ESSENTIAL

MIKE KRUPA—In the statement quoted above, Robert F. Kennedy went on to state: “Our objective is clear. It is to facilitate the reconciliation of Eastern and Western Europe in association with the United States. This is the only sure guarantee against nuclear war whether by design or by accident. It is also the surest means of fostering our common prosperity.” These are words that in no way have lost their relevance and there is no better place to make the case for rescuing civilization from the apocalypse of nuclear war than Warsaw, which still bears the scars of total annihilation resulting from a politics of genocide, terror, subordination, hubris, and totalitarian ideology.

VIJAY PRASHAD—The issue of corruption hangs over Niger, a country with one of the world’s most lucrative uranium deposits. The “corruption” that is talked about in Niger is not about petty bribes by government officials, but about an entire structure—developed during French colonial rule—that prevents Niger from establishing sovereignty over its raw materials and over its development.

MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY—The SAC study includes chilling details. …  the authors developed a plan for the “systematic destruction” of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted “population” in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw. The SAC document includes lists of more than 1100 airfields in the Soviet bloc, with a priority number assigned to each base. A second list was of urban-industrial areas identified for “systematic destruction.”  SAC listed over 1200 cities in the Soviet bloc, from East Germany to China, also with priorities established.  Moscow and Leningrad were priority one and two respectively.  Moscow included 179 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) while Leningrad had 145, including “population” targets.  … According to the study, SAC would have targeted Air Power targets with bombs ranging from 1.7 to 9 megatons. 

M.K. BHADRAKUMAR—However, a historically contentious detail still remains without definitive conclusion — that the US had toyed with the idea of using atomic weapons against North Korea (and possibly China as well) with a view to shift the overall military balance in its favour and force them to the negotiating table. Indeed, both President Truman and his successor Dwight Eisenhower continued to posit that such an option was on the table, as it emerged by the end of the summer of 1950 already that the good guys would lose the war. Of course, in the event, an atomic attack by the US never materialised despite the fact that the Soviet atomic capabilities were still extremely limited compared to American ones, Washington’s nuclear monopoly was largely intact, and the US remained the only nation capable of delivering an atomic bomb to a distant target.

PATRICK LAWRENCE—“The story of the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling scheme, which netted tens of millions of dollars from Ukraine, China, Russia and beyond, is scandal enough,” Devine writes. “But the coverup — from Big Tech’s censorship of the Post’sreporting from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, and CIA lies that it was Russian disinformation, to the burying of this FD–1023 — is bigger than Watergate.”