1. Russia tried to negotiate a ceasefire and settlement in April 2024. One of the chief Ukrainian negotiators was assassinated by the Ukrainian security service, SBU. And Boris Johnson insisted that no peace agreement be signed.
2. The Ukrainian military shelled a nuclear power plant occupied by the Russians, and when independent OSCE inspectors came in to assess the damage and cause, all they could do was say, ‘yup somebody sent these shells’ from somewhere, even though the trajectory, from Ukrainian positions was obvious.
3. The Russians clearly misjudged the course of the war. While it did wipe out most of the Ukrainian military’s weapons, and make it difficult to fight, it didn’t send enough troops to cover all the territory in Russian speaking regions. As a result, Ukraine took back some areas, and Russian speaking residents have faced deadly consequences.
4. Russia finally came to the realization that this is not a civil war between Ukrainian speaking and Russian speaking Ukrainians, and not merely a defense of Russian speakers by Russia, in response to 8 years of terror by the Kiev illegal coup regime, controlled by the ideological heirs to Stepan Bandera, notorious Nazi collaborator of WWII, who killed and brutalized at least 100,000 civilians, Poles, Jews, Roma, Russians. This is a US war, using NATO and its Ukrainian cannon fodder, to ultimately weaken and destroy Russia. Why? To destroy its rival and capture Russia’s vast resources.
5. Russian naivete was at play in negotiating treaties that the US subsequently broke, naivete that it was possible to negotiate with the Neo Nazi core that controls Ukraine.
6. Nonetheless, Russia over the past 20 years rebuilt its military after the USSR unilaterally disarmed. It also restored its own agriculture and manufacturing to make it far more resistant to Western sanctions.
7. It is the failure of the US plan to destroy the Russian economy and bring it back into the colonial status it had during the 1990’s that both enrages and scares US policy makers. That’s why they ‘fight Russia to the last Ukrainian’.

Conclusion:

A clear Russian victory will doom Biden’s nefarious plan, and drive a large nail in the coffin of US Hegemony.  That is why the US and NATO openly admit that they cannot afford to lose, even while they hypocritically say they’re not a party to the war, and even as they scramble to rearm Ukraine, and bring in ever more foreign mercenaries to replace the largely defeated Ukraine army.

Russia seems finally to understand that negotiations always fail with the West.

The US Nuclear Posture Review says that Russia and China “each poses

a major and growing nuclear threat”…..”No First Use and Sole Purpose policies …….would result in an unacceptable level of risk.”….”The United States would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances”

What are those circumstances?  And now, Russia, which has up until now rejected that doctrine of No First Use, is now seriously reconsidering it.

https://rumble.com/v26y9ks-a-russia-and-an-america-on-ukraine-americas-goal-regime-change-in-russia.html (“Free Speech France” blocks this video website.)

And to top off the insanity, even the previously sane Atomic Scientists, can’t even get the facts right regarding the US responsibility for the conflict, in the face of obvious open source facts.

Thus, they have now moved the Doomsday Clock from 100 minutes to 90 minutes.

And there is no peace movement on the scale of the 1980’s.

Please share this post with friends and family.  We need mass awareness to get these crazies to stop the march to nuclear Armageddon.

Special Addendum

90 Seconds to Midnight? A clear signal to the US leadership that there will be no survivors in any nuclear exchange between the US and Russia SCOTT RITTER JAN 24, 2023       The Russian guided missile frigate, the Admiral Gorshkov, is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, ostensibly heading toward the east coast of the United States, part of a planned journey which began on 4 January 2023 and is expected to transit the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea. The Admiral Gorshkov is outfitted with 16 vertical launch tubes, each of which, in theory, could be armed with nuclear-capable Zircon hypersonic missiles capable of covering 1,000 kilometers in less than 10 minutes. To put it bluntly, soon Russia will be in a position where a single ship could, in a matter of minutes, fire 16 nuclear armed hypersonic missiles at the United States which not only cannot be intercepted by anything in the US arsenal, but also would impact their respective targets before any meaningful evacuation could be conducted. It is, literally, a decapitation weapon. Current Russian nuclear doctrine does not allow for a nuclear first strike; indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that Russia would not be the first nation to use nuclear weapons in any future nuclear conflict. But he also emphasized that Russia would not be the second, either, meaning that Russia would release its nuclear arsenal without waiting for any US first strike to impact Russian soil. The Admiral Gorshkov is sending a clear signal to the US leadership that there will be no survivors in any nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. Amid this muscle flexing, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a disarmament advocacy group founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, and which currently maintains what is known as the “Doomsday Clock” that reflects the risk of nuclear conflict, decided to move the hands of the clock ten seconds forward from the current 100 seconds to midnight. In a statement announcing this decision, “A time of unprecedented danger: It is 90 seconds to midnight,” the board declared the following: “The war in Ukraine may enter a second horrifying year, with both sides convinced they can win. Ukraine’s sovereignty and broader European security arrangements that have largely held since the end of World War II are at stake. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks. “And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.” The ignorance of this statement is manifest. What the Board calls “Russia’s war on Ukraine” ignores the fact-based historical truth that the Ukraine conflict was, and is, solely the byproduct of a concerted plan by the United States and NATO to use Ukraine as a foil to generate conflict designed to bring down the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin. This plan has been in place since at least 2008, when the former US Ambassador to Russia (and current Director of the CIA), William Burns, warned that any effort by NATO to bring Ukraine into its ranks would precipitate an eventual Russian military intervention. Despite this stark warning, NATO extended an invitation to Ukraine in November 2008, clearly initiating a known cause-effect relationship that defined NATO’s policy toward Russia as being one which sought a proxy conflict using Ukraine as a stand-in for NATO. This policy as furthered by the US, EU and NATO all acting in concert to precipitate a coup in Ukraine in February 2014 designed to oust the constitutionally elected president, Victor Yanukovych, and replace him with a new, ultra-nationalist government dominated by adherents of the odious ideology of Stepan Bandera. The coup succeeded, and in April the new Ukrainian government declared war on the ethnic Russian population of the Donbas. This action triggered the Russian annexation of Crimea and the provision of military support by Russia to the Donbas, triggering the very military intervention William Burns had warned about six years prior. Ukraine and its NATO allies then sued for peace, initiating negotiations that led to the adoption of the Minsk Agreement, which put in place a ceasefire in exchange for guarantees regarding Ukrainian sovereignty over the Donbas as well as relative autonomy for the ethnic Russians of the Donbas, protecting their language, religion, culture, and traditions. The Minsk Accords floundered for eight years, with Ukraine failing to implement the required constitutional changes necessary to secure the rights of the ethnic Russians of the Donbas. The reasons for this delay are today well known, thanks to the public confessions of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and former French President Francois Hollande, all three signatories to the accords. These three national leaders have acknowledged that the Minsk Accords were simply a sham designed by Ukraine to buy time to build a NATO proxy military capable of reclaiming both the Donbas and Crimea.    Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was not an unprovoked act of aggression, but rather a legitimate exercise of its right, together with the newly independent republics of Lugansk and Donetsk, of preemptive collective self-defense in the face of the imminent threat of aggression by Ukraine’s newly trained army which was, by design, little more than a NATO proxy. The fact that the esteemed members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists - which includes among its ranks ten Nobel laureates - seem ignorant of this history, colors their ability to comprehend the true nature of the threat facing the world today, and from whence that threat comes. The United States, having deliberately provoked a pre-meditated conflict with Russia, is now trying to implement a two-tracked policy designed to trigger a Maidan-like moment in Moscow (named after Maidan Square, in Kiev, where US-backed neo-Nazi’s staged a violent coup against former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych) where the Russian population would rise up against the government of President Vadimir Putin, overthrowing him and installing a pro-western leader who would return Russia to the colonial-like existence of the 1990’s, when Boris Yeltsin allowed the collective west to rape Russia economically and dominate Russia politically. The two-tracks of this policy involve the imposition of economic sanctions linked to Russia’s decision to militarily intervene in Ukraine, and the prosecution of a proxy conflict in Ukraine designed to bleed Russia white. The goal of this policy is to engender massive unrest among a demoralized Russian population which would in turn rise and remove President Putin from power. The insanity of such a plan is incomprehensible. Imagine for a moment that Russia embarked on a plan of action designed to strip away Mexico from the US sphere of influence and, in doing so, promulgated a conflict the goal of which was to have Mexico re-take by force the territory encompassing the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The idea that the United States would sit idly in the face of such a threat is ludicrous. So, too, is any concept that Russia should do the same. A quick history lesson for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: It was the US, not Russia, that withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile and Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaties. It is the US, not Russia, that has frozen talks on the extension of the New Strategic Arms Treaty. It is the US, not Russia, that has recently promulgated a nuclear posture policy which allows for the preemptive use of nuclear weapons in a non-nuclear scenario. It is the US, not Russia, that has deployed a low-yield (i.e., “usable) nuclear warhead (the W-76-2) on Trident submarine launched ballistic missiles, and conducted war games where the Secretary of Defense has practiced the communications procedures necessary to launch this weapon where Russia was the named target of the missile. It is the US, not Russia, that is building a Ukrainian proxy army designed by intent to be able to capture territory Russia claims as its own (the four former Ukrainian provinces annexed by Russia in September 2022, and Crimea), knowing full well that one of the triggers for release of Russian nuclear weapons is any conventional military force that threatens the existential survival of Russia. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to know these underlying facts, and not to see them as truth. Which means they are complicit in the nuclear terror being perpetrated by the United States, and indifferent to the consequences thereof. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is therefore fundamentally wrong in its assessment of it being 90 seconds until midnight. The truth is the world is one second to midnight, and the clock can strike at any time, something the presence of the Admiral Gorshkov off the coast of the United States proves only too well. Scott Ritter will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Episode 40 of Ask the Inspector. Share Upgrade to paid Donate SOURCE: 90 Seconds to Midnight? – Scott Ritter Extra