“Israel” has dropped 65,000 tons of explosives and missiles on Gaza in three months, which outweighs and is more powerful than three nuclear bombs that the US dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, a report by Gaza’s Government Media Office revealed.
In more detail, the report said that the “occupation aircraft dropped over 45,000 missiles and giant bombs, some of them weighing two thousand pounds of explosives, during the comprehensive genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, deliberately targeting entire residential areas.”
The deliberate targeting of civilians is further proven by the occupation’s use of “dumb bombs”; i.e. imprecise and unguided bombs.
Moreover, the occupation used at least nine types of internationally prohibited missiles in the Strip, including the repeated use of white phosphorus which has been intensely criticized and condemned.
‘Israel’ crumbles in Gaza at the hands of the Resistance
Just this morning, the Resistance targeted IOF vehicles and soldier gatherings in Gaza.
Al Mayadeen‘s correspondent in Gaza reported that the Resistance engaged in intense confrontations with the occupation forces, who are attempting to advance on multiple fronts in the Gaza Strip, particularly in the central and southern regions, with confirmed reports of explosions sounding in various areas of the central governorate of the Gaza Strip.
The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas movement, has confirmed the destruction of an Israeli Merkava tank east of al-Maghazi in the central Gaza Strip. Additionally, the Resistance fighters successfully detonated an explosive device targeting Israeli occupation forces stationed in a house north of the Nuseirat camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip.
Similarly, al-Qassam targeted a gathering of occupation vehicles and soldiers in al-Bureij refugee camp in the center of the Gaza Strip with heavy-caliber mortar shells. They also successfully detonated an anti-personnel device within an Israeli force stationed inside a building in the al-Mughraqa area in the center of the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, they confirmed the destruction of the forces assembled in the same area with mortar shells, according to the military media of the al-Qassam Brigades.
Related Videos
Evening | Has the region entered a new phase of confrontation? | 01-04-2024
The first response from Hamas to Israel in the Saleh Al-Arouri operation, Iran’s response, and the secret of Plan 707
The surprises of the Radwan forces are greater than a strike and less than a war.. A journalist reveals: The thunderbolt in the Mediterranean
While Israel has dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on Gaza – and mulls over the prospect of deploying an actual one – normalized Arab regimes are quietly protecting their commitment to support Tel Aviv over Tehran.
“The world cannot see another Hiroshima. If the world sees 100,000 people dead, that means you are in a war with the rest of the world.”
So spoke Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) in a first-ever English-language interview with Fox News, as recently as September, 2023.
Yet in what can only be described as the “another Hiroshima,” the Gaza Strip is now the target of a genocidal onslaught that the Saudi royal explicitly stated should be avoided for world peace.
Normalization still on the Saudi table
For over a month now, Israel’s aggression has resulted in the deaths and injuries of more than 40,000 people in the densely populated enclave. In fact, the US-backed occupation army has dropped over 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since 7 October, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs.
In a press release issued by Euro-Med Monitor on 2 November, the Geneva-based NGO said: “This means that the destructive power of the explosives dropped on Gaza exceeds that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”
Despite this, MbS has not backtracked from his controversial statement about Riyadh’s increasingly close ties to Israel’s most right-wing government: “Every day we get closer.” This was most recently confirmed by Saudi Minister of Investment Khalid bin Abdulaziz al-Falih, who said, “This matter [normalization] was on the table, and it is still on the table.”
It is important to note, however, that the MbS interview was aired just two weeks before the 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood operation by the Palestinian resistance. Also interesting is that the crown prince’s statement wasn’t directed at Israel; it was in response to a question about the dangers of Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb.
What becomes clear is that not only Saudi Arabia, but also the five other Arab states – Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco – that already have peace treaties with Tel Aviv have shown no signs of reconsidering these agreements, even in the face of mounting public pressure against Israel’s ongoing massacres in Gaza. Although reports suggest that some lawmakers in Bahrain are calling for a reversal of Manama’s normalization agreement, amid suspended economic ties and the recalling of its ambassador from Tel Aviv.
Arab countries that have pursued “peace treaties” with the occupation state have long marketed these agreements to their people as pathways to security, prosperity, and regional stability. MbS himself has touted these benefits when he told Fox News that a potential Saudi-Israeli deal brokered by the Biden administration would be a historic milestone, potentially the largest since the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Resistance delaying Riyadh’s moves
US President Joe Biden, the official protector of Israeli aggression, believes that the Hamas-led operation was an attempt to disrupt his negotiations with Saudi Arabia about normalization. His Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been even more direct in his assessment, stating that one motive behind the Hamas attack was to hinder efforts to bring Saudi Arabia and Israel closer, “along with other countries that are not interested in it,” likely referring to key resistance supporter Iran.
Though there hasn’t been an official Saudi position from either MbS or his foreign ministry, carefully leaked reports by “informed sources” and a “source in the Saudi government” were published by Reuters on 13 October and then by AFP the following day, suggesting that Saudi Arabia had decided to freeze or suspend normalization talks and had communicated this to US officials.
Publicly, Israel seemed unfazed by this implicit threat. As for Saudi Arabia, following its initial call for immediate de-escalation and civilian protection, it continues to emphasize its condemnation of civilian targeting. The Saudis use careful phrasing to placate Washington, which demands that its regional allies condemn the killing of Israeli “civilians” despite evidence of direct Israeli military responsibility for many of those deaths.
Because Saudi Arabia hasn’t yet entered into a normalization agreement with Israel, this theoretically frees it from any diplomatic obligations with Tel Aviv. However, what raises eyebrows is Riyadh’s clear hesitation to leverage its significant political and oil influence to pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza. If anything, the Saudis dilly-dallied until 30 October to announce an “emergency” Arab summit scheduled for 11 November in Riyadh.
This inaction may suggest that the path of normalization with Israel has progressed further than we’re aware, considering that in September, Saudi Arabia hosted Israeli Tourism Minister Haim Katz and Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, the latter even broadcasting himself performing the Jewish morning prayer and celebrating Sukkot in Riyadh just days before Al-Aqsa Flood unfolded.
Arab ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ peace with Israel
The UAE, which helped spearhead the Arab normalization drive, has been far more vocal in its support for Israel.Reem al-Hashemi, the Emirati minister of state for international cooperation, delivered a stinging speech at the UN Security Council in New York, in which she condemned the “barbaric and heinous attacks” launched by Hamas.
Hashemi called for the immediate and unconditional release of “hostages” and an end to the ongoing bloodshed, while also criticizing “Israel’s policy of collective punishment toward the Gaza Strip.”
Alongside its neighbor Bahrain, the UAE has maintained two peace agreements with Israel since the September 2020 signing of the Abraham Accords. The status of the Israeli embassy in Abu Dhabi remains unchanged, and the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not even bothered to summon the Israeli ambassador for a perfunctory dressing down, which is the most minimal form of diplomatic censure expected – especially given the expanding bombing of Gaza.
Egypt holds the distinction of being the first Arab country to openly normalize relations with Israel in 1978, a peace brokered by the Americans. In the years following, Washington has relentlessly taken the global lead in advancing normalization with Tel Aviv, succeeding in the signing of the 1994 Wadi Araba Agreement with Jordan, and then in 1993 with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
However, since the 2020 Trump administration-sponsored Abraham Accords between Israel and Morocco, the UAE, Sudan, and Bahrain, questions persist about the motivation behind normalization for Arab states that are neither immediate neighbors to Palestine nor directly involved in the conflict. Particularly vexing for detractors is the trend among some Arab regimes to formalize peace deals with Israel without connecting this concession to demands for Palestinian rights.
Opposing another Nakba
The peace talks with Palestinians, the principal party in conflict with Israel, have been at a standstill since April 2014 due to various factors, including the suffocating Gaza siege and the gradual expansion of settlements in the West Bank, rendering the “two-state solution” dead for all practical purposes.
In Jordan, where Palestinians make up a slight majority of the population, public anger over Gaza has been palpable. Authorities in Amman initially coordinated with their counterparts in Cairo, both strongly rejecting Israeli proposals to displace Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan and from Gaza to Egypt.
Under significant domestic fire, Amman later took the significant step of recalling its ambassador from Tel Aviv and refusing to welcome back the Israeli ambassador who had left the kingdom. Jordan is faced with a heightened sense of danger: Israel’s Gaza offensive coincides with a sharp spike in Israeli army and settler attacks on West Bank Palestinians, which fuels Amman’s long-standing fears that Israel aims to ethically cleanse and annex the West Bank.
Jordanian Prime Minister Bisher Khasawneh has gone so far as to explicitly state that any attempt to displace Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza will be viewed as a declaration of war.
The Kingdom of Morocco – which, unlike other Arab states, “resumed” pre-existing relations with Israel in 2020 – has issued statements condemning the Gaza bombings and criticizing western inaction, but has otherwise taken no concrete actions. This is despite King Mohammed VI’s role as the head of the “Al-Quds Committee,” established in 1975 by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and headquartered in Rabat.
Normalizing genocide, but facing resistance
As the “emergency” Arab summit convenes in Riyadh today, it remains to be seen whether countries like Saudi Arabia, along with other Arab states and those engaging with the genocidal government in Israel, will attempt to address their political and public failures during the month-long war against Gaza.
This situation has given rise to an unsettling reality in which the “other Hiroshima” that MbS once feared – from, ironically, Iran – has instead been threatened by Israel in Gaza when Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested the possibility of nuclear strikes.
What is clear at this stage is that those Arab states that have normalized with Tel Avivl show no inclination to reverse these agreements. Their pacts, after all, were not peace treaties ending a state of war that never existed with Israel; they are alliance agreements encompassing various facets of diplomacy, military cooperation, security, finance, and trade.
If anything, following the 7 October events, the normalization Arab regimes look to be banking on their Israeli alliance to prevail over their regional adversaries in the Axis of Resistance. They perceive the events in Gaza, much like the US and Israelis, as a threat to Israel and, by extension, their own regional interests.
Their goal is to transform this threat into an opportunity to eliminate resistance in Gaza – much as they redirected the 2011 Arab uprisings to cripple their Resistance Axis foes. If their bet on Tel Aviv succeeds, they can tuck away the thorny Palestinian issue and pave the way for a new regional order with Israel at its core.
This vision has been articulated by MbS and other officials supporting normalization, culminating in discussions at the G20 summit in New Delhi last September when a project was announced to enhance transportation and communication between India and Europe via the Persian Gulf states, with Israel as a central hub.
The US-Israeli alliance, along with the Arab normalization states, is actively pursuing this regional rearrangement while Gaza burns. However, their progress is hindered by the fact that Israel faces significant challenges in defeating the resistance in Gaza, and potentially, the entire Axix of Resistance in West Asia.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
This article was first published on March 9, 2022, revised and expanded on October 5, 2022, minor revisions on May 25, 2023.
Introduction
At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable. All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped.
Let us also recall the unspoken history of America’s doctrine pertaining to the conduct of nuclear war.
Barely six weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,the U.S. War Department released a Secret Plan on September 15, 1945 to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union with 204 atomic bombs.
The September 1945 Plan was to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map” at a time when the US and the USSR were allies. Confirmed by declassified documents, Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as a “Dress Rehearsal” (see historical details and analysis below).
Putin’s February 2022 Statement
Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to US threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the US would not be resorting to “A first strike” nuclear attack against an enemy of America:
“Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.” (Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added)
In July 2021, the Biden administration launched its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) which was formally announced in October 2022.
The 2022 NPR includes what is described as a “nuclear declaratory policy of the United States”.
The 2022 NPR largely confirms the nuclear options developed by the Obama and Bush administrations predicated on the notion of preemptive nuclear war raised in President Putin’s speech.
The underlying US nuclear doctrine consists in portraying nuclear weapons as a means of “self defense” rather than as a “weapon of mass destruction”.
The NPR does not rule out the possibility of a “first strike” nuclear attack against Russia. According to theUS Congress Research Service:
“The NPR [2022] suggests that the United States may use nuclear weapons in circumstances that do not involve potential adversaries’ potential use of nuclear weapons. …The review also asserts that an ‘effective nuclear deterrent is foundational to broader U.S. defense strategy,’ but does not elaborate. (…)”
“Should deterrence fail, ‘the United States would seek to end any conflict at the lowest level of damage possible on the best achievable terms’— language implying that the United States might use nuclear weapons for purposes other than deterrence.” (CRS Reports. US Congress 2022 NPR, emphasis added)
The Privatization of Nuclear War
It should be understood, that there are powerful financial interests behind the NPR which are tied into the $1.3 trillion nuclear weapons program initiated under President Obama.
Although the Ukraine conflict has so-far been limited to conventional weapons coupled with “economic warfare”, the use of a large array of sophisticated WMDs including nuclear weapons is on the drawing board of the Pentagon.
Dangerous narrative: The NPR proposes “increased integration of conventional and nuclear planning”, which consists in categorizing tactical nuclear weapons (e.g. B61-11 and 12) as conventional weapons, to be used on a preemptive basis in the conventional war theater (as a means of self defense)
According to the Federation of American Scientists, the total number of nuclear warheads Worldwide is of the order of 13,000. Russia and the United States “each have around 4,000 warheads in their military stockpiles”.
The Dangers of Nuclear War are Real. Profit Driven. Two Trillion Dollars
Under Joe Biden, public funds allocated to nuclear weapons are slated to increase to 2 trillion by 2030 allegedly as a means to safeguarding peace and national security at taxpayers expense. (How many schools and hospitals could you finance with 2 trillion dollars?):
The United States maintains an arsenal of about 1,700 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and at strategic bomber bases. There are an additional estimated 100 non-strategic, or tactical, nuclear weapons at bomber bases in five European countries and about 2,000 nuclear warheads in storage. [see our analysis of B61-11 and B61-12 below]
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in May 2021 that the United States will spend a total of $634 billion over the next 10 years to sustain and modernize its nuclear arsenal. (Arms Control)
In this article, I will focus on
The Post Cold War shift in US Nuclear Doctrine,
A brief review of the History of US-Russia Relations since World War I,
An Assessment of the history of nuclear weapons going back to the Manhattan Project initiated in 1939 with the participation of both Canada and the United Kingdom.
Most people in America do not know that the Manhattan Project in the immediate wake of bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki in August 1945, was intended to formulate a nuclear attack against the USSR, at a time when the Soviet Union and the U.S. were allies.
What I am referring to is the U.S Blueprint of September 15, 1945 according to which the US War Department planned to drop more than 200 atomic bombs on 66 cities of the Soviet Union. This is not mentioned in the history books. See:
A Note on the History of US-Russia Relations. The Forgotten War of 1918
From a historical standpoint the US and its Allies have been threatening Russia for more than 104 years starting during World War I with the deployment of US and Allied Forces against Soviet Russia on January 12, 1918, (two months following the November 7, 1917 revolution allegedly in support of Russia’s Imperial Army).
The 1918 US-UK Allied invasion of Russia is a landmark in Russian History, often mistakenly portrayed as being part of a Civil War.
It lasted for more than two years involving the deployment of more than 200,000 troops of which 11,000 were from the US, 59,000 from the UK. Japan which was an Ally of Britain and America during World War I dispatched 70,000 troops.
The US threat of nuclear war against Russia was formulated more than 76 years ago in September 1945, when the US and the Soviet Union were allies. It consisted in a “World War III Blueprint” of nuclear war against the USSR, targeting 66 cities with more than 200 atomic bombs. This diabolical project under the Manhattan Project was instrumental in triggering the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. (See analysis below).
Chronology
1918-1920: The first US and allied forces led war against Soviet Russia with more than 10 countries sending troops to fight alongside the White Imperial Russian army. This happened exactly two months after the October Revolution, on January 12, 1918, and it lasted until the early 1920s.
The Manhattan Project initiated in 1939, with the participation of the UK and Canada. Development of the Atomic Bomb.
Operation Barbarossa, June 1941. Nazi Invasion of the Soviet Union. Standard Oil of New Jersey was selling oil to Nazi Germany.
February 1945: The Yalta Conference. The meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.
“Operation Unthinkable”: A Secret attack plan against the Soviet Union formulated by Winston Churchill in the immediate wake of the Yalta conference. It was scrapped in June 1945.
April 12, 1945:The Potsdam Conference. President Harry Truman and Prime Minister Winston Churchill approve the atomic bombing of Japan.
September 15, 1945: A World War III Scenario formulated by the US War Department: A plan to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union with 204 atomic bombs, when the US and USSR were allies. The Secret plan (declassified in 1975) formulated during WWII, was released less than two weeks after the official end of WWII on September 2, 1945
1949: The Soviet Union announces the testing of its nuclear bomb.
Post Cold War Doctrine: “Preemptive Nuclear War”
The Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) of the Cold War Era no longer prevails. It was replaced at the outset of the George W. Bush Administration with the Doctrine of Preemptive Nuclear War, namely the use of nuclear weapons as a means of “self-defense” against both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states.
In early 2002, the text of George W. Bush’s Nuclear Posture Review had already been leaked, several months prior to the release of the September 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) which defined, “Preemption” as:
“the anticipatory use of force in the face of an imminent attack”.
Namely as an act of war on the grounds of self-defense
The MAD doctrine was scrapped. The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review not only redefined the use of nuclear weapons, so-called tactical nuclear weapons or bunker buster bombs (mini-nukes) could henceforth be used in the conventional war theater without the authorization of the Commander in Chief, namely the President of the United States.
Discussing “requirements for nuclear strike capabilities,” the report lists Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Syria as “among the countries that could be involved in immediate, potential, or unexpected contingencies.” …
Three of these countries (Iraq, Libya and Syria) have since then been the object of US-led wars. The 2001 NPR also confirmed continued nuclear war preparations against China and Russia.
“The Bush review also indicates that the United States should be prepared to use nuclear weapons against China, citing “the combination of China’s still developing strategic objectives and its ongoing modernization of its nuclear and non-nuclear forces.”
“Finally, although the review repeats Bush administration assertions that Russia is no longer an enemy, it says the United States must be prepared for nuclear contingencies with Russia and notes that, if “U.S. relations with Russia significantly worsen in the future, the U.S. may need to revise its nuclear force levels and posture.” Ultimately, the review concludes that nuclear conflict with Russia is “plausible” but “not expected.” [that. was back in 2002] ( Arms Control) emphasis added.
The Privatization of Nuclear War
With tensions growing in major regions of the World, a new generation of nuclear weapons technology was unfolding making nuclear warfare a very real prospect. And with very little fanfare, the US had embarked on the privatization of nuclear war under a first-strike “preemptive” doctrine. This process went into full swing in the immediate wake of the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (2001 NPR) adopted by the US Senate in 2002.
On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, commemorating when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex were in attendance.
This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima. The meeting was intended to set the stage for the development of a new generation of “smaller”, “safer” and “more usable” nuclear weapons, to be used in the “in-theater nuclear wars” of the 21st Century.”
Nuclear War against both China and Russia is contemplated
Russia is tagged as “Plausible” but “Not Expected”. That was back in 2002.
Today at the height of the Ukraine war, a Preemptive Nuclear attack against Russia is on the drawing of the Pentagon. That does not however mean that it will be implemented.
A Nuclear War Cannot be Won?
We recall Reagan’s historic statement: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used.”
Nonetheless, there are powerful voices and lobby groups within the US establishment and the Biden administration that are convinced that “a nuclear war is winnable”.
Flashback to Inter-War Period: Wall Street Finances Hitler’s Election Campaign
According to Yuri Robsov, Wall Street and the Rockefellers were funding Germany’s war machine as well as Adolf Hitler’s election campaign:
American cooperation with the German military-industrial complex was so intense and pervasive that by 1933 the key sectors of German industry and large banks such as Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Danat-Bank (Darmstädter und Nationalbank), etc. were under the control of American financial capital.
The political force that was intended to play a crucial role in Anglo-American plans was being simultaneously prepared. We are talking about the funding of the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler personally.
On January 4th, 1932, a meeting was held between British financier Montagu Norman (Governor of the Bank of England), Adolf Hitler andFranz Von Papen (who became Chancellor a few months later in May 1932) At this meeting, an agreement on the financing of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei(NSDAP or Nazi Party) was reached.
This meeting was also attended by US policy-makers and the Dulles brothers, something which their biographers do not like to mention.
A year later, on January 14th, 1933, another meeting was held between Adolf Hitler, Germany’s Financier Baron Kurt von Schroeder, Chancellor Franz von Papen and Hitler’s Economic Advisor Wilhelm Keppler took place, where Hitler’s program was fully approved.
It was here that they finally resolved the issue of the transfer of power to the Nazis, and on the 30th of January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor. The implementation of the fourth stage of the strategy thus begun.
World War II: “Operation Barbarossa”
There is ample evidence that both the US and its British ally were intent upon Nazi Germany winning the war on the Eastern Front with a view to destroying the Soviet Union:
.
“Stalin and his entourage’s growing suspicions, that the Anglo-American powers hoped the Nazi-Soviet War would last for years, were based on well-founded concerns. This desire had already been expressed in part by Harry S. Truman, future US president, hours after the Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union.
Truman, then a US Senator, said he wanted to see the Soviets and Germans “kill as many as possible” between themselves, an attitude which the New York Times later called “a firm policy”. The Times had previously published Truman’s remarks on 24 June 1941, and as a result his views would most likely not have escaped the Soviets’ attention. (Shane Quinn, Global Research, March 2022)
Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa initiated in June 1941 would have failed from the very outset had it not been for the support of Standard Oil of New Jersey (owned by the Rockefellers) which routinely delivered ample supplies of oil to the Third Reich. While Germany was able to transform coal into fuel, this synthetic production was insufficient. Moreover, Romania’s Ploesti oil resources (under Nazi control until 1944) were minimal. Nazi Germany largely depended on oil shipments from US Standard Oil.
.
Trading with the Enemy legislation (1917) officially implemented following America’s entry into World War II did not prevent Standard Oil of New Jersey from selling oil to Nazi Germany. This despite the Senate 1942 investigation of US Standard Oil.
While direct US oil shipments were curtailed, Standard Oil would sell US oil through third countries. US oil was shipped to occupied France (officially via Switzerland, and from France it was shipped to Germany: “… The shipments went through Spain, Vichy France’s colonies in the West Indies, and Switzerland.”
Without those oil shipments instrumented by Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, Nazi Germany would not have been able to implement its military agenda. Without fuel, the Third Reich’s eastern front under Operation Barbarossa would most probably not have taken place, saving millions of lives. The Western front including the military occupation of France, Belgium and The Netherlands would no doubt also have been affected.
The USSR actually won the war against Nazi Germany, with 27 million deaths, which in part resulted from the blatant violation of Trading with the Enemy by Standard Oil.
.
“Operation Unthinkable”: A World War III Scenario Formulated During World War II
.
A World War III scenario against the Soviet Union had already been envisaged in early 1945, under what was called Operation Unthinkable, to be launched prior to the official end of World War II on September 2, 1945.
.
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta in early February 1945 largely with a view to negotiating the post war occupation of Germany and Japan.
“If you thought the Cold War between East and West reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, then think again. 1945 was the year when Europe was the crucible for a Third World War.
.
The plan called for a massive Allied assault on 1 July 1945 by British, American, Polish and German – yes German – forces against the Red Army. They aimed to push them back out of Soviet-occupied East Germany and Poland, give Stalin and bloody nose, and force him to re-consider his domination of East Europe. … Eventually in June 1945 Churchill’s military advisors cautioned him against implementing the plan, but it still remained a blueprint for a Third World War. …The Americans had just successfully tested an atomic bomb, and there was now the final temptation of obliterating Soviet centres of population”
.
Churchill’s “Operation Unthinkable” against Soviet Forces in Eastern Europe (see above) was abandoned in June 1945.
During his mandate as Prime Minister (1940-45), Churchill had supported the Manhattan Project. He was a protagonist of nuclear war against the Soviet Union, which had been contemplated under the Manhattan project as early as 1942, when the US and the Soviet Union were allies against Nazi Germany.
A Blueprint for a Third World War using nuclear weapons against 66 major urban areas of the Soviet Union was officially formulated on September 15, 1945 by the US War Department (see section below).
The Potsdam Conference
Vice President Harry S. Truman was sworn in as president of the United States on April 12, 1945, after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage.
.
At the Potsdam meetings, President Truman entered into discussions (July 1945) with Stalin and Churchill: (see image right). The discussions were of a different nature to those of Yalta, specifically with regard to both Truman and Churchill who were both in favour of nuclear warfare:
.
“[British] PM [Churchill] and I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told PM [Churchill] of telegram from Jap emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time. (Truman Diary, July 17, 1945, emphasis added)
What this statement from Truman’s Diary confirms is that Japan would “fold up” and surrender to the US “before Russia comes in”. Ultimately this was the objective of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While Stalin was casually informed by Truman regarding the Manhattan Project in July 1945, sources suggest that the Soviet Union was aware of the Manhattan Project as early as 1942. Did Truman tell Stalin that the atom bomb was intended for Japan?
“We met at 11.00am. today.[ That is, Stalin, Churchill and the US president].
But I had a most important session [without Stalin?] with Lord Mountbatten and General Marshall [US joint Chiefs of Staff] before that. [This meeting was not part of the official agenda] We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley era, after Noah and his fabulous ark. Anyway, we think we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexico desert was startling – to put it mildly. Thirteen pounds of the explosive caused a crater six hundred feet deep and twelve hundred feet in diameter, knocked over a steel tower a half mile away, and knocked men down ten thousand yards away. The explosion was visible for more than two hundred miles and audible for forty miles and more.
This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th.I have told the secretary of war, Mr Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.” (Truman’s Diary, Potsdam meeting on July 18, 1945)
The discussion on the Manhattan Project does not appear in the official minutes of the meetings.
The Infamous “WW III Blueprint” to Wage a Nuclear Attack against the Soviet Union (September 15, 1945)
Barely two weeks after the official end of World War II (September 2, 1945), the US War Department issued a directive (September 15, 1945) to “Erase the Soviet Union off the Map” (66 cities with 204 atomic bombs), when the US and USSR were allies, confirmed by declassified documents. (For further details see Chossudovsky, 2017)
All major cities of the Soviet Union were included in the list of 66 “strategic” targets. The tables below categorize each city in terms of area in square miles and the corresponding number of atomic bombs required to annihilate and kill the inhabitants of selected urban areas.
Six atomic bombs were to be used to destroy each of the larger cities including Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa.
The Pentagon estimated that a total of 204 atomic bombs would be required to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”. The targets for a nuclear attack consisted of sixty-six major cities.
One single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima resulted in the immediate death of 100,000 people in the first seven seconds. Imagine what would have happened if 204 atomic bombs had been dropped on major cities of the Soviet Union as outlined in a secret U.S. plan formulated during the Second World War.
Hiroshima in the wake of the atomic bomb attack, 6 August 1945
The document outlining this diabolical military agenda had been released in September 1945, barely one month after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (6 and 9 August, 1945) and two years before the onset of the Cold War (1947).
The secret plan dated September 15, 1945 (two weeks after the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945 aboard the USS Missouri, see image below) , however, had been formulated at an earlier period, namely at the height of World War II, at a time when America and the Soviet Union were close allies.
The Manhattan project was launched in 1939, two years prior to America’s entry into World War II in December 1941. The Kremlin was fully aware of the secret Manhattan project as early as 1942.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Dress Rehearsal for Planned Nuclear Attack against the Soviet Union
Were the August 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks used by the Pentagon to evaluate the viability of a much larger attack on the Soviet Union consisting of more than 204 atomic bombs? The key documents to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union (15 September 1945) were finalized 5-6 weeks after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (6, 9 August 1945):
“On September 15, 1945 — just under two weeks after the formal surrender of Japan and the end of World War II — Norstad sent a copy of the estimate to General Leslie Groves, still the head of the Manhattan Project, and the guy who, for the short term anyway, would be in charge of producing whatever bombs the USAAF might want. As you might guess, the classification on this document was high: “TOP SECRET LIMITED,” which was about as high as it went during World War II. (Alex Wellerstein, The First Atomic Stockpile Requirements (September 1945)
The Kremlin was aware of the 1945 plan to bomb sixty-six Soviet cities.
The documents confirm that the US was involved in the “planning of genocide” against the Soviet Union.
Let’s cut to the chase. How many bombs did the USAAF request of the atomic general, when there were maybe one, maybe twobombs worth of fissile material on hand? At a minimum they wanted 123. Ideally, they’d like 466. This is just a little over a month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Of course, in true bureaucratic fashion, they provided a handy-dandy chart (Alex Wellerstein, op. cit)
Central to our understanding of the Cold War which started (officially) in 1947, Washington’s September 1945 plan to bomb 66 cities into smithereens played a key role in triggering the nuclear arms race.
The Soviet Union was threatened and developed its own atomic bomb in 1949 in response to 1942 Soviet intelligence reports on the Manhattan Project.
While the Kremlin knew about these plans to “Wipe out” the USSR, the broader public was not informed because the September 1945 documents were of course classified. They were declassified 30 years later in September 1975
Today, neither the September 1945 plan to blow up the Soviet Union nor the underlying cause of the nuclear arms race are acknowledged. The Western media has largely focussed its attention on the Cold War US-USSR confrontation. The plan to annihilate the Soviet Union dating back to World War II and the infamous Manhattan project are not mentioned.
Washington’s Cold War nuclear plans are invariably presented in response to so-called Soviet threats, when in fact it was the U.S. plan released in September 1945 (formulated at an earlier period at the height of World War II) to wipe out the Soviet which motivated Moscow to develop its nuclear weapons capabilities.
The assessment of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists mistakenly blamed and continue to blame the Soviet Union for having launched the nuclear arms race in 1949, four years after the release of the September 1945 US Secret Plan to target 66 major Soviet cities with 204 nuclear bombs:
“1949: The Soviet Union denies it, but in the fall, President Harry Truman tells the American public that the Soviets tested their first nuclear device, officially starting the arms race. “We do not advise Americans that doomsday is near and that they can expect atomic bombs to start falling on their heads a month or year from now,” the Bulletin explains. “But we think they have reason to be deeply alarmed and to be prepared for grave decisions.” (Timeline of the Doomsday Clock, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 2017)
IMPORTANT: Had the US decided NOT to develop nuclear weapons for use against the Soviet Union, the nuclear arms race would not have taken place.
Neither The Soviet Union nor the People’s Republic of China would have developed nuclear capabilities as a means of “Deterrence” agains the US which had already formulated plans to annihilate the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union lost 26 million people during World War II.
The Cold War Era
The Nuclear Arms Race was the direct result of America’s September 1945 plan to “blow up the Soviet Union”, formulated by the US War Department.
The Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb in 1949. Without the Manhattan Project and the War Department’s September 15, 1945 “World War III Blueprint”, the Arms Race would not have occurred.
The September 15, 1945 War Department set the stage for numerous plans to wage World War III against Russia and China:
The Cold War List of 1200 Targeted Cities
This initial 1945 list of sixty-six cities was updated in the course of the Cold War (1956) to include some 1200 cities in the USSR and the Soviet block countries of Eastern Europe (see declassified documents below). The bombs slated for use were more powerful in terms of explosive capacity than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Excerpt from list of 1200 Soviet cities targeted for nuclear attack in alphabetical order. National Security Archive, op. cit.
“According to the 1956 Plan, H-Bombs were to be Used Against Priority “Air Power” Targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Major Cities in the Soviet Bloc, Including East Berlin, Were High Priorities in “Systematic Destruction” for Atomic Bombings. (William Burr, U.S. Cold War Nuclear Attack Target List of 1200 Soviet Bloc Cities “From East Germany to China”, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 538, December 2015
During the Cold War, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevailed, namely that the use of nuclear weapons would result in “the destruction of both the attacker and the defender”.
In the post Cold war era, US nuclear doctrine was redefined. “Offensive” military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of “self-defense”.
Humanitarian Nuclear Warfare under Joe Biden
US-NATO led military Interventions (Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen) which have resulted in millions of civilian casualties are heralded as Humanitarian Wars, as a means to ensuring Peace.
This is also the discourse underlying US-NATO intervention in Ukraine.
“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace” said George W. Bush
“Humanitarian Nuclear Bombs”
This kind of window dressing of “humanitarian nuclear bombs” is not only embedded into Joe Biden’s foreign policy agenda, it constitutes the mainstay of US military doctrine, namely the so-called Nuclear Posture Review, not to mention the 1.2 trillion nuclear weapons program initiated during the Obama administration.
The B61 Mini-nukes Deployed in Western Europe
The latest B61-12 “mini nuke” is slated to be deployed in Western Europe, aimed at Russia and the Middle East (replacing the existing of B61 nuclear bombs).
B-61-12 is portrayed as a “more usable” “low yield” “humanitarian bomb” “‘harmless to civilians”. That’s the ideology. The reality is “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD).
The B61-12 has a maximum yield of 50 kilotons which is more than three times that of a Hiroshima bomb (15 kilotons) which resulted in excess of 100,000 deaths in matter of minutes.
If a preemptive attack using a so-called mini nuke were to succeed, targeted against Russia or Iran, this could potentially lead humanity into a WW III scenario. Of course these details are not highlighted in mainstream media reports.
F-15E Eagle Strike Eagle Fighter for the Delivery of the B-61-12
Low Yield Nukes: Humanitarian Warfare Goes Live
And when the characteristics of this “harmless” low yield nuclear bomb are inserted into the military manuals, “humanitarian warfare” goes live: “It’s low yield and safe for civilians, let’s use it” [paraphrase].
The US arsenal of B61 nuclear bombs directed against the Middle East are currently located in the military bases of 5 non-nuclear states (Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey). The command structure pertaining to the B61-12 is yet to be confirmed. The situation with regard to Turkey’s Incirlik base is unclear.
Upholding WMDs as Instruments of Peace is a Dangerous Gimmick
Throughout History, “Mistakes” have Played a Key Role
We are at a Dangerous Crossroads. There is no Real Anti-war Movement in Sight.
Why? Because War is Good for Business!
And the powers of Big Money which are behind US-NATO led wars control both the anti-war movement as well as the media coverage of US led wars. That’s nothing new. It goes back to the so-called Soviet-Afghan War (1979-) which was spearheaded by US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Through their “philanthropic” foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Soros et al) the financial elites have over the years channelled millions of dollars into financing so-called “progressive movements” including the World Social Forum (WSF)
It’s Called “Manufactured Dissent”: Big Money is also behind numerous coups d’état and color revolutions.
Meanwhile, important sectors of the Left including committed anti-war activists have endorsed the Covid mandates without verifying or acknowledging the facts and the history of the so-called pandemic.
It should be understood that the lockdown policies as well as the Covid-19 “Killer Vaccine” are an integral part of the financial elite’s “broader arsenal”. They are instruments of submission and tyranny.
The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset is an integral part of the World War III scenario which consists in establishing through military and non military means an imperial system of “global governance”.
The same powerful financial interests (Rockefeller, Rothschild, BlackRock, Vanguard, et al) which are supportive of the US-NATO military agenda are firmly behind the “Covid Pandemic Op”.
***
The Historic Battle for Peace and Democracy. A Third World War Spells the End of Humanity?
Relentless War Propaganda and Media Disinformation Is the Driving Force. It Must be Confronted.
Is “Peaceful Coexistence” and Diplomacy between Russia and the U.S. an Option?
“War is Good for Business”: Corrupt Governments which Uphold the Interests of Big Money Must be Challenged
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3 Year: 2012 Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
The original source of this article is Global Research
After NATO was formed and after deploying part of its nuclear arsenal in Europe, the US became the guarantor of the security of its NATO allies, and the “US nuclear umbrella” was born.
In 1945, Pax Americana emerged as the dominant global power, with Washington aiming to assert its authority on the world stage.
To showcase its strength and deter potential challengers, the United States made a bold statement by choosing Hiroshima, Japan, as a symbolic demonstration of its military might.
The devastating atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 marked the beginning of an era where defying American would come with severe consequences. It was a defining moment that illustrated the immense power and resolve of the United States in shaping the post-war world order.
It was the day when the first and, thus far, the only nuclear bomb was deployed, causing unimaginable devastation and resulting in the loss of nearly 70,000 innocent Japanese lives.
On August 9, 1945, Nagasaki, Japan, became the second target of a devastating nuclear attack. The United States, seeking to assert its power and send a clear message to the world, unleashed another destructive force, resulting in widespread destruction and the loss of approximately 40,000 lives.
The massive mushroom cloud that enveloped Nagasaki served as a chilling symbol of the destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons and the immense human suffering they cause.
On May 19, 2023, 78 years later, Japan hosted a meeting for the G7 leaders and chose Hiroshima as the summit location. US President Joe Biden arrived at the meeting destination, becoming the first American to land his feet on the radiated city.
During the G7 summit in Hiroshima, the Japanese Prime Minister aimed to initiate discussions on nuclear arms and encourage leaders to commit to a framework regarding the use of nuclear weapons. However, the final statement issued by the group primarily focused on condemning China’s nuclear weapons, which was no surprise to observers.
The Western world applauded the resolute declaration, perceiving it as a deterrence against Beijing’s nuclear “threat to humanity,” despite the fact that China has not been involved in any military conflicts beyond its own borders, while the countries endorsing the statement have themselves waged numerous wars in the past decades.
From left, President of the European Council Charles Michel, Italy’s Premier Giorgia Meloni, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, U.S. President Joe Biden, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visit the Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima Island in Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima prefecture, western Japan, Friday, May 19, 2023 (Kenny Holston/Pool Photo via AP)
It indeed appears as a tragicomedy or a surreal theatrical production. The image of the American nuclear bomber alongside the Japanese victims, accompanied by former colonizers and the colonized, serves as a warning to the world about the perceived “global threats” posed by China and Russia’s military capabilities. The irony and contradictions within this scenario are hard to overlook.
The observation of this theatrical display paves the way to the realization that the statements made by the leaders hold some truth, despite the ironic and contradictory nature of the situation. While it may be unsettling, there are elements of reality within their assertions.
In the intricate web of global affairs, a world dominated by Washington and its proxy nations finds itself facing a profound threat.
The very foundations of this order, woven through institutions tainted by notions of genocide, such as the IMF and the World Bank, and bolstered by the military might of NATO and its war coalition, stand on shaky ground.
Emerging on the horizon are the pillars of multipolarity, heralding an alternative world order.
The collective uprising of the Global South and the rise of BRICS, the SCO, and the Eurasian Economic Forum (among others), as well as Beijing’s dissemination of a new economic and political paradigm, present a formidable challenge to the established norms.
The tides of change are shifting, and the winds of multipolarity are blowing, ushering in a new era where power is shared and a different vision of global governance takes shape.
Pax Americana: Sole owner of war and peace
Since the advent of the nuclear era in 1945, the nature of the conflict between the United States and its perceived adversaries has undergone significant transformations.
In the realm of Pax Americana, a grand tapestry of power, profits, and resources was woven through a blood-soaked ideology and unabashed hubris.
This hegemonic force, fueled by military might, gave birth to a multidimensional industry that reaped fortunes for the colossal corporations of the era. Within the fabric of this empire, social structures were shaped and molded, with the United States and its satellites standing as both beneficiaries and captives of this all-encompassing enterprise.
The prosperous post-World War II economy in the United States, fueled in part by the government’s sales of arms to the fighting parties, spurred the emergence of a new way of life in the country. This economic success became a driving force behind the nation’s quest for hegemonic expansion, aiming to secure vital resources and trade routes essential for any superpower seeking unipolar dominance.
Indeed, the belief during that time was that a wealthier society could attain military superiority over adversaries with lesser industrial wealth. This assumption, however, underwent a significant shift with the introduction of atomic weapons into the equation of warfare.
The destructive power and indiscriminate nature of nuclear weapons rendered the traditional metrics of military superiority based on economic wealth and industrial capabilities less relevant. The presence of atomic weapons introduced a new level of danger and mutually assured destruction, altering the dynamics of military strategy and emphasizing the importance of nuclear deterrence.
Globalization within this context was promoted by the United States – just like the notion of democracy – for decades as the highest form of the growing interconnections of world nations.
Of course, globalization is indeed a natural outcome of the progress and scientific breakthroughs that took place, with regard to communications, transportation means, and the advancement of industrialization systems.
However, while the United States pushed for adopting the concept on a global scale under the pretext of connecting countries economically and culturally, it aimed to establish market and trade integration only as a means to further extend its hegemony and economic control. (Take as an example Washington’sn real intentions from inviting China to join the WTO for long years.)
Indeed, following World War II, there were policymakers in Washington who advocated for the growth of the US nuclear arsenal. Figures like Henry Kissinger and Walt Rostow believed that a robust nuclear arsenal would be essential in maintaining American dominance and furthering its expansion in a world still reeling from the war’s aftermath.
The proponents of this approach argued that possessing large and advanced nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent factor against potential adversaries and solidify American superiority. They believed that the possession of such weapons would not only ensure national security but also provide leverage in shaping global affairs according to US interests.
This perspective was rooted in the belief that nuclear weapons represented a significant shift in the balance of power, offering a unique form of military might that could secure dominance in international relations. As a result, the United States pursued the development and deployment of nuclear weapons as a key component of its defense strategy during this period.
A Polaris missile was fired from the nuclear submarine, USS George Washington, at Cape Canaveral, Fla. on July 20, 1960, in the first test firing of a missile from underwater (AP)
As such, the United States’ nuclear doctrine was born: it is not only about deterring potential rivals but also a means to establish and enforce total hegemony over global countries, economies, and markets. This transformation positioned the US as the sole decider of war and peace.
The nuclear race that ensued can be attributed mostly to the example set by the United States. As the first country to develop and use atomic weapons, the US demonstrated the immense destructive power and geopolitical leverage that these weapons could provide. Pax Americana here prompted other nations to acquire their own nuclear arsenals as a means of deterrence and self-defense.
The pursuit of nuclear weapons or hosting them from allied countries has then become a means for certain anti-hegemonic states to protect their sovereignty and territorial integrity against perceived threats from US-led Western campaigns.
The history of military interventions and regime changes carried out by Western powers, often in pursuit of strategic interests or access to resources, has created a sense of vulnerability and the need for self-defense among these states.
The development and proliferation of nuclear weapons created a new paradigm in warfare, where the destructive power of these weapons exceeded the capacity of any state to withstand their impact. This realization led to a mutually assured destruction (MAD) scenario, in which engaging in a full-scale nuclear war would result in catastrophic consequences for all parties involved, including Americans themselves.
Nuclear ‘madman’
The post-World War II era witnessed the emergence of a new paradigm in which the manufacturing of public anxiety and the creation of existential enemies played a significant role in shaping nuclear power dynamics. This approach was fueled by the desire to justify and perpetuate a massive war machine, primarily controlled by a few powerful military-industrial complexes.
By crafting and amplifying fear, political leaders and those with vested interests in the military-industrial complex sought to maintain public support for substantial defense expenditures and the expansion of military capabilities. Portraying external threats as existential enemies helped in justifying the continued development and deployment of advanced weaponry, including nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, the United States government engaged in extensive psychological operations (psyops) aimed at influencing public opinion and shaping perceptions, both domestically and internationally. These psyops were part of a broader strategy to counter the influence of the Soviet Union and its allies.
A famous example of such psyops was the Committee on Present Danger. The committee, formed in the 1950s and comprising prominent figures from the government, military, and academia, was tasked with spreading terror among the masses of communism and Soviet expansionism.
The propaganda group employed various strategies, including media campaigns and public speeches, to generate fear and rally support for US policies and military spending.
By creating a horrified public, in which the government appears as the sole protector, the state was in full control.
But add nuclear weapons to the equation, the matters become more serious.
Throughout history, there have been instances where American decision-makers and policy planners employed psychological tactics to enhance nuclear intimidation.
One notable example is the concept of “nuclear brinkmanship”, which involves deliberately escalating tensions and pushing the limits of nuclear confrontation to gain leverage in negotiations or intimidate opponents. This approach was famously employed during the Cold War, particularly by presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
In October 1969, during the Vietnam War, Washington devised a secret plan, dubbed Operation Duck Hook, during which the US would appear to threaten Hanoi with an imminent nuclear attack.
The cover page to the Navy’s Duck Hook plan for mining Haiphong Harbor, developed in July 1969 at the request of President Nixon and national security adviser Kissinger (US National Security Archive, The George Washington University)
According to Harry Robbins “Bob” Haldeman, White House Chief of Staff in Nixon’s administration, the basis of the tactic was to make the US leader appear “psychologically unstable,” unpredictable, and with no limits to the measures he would take.
Haldeman revealed, quoting Nixon as telling him, “They’ll believe any threat of force that Nixon makes because it’s Nixon. I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.”
And while this was not the first time, nor the last time, that a country resorted to the “madman” approach to deter its opponents, the line separating genuine threats from bluffs remained very thin.
In 1959, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) introduced a war plan titled Atomic Weapons Requirements Study. The document was later updated in 1961 following the Berlin Crisis.
However, one significant aspect was that one of the potential targets was China, although it would not test its first nuclear weapon until 1964 nor it was in direct conflict with the US. According to the plan, 49 to 78 Chinese cities would be hit with US atomic bombs, with prospected fatalities of around 67 million and 107 million.
But plans and proposals to launch a “preventive” or “preemptive” nuclear strike against the USSR were rapidly toned down when the Soviets developed a serious retaliatory capability, including the most powerful atomic bomb produced and tested: “Tsar Bomba”.
Russia’s nuclear parity with the US made Nixon believe that the nuclear umbrella was no longer sustainable.
The concept of “massive retaliation” adopted by the United States to justify its nuclear buildup became afterward an outdated strategy and was replaced by the concept of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD); a necessary doctrine to protect countries from America’s war machines.
The intensification of hostilities between Russia and the United States set the stage for a high-stakes, zero-sum game in any potential armed conflict, compelling the United States to reevaluate its approach and adopt a more cautious stance. This pivotal shift in strategy ultimately laid the foundation for the Cold War.
Two-way annihilation
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, its nuclear infrastructure was dissolved, while its nuclear warheads were removed from the country and deployed in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.
One of the American nuclear scientists that participated in joint Soviet-US efforts to end Moscow’s nuclear power was Professor Siegfried Hecker, who then served as a director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
According to Hecker, when the USSR collapsed, the nature of the nuclear threat to the US changed: it was not one of mutual annihilation anymore.
The United States later made Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine sign the Lisbon Protocol to the START agreement, committing the newly independent states to transfer the former Soviet nuclear arsenals to Russia and to join the NPT as nonnuclear-weapons states.
Meanwhile, the US funded the denuclearization process in the three countries bordering Russia with billions of dollars and ended the nuclear programs, destroying over 6,800 nuclear warheads along the way.
But the American PR campaign to turn the world into a “safer place” was later exposed.
In the subsequent years, disregarding numerous warnings from influential global figures and Moscow, the US-led NATO persisted in its expansion toward the Russian borders, violating a previous agreement between the former Soviet Union and Washington that stipulated no further countries would join the military coalition.
Last March, just over a year following the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Moscow will be deploying some of its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Putin then explained that the measure will be similar to the United States’ deployment of some of its nuclear arsenal in Europe (and Asia), further noting that Russia’s action does not violate the nuclear nonproliferation agreements NPT.
The Russian leader thus revived the “mutually assured destruction” policy and placed it back on the table for the world to see.
His announcement triggered a fervent response in Western countries, issuing warnings about the potential escalation. Nonetheless, the strategic move has thus far achieved its intended objectives.
Since then, the inclusion of the possibility of a Russian tactical nuclear attack in the plans of European leaders and American officials when engaging with Moscow has become a prevalent factor.
Putin stressed that the deployment of atomic in Belarus is of a deterrent nature for those oblivious in the West who assume they can inflict on Russia a strategic defeat.
While NATO’s agenda remained centered around its eastern expansion, the changing circumstances led to a moderation of fervent rhetoric in the West after a year of advocating to “end Russia”.
From Europe’s perspective, the haunting memories of both world wars have made them acutely aware that the continent would inevitably become the epicenter of any conflict between Russia and the West. And even if it declared a neutral stance, Europe understands that it would likely become the battleground in any confrontation between Moscow and the United States.
Washington, in light of Russia’s advancements in nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles and long-range naval vessels capable of launching nuclear warheads, has become increasingly cautious when considering any direct escalation with Moscow. The realization that these technologies pose a significant challenge to interception systems has compelled Washington to exercise greater restraint in its approach toward Russia.
In this image taken from a video released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on May 28, 2022, a new Zircon hypersonic cruise missile is launched by the frigate named “Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Gorshkov” of the Russian Navy from the Barents Sea (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)
“Nuclear weapons have been made to ensure our security in the broadest sense of the word and the existence of the Russian state, but we…have no such need [to use them],” Putin said.
“Just talking about this (the potential use of nuclear weapons) lowers the nuclear threshold. We have more than NATO countries and they want to reduce our numbers. Screw them,” he added said.
As did DPRK’s leader Kim Jong Un, the Russian President also was promising imperialist powers “mutual annihilation”.
The nuclear umbrella of illusion
The US, through its proxy war in Ukraine, sought to amplify the bloc mentality on a larger scale, utilizing its influence and resources to hinder a potential Eurasian uprising and redirect Europe’s foreign policy toward disengaging from China and Russia. This strategic maneuver aimed to consolidate American power and disrupt the growing connections between countries in Eurasia.
As part of Washington’s neo-bloc strategy, political integration is closely intertwined with hyper-militarization.
This approach not only entails the presence of direct, yet limited US forces but also compels allies to substantially increase their defense spending to unprecedented levels. The objective is to create a framework where political and military cooperation aligns, solidifying American influence and promoting a sense of collective security among allies.
Following the establishment of NATO and the deployment of a portion of its nuclear arsenal in Europe, the United States assumed the role of security guarantor for its transatlantic allies, giving rise to what is commonly referred to as the “US nuclear umbrella.”
The deployment of American nuclear weapons in Europe during the 1950s served multiple purposes, one of which was maintaining control over allied nations.
While the primary goal was to counter the perceived Soviet threat during the Cold War, the presence of nuclear arms also played a role in exerting influence and control over its transatlantic allies.
The concept of the US nuclear umbrella created a perception of safety and protection for its allies. By positioning itself as the guarantor of their security, Washington fostered a sense of dependence and reliance on its nuclear capabilities.
This allowed the United States to justify its own retention and modernization of nuclear weapons, citing the need to maintain a credible deterrent to protect its allies. In doing so, it effectively used the nuclear umbrella as a justification to evade or delay its disarmament commitments, arguing that the security of its allies depended on its nuclear arsenal.
This approach allowed Washington to maintain a significant nuclear presence and influence on the global stage, while also preserving its strategic interests and exerting control over the disarmament agenda.
The US-led NATO’s increasing control over Europe’s security, particularly in the aftermath of the Ukraine conflict, has resulted in an unprecedented level of influence and dominance. Through years of fearmongering and portraying Moscow as a threat, NATO has successfully consolidated its grip on the region.
The concept of “extended deterrence” has played a crucial role in this process, as the deployment of US nuclear weapons in allied countries acts as a symbolic and tangible demonstration of American power and commitment to their defense.
By positioning itself as the ultimate authority, Washington effectively solidifies its influence to the extent that its directives are regarded as virtually constitutional. This further reinforces the hegemonic control of the United States and its ability to shape the security policies and decision-making of its allies.
This blind faith in the postulations of Deterrence Theory has established what anti-nuclear advocate and international security expert, Professor Nick Ritchie, called the “regime of nuclear truth” and denominated “nuclear absolutism”.
In January 2023, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol raised the possibility of developing independent nuclear weapons as a response to the DPRK’s growing power. However, this proposal was met with disapproval from the White House, which expressed its opposition and implied potential consequences if South Korea were to pursue such a policy.
Despite publicly acknowledging the nuclear threat posed by DPRK to South Korea, the United States maintained its opposition to Seoul’s proposal of developing its own nuclear weapons.
Paradoxically, in April, the United States agreed to deploy nuclear-armed submarines to South Korea for the first time in decades and involve Seoul in its nuclear planning operations. This contradictory stance by Washington raised questions about its true intentions and strategic objectives in the region.
Mainly, this means that South Korea is officially under US “extended deterrence” program, and therefore, the Americans are forced as per the agreement to come to its aid in the event of an attack.
The deal between Washington and Seoul was met with skepticism by the South Korean public, as reflected in polls.
There were concerns about whether the United States would truly uphold its commitments, given its history of uncertainties and wavering policies in international relations.
This skepticism highlighted the importance of trust and transparency in such agreements, as the South Korean public sought reassurances regarding the reliability and consistency of the United States as a strategic partner.
Here, an age-long question reemerged: “Would Washington risk San Francisco for Seoul in the event of nuclear war?” Of course, the question here is completed by another one: “What are the odds of completely losing what’s left of the country’s sovereignty and marginal decision-making ability by hosting US nuclear arms, and eventually being sold out by Washington?”
But the fear of fully entrusting in the United States is not a new phenomenon and has been a recurring theme for decades.
In the 1960s, French General Charles de Gaulle was highly skeptical of America’s nuclear security guarantees, particularly after the Soviet Union developed ICBMs that can reach the US mainland.
De Gaulle’s skepticism led him to ask then-US President John F. Kennedy if he would be willing to risk New York for Paris.
Eventually, the lack of confidence in American assurances was the reason behind establishing the “French nuclear deterrent force,” which allowed Paris to ensure its own safety and avoid overdependence on NATO.
History says no
A South Korean demonstrator holds a placard at a rally against South Korea and US policy on DPRK in front of the Foreign Ministry in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, April 26, 2011 (AP/Ahn Young-joon)
The 2022 US Nuclear Posture Review notes that “extended nuclear deterrence contributes to U.S. nonproliferation goals by giving Allies and partners confidence that they can resist strategic threats and remain secure without acquiring nuclear weapons of their own.”
The debate among US allies about the level of trust they can place in their American partners reached a new level of intensity with the assumption of former US President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy.
This was further amplified when Trump openly questioned Washington’s commitments to its NATO obligations and even suggested the possibility of withdrawing US troops from Europe. The fears and concerns of European nations were heightened as they witnessed a more self-preserving and protectionist stance taken by Washington, raising doubts about the extent to which the United States would defend the continent despite its grand promises.
A recent CSIS study explored four potential future scenarios in which the United States would have to navigate a world where adversaries possess substantial nuclear arsenals. The study’s findings revealed a consistent credibility challenge for the US in assuring its allies about their protection and the safeguarding of their interests.
Commenting on the Nuclear Posture Review of 2022, the Washington-based think tank said fundamental trust in the United States’ ability to secure collective defense [bloc alliances] “is far from guaranteed.”
“A cohesive and confident alliance network backed by credible extended deterrence [nuclear umbrella] guarantees U.S. strategic interests,” the study added, stressing “that the United States will need to continue to rely on nuclear weapons for extended deterrence purposes.”
One of the core suggestions of the study is that the United States, while adopting a bloc-alliance policy, should seriously consider further nuclear deployment in allied countries, especially those in close proximity to states considered by Washington as “strategic national security threats”: China and Russia.
But American “extended deterrence” that extends over a set of allied countries also generates concerns regarding the rationality behind trusting a bloc’s security under Washington’s nuclear umbrella.
If US adversaries feel an existential threat, will decision-makers in said countries consider states hosting American nuclear weapons a factor of deterrence or military targets? Will the nuclear bloc mentality subject its members to collective punishment, regardless of the actual interests of each country separately?
This perspective sheds light on an important observation: while the United States presents itself as a guardian of allies and a promoter of global stability, its actions often involve consolidating the military capabilities of its partners and prioritizing American interests above all else.
This approach reflects one of the many forms of unipolarity, where Washington’s influence and dominance shape international dynamics to a large extent.
Within this framework, nuclear umbrellas can be perceived as sources of insecurity rather than genuine protection and deterrence for their host countries.
Within this framework, nuclear umbrellas can be realized as the foundations of insecurity for their hosts rather than protection and deterrence, and their costs outweigh their benefits under a unipolar world order governed by the White House and America’s industrial complex.
Historically, military alliances based on shared assistance and mutual defense have proven to be only circumstantial empty promises.
So, in short, history says that no, the United States will not risk San Francisco for Seoul, nor New York for Paris, and the US nuclear umbrella remains an illusion designed by unipolarity and employed for imperialistic drives that will be extremely marginalized in the rising multipolar world, but this is a discussion for another article.
The Group of Seven held a de facto war summit in Hiroshima, a place that is synonymous with the horror and evil of war.
The United States-led “Group of Seven” cabal held one of their increasingly meaningless jamborees this weekend in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The posturing of solemnity by these warmongering elites in a place that represents the ultimate barbarity of American imperialism is not only sickening in its hypocrisy and profanity. The evident lack of awareness and shame of these charlatans is a sure sign that their privileged historical charade is coming to an end.
American President Joe Biden took time out from his nation’s collapsing economy and scandals over his rampant family corruption to attend the G7 summit in Japan. He was joined by so-called leaders from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada as well as the premier of the host nation, Fumio Kishida. Joining the lackeys was the European Union’s chief ventriloquist doll, Ursula von der Leyen, and Ukrainian comedian-turned-arms-dealer, aka “president”, Vladimir Zelensky.
The proceedings began with a cynical and disingenuous “dedication” at the Hiroshima Peace Park whose centerpiece is the Genbaku Dome, the iconic spectral ruin caused by the U.S. atomic bombing in 1945. The very gathering of leaders at this sacred place is the same people who are criminally pushing the world toward another conflagration.
Biden and his cronies soon dispensed with hollow talk about “peace” and “nuclear disarmament” to make the G7 summit a rallying call for more hostility toward Russia and China. There were plans for more economic warfare (sanctions) against Moscow, which was vilified as usual for “unprovoked aggression” against Ukraine. There were pledges of supplying more weapons to the powder keg that the U.S. and its NATO partners have created in Ukraine. There were high-handed dismissals of international diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict, which have been proposed by China, and Latin American and African nations.
The U.S.-led G7 camarilla also made their hate fest a forum for drumming up more hostility toward China, accusing Beijing of building up nuclear arms and threatening the world.
In short, the Group of Seven held a de facto war summit in Hiroshima, a place that is synonymous with the horror and evil of war.
Seventy-eight years ago, on the morning of August 6, 1945, at 8.15 am, the US Air Force Enola Gay B-29 bomber dropped the atomic bomb on the city. The resulting death toll would be 140,000, mainly civilians, many of them instantly incinerated, others dying from horrendous burns and radiation poisoning. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later.
History has shown that there was no military need to use such weapons of mass destruction. Official American reasoning ostensibly about hastening the end of the Pacific War can now be seen as a flagrant lie. The bombs were deliberately used by the United States in a demonstration of state terrorism especially directed at its wartime ally, the Soviet Union. Arguably, these grotesque genocidal crimes sealed the beginning of the Cold War. This horrific demarcation was how the U.S.-led Western imperialist system would try to control the postwar world.
The same deplorable and criminal Cold War mentality persists among the U.S. rulers and their Western minions. Washington needs wars and conflict to maintain its untenable hegemonic ambitions along with its Western satraps who are equally complicit. The barbarous power structure can only be sustained by “ideological projections” designating “enemies” and “threats” that, in turn, provide cover for the otherwise unacceptable barbarism and warmongering. The Soviet Union was the “enemy”, then it became “Islamic terrorists”, and now it’s Russia and China.
The ideological projection also casts a narcissistic image of America and its Western allies as benevolent, peace-loving, democratic, law-abiding, and so on. It’s an almost incredible feat of global gaslighting and inversion of reality; made possible largely by mass disinformation via the Western corporate media/propaganda system. Thankfully, that charade is becoming threadbare too.
One indicator this week was a study by the respected Brown University’s Cost of War project which estimated the number killed just over the past two decades from U.S.-led wars at 4.5 million. All told, since the end of World War Two estimates of deaths from American wars of aggression around the world are in the order of 20-30 million. No other nation in history comes close to the destructiveness of U.S. power, which laughably declares itself the “leader of the free world”, the “democratic upholder of rules-based order”.
The United States has devolved into a monstrous imperialist rogue state that is addicted to war, conflict, mass killing and even threats of annihilation in order to prop up its corporate capitalist economy. Its accumulated record $31 trillion of national debt speaks of the chronic disease and its moribund dollar lifeline.
Yet, Washington’s ideological pretensions – sustained and promulgated by a subservient corporate media/propaganda system – have the absurd audacity to paint Russia, China and other nations as “threats” to international peace.
The war in Ukraine has been at least nine years in the making. Even NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg brazenly admits the preparation for war against Russia since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. The war is playing out now in a way that vividly manifests the psychopathic logic of the U.S. rulers and their Western lackeys. Britain has emerged as Uncle Sam’s righthand henchman for provoking escalation, the latest provocation to Russia being the supply of long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles capable of striking Crimea. Already, Russian civilians have been casualties from these British munitions. This is like Part Two of the slaughter-fest madness of Britain’s Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea War (1853-56). Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is another contemptible diversity cut-out figure. Dweebs like him, Biden, Scholz, Trudeau, Macron, Meloni and Von der Leyen should be marched off to the dock for war crimes.
The relentless logic of war compelled by American hegemonic ambitions means that the world is being pushed to the brink of world war again. The same imperialist tendencies that created two previous world wars are reaching fever-pitch again.
Hiroshima is an obscene reminder of war and in particular U.S.-led war. It is truly disturbing that an American president and his Western elite flunkies were paying homage to victims of an atomic holocaust while at the same insanely making plans for intensifying aggression toward Russia and China.
The arrogant American rulers have never even offered an apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, they persist in claiming righteousness. Biden over the weekend added insult to travesty when he declared that Japan would be offered “protection” from America’s “nuclear umbrella” against alleged Chinese expansionism. This was stated by the leader of a nation that is ringing China with military bases, missile systems, naval firepower and nuclear-capable bombers. Japan’s abject premier Fumio Kishida actually thanked Biden and declared that the U.S. was a force for peace in the world.
In any case, the G7 is becoming a global irrelevance. It is a relic of former American imperial might. The “rich club” used to command half of the world’s economy, it is now down to 30 per cent and falling. The emerging multipolar world led by China, Russia, the Global South and many others, the BRICS, ASEAN, ALBA, EEA, SCO, are all testimony to the waning American Empire and its rapidly declining dollar dominance. The G7 doesn’t even make any pretence about helping the global economy and development. It has become a bellicose vehicle emitting desperate warmongering by a crumbling hegemonic system.
Only in the fairytale realm of Western media/propaganda could such a vile charade at Hiroshima be projected. To the rest of the world, it is utterly sickening.
The cost of all this is not only financial but the simple math can be worked out in terms of the distrust of the U.S. general public and loss of confidence in the U.S. institutions and the President’s credibility.
Washington DC is viewed by many as sending us terribly patronizing cancel culture messages along the lines of “Don’t you dare listen to what Vladimir Putin says”, but this is where a truth bombshell by Seymore Hersh, a seasoned professional in journalism who exposed the Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam, comes from. The 86-year old Seymore Hersh referred to the anonymous but genuine source with all the brutal details told the world how the Nord Stream’s three pipelines out of four in total were demolished. The Collective Biden is behind it of course. All the arrangements happened on the last floor of the old building of the Executive Cabinet in Washington DC. One cannot help noticing another grim example in a long succession of examples of U.S. Machiavellianism.
One has to wonder how much their Machiavellianism-ridden political rituals of all shapes and forms have cost the U.S. and the world so far. This is the U.S. effort to plunder as many resources globally and pocket as much profit as possible along the way. Ukraine is undoubtedly one of their ‘profit and power pursuits’. The U.S. goes around brandishing their quasi declaration that this is their courageous campaign for the EU/European energy security issue. But the real truth is normally quite the opposite. The U.S. regrettably chooses to bomb sovereign countries for alleged ‘humanitarian reasons’ only to diabolically call all civilian casualties ‘collateral damage’. By the same token, the U.S. evil elite bent almost double so as to destroy European energy efficiency in order to falsely declare it as the campaign for its safety and well being. The aftermath of it all is they are now paying several times more for gas than before.
Their desperation to oust Russia out of the big picture is almost palpable. The Nord Stream is the greatest willfully malicious damage done to any peacetime engineering project for the general public use. The damage wrought is estimated at circa 30 billion euros. This was one of the most wantonly destructive terrorist attacks of all time. What is the cost of the damage done to lay the Nord Stream to waste? Shall we go back in history and try to work out how much it cost to send nukes and destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? And one wonders why the U.S. committed that monstrous cruelty on Japan if Japan had already been on the brink of capitulation? Nuclear bombs were thrown at civilians nonetheless with the intention only to send a clear message to the then USSR in close geographical proximity. Any country ready and willing to commit such appalling atrocities, is ready to do anything at any cost. Another such thing was to spread deliberate and downright American lies about Vietnam. The Tragic Tokyo Bay Plane Crash was proven to be made up, engineered and orchestrated with all the political theatrics.
To get back to Europe geographically and more recent history, with the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the explosion and the ensuing massacre in the Vace Mickina Street in Sarajevo on 27 May, 1992 was yet another false flag brutally engineered by USA though; the American perpetrators surely knew the then militant Muslim forces were to blame for it. But the U.S. political elite back then used that U.S.-orchestrated incident to launch the most brutal sanctions on the former Yugoslavia and to strongarm the rest of their vassal countries to follow suit. They were well aware all that was a barefaced lie. The same goes for Račak in Kosovo (and Metohija) and more recently Bucha incident in Ukraine. A German documentary ‘It began with a lie’ told the real truth yet it was presented on German TV once and never again. It talked about all the U.S. and NATO lies including the ones about Račak in Kosovo on 15 January 1999, which led to the aggression against Yugoslavia. And then one cannot help but recall the late Colin Powell and his infernal misdeeds with the fake claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
All these colossal adverse consequences are beyond any quantifiable measure. Sadly all this seems to have ominous clang, leading to a possible world war now. And now back to the USA and all this ongoing monkey business over a balloon, which is soon to give way to the media spins about alleged aliens and UFOs and all the fear porn around it. Even Edward Snowden responded a couple of days ago that it is but a media spin to silence any questioning and/or reasonable debate on the Nord Stream blast, without the approval of the U.S. Congress, which might as well cost Biden even his presidential position.
So now besides the Nord Stream blast, we have a series of new confrontations with China. The cost of all this is not only financial but the simple math can be worked out in terms of the distrust of the U.S. general public and loss of confidence in the U.S. institutions and the President’s credibility to boot.
With hindsight, on January 17, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower ends his presidential term by warning the nation about the increasing power of the military-industrial complex. I am not entirely convinced that the sufficient critical mass in the U.S. will take heed of it soon enough.
Russia’s Sputnik News reported examples of US war crimes post-WW II.
My own examples follow below. First Sputnik’s:
The July 1950 No Gun Ri massacre occurred one month after Truman’s war of aggression on nonbelligerent, nonthreatening North Korea.
Covered up for nearly half a century, what happened took the lives of around 300 men, women and children.
From December 1968 – May 1969, US forces indiscriminately massacred thousands of North Vietnamese civilians in so-called “free-fire zones” during Operation Speedy Express — to cause maximum numbers of casualties.
In February 1991 near end of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, civilians and fleeing combatants were massacred along the so-called Highway of Death.
In May 1999 near Korisa, Kosovo, US terror-bombing massacred civilian refugees — ones who unsuccessfully sought shelter out of harm’s way.
In the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004 — during the Second Persian Gulf War — US and UK forces terror-bombed Iraqis with banned weapons, including white phosphorous, incendiary bombs, and radiological weapons.
Thousands were massacred in cold blood, largely civilians.
In October 2015, US forces terror-bombed a Kunduz, Afghanistan hospital on the phony pretext of targeting Taliban fighters.
Dozens were killed, dozens more injured.
During the siege of Mosul, Iraq in 2017, an estimated 40,000 Iraqi civilians were massacred on the phony pretext of combating US created and supported ISIS jihadists.
Similar mass slaughter occurred in the same year against Raqqa, Syria civilians.
US genocides began by mass-exterminating countless millions of Native America to expand the nation from sea-to-shinning sea — by stealing their land, livelihoods and lives.
In his book titled, “A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present,” Ward Churchill explained that the nation’s indigenous population was reduced to at most 3% of its original numbers before it all began — by butchery and other forms of brutality.
During the infamous Middle Passage transatlantic slave trade — the African holocaust — millions perished en route in extreme discomfort.
Around 100 million human beings arriving in America were sold like cattle.
Describing the centuries-long horror, historian Howard Zinn said the following:
US slavery was “the most cruel form in history.”
It reflected a “frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.”
Post-WW II US genocides occurred against North Koreans, Southeast Asians, Central and Latin Americans, Africans, other Asians, Yugoslavs, Afghans, Yemenis, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians and others.
With no end of it in prospect, unparalleled genocide has been ongoing by kill shots throughout the West and elsewhere since December 2020 — the human toll unknown because of coverup and denial.
If continues longterm, billions may perish out of sight and mind — unwanted people that US/Western dark forces want exterminated to more greatly empower and enrich the privileged few at their expense.
During America’s dirty 1898 – 1902 Spanish-American War against Spain to cede control of the Philippines, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were brutally slaughtered.
US cutthroat killer general Jacob Smith ordered his troops to:
“Kill and burn.”
“This is no time to take prisoners.”
“The more you kill and burn, the better.”
“Kill all above the age of ten.”
Then “turn (the country into) a howling wilderness.”
Few people anywhere suffered longer, more horrifically with anguish than Haitians for over 500 years and still counting.
They endured genocidal oppression, slavery, despotism, colonization, reparations, embargoes, sanctions, deep poverty, starvation, untreated diseases, unrepayable debt, and natural calamities unprotected.
Along with strategic bombing to destroy an adversary’s economic and military might, US terror bombings targeted civilians to break their morale, cause panic, weaken an invented enemy’s will to fight, along with inflicting mass casualties and punishment.
Geneva and other international laws prohibit it.
The Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907 Hague IV Convention’s Article 25 states:
“The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or building which are undefended is prohibited.”
Fourth Geneva protects civilians in time of war.
It prohibits violence of any kind against them and requires treatment for the sick and wounded.
The 1945 Nuremberg Principles forbid “crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
These include “inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war,” including indiscriminate killing and “wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”
In virtually all US wars of aggression against invented enemies, the above and similar war crimes occur with disturbing regularity.
During the firebombing of Dresden, Germany in February 1945 — when what Russia calls its Great Patriotic War was virtually won — the US and UK gratuitously incinerated around 100,000 city residents.
The morally indefensible high crime was repeated against Tokyo the same month in similar fashion after virtual surrender by imperial Japan was rejected by Franklin Roosevelt. surrendered and accepted defeat.
In August 1945, Harry Truman gratuitously destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki by nuclear immolation.
When WW II was virtually over, hundreds of thousands were killed.
To this day, future generations were scarred with birth defects and other serious health issues.
During the post-WW II period, countless millions more were massacred during US imperial wars — accountability for the highest of high crimes never forthcoming.
Genocidal wars were waged against nonbelligerent North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and worldwide against unwanted people.
US use of chemical, biological, radiological and other banned weapons is well-documented throughout US history.
From smallpox infected blankets against Native Americans to chlorine gas during the US Civil War to today’s chemical, biological, radiological and other banned weapons, anything goes has been official US policy throughout its history.
Deadly dioxin-containing Agent Orange and nerve gas were used by US forces in Southeast Asia.
So were other terror weapons in all US wars of aggression.
It’s not a pretty picture.
The self-styled indispensable state’s history is pockmarked with virtually every type crime imaginable at home and worldwide.
They’ve gone on by endless wars of choice against Native Americans to the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli to the present day at home and abroad worldwide — with no end of them in prospect.
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — The branding of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal by Joe Biden, who lobbied for the Iraq war and staunchly supported the 20 years of carnage in the Middle East, is one more example of the hypocritical moral posturing sweeping across the United States. It is unclear how anyone would try Putin for war crimes since Russia, like the United States, does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But justice is not the point. Politicians like Biden, who do not accept responsibility for our well-documented war crimes, bolster their moral credentials by demonizing their adversaries. They know the chance of Putin facing justice is zero. And they know their chance of facing justice is the same.
We know who our most recent war criminals are, among others: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, General Ricardo Sanchez, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Asst. Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee, former Dep. Asst. Atty. Gen. John Yoo, who set up the legal framework to authorize torture; the helicopter pilots who gunned down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikiLeaks. We have evidence of the crimes they committed.
But, like Putin’s Russia, those who expose these crimes are silenced and persecuted. Julian Assange, even though he is not a US citizen and his WikiLeaks site is not a US-based publication, is charged under the US Espionage Act for making public numerous US war crimes. Assange, currently housed in a high security prison in London, is fighting a losing battle in the British courts to block his extradition to the United States, where he faces 175 years in prison. One set of rules for Russia, another set of rules for the United States. Weeping crocodile tears for the Russian media, which is being heavily censored by Putin, while ignoring the plight of the most important publisher of our generation speaks volumes about how much the ruling class cares about press freedom and truth.
If we demand justice for Ukrainians, as we should, we must also demand justice for the one million people killed — 400,000 of whom were noncombatants — by our invasions, occupations and aerial assaults in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. We must demand justice for those who were wounded, became sick or died because we destroyed hospitals and infrastructure. We must demand justice for the thousands of soldiers and marines who were killed, and many more who were wounded and are living with lifelong disabilities, in wars launched and sustained on lies. We must demand justice for the 38 million people who have been displaced or become refugees in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria, a number that exceeds the total of all those displaced in all wars since 1900, apart from World War II, according to the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University. Tens of millions of people, who had no connection with the attacks of 9/11, were killed, wounded, lost their homes, and saw their lives and their families destroyed because of our war crimes. Who will cry out for them?
Every effort to hold our war criminals accountable has been rebuffed by Congress, by the courts, by the media and by the two ruling political parties. The Center for Constitutional Rights, blocked from bringing cases in US courts against the architects of these preemptive wars, which are defined by post-Nuremberg laws as “criminal wars of aggression,” filed motions in German courts to hold US leaders to account for gross violations of the Geneva Convention, including the sanctioning of torture in black sites such as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.
Those who have the power to enforce the rule of law, to hold our war criminals to account, to atone for our war crimes, direct their moral outrage exclusively at Putin’s Russia. “Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, condemning Russia for attacking civilian sites, including a hospital, three schools and a boarding school for visually impaired children in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. “These incidents join a long list of attacks on civilian, not military locations, across Ukraine,” he said. Beth Van Schaack, an ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, will direct the effort at the State Department, Blinken said, to “help international efforts to investigate war crimes and hold those responsible accountable.”
This collective hypocrisy, based on the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, is accompanied by massive arms shipments to Ukraine. Fueling proxy wars was a specialty of the Cold War. We have returned to the script. If Ukrainians are heroic resistance fighters, what about Iraqis and Afghans, who fought as valiantly and as doggedly against a foreign power that was every bit as savage as Russia? Why weren’t they lionized? Why weren’t sanctions imposed on the United States? Why weren’t those who defended their countries from foreign invasion in the Middle East, including Palestinians under Israeli occupation, also provided with thousands of anti-tank weapons, anti-armor weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, helicopters, Switchblade or “Kamikaze” drones, hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Javelin anti-tank missiles, machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition? Why didn’t Congress rush through a $13.6 billion package to provide military and humanitarian assistance, on top of the $1.2 billion already provided to the Ukrainian military, for them?
Well, we know why. Our war crimes don’t count, and neither do the victims of our war crimes. And this hypocrisy makes a rules-based world, one that abides by international law, impossible.
This hypocrisy is not new. There is no moral difference between the saturation bombing the US carried out on civilian populations since World War II, including in Vietnam and Iraq, and the targeting of urban centers by Russia in Ukraine or the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Mass death and fireballs on a city skyline are the calling cards we have left across the globe for decades. Our adversaries do the same.
The deliberate targeting of civilians, whether in Baghdad, Kyiv, Gaza, or New York City, are all war crimes. The killing of at least 112 Ukrainian children, as of March 19, is an atrocity, but so is the killing of 551 Palestinian children during Israel’s 2014 military assault on Gaza. So is the killing of 230,000 people over the past seven years in Yemen from Saudi bombing campaigns and blockades that have resulted in mass starvation and cholera epidemics. Where were the calls for a no-fly zone over Gaza and Yemen? Imagine how many lives could have been saved.
War crimes demand the same moral judgment and accountability. But they don’t get them. And they don’t get them because we have one set of standards for white Europeans, and another for non-white people around the globe. The western media has turned European and American volunteers flocking to fight in Ukraine into heroes, while Muslims in the west who join resistance groups battling foreign occupiers in the Middle East are criminalized as terrorists. Putin has been ruthless with the press. But so has our ally the de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the murder and dismemberment of my friend and colleague Jamal Khashoggi, and who this month oversaw a mass execution of 81 people convicted of criminal offenses. The coverage of Ukraine, especially after spending seven years reporting on Israel’s murderous assaults against the Palestinians, is another example of the racist divide that defines most of the western media.
World War II began with an understanding, at least by the allies, that employing industrial weapons against civilian populations was a war crime. But within 18 months of the start of the war, the Germans, Americans and British were relentlessly bombing cities. By the end of the war, one-fifth of German homes had been destroyed. One million German civilians were killed or wounded in bombing raids. Seven-and-a-half million Germans were made homeless. The tactic of saturation bombing, or area bombing, which included the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo, which killed more than 90,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo and left a million people homeless, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took the lives of between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, had the sole purpose of breaking the morale of the population through mass death and terror. Cities such as Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Coventry, Royan, Nanjing and Rotterdam were obliterated.
It turned the architects of modern war, all of them, into war criminals.
Civilians in every war since have been considered legitimate targets. In the summer of 1965, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called the bombing raids north of Saigon that left hundreds of thousands of dead an effective means of communication with the government in Hanoi. McNamara, six years before he died, unlike most war criminals, had the capacity for self-reflection. Interviewed in the documentary, “The Fog of War,” he was repentant, not only about targeting Vietnamese civilians but about the aerial targeting of civilians in Japan in World War II, overseen by Air Force General Curtis LeMay.
“LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals,” McNamara said in the film. “And I think he’s right…LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?”
LeMay, later head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, would go on to drop tons of napalm and firebombs on civilian targets in Korea which, by his own estimate, killed 20 percent of the population over a three-year period.
Industrial killing defines modern warfare. It is impersonal mass slaughter. It is administered by vast bureaucratic structures that perpetuate the killing over months and years. It is sustained by heavy industry that produces a steady flow of weapons, munitions, tanks, planes, helicopters, battleships, submarines, missiles, and mass-produced supplies, along with mechanized transports that ferry troops and armaments by rail, ship, cargo planes and trucks to the battlefield. It mobilizes industrial, governmental and organization structures for total war. It centralizes systems of information and internal control. It is rationalized for the public by specialists and experts, drawn from the military establishment, along with pliant academics and the media.
Industrial war destroys existing value systems that protect and nurture life, replacing them with fear, hatred, and a dehumanization of those who we are made to believe deserve to be exterminated. It is driven by emotions, not truth or fact. It obliterates nuance, replacing it with an infantile binary universe of us and them. It drives competing narratives, ideas and values underground and vilifies all who do not speak in the national cant that replaces civil discourse and debate. It is touted as an example of the inevitable march of human progress, when in fact it brings us closer and closer to mass obliteration in a nuclear holocaust. It mocks the concept of individual heroism, despite the feverish efforts of the military and the mass media to sell this myth to naïve young recruits and a gullible public. It is the Frankenstein of industrialized societies. War, as Alfred Kazin warned, is “the ultimate purpose of technological society.” Our real enemy is within.
Historically, those who are prosecuted for war crimes, whether the Nazi hierarchy at Nuremberg or the leaders of Liberia, Chad, Serbia, and Bosnia, are prosecuted because they lost the war and because they are adversaries of the United States.
There will be no prosecution of Saudi Arabian rulers for the war crimes committed in Yemen or for the US military and political leadership for the war crimes they carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, or a generation earlier in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The atrocities we commit, such as My Lai, where 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were gunned down by US soldiers, which are made public, are dealt with by finding a scapegoat, usually a low-ranking officer who is given a symbolic sentence. Lt. William Calley served three years under house arrest for the killings at My Lai. Eleven US soldiers, none of whom were officers, were convicted of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But the architects and overlords of our industrial slaughter, including Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson, Gen. William Westmoreland, George W. Bush, Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are never held to account. They leave power to become venerated elder statesmen.
The mass slaughter of industrial warfare, the failure to hold ourselves to account, to see our own face in the war criminals we condemn, will have ominous consequences. Author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi understood that the annihilation of the humanity of others is prerequisite for their physical annihilation. We have become captives to our machines of industrial death. Politicians and generals wield their destructive fury as if they were toys. Those who decry the madness, who demand the rule of law, are attacked and condemned. These industrial weapons systems are our modern idols. We worship their deadly prowess. But all idols, the Bible tells us, begin by demanding the sacrifice of others and end in apocalyptic self-sacrifice.
Just because an air incident over the Black Sea’s Int waters has been prevented, this does not mean the US and NATO can further put people’s lives at #risk with impunity.
MFA spox #Zakharova: In #Russia, foreign ministers do not ride tanks; the military do. Foreign ministers are engaged in negotiation processes and peacekeeping. pic.twitter.com/xHy9kuL9ds
💬 #Opinion by Maria Zakharova (in response to remarks by Jen Psaki):
It is important to remember who dropped atomic bombs on the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who killed people with napalm in Vietnam, who bombed Belgrade's denizens, etc.
It appears that @BILD did some digging into the German archives, made a few changes with some correction fluid and posted the article: https://t.co/ZhJwbAyOo3
Ideology-based propaganda cancels out any common sense.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
Nuclear war threatens the future of humanity. We are no longer dealing with a hypothetical scenario. The threat of World War III is real.
US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”. Since the George W. Bush administration, pre-emptive nuclear war has been portrayed as a “humanitarian undertaking”.
While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq, Syria and Yemen, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality. The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.
The following article first published in 2017 questions the history of the Cold War. US nuclear threats directed against Russia predate the Cold War. They were first formulated at the height of World War II under the Manhattan Project when the US and the Soviet Union were allies.
The plan to bomb 66 Soviet cities was “officially” released in mid-September 1945, two weeks after the formal surrender of Japan.
Had the US decided NOT to develop nuclear weapons for use against the Soviet Union, the nuclear arms race would not have taken place.
Neither The Soviet Union nor the People’s Republic of China would have developed nuclear capabilities as a means of “Deterrence” agains the US which had already formulated plans to annihilate the Soviet Union.
Flash Forward to 2021:
President Joe Biden does not have the foggiest idea as to the consequences of nuclear war.
In the words of Fidel Castro, “In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity. Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!” (Fidel Castro Ruz, October 2010)
Humanity is at a dangerous crossroads. Nuclear war has become a multi-billion dollar undertaking, which fills the pockets of US defense contractors. What is at stake is the outright “privatization of nuclear war”.
Massive amounts of money have been allocated by the Joe Biden Administration to feed the weapons industry including the Pentagons’ 1.3 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program first launched under Obama, is ongoing under the Biden administration.
All major cities of the Soviet Union were included in the list of 66 “strategic” targets. The tables below categorize each city in terms of area in square miles and the corresponding number of atomic bombs required to annihilate and kill the inhabitants of selected urban areas.
Six atomic bombs were to be used to destroy each of the larger cities including Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa.
The Pentagon estimated that a total of 204 atomic bombs would be required to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”. The targets for a nuclear attack consisted of sixty-six major cities.
To undertake this operation the “optimum” number of bombs required was of the order of 466 (see document below)
One single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima resulted in the immediate death of 100,000 people in the first seven seconds. Imagine what would have happened if 204 atomic bombs had been dropped on major cities of the Soviet Union as outlined in a secret U.S. plan formulated during the Second World War.
Hiroshima in the wake of the atomic bomb attack, 6 August 1945
The document outlining this diabolical military agenda had been released in September 1945, barely one month after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (6 and 9 August, 1945) and two years before the onset of the Cold War (1947).
Video produced by South Front
Since this article was first published in 2017, YouTube has recently decided to remove the short video produced by South Front which is largely based on the declassified documents quoted in this article. This constitutes an act of censorship, which has repercussions on our understanding of the history of the Cold War.
The secret plan dated September 15, 1945 (two weeks after the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945 aboard the USS Missouri, see image below) , however, had been formulated at an earlier period, namely at the height of World War II, at a time when America and the Soviet Union were close allies.
It is worth noting that Stalin was first informed through official channels by Harry Truman of the infamous Manhattan Project at the Potsdam Conference on July 24, 1945, barely two weeks before the attack on Hiroshima.
The Manhattan project was launched in 1939, two years prior to America’s entry into World War II in December 1941. The Kremlin was fully aware of the secret Manhattan project as early as 1942.
Were the August 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks used by the Pentagon to evaluate the viability of a much larger attack on the Soviet Union consisting of more than 204 atomic bombs? The key documents to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union (15 September 1945) were finalized 5-6 weeks after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (6, 9 August 1945):
“On September 15, 1945 — just under two weeks after the formal surrender of Japan and the end of World War II — Norstad sent a copy of the estimate to General Leslie Groves, still the head of the Manhattan Project, and the guy who, for the short term anyway, would be in charge of producing whatever bombs the USAAF might want. As you might guess, the classification on this document was high: “TOP SECRET LIMITED,” which was about as high as it went during World War II. (Alex Wellerstein, The First Atomic Stockpile Requirements (September 1945)
The Kremlin was aware of the 1945 plan to bomb sixty-six Soviet cities.
The documents confirm that the US was involved in the “planning of genocide” against the Soviet Union.
Let’s cut to the chase. How many bombs did the USAAF request of the atomic general, when there were maybe one, maybe two bombs worth of fissile material on hand? At a minimum they wanted 123. Ideally, they’d like 466. This is just a little over a month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Of course, in true bureaucratic fashion, they provided a handy-dandy chart (Alex Wellerstein, op. cit)
Central to our understanding of the Cold War which started (officially) in 1947, Washington’s September 1945 plan to bomb 66 cities into smithereens played a key role in triggering the nuclear arms race.
The Soviet Union was threatened and developed its own atomic bomb in 1949 in response to 1942 Soviet intelligence reports on the Manhattan Project.
While the Kremlin knew about these plans to “Wipe out” the USSR, the broader public was not informed because the September 1945 documents were of course classified.
Today, neither the September 1945 plan to blow up the Soviet Union nor the underlying cause of the nuclear arms race are acknowledged. The Western media has largely focussed its attention on the Cold War US-USSR confrontation. The plan to annihilate the Soviet Union dating back to World War II and the infamous Manhattan project are not mentioned.
Washington’s Cold War nuclear plans are invariably presented in response to so-called Soviet threats, when in fact it was the U.S. plan released in September 1945 (formulated at an earlier period at the height of World War II) to wipe out the Soviet which motivated Moscow to develop its nuclear weapons capabilities.
The assessment of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists mistakenly blamed and continue to blame the Soviet Union for having launched the nuclear arms race in 1949, four years after the release of the September 1945 US Secret Plan to target 66 major Soviet cities with 204 nuclear bombs:
“1949: The Soviet Union denies it, but in the fall, President Harry Truman tells the American public that the Soviets tested their first nuclear device, officially starting the arms race. “We do not advise Americans that doomsday is near and that they can expect atomic bombs to start falling on their heads a month or year from now,” the Bulletin explains. “But we think they have reason to be deeply alarmed and to be prepared for grave decisions.” (Timeline of the Doomsday Clock, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 2017)
IMPORTANT: Had the US decided NOT to develop nuclear weapons for use against the Soviet Union, the nuclear arms race would not have taken place.
Neither The Soviet Union nor the People’s Republic of China would have developed nuclear capabilities as a means of “Deterrence” agains the US which had already formulated plans to annihilate the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union lost 26 million people during World War II.
The Cold War List of 1200 Targeted Cities:
This initial 1945 list of sixty-six cities was updated in the course of the Cold War (1956) to include some 1200 cities in the USSR and the Soviet block countries of Eastern Europe (see declassified documents below). The bombs slated for use were more powerful in terms of explosive capacity than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Source: National Security Archive
“According to the 1956 Plan, H-Bombs were to be Used Against Priority “Air Power” Targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Major Cities in the Soviet Bloc, Including East Berlin, Were High Priorities in “Systematic Destruction” for Atomic Bombings. (William Burr, U.S. Cold War Nuclear Attack Target List of 1200 Soviet Bloc Cities “From East Germany to China”, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 538, December 2015
Source: National Security Archive
Washington, D.C., December 22, 2015 – The SAC [Strategic Air Command] Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, produced in June 1956 and published today for the first time by the National Security Archive www.nsarchive.org, provides the most comprehensive and detailed list of nuclear targets and target systems that has ever been declassified. As far as can be told, no comparable document has ever been declassified for any period of Cold War history.
The SAC study includes chilling details. According to its authors, their target priorities and nuclear bombing tactics would expose nearby civilians and “friendly forces and people” to high levels of deadly radioactive fallout. Moreover, 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. Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 538, December 2015
List of Cities
Excerpt of list of 1200 cities targeted for nuclear attack in alphabetical order. National Security Archive, op. cit.
From the Cold War to Donald Trump
In the post Cold War era, under Donald Trump’s “Fire and Fury”, nuclear war directed against Russia, China, North Korea and Iran is “On the Table”.
What distinguishes the October 1962 Missile Crisis to Today’s realities:
1. Today’s president Donald Trump does not have the foggiest idea as to the consequences of nuclear war.
2, Communication today between the White House and the Kremlin is at an all time low. In contrast, in October 1962, the leaders on both sides, namely John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev were accutely aware of the dangers of nuclear annihilation. They collaborated with a view to avoiding the unthinkable.
3. The nuclear doctrine was entirely different during the Cold War. Both Washington and Moscow understood the realities of mutually assured destruction. Today, tactical nuclear weapons with an explosive capacity (yield) of one third to six times a Hiroshima bomb are categorized by the Pentagon as “harmless to civilians because the explosion is underground”.
4. A one trillion ++ nuclear weapons program, first launched under Obama, is ongoing.
5. Today’s thermonuclear bombs are more than 100 times more powerful and destructive than a Hiroshima bomb. Both the US and Russia have several thousand nuclear weapons deployed.
Moreover, an all war against China is currently on the drawing board of the Pentagon as outlined by a RAND Corporation Report commissioned by the US Army
“Fire and Fury”, From Truman to Trump: U.S Foreign Policy Insanity
There is a long history of US political insanity geared towards providing a human face to U.S. crimes against humanity.
On August 9, 1945, on the day the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, president Truman (image right), in a radio address to the American people, concluded that God is on the side of America with regard to the use of nuclear weapons and that
“He May guide us to use it [atomic bomb] in His ways and His purposes”.
According to Truman: God is with us, he will decide if and when to use the bomb:
[We must] prepare plans for the future control of this bomb. I shall ask the Congress to cooperate to the end that its production and use be controlled, and that its power be made an overwhelming influence towards world peace.
We must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force–to prevent its misuse, and to turn it into the channels of service to mankind.
It is an awful responsibility which has come to us.
We thank God that it [nuclear weapons] has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it [nuclear weapons] in His ways and for His purposes” (emphasis added)
The Beltway was always fond of describing the late Andrew Marshall – who identified emerging or future threats for the Pentagon and whose proteges included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – as Yoda.
Well, if that’s the case, then Chinese national security supremo Yang Jiechi – who recently made shark fin’s soup out of Tony Blinken in Alaska – is Double Yoda. And Nikolai Patrushev – Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation – is Triple Yoda.
Amid current ice-cold US-Russia relations – plunged into their worst state since the end of the Cold War – Triple Yoda, discreet, diplomatic and always sharp as a dagger, remains a soothing voice of reason, as demonstrated in a stunning interview by Kommersant daily.
Patrushev, born in 1951, is an army general who worked for KGB counter-intel in Leningrad, during the USSR days. Starting in 1994 he was the head of quite a few FSB departments. From 1999 to 2008 he was the FSB director, and led counter-terror ops in the North Caucasus from 2001 to 2003. Since May 2008 he is Russia’s top security advisor.
Patrushev rarely talks to the media. Thus the importance, for global public opinion, of highlighting some of his key insights. Let us hope the Beltway will be listening.
Patrushev clearly states that Russia does not want Cold War 2.0: “We would really not want that.” And he hopes that “common sense will prevail in Washington.”
Patrushev speaks
On Biden declaring Putin a “killer”: “I would not like to draw parallels, but exactly 75 years ago, in March 1946, Churchill delivered the famous Fulton speech in the presence of President Truman, in which he declared our country, his recent ally in the anti-Hitler coalition, an enemy. This marked the beginning of the Cold War.”
On Ukraine and Donbass: “I am convinced that this is a consequence of serious internal problems in Ukraine, from which the authorities are trying to divert attention in this way. They solve their problems at the expense of Donbass, while capital from the country has been flowing abroad for a long time … and Kiev is selling to foreigners – as they say now, at democratic prices – those remnants of industry that were able to stay afloat.”
On the first order of business for the US and Russia: It’s “the sphere of strategic stability and arms control. There is already a positive example here. It is our common decision to extend the Treaty on Strategic Offensive Arms, which was certainly not easy for the US administration.”
On possible areas of cooperation: “There is a certain potential for joint work on such issues as the fight against international terrorism and extremism … as well as Syria, the Middle East settlement, the nuclear problem of the Korean peninsula, the JCPOA with Iran … It is long overdue to discuss cyber-security issues, especially in view of Russia’s concerns and the accusations that have been brought forward to us for several years now.”
On contacts with Washington: “They continue. At the end of March, I had a telephone conversation with the assistant to the president of the United States for national security, Mr Sullivan .… By the way, it was held in a calm, business-like atmosphere, and we communicated quite thoroughly and constructively.”
On having no illusions about US apologies: “The United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan completely unnecessarily – although they knew perfectly well that the Red Army was starting hostilities against the Japanese grouping in Manchuria; they knew that Tokyo was ready to surrender. And the Japanese, and indeed the whole world, have been told for three quarters of a century that atomic strikes were inevitable … a kind of punishment from above. Remember what Obama said in his speech at the Hiroshima mourning event? ‘Death fell from heaven.’ And he did not want to say that this death fell from an American plane on the orders of the American president.”
On improvement of relations: “Given the unprecedentedly difficult nature of the internal situation in the United States today, the prospects for the further development of relations can hardly be called encouraging.”
On the US seeing Russia as a “threat,” and whether it is reciprocal: “We now see the main threat in a pandemic. For the United States, by the way, it turned out to be the moment of truth. The problems that American politicians were hiding from their fellow citizens became obvious, including by diverting their attention to the legends of ‘aggressive Russia.’”
On US bio-labs: “I suggest that you pay attention to the fact that numbers of biological laboratories under US control are growing by leaps and bounds across the world. And – by a strange coincidence – mainly at the Russian and Chinese borders … Of course, we and our Chinese partners have questions. We are told that there are peaceful sanitary and epidemiological stations near our borders, but for some reason they are more reminiscent of Fort Detrick in Maryland, where Americans have been working in the field of military biology for decades. By the way, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that outbreaks of diseases uncharacteristic of these regions are recorded in the adjacent areas.”
On US accusations that Russia uses chemical weapons: “There is zero evidence, there is no argumentation either; some speculation does not even withstand an elementary test … When chemical incidents occurred in Syria, conclusions were drawn instantly and based on the information of the notorious ‘White Helmets.’ The organization worked so ‘well’ that it sometimes published its reports even before the incidents themselves.”
On NATO: “The question arises: who is holding back whom? Are Washington and Brussels holding back Russia, or is it their task to hold back the development of Germany, France, Italy and other European states? On the whole, NATO can hardly be called a military-political bloc. Remember how in the days of feudalism the vassals were obliged to appear to the master with their armies at his first request? Only today they still have to buy weapons from the patron, regardless of their financial situation; otherwise questions about their loyalty will arise.”
On Europe: “Engaging with Europe is important. But being together with Europe at any cost is not a fix for Russian geopolitics. Nevertheless we keep the doors open, because we understand perfectly well that there is a momentary situation that Western politicians are guided by, and at the same time there are historical ties that have been developing between Russians and Europeans for centuries.”
On multipolarity: “There are a number of problems in the world today that, in principle, cannot be resolved without normal cooperation between the world’s leading players – Russia, the USA, the EU, China and India.”
The SWIFT ‘nuclear option’
Patrushev’s insights are particularly relevant as the Russia-China strategic partnership is solidifying by the minute; Foreign Minister Lavrov, in Pakistan, has called for literally everyone, “including the European Union,” to join Russia’s vision of a Greater Eurasia; and everyone is waiting for a face-off in the Donbass.
Patrushev’s diplomatic finesse still cannot erase the uneasy feeling in chancelleries across Eurasia about the distinct possibility of an incoming flare-up in the Donbass – with some extremely worrying consequences.
Dangerous scenarios are being openly discussed in Brussels corridors, especially one that sees the US/NATO combo expecting a de facto partition after a short hot war – with Novorossiya absorbing even Odessa.
If that is established as a fact on the ground, a new harsh round of US sanctions will follow. Iron Curtain 2.0 would be in effect; pressure for cancelation of Nord Stream 2 would reach fever pitch; and even the expulsion of Russia from SWIFT would be considered.
Dmitri Medvedev, currently Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, once called the latter “the nuclear option.” Patrushev was diplomatic enough not to address its volcanic consequences.
NATO supremacists klansmen running the United Nations held their umpteenth chemical hoax anti-Syria UNSC meeting on 3 February. The UN press corps had immediately chosen not to publish a release on the bad infinity meeting, seemingly too busy in sharing the announcements of various new (temporary) permanent members engaging in ring-kissing meetings with Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres (a small photo gallery of the SG’s colonialist leanings found here).
These monthly reruns are held under the guise of implementing UNSCR 2118, which was passed on 27 September 2013; UNSCR 242 that was passed in 1967 not only does not require monthly meetings on implementation, but also does not require any resolutions to condemn occupying forces from treating wounded terrorists, nor to condemn occupying forces when they bomb from the region, nor to condemn presidents who illegally make presents of the occupied region.
When it comes to terrorists on the occupied Golan, Israel spares no US taxpayer expense in state of art medical care
Before taking a perfunctory glance at the hypocritical arrogance of the P3 Security Council member supremacists, and their customary vomiting up lies and then eating their own, and each other’s emesis, like ravenous dogs, the following article will serve as a refresher course from the first threats to use chemical weapons against Syria, beginning 5 December 2012. It was published 2 March 2017, one month and two days before Jahbat al Nusra terrorists staged its heinous murders of mostly children who were kidnapped, for the supremacists and their media dogs, in Khan Sheikhoun.
Let us take a short trip down memory lane, followed by an amnesia antidote on the chemical terror attack leading up to UNSCR 2118 (2013), possibly the resolution that incited the most excitement among the supremacists running the United Nations — that bastion ofpeace and security that continues to inversely unleash mayhem throughout the world.
Western P3 supremacists France, Britain, and the US have extensive histories as the world leaders in genocide, and also in deployment of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical ones. France called its nuclear bombings of Algerian tribes, Gerboise Bleue; Britain gassed Russia and also “uncivilized tribes” in Iraq; America’s Truman chuckled before telling his people that he had used the country’s two nuclear bombs against Japan, and the US has consistently used white phosphorus as an alleged incendiary device. By naming the chemical weapon white phosphorus ”incendiary device,” it becomes exempt from being considered a chemical weapon. Human beings destroyed by them are merely ”collateral damage,” oh well.
Photos of Algerian survivors of France nuclear bombings seem to be in permanent lockdown.
Let us now do a short decontamination of the NATO supremacists’ convenient amnesia:
The US joined the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997. The US still has over 3,000 tons of CWs that have somehow not yet been destroyed. There was no UNSC resolution when the US joined; therefore there is no ability to hold monthly meetings for its implementation.
In December 2012, threats of unleashing chemical attacks were uploaded to social media. The threats came from within Turkey. The criminals used rabbits in two fatal experiments; the first appeared to have used VX. In the second, the savage demonstration, the claim was made that a quick-acting poison would be used to pollute the Alsinn water supply to Lattakia. Dr. Jaafari requested a UN investigation, which was ignored (comparing the 21 December 2012 rabbit video with the original Khan Sheikhoun snuff porn video uploaded by the al Qaeda White Helmets on 4 April 2017, this author states with reasonable certainty that this was the same chemical poison.
On 19 March 2013, terrorists unleashed weapons-grade chlorine on Khan al Asal. Two dozen soldiers and civilians were murdered. Ambassador Jaafari’s request one day later, for a UN-OPCW investigation was sabotaged by the British and French ambassadors. OPCW investigators sent to inspect Khan al Asal five months after evidence would have been degraded arrived just before the 21 August Ghouta attack, and were diverted.
In May 2013, American illegal in Aleppo, Matthew VanDyke emailed former ladies’ undergarments salesman cum unemployed couch potato and gamer Eliot Higgins that terrorists had ”small quantities” of chemical weapons, and were prepared to use them against civilians, to blame on the Syrian government.
In early August 2013, moderate FSA terrorists — including criminals from Qatar’s al Jazeera — raided villages in Lattakia, slaughtering men, and kidnapping women and their children. Some of the abductees were identified by their corpses shown after the terrorist chemical attack in al Ghouta, 21 August 2013. Terrorists later complained that they did not know that the missiles from al Saud contained chemical agents, that Prince Bandar should have sent instructions on how to use them.
The world stood on edge as Obama and other western supremacists considered the obliteration of the S. A. R., because Western-supported terrorists had used chemical weapons. Syria acceded to the CWC on 14 October 2013.
The UN-OPCW held several meetings high-fiving each other for the speed at which Syria’s CWs were collected and obliterated (some photos, here.). Nobody mentioned that the UN-OPCW came under missile fire via Madman Erdogan, though, while at the Lattakia port — daintily described as “volatile security conditions” in the 4 June 2014 UN news report on OPCW-UN Special Coordinator Sigrid Kaag’s address to the Security Council.
How did a White Helmet come into possession of a dead fetus & why does this pervert play with the body?
On 20 January 2020, an Arria Formula meetingwas held on Douma, because the NATO supremacists refused to give a Security Council audience to the OPCW’s own Ian Henderson, who led the investigations (Syria News reminds our readers that the SAR immediately requested an investigation by UN-OPCW, and that the investigations were postponed after members came under sniper fire by the same terrorists who had slaughtered dozens of Syrians in Douma, uploaded what should have been recognized as their crimes, to social media, while screaming ‘chemical weapons.’). This was the same SC that refused to hear Jose Bustani in October 2020, on the pretense that he had not participated in the investigations, after which the OPCW censored people with questions, but limiting comments to its Twitter account, to the insider elite tagees.
OPCW has sold itself to NATO warmongers & functions as press liaison for al Qaeda in Syria.
Upon digesting the above, it comes as no surprise that the tripartite aggressor UN representatives — speaking for the world’s leaders in genocide, colonialism, and all other forms of supremacy — were the unified, barking rabid dogs of war, unabashedly unashamed by their hypocrisy and arrogance. The UK — the country whose Tony Blair has not only never been indicted for his war crimes involving his WMD lies about Iraq — lied that “Syria’s declaration…can still not be considered accurate & complete.” France — which never forgave Syria for ejecting French occupiers — again announced its support of al Qaeda in the SAR, functioning as press liaison to terrorists of Ghouta, Khan Sheikhoun, Ltamenah, Douma. The US — which released al Baghdadi from an Iraqi jail and sent him to Jordan with a $10,000,000 slush fund to train DAESH savages — demanded Syria to be held accountable for the terror inflicted on the country by the degenerate criminals it has trained, armed, and deployed into the country.
Utilizing his unique and uncanny skill of throwing those proverbial pearls before swine while maintaining the protocol of true diplomatic language, Dr. Jaafari again meticulously explained reality to the P3 NATO klan supremacists — and to their dancing House Servants — that Syria joined the OPCW 2013, that Syria relinquished all of its chemical weapons stockpile, that Syria has engaged in full cooperation with the OPCW.
Though it was beginning to look as though His Excellency, Minister Dr. Jaafari were to give new meaning to Permanent Representative, this 3 February address to the NATO junta supremacists ruling the United Nations, was his final act of pearl-throwing.
To help us continue please visit the Donate page to donate or learn how you can help us with no cost on you. Follow us on Telegram: http://t.me/syupdates link will open Telegram app.
Generations of countless Americans have been contaminated and sickened by the first-ever atomic bomb test. The Trinity explosion on July 16, 1945, was carried out in the New Mexico desert. Three weeks later, two A-bombs were dropped on Japan, killing up to 200,000 people.
But the number of American victims caused by radiation fallout from the Trinity test is reckoned to be also imponderably high. The American government conducted the explosion in secret, unbeknownst to the population of New Mexico. That was in spite of warnings from Manhattan Project scientists of a high risk to public health from the extreme radiation. Without a warning to the public and because of a cover-up about the event, countless Americans were exposed to carcinogenic radiation.
In a recent interview with Karl Grossman, New Mexican resident Tina Cordova tells how her community has been campaigning for decades to find out the truth behind the Trinity test and to seek reparations from the federal government. Incredibly, there has never been a federal investigation into establishing the human health impact from that atomic test explosion. But Cordova and her community estimate that the number is huge. She is the fourth generation in her family to have suffered from cancer. Countless others tell of high numbers of infant mortality over the decades and other morbidities that stretch across the entire state of New Mexico.
A combination of factors conspired to wreak a heavy toll on the people of New Mexico. It is one of the poorest states in the U.S., with large numbers of native Americans and Latinos. In selecting the test site for the A-bomb, there was a tacit racism among planners in Washington who viewed the area and its population as expendable. By not warning the people of the explosion, local populations were given no chance to take protective measures such as evacuation or avoiding consumption of contaminated water and food produced from the soil. The people were deceived into continuing their livelihoods as normal following the explosion, drinking contaminated water and breathing radioactive air. The New York Times was instrumental in the cover-up, issuing reports that the explosion was due to a conventional munitions incident. It was only after the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 an 9 that the people of New Mexico realized what had really happened at the Trinity site. Even then they were kept in the dark by Washington stonewalling about the event for decades to come.
Still another factor that maximized the damage on public health was the rush by the American government to weaponize the A-bomb technology. As Karl Grossman points out, the rationale behind the Manhattan Project was said to be to preempt Nazi Germany. But by July 1945, Nazi Germany was defeated and imperial Japan was on its knees. The inescapable implication is that President Harry Truman and the Pentagon wanted to display the new awesome weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union in what would be a chilling demarcation of the postwar globe according to American power.
Truman eagerly awaited the news of the Trinity test while attending the Potsdam allies’ conference in Germany along with Britain’s Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin. On receiving news of the successful explosion, Truman immediately adopted a more strident attitude towards Stalin. In that moment, a new Cold War was born.
Thus, it was Russophobia among the American ruling class that rushed the Trinity A-bomb explosion, even though that event would lead to generations of American citizens stricken with fatal diseases from the fallout. In a very real and frightening way, the U.S. rulers took a decision to “nuke” their own people such was their obsession with confronting the Soviet Union.
Subsequent U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 60s was conducted in remote areas of Nevada and in the Pacific Ocean. Those tests also took a deadly toll on the environment and local populations on Pacific islands.
But the recklessness and callous conditions of the New Mexico test is unparalleled in the toxic exposure it imposed on unsuspecting populations.
The stone-cold willingness to, in effect, bomb its own citizens by the federal government is a shuddering testimony as to the nefarious lengths the planners in Washington were prepared to go in their obsessive Russophobia.
When we survey the relentless fixation today in Washington and the U.S. political class with blaming Russia for all sorts of alleged malign intent, one can easily discern that this endemic Russophobia among America’s rulers has not waned.
The barbarity of what happened in New Mexico 75 years ago is alive and well. If it can be inflicted without apology on American citizens, then what does that say about the danger to the rest of the world?
Over a year ago I published the book Power and Primacy: The History of Western Intervention in the Asia-Pacific, which was an attempt to fill what I saw as a gap in scholarship on the subject. I found that while several scholars had covered individual cases of Western powers intervening in the region, from David Easter and Geoffrey B. Robinson’s works on the Western-engineered coup and massacres in Indonesia of an estimated 500,000 to 3 million people[1] – to Bruce Cumings and Hugh Deane’s works on the Korean War, there were no major works assessing broader trends and consistencies in Western intervention. Power and Primacy was thus written to show the consistencies in Western designs towards the region and the means used to achieve them over a period of more than 70 years, from the Pacific War which began in 1941 to Western policies towards China and North Korea today.
This month marks the 75th anniversary of the dismantling of the Japanese Empire, and the famous declaration by General Douglas MacArthur that, with the region’s only non-Western military power and the world’s only non-Western naval power now defeated, ‘The Pacific is now an Anglo-Saxon lake.’ While the U.S. and its allies portrayed themselves as a benevolent and democratising force in the region, the darker aspects of East Asia’s time under the new hegemon, which starkly contradict this, have seen very little discussion or coverage. It is notable, for example, that after the Japanese Empire’s fall not only did living standards in southern Korea fall dramatically after it was placed under the rule of an American military government, but mass rapes, the use of comfort women, and serious human trafficking – the very things used by many to justify the American embargo on Japan which had started hostilities in 1941 – not only continued but were expanded under U.S. control. The government of Syngman Rhee, the Princeton-educated Christian radical the U.S. placed in power, killed 2% of its population at the most conservative estimate within five years, placing hundreds of thousands more in concentration camps and exercising a level of brutality not seen even under the Japanese Empire.
With Japan today having seen 75 uninterrupted years with tens of thousands of Western soldiers based on its territory, where they appear set to remain indefinitely, this is a suitable time to reflect on the nature of the relationship between the country and the West – which is very far from that of equal sovereign powers with shared goals and ideals. Evidence for this has ranged from massive involvement of American intelligence in the political process, including funding pro-Western political parties and supporting their election campaigns,[2] to the testimonies of multiple officials. Former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, for example, noted regarding his country’s inability to reach a deal with Russia over the Kuril Islands due to an effective American veto over all major foreign policy decisions: “I think it represents a big problem that when making foreign policy decisions, Tokyo is always guided by the United States’ approach. Japan depends on America.” He further stated: “The Japanese media and government… always take America’s side. Tokyo is dependent on the US’ views … Japan will continue to side with America and the G7 countries.”[3] Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama, who in the 1950s had also sought to resolve the dispute with Moscow and sign a peace treaty on the basis that Japan would receive two of the four islands, was harshly threatened by the U.S. and was ultimately forced to concede to Washington’s demands not to go through with an agreement. Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori came to a similar conclusion regarding the country’s lack of effective sovereignty in an interview with Russian state media in 2018. [4]
Beyond these political indicators, however, are more human indicators of the nature of America’s place in post-war Japan which cannot be overlooked, and which contrast very strongly with portrayals in the vast majority of Western media including both documentaries and popular media. An extract from the book Power and Primacy, pages 66-69, given below, recently reached over 3 million viewers on social media and highlighted the true consequences for Japan’s population of subjugation by the United States. The full references are provided in the book itself. Perhaps most importantly, this is not presented as an isolated set of cases of U.S. and Western conduct towards an East Asian population placed under their power – rather it is part of a much wider trend which if anything was considerably more extreme in Vietnam and in both South and North Korea – the latter of which was briefly occupied by U.S. forces in 1950. An understanding of the past is key to comprehending the nature of Western involvement in the Asia-Pacific region today, which is why I found that this project was particularly essential now in light of the ‘Pivot to Asia,’ the North Korean nuclear crisis, the Trump administration’s recent ‘Tech War’ on China and other key events which have increasingly placed the region at the centre of determining the future of world order.
Text Start:
There was a far darker side to the U.S. and allied occupation of Japan, one which is little mentioned in the vast majority of histories – American or otherwise. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, mass rapes by occupying forces were expected… [despite setting up of a comfort women system which recruited or otherwise trafficked desperate women to brothels] such crimes were still common and several of them were extremely brutal and resulted in the deaths of the victims. Political science professor Eiji Takemae wrote regarding the conduct of American soldiers occupying Japan:
‘U.S. troops comported themselves like conquerors, especially in the early weeks and months of occupation. Misbehavior ranged from black-marketeering, petty theft, reckless driving and disorderly conduct to vandalism, assault, arson, murder and rape. Much of the violence was directed against women, the first attacks beginning within hours after the landing of advanced units. In Yokohama, China and elsewhere, soldiers and sailors broke the law with impunity, and incidents of robbery, rape and occasionally murder were widely reported in the press [which had not yet been censored by the U.S. military government]. When U.S. paratroopers landed in Sapporo an orgy of looting, sexual violence and drunken brawling ensued. Gang rapes and other sex atrocities were not infrequent […] Military courts arrested relatively few soldiers for their offences and convicted even fewer, and restitution for the victims was rare. Japanese attempts at self-defense were punished severely. In the sole instance of self-help that General Eichberger records in his memoirs, when local residents formed a vigilante group and retaliated against off-duty GIs, the Eighth Army ordered armored vehicles in battle array into the streets and arrested the ringleaders, who received lengthy prison terms.’
The U.S. and Australian militaries did not maintain rule of law when it came to violations of Japanese women by their own forces, neither were the Japanese population allowed to do so themselves. Occupation forces could loot and rape as they pleased and were effectively above the law.
An example of such an incident was in April 1946, when approximately U.S. personnel in three trucks attacked the Nakamura Hospital in Omori district. The soldiers raped over 40 patients and 37 female staff. One woman who had given birth just two days prior had her child thrown on the floor and killed, and she was then raped as well. Male patients trying to protect the women were also killed. The following week several dozen U.S. military personnel cut the phone lines to a housing block in Nagoya and raped all the women they could capture there – including girls as young as ten years old and women as old as fifty-five.
Such behavior was far from unique to American soldiers. Australian forces conducted themselves in much the same way during their own deployment in Japan. As one Japanese witness testified: ‘As soon as Australian troops arrived in Kure in early 1946, they ‘dragged young women into their jeeps, took them to the mountain, and then raped them. I heard them screaming for help nearly every night.’ Such behavior was commonplace, but news of criminal activity by Occupation forces was quickly suppressed.
Australian officer Allan Clifton recalled his own experience of the sexual violence committed in Japan:
‘I stood beside a bed in hospital. On it lay a girl, unconscious, her long, black hair in wild tumult on the pillow. A doctor and two nurses were working to revive her. An hour before she had been raped by twenty soldiers. We found her where they had left her, on a piece of waste land. The hospital was in Hiroshima. The girl was Japanese. The soldiers were Australians. The moaning and wailing had ceased and she was quiet now. The tortured tension on her face had slipped away, and the soft brown skin was smooth and unwrinkled, stained with tears like the face of a child that has cried herself to sleep.’
Australians committing such crimes in Japan were, when discovered, given very minor sentences. Even these were most often later mitigated or quashed by Australian courts. Clifton recounted one such event himself, when an Australian court quashed a sentence given by a military court martial citing ‘insufficient evidence,’ despite the incident having several witnesses. It was clear that courts overseeing Western occupation forces took measures to protect their own from crimes committed against the Japanese – crimes which were largely regarded as just access to ‘spoils of war’ at the time by the Western occupiers.
As had been the case during the war, underreporting of rapes in peace- time due to the associated shame in a traditional society and inaction on the part of authorities (rapes in both cases occurred when Western militaries were themselves in power) would lower the figures significantly. In order to prevent ill feeling towards their occupation from increasing, the United States military government implemented very strict censorship of the media. Mention of crimes committed by Western military personnel against Japanese civilians was strictly forbidden. The occupying forces ‘issued press and pre-censorship codes outlawing the publication of all reports and statistics “inimical to the objectives of the Occupation.”’ When a few weeks into the occupation Japanese press mentioned the rape and widespread looting by American soldiers, the occupying forces quickly responded by censoring all media and imposing a zero tolerance policy against the reporting of such crimes. It was not only the crimes committed by Western forces, but any criticism of the Western allied powers whatsoever which was strictly forbidden during the occupation period – for over six years. This left the U.S. military government, the supreme authority in the country, beyond accountability. Topics such as the establishment of comfort stations and encouragement of vulnerable women into the sex trade, critical analysis of the black market, the population’s starvation level calorie intakes and even references to the Great Depression’s impact on Western economies, anti-colonialism, pan-Asianism and emerging Cold War tensions were all off limits.
What was particularly notable about the censorship imposed under American occupation was that it was intended to conceal its own existence. This meant that not only were certain subjects strictly off limits, but the mention of censorship was also forbidden. As Columbia University Professor Donald Keene noted: ‘the Occupation censorship was even more exasperating than Japanese military censorship had been because it insisted that all traces of censorship be concealed. This meant that articles had to be rewritten in full, rather than merely submitting XXs for the offending phrases.’ For the U.S. military government it was essential not only to control information – but also to give the illusion of a free press when the press was in fact more restricted than it had been even in wartime under imperial rule.
By going one step further to censor even the mention of censorship itself, the United States could claim to stand for freedom of press and freedom of expression. By controlling the media the American military government could attempt to foster goodwill among the Japanese people while making crimes committed by their personnel and those of their allies appear as isolated incidents. While the brutality of American and Australian militaries against Japanese civilians was evident during the war and in its immediate aftermath, it did not end with occupation. The United States has maintained a significant military presence in Japan ever since and crimes including sexual violence and murder against Japanese civilians continue to occur.”
For A. B. Abrams’ upcoming work, scheduled for publication in October 2018, titled Immovable Object: North Koreans 70 Years at War with American Power:
First published November 4, 2017. Revisions to the English Text, December 10, 2017
Author’s Note
Since this article was first published in 2017, YouTube has decided to Censor the short video produced by South Front which is largely based on the declassified documents quoted in this article.
US nuclear threats directed against Russia predate the Cold War. They were first formulated at the height of World War II under the Manhattan Project when the US and the Soviet Union were allies.
The plan to bomb 66 Soviet cities was “officially” formulated in mid-September 1945, two weeks after the formal surrender of Japan.
Had the US decided NOT to develop nuclear weapons for use against the Soviet Union, the nuclear arms race would not have taken place.
Neither The Soviet Union nor the People’s Republic of China would have developed nuclear capabilities as a means of “Deterrence” agains the US which had already formulated plans to annihilate the Soviet Union.
Flash Forward to 2020: Nuclear War is still on the drawing board of the Pentagon. In the post Cold War era, under Donald Trump’s “Fire and Fury”, nuclear war directed against Russia, China, North Korea and Iran is “On the Table”.
A one $1.2 trillion ++ nuclear weapons program, first launched under Obama, is ongoing.
All major cities of the Soviet Union were included in the list of 66 “strategic” targets. The tables below categorize each city in terms of area in square miles and the corresponding number of atomic bombs required to annihilate and kill the inhabitants of selected urban areas.
Six atomic bombs were to be used to destroy each of the larger cities including Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa.
The Pentagon estimated that a total of 204 atomic bombs would be required to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”. The targets for a nuclear attack consisted of sixty-six major cities.
To undertake this operation the “optimum” number of bombs required was of the order of 466 (see document below)
One single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima resulted in the immediate death of 100,000 people in the first seven seconds. Imagine what would have happened if 204 atomic bombs had been dropped on major cities of the Soviet Union as outlined in a secret U.S. plan formulated during the Second World War.
Hiroshima in the wake of the atomic bomb attack, 6 August 1945
The document outlining this diabolical military agenda had been released in September 1945, barely one month after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (6 and 9 August, 1945) and two years before the onset of the Cold War (1947).
Video produced by South Front
The secret plan dated September 15, 1945 (two weeks after the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945 aboard the USS Missouri, see image below) , however, had been formulated at an earlier period, namely at the height of World War II, at a time when America and the Soviet Union were close allies.
It is worth noting that Stalin was first informed through official channels by Harry Truman of the infamous Manhattan Project at the Potsdam Conference on July 24, 1945, barely two weeks before the attack on Hiroshima.
The Manhattan project was launched in 1939, two years prior to America’s entry into World War II in December 1941. The Kremlin was fully aware of the secret Manhattan project as early as 1942.
Were the August 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks used by the Pentagon to evaluate the viability of a much larger attack on the Soviet Union consisting of more than 204 atomic bombs? The key documents to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union (15 September 1945) were finalized 5-6 weeks after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (6, 9 August 1945):
“On September 15, 1945 — just under two weeks after the formal surrender of Japan and the end of World War II — Norstad sent a copy of the estimate to General Leslie Groves, still the head of the Manhattan Project, and the guy who, for the short term anyway, would be in charge of producing whatever bombs the USAAF might want. As you might guess, the classification on this document was high: “TOP SECRET LIMITED,” which was about as high as it went during World War II. (Alex Wellerstein, The First Atomic Stockpile Requirements (September 1945)
The Kremlin was aware of the 1945 plan to bomb sixty-six Soviet cities.
The documents confirm that the US was involved in the “planning of genocide” against the Soviet Union.
Let’s cut to the chase. How many bombs did the USAAF request of the atomic general, when there were maybe one, maybe two bombs worth of fissile material on hand? At a minimum they wanted 123. Ideally, they’d like 466. This is just a little over a month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Of course, in true bureaucratic fashion, they provided a handy-dandy chart (Alex Wellerstein, op. cit)
Central to our understanding of the Cold War which started (officially) in 1947, Washington’s September 1945 plan to bomb 66 cities into smithereens played a key role in triggering the nuclear arms race.
The Soviet Union was threatened and developed its own atomic bomb in 1949 in response to 1942 Soviet intelligence reports on the Manhattan Project.
While the Kremlin knew about these plans to “Wipe out” the USSR, the broader public was not informed because the September 1945 documents were of course classified.
Today, neither the September 1945 plan to blow up the Soviet Union nor the underlying cause of the nuclear arms race are acknowledged. The Western media has largely focussed its attention on the Cold War US-USSR confrontation. The plan to annihilate the Soviet Union dating back to World War II and the infamous Manhattan project are not mentioned.
Washington’s Cold War nuclear plans are invariably presented in response to so-called Soviet threats, when in fact it was the U.S. plan released in September 1945 (formulated at an earlier period at the height of World War II) to wipe out the Soviet which motivated Moscow to develop its nuclear weapons capabilities.
The assessment of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists mistakenly blamed and continue to blame the Soviet Union for having launched the nuclear arms race in 1949, four years after the release of the September 1945 US Secret Plan to target 66 major Soviet cities with 204 nuclear bombs:
“1949: The Soviet Union denies it, but in the fall, President Harry Truman tells the American public that the Soviets tested their first nuclear device, officially starting the arms race. “We do not advise Americans that doomsday is near and that they can expect atomic bombs to start falling on their heads a month or year from now,” the Bulletin explains. “But we think they have reason to be deeply alarmed and to be prepared for grave decisions.” (Timeline of the Doomsday Clock, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 2017)
IMPORTANT: Had the US decided NOT to develop nuclear weapons for use against the Soviet Union, the nuclear arms race would not have taken place.
Neither The Soviet Union nor the People’s Republic of China would have developed nuclear capabilities as a means of “Deterrence” agains the US which had already formulated plans to annihilate the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union lost 26 million people during World War II.
The Cold War List of 1200 Targeted Cities:
This initial 1945 list of sixty-six cities was updated in the course of the Cold War (1956) to include some 1200 cities in the USSR and the Soviet block countries of Eastern Europe (see declassified documents below). The bombs slated for use were more powerful in terms of explosive capacity than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Source: National Security Archive
“According to the 1956 Plan, H-Bombs were to be Used Against Priority “Air Power” Targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Major Cities in the Soviet Bloc, Including East Berlin, Were High Priorities in “Systematic Destruction” for Atomic Bombings. (William Burr, U.S. Cold War Nuclear Attack Target List of 1200 Soviet Bloc Cities “From East Germany to China”, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 538, December 2015
Source: National Security Archive
Washington, D.C., December 22, 2015 – The SAC [Strategic Air Command] Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, produced in June 1956 and published today for the first time by the National Security Archive www.nsarchive.org, provides the most comprehensive and detailed list of nuclear targets and target systems that has ever been declassified. As far as can be told, no comparable document has ever been declassified for any period of Cold War history.
The SAC study includes chilling details. According to its authors, their target priorities and nuclear bombing tactics would expose nearby civilians and “friendly forces and people” to high levels of deadly radioactive fallout. Moreover, 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. Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 538, December 2015
List of Cities
Excerpt of list of 1200 cities targeted for nuclear attack in alphabetical order. National Security Archive, op. cit.
From the Cold War to Donald Trump
In the post Cold War era, under Donald Trump’s “Fire and Fury”, nuclear war directed against Russia, China, North Korea and Iran is “On the Table”.
What distinguishes the October 1962 Missile Crisis to Today’s realities:
1. Today’s president Donald Trump does not have the foggiest idea as to the consequences of nuclear war.
2, Communication today between the White House and the Kremlin is at an all time low. In contrast, in October 1962, the leaders on both sides, namely John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev were accutely aware of the dangers of nuclear annihilation. They collaborated with a view to avoiding the unthinkable.
3. The nuclear doctrine was entirely different during the Cold War. Both Washington and Moscow understood the realities of mutually assured destruction. Today, tactical nuclear weapons with an explosive capacity (yield) of one third to six times a Hiroshima bomb are categorized by the Pentagon as “harmless to civilians because the explosion is underground”.
4. A one trillion ++ nuclear weapons program, first launched under Obama, is ongoing.
5. Today’s thermonuclear bombs are more than 100 times more powerful and destructive than a Hiroshima bomb. Both the US and Russia have several thousand nuclear weapons deployed.
Moreover, an all war against China is currently on the drawing board of the Pentagon as outlined by a RAND Corporation Report commissioned by the US Army
“Fire and Fury”, From Truman to Trump: U.S Foreign Policy Insanity
There is a long history of US political insanity geared towards providing a human face to U.S. crimes against humanity.
On August 9, 1945, on the day the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, president Truman (image right), in a radio address to the American people, concluded that God is on the side of America with regard to the use of nuclear weapons and that
“He May guide us to use it [atomic bomb] in His ways and His purposes”.
According to Truman: God is with us, he will decide if and when to use the bomb:
[We must] prepare plans for the future control of this bomb. I shall ask the Congress to cooperate to the end that its production and use be controlled, and that its power be made an overwhelming influence towards world peace.
We must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force–to prevent its misuse, and to turn it into the channels of service to mankind.
It is an awful responsibility which has come to us.
We thank God that it [nuclear weapons] has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it [nuclear weapons] in His ways and for His purposes” (emphasis added)
The original source of this article is Global Research
Photograph Source: Oilstreet – Own work – CC BY 2.5
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open.
At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite.
I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then I walked down to the river where the survivors still lived in shanties.
I met a man called Yukio, whose chest was etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He described a huge flash over the city, “a bluish light, something like an electrical short”, after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. “I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead.”
Nine years later, I returned to look for him and he was dead from leukaemia.
“No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said The New York Times front page on 13 September, 1945, a classic of planted disinformation. “General Farrell,” reported William H. Lawrence, “denied categorically that [the atomic bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.”
Only one reporter, Wilfred Burchett, an Australian, had braved the perilous journey to Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing, in defiance of the Allied occupation authorities, which controlled the “press pack”.
“I write this as a warning to the world,” reported Burchett in the London Daily Express of September 5,1945. Sitting in the rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter, he described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries who were dying from what he called “an atomic plague”.
For this, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared. His witness to the truth was never forgiven.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by lies that form the bedrock of America’s war propaganda in the 21st century, casting a new enemy, and target – China.
During the 75 years since Hiroshima, the most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and to save lives.
“Even without the atomic bombing attacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war [against Japan] and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
The National Archives in Washington contains documented Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US made clear the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including “capitulation even if the terms were hard”. Nothing was done.
The US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US Air Force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. Stimson later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the [atomic] bomb”.
Stimson’s foreign policy colleagues — looking ahead to the post-war era they were then shaping “in our image”, as Cold War planner George Kennan famously put it — made clear they were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the [atomic] bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the atomic bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.”
The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Harry Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.
The “experiment” continued long after the war was over. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific: the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima every day for 12 years.
The human and environmental consequences were catastrophic. During the filming of my documentary, The Coming War on China, I chartered a small aircraft and flew to Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls. It was here that the United States exploded the world’s first Hydrogen Bomb. It remains poisoned earth. My shoes registered “unsafe” on my Geiger counter. Palm trees stood in unworldly formations. There were no birds.
I trekked through the jungle to the concrete bunker where, at 6.45 on the morning of March 1, 1954, the button was pushed. The sun, which had risen, rose again and vaporised an entire island in the lagoon, leaving a vast black hole, which from the air is a menacing spectacle: a deathly void in a place of beauty.
The radioactive fall-out spread quickly and “unexpectedly”. The official history claims “the wind changed suddenly”. It was the first of many lies, as declassified documents and the victims’ testimony reveal.
Gene Curbow, a meteorologist assigned to monitor the test site, said, “They knew where the radioactive fall-out was going to go. Even on the day of the shot, they still had an opportunity to evacuate people, but [people] were not evacuated; I was not evacuated… The United States needed some guinea pigs to study what the effects of radiation would do.”
Like Hiroshima, the secret of the Marshall Islands was a calculated experiment on the lives of large numbers of people. This was Project 4.1, which began as a scientific study of mice and became an experiment on “human beings exposed to the radiation of a nuclear weapon”.
The Marshall Islanders I met in 2015 — like the survivors of Hiroshima I interviewed in the 1960s and 70s — suffered from a range of cancers, commonly thyroid cancer; thousands had already died. Miscarriages and stillbirths were common; those babies who lived were often deformed horribly.
Unlike Bikini, nearby Rongelap atoll had not been evacuated during the H-Bomb test. Directly downwind of Bikini, Rongelap’s skies darkened and it rained what first appeared to be snowflakes. Food and water were contaminated; and the population fell victim to cancers. That is still true today.
I met Nerje Joseph, who showed me a photograph of herself as a child on Rongelap. She had terrible facial burns and much of her was hair missing. “We were bathing at the well on the day the bomb exploded,” she said. “White dust started falling from the sky. I reached to catch the powder. We used it as soap to wash our hair. A few days later, my hair started falling out.”
Lemoyo Abon said, “Some of us were in agony. Others had diarrhoea. We were terrified. We thought it must be the end of the world.”
US official archive film I included in my film refers to the islanders as “amenable savages”. In the wake of the explosion, a US Atomic Energy Agency official is seen boasting that Rongelap “is by far the most contaminated place on earth”, adding, “it will be interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment.”
American scientists, including medical doctors, built distinguished careers studying the “human uptake’. There they are in flickering film, in their white coats, attentive with their clipboards. When an islander died in his teens, his family received a sympathy card from the scientist who studied him.
I have reported from five nuclear “ground zeros” throughout the world — in Japan, the Marshall Islands, Nevada, Polynesia and Maralinga in Australia. Even more than my experience as a war correspondent, this has taught me about the ruthlessness and immorality of great power: that is, imperial power, whose cynicism is the true enemy of humanity.
This struck me forcibly when I filmed at Taranaki Ground Zero at Maralinga in the Australian desert. In a dish-like crater was an obelisk on which was inscribed: “A British atomic weapon was test exploded here on 9 October 1957”. On the rim of the crater was this sign:
WARNING: RADIATION HAZARD
Radiation levels for a few hundred metres
around this point may be above those considered
safe for permanent occupation.
For as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the ground was irradiated. Raw plutonium lay about, scattered like talcum powder: plutonium is so dangerous to humans that a third of a milligram gives a 50 per cent chance of cancer.
The only people who might have seen the sign were Indigenous Australians, for whom there was no warning. According to an official account, if they were lucky “they were shooed off like rabbits”.
Today, an unprecedented campaign of propaganda is shooing us all off like rabbits. We are not meant to question the daily torrent of anti-Chinese rhetoric, which is rapidly overtaking the torrent of anti-Russia rhetoric. Anything Chinese is bad, anathema, a threat: Wuhan …. Huawei. How confusing it is when “our” most reviled leader says so.
The current phase of this campaign began not with Trump but with Barack Obama, who in 2011 flew to Australia to declare the greatest build-up of US naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since World War Two. Suddenly, China was a “threat”. This was nonsense, of course. What was threatened was America’s unchallenged psychopathic view of itself as the richest, the most successful, the most “indispensable” nation.
What was never in dispute was its prowess as a bully — with more than 30 members of the United Nations suffering American sanctions of some kind and a trail of the blood running through defenceless countries bombed, their governments overthrown, their elections interfered with, their resources plundered.
Obama’s declaration became known as the “pivot to Asia”. One of its principal advocates was his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who, as WikiLeaks revealed, wanted to rename the Pacific Ocean “the American Sea”.
Whereas Clinton never concealed her warmongering, Obama was a maestro of marketing.”I state clearly and with conviction,” said the new president in 2009, “that America’s commitment is to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Obama increased spending on nuclear warheads faster than any president since the end of the Cold War. A “usable” nuclear weapon was developed. Known as the B61 Model 12, it means, according to General James Cartwright, former vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable”.
The target is China. Today, more than 400 American military bases almost encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to South-East Asia, Japan and Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as one US strategist told me, “the perfect noose”.
A study by the RAND Corporation – which, since Vietnam, has planned America’s wars – is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the US Army, the authors evoke the infamous catch cry of its chief Cold War strategist, Herman Kahn – “thinking the unthinkable”. Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a “winnable” nuclear war.
Kahn’s apocalyptic view is shared by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical fanatic who believes in the “rapture of the End”. He is perhaps the most dangerous man alive. “I was CIA director,” he boasted, “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses.” Pompeo’s obsession is China.
The endgame of Pompeo’s extremism is rarely if ever discussed in the Anglo-American media, where the myths and fabrications about China are standard fare, as were the lies about Iraq. A virulent racism is the sub-text of this propaganda. Classified “yellow” even though they were white, the Chinese are the only ethnic group to have been banned by an “exclusion act” from entering the United States, because they were Chinese. Popular culture declared them sinister, untrustworthy, “sneaky”, depraved, diseased, immoral.
An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, was devoted to promoting fear of the “yellow peril” as if all of Asia was about to fall down on the whites-only colony by the force of gravity.
As the historian Martin Powers writes, acknowledging China’s modernism, its secular morality and “contributions to liberal thought threatened European face, so it became necessary to suppress China’s role in the Enlightenment debate …. For centuries, China’s threat to the myth of Western superiority has made it an easy target for race-baiting.”
In the Sydney Morning Herald, tireless China-basher Peter Hartcher described those who spread Chinese influence in Australia as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows”. Hartcher, who favourably quotes the American demagogue Steve Bannon, likes to interpret the “dreams” of the current Chinese elite, to which he is apparently privy. These are inspired by yearnings for the “Mandate of Heaven” of 2,000 years ago. Ad nausea.
To combat this “mandate”, the Australian government of Scott Morrison has committed one of the most secure countries on earth, whose major trading partner is China, to hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American missiles that can be fired at China.
The trickledown is already evident. In a country historically scarred by violent racism towards Asians, Australians of Chinese descent have formed a vigilante group to protect delivery riders. Phone videos show a delivery rider punched in the face and a Chinese couple racially abused in a supermarket. Between April and June, there were almost 400 racist attacks on Asian-Australians.
“We are not your enemy,” a high-ranking strategist in China told me, “but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.” China’s arsenal is small compared with America’s, but it is growing fast, especially the development of maritime missiles designed to destroy fleets of ships.
“For the first time,” wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack… This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy…”
In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of international affairs at George Washington University, who wrote that a “blinding attack on China” was planned, “with strikes that could be mistakenly perceived [by the Chinese] as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma [that would] lead to nuclear war.”
In 2019, the US staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War, much of it in high secrecy. An armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an “Air-Sea Battle Concept for China” – ASB – blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.
It is fear of such a blockade that has seen China develop its Belt and Road Initiative along the old Silk Road to Europe and urgently build strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands.
In Shanghai, I met Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and novelist, typical of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her best-selling book has the ironic title Socialism Is Great! Having grown up in the chaotic, brutal Cultural Revolution, she has travelled and lived in the US and Europe. “Many Americans imagine,” she said, “that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the yellow peril has never left them… They have no idea there are some 500 million people being lifted out of poverty, and some would say it’s 600 million.”
Modern China’s epic achievements, its defeat of mass poverty, and the pride and contentment of its people (measured forensically by American pollsters such as Pew) are wilfully unknown or misunderstood in the West. This alone is a commentary on the lamentable state of Western journalism and the abandonment of honest reporting.
China’s repressive dark side and what we like to call its “authoritarianism” are the facade we are allowed to see almost exclusively. It is as if we are fed unending tales of the evil super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu. And it is time we asked why: before it is too late to stop the next Hiroshima.
We hope that by publishing diverse view points, submitted by journalists and experts dotted all over the world, the website can serve as a reminder that no matter what narrative we are presented with, things are rarely as cut and dry as they seem.
If Global Research has been a resource which has offered you some solace over the past few months, we ask you to make a financial contribution to our running costs so that we may keep this important project alive and well! We thank you for your support!
COVID assumptions – the assumptions people make about COVID, how dangerous it is, how it spreads and what we need to do to stop it – are running rampant, running far more wildly than the supposed virus SARS-CoV2 itself. The coldly calculated campaign of propaganda surrounding this ‘pandemic’ has achieved its aim. Besieged with a slew of contradictory information coming from all angles, people in general have succumbed to confusion. Some have given up trying to understand the situation and found it is just easier to obey official directives, even if it means giving up long-held rights. Below is a list of commonly held COVID assumptions which, if you believe them, will make you much more likely to submit to the robotic, insane and abnormal conditions of the New Normal – screening, testing, contact tracing, monitoring, surveillance, mask-wearing, social distancing, quarantine and isolation, with mandatory vaccination and microchipping to come.
Cotton’s proposal, stuffed with lucrative giveaways to the defense industry — $1.6 billion for “logistics and security enablers,” $775 million for “building national resilience to space weather,” among others — bears little apparent relevance to the military equation in Asia and is unlikely to be embraced by a majority of Senators. However, many of his proposed budgetary add-ons have been incorporated into other measures aimed at boosting U.S. military might in the Asia-Pacific region.
On July 3, 1945, the great atomic scientist Leo Szilard finished a letter/petition that would become the strongest (virtually the only) real attempt at halting President Truman’s march to using the atomic bomb–still almost two weeks from its first test at Trinity–against Japanese cities.
We rarely hear that as the Truman White House made plans to use the first atomic bombs against Japan in the summer of 1945, a large group of atomic scientists, many of whom had worked on the bomb project, raised their voices, or at least their names, in protest. They were led by the great physicist Szilard who, among things, is the man who convinced Albert Einstein to write his famous yes-it-can-be-done letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, setting the bomb project in motion.
The Arctic is once again on fire. And the extremely warm temperatures in the region — and concurrent wildfires — are another urgent reminder that we need to divest from fossil fuels as soon as possible.
They are a pressing reminder that any post COVID-19 bailout should be focused on an immediate just recovery toward industry workers, renewables, and clean energy.
It should surprise no one paying attention that the suspect in the recent stabbing spree in Reading, UK was not only known to British security agencies as an extremist and security threat, but that he comes from the pool of extremists the British aided Washington in funding, arming, training, and providing air support for during the 2011 overthrow of the Libyan government and have harbored before and ever since.
Why is the media so fixated on Sweden’s coronavirus policy? What difference does it make?
Sweden settled on a policy that they thought was both sustainable and would save as many lives as possible. They weren’t trying to ‘show anyone up’ or ‘prove how smart they were’. They simply took a more traditionalist approach that avoided a full-scale lockdown. That’s all.
Two of the US’s top “strategic threats” are getting closer and closer within the scope of the New Silk Roads – the leading 21st century project of economic integration across Eurasia. The Deep State will not be amused.
Talk by Alison Bodine at the United National Antiwar Coalition National Conference held from February 21–23, 2020, at the People’s Forum in New York City.
***
To begin, I hope everyone has been able to see actions across Canada in solidarity with the people of Wet’suwet’en media and social media lately, footage and their hereditary chiefs who are standing against a fracked gas, or what they call a “natural” gas pipeline, up in northern British Columbia. This struggle is part of my talk today, however, the focus of what I wanted to say is about the importance of bringing the anti-war movement and the climate justice movement together or anti-war organizers and the climate justice movement together.
The Devastating Human and Environmental Impact of War & Occupation
I want to start with just three short examples of the impact of war on the environment that I think are very important to remember.
On January 24th, over a million people protested in Iraq. The streets were full in Baghdad of people demanding the U.S. Out of Iraq Now! It was incredibly inspiring.
Iraq is a country that has been devastated for 17 years by U.S. led war and occupation. Over a million people have been killed, not to mention the millions who were killed before the war began in 2003 when the U.S. and the United Nations Security Council imposed severe sanctions between 1991 and 2003. Iraq is a devastated country where the U.S. has set up 500 big and small military bases throughout 17 years of occupation, and deployed countless bullets, bombs, chemical weapons, depleted uranium and burn pits filled with toxic plastics, heavy military machinery and shells of weaponry.
No wonder people in Iraq were demanding U.S. Out of Iraq Now! Because of the devastation that has been brought upon them. But I wanted to further centre our discussion on climate justice by talking about one example of what climate devastation and climate justice means to people in Iraq.
In 2010, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health wrote an article where they reported a 38-fold increase in leukemia, a tenfold increase in breast cancer, and an infant mortality rate eight times higher than in neighboring Kuwait, following what had then been seven years of U.S. war and occupation in Iraq. A big cause of this could be linked to the chemical weapons used, and especially to depleted uranium, which has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. According to a 2007 report by the U.N. Environment Program, between 1000 and 2000 metric tons of depleted uranium were fired into Iraq.
The city of Nagasaki is shown as a teeming urban area, above, then as a flattened, desolate wasteland following the detonation of an atomic bomb, below. Circles indicate the thousands of feet from ground zero.
Now I will bring it back home to the U.S. and Canada. In Canada, an Indigenous Dené nation community in the Northwest Territories became known as the “Village of Widows” because men of the population died of cancers that they developed when mining for uranium. This was the same uranium that was used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As well, the radium and the uranium mines in the community released tailings into the lake and landfills. The devastating effects of this are still experienced in the community today.
That brings us to what has been said many times, importantly, in this conference already, which is that the U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest polluter. We are talking about 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases emitted annually. That is the equivalent of 257 million cars on the road for a year.
In Canada, the Department of National Defence also makes an enormous contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. A portion of this is through the fueling of the warplanes of Canada and other imperialist countries. The government of Canada is often claiming that they are not participating in U.S.-led wars, but then refueling all the jets that are dropping the bombs. The Canadian military provided 65 million pounds of fuel to refuel aircraft used in the bombing of Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019. This is incomparable, of course, to the fuel consumption of the vehicles that any of us here in this room drive.
The Department of Defense in the United States is the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels. In Canada, the Department of National Defence is the largest consumer of petroleum and Canada’s largest landholder.
This is added to the continued environmental and human impact of chemical and radioactive weapons such as Agent Orange and depleted uranium. Also, the military bases of the United States and its allies around the world persist in poisoning and in polluting.
Another topic to talk about that is important to the discussion about environment and war is military emissions, because specific sources of greenhouse gases are excluded from federal reduction targets due to their important role in “ensuring the national safety and security of all Canadians” — as Canada’s previous environment minister, Catherine McKenna, justified why the declared emissions of the Department of National Defence in Canada has never been counted in Canada’s emission reduction targets.
Military emissions are explicitly stated as excluded in the targets set by the 2015 United National Paris agreements. Under these agreements, countries are “required,” as much as the Paris agreements can “require” anything, to report on their military emissions. Still, countries are not obligated or encouraged to do anything to reduce them. In the international climate agreements that proceeded with the Paris agreement, the Kyoto Accords, military emissions were not even part of the discussion. Military emissions continue to be considered a so-called necessary expense for our planet.
Then, there is the issue of military budgets. For example, the world’s biggest military budget ever has been passed yet again in the United States recently. Instead of being spent on human and environmental destruction, this money could go towards climate justice, meaning health care, education, jobs, public transit, and more.
As Martin Luther King Junior said, and I think this is a good quote for us to use when talking about the environment and war,
“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
So, where is the technology that we need to save our planet earth now?
The War at Home: Wet’suwet’en & the Struggle for Indigenous Rights
The wars abroad by imperialist countries such as the U.S. and Canada are also carried out against people at home. And I think every once in a while, there are these escalated times when that reality can shake oppressed people and their very foundations. And that has happened with Indigenous people in Canada over the past few weeks.
There is a war against Indigenous people in Canada. There has been since the colonisation of Indigenous land. The Canadian state has the same roots as the United States of genocide, residential schools, and reservation systems. This history and the current reality of colonization are reflected in the mobilization of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en today.
It is important to understand that one year ago, the RCMP -the Canadian national police- first invaded the territory of the Wet’suwet’en people, and they kept a detachment there for an entire year. Then this January is when things escalated again because the RCMP moved further into the territory and cleared people off of a road to make way for the development of the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which is in violation of the demands of the Wet’suwet’en people. British Columbia is an unceded territory. No treaties, in 92 percent of the land, were ever signed. So hereditary chiefs and their system of governance are law in those unceded territories.
The Coastal GasLink pipeline is fracked gas. There has been a lot of talk, specifically in the Province of British Columbia about how the Coastal GasLink pipeline is going to “replace coal for the world,” and at the same time, not have a big impact on greenhouse gas emissions. However, the impact of “natural gas” emissions can only be considered minor when you ignore the methane and poisons that are released when it is extracted and considering that when it is burned, Canada does not have to count those emissions targets.
It is Time to Unite the Antiwar and Climate Justice Movement
That brings me to my final point, which is about bringing together the anti-war movement with the climate justice movement. One way to do this is by making sure “self-determination for oppressed nations, including Indigenous nations!” is always part of our demands. This has always been part of our demands within Mobilization Against War and Occupation (MAWO) and MAWO has consistently brought this demand to the cross-border movement that we would like to strengthen and build together, including with this conference.
I think there are four strategies and demands that we need to bring into our antiwar, anti-pollution, and anti-imperialist movement. The first is that we must build a movement that is against imperialist war and occupation. Today, we live in what we in MAWO call “the new era of war and occupation,” which is the never-ending wars that started in 2001, that we are all coming together to organize against. This era is characterized by a campaign to regain hegemony in the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America by capitalist countries that are facing a grave economic crisis and a rapid falling rate of profit. These countries are on the war path to gain new markets and resources, which means more killing of our planet.
Secondly, self-determination for oppressed nations, as I said, must be part of our work, from Indigenous and Black people, to oppressed countries under attack and occupation. This important demand calls on us to have strategical unity against any occupation, domestic or international. We cannot just be talking about the U.S. occupying other countries but also what it means when there are oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canada borders.
Thirdly, we need to fight for a world without NATO and U.S. military bases, because of the environmental pollution and also because of the way that the United States uses these bases to increase their wars and occupations and consequently further ecological degradation.
Lastly, I think the environmental struggle ties into the movement against sanctions and blockades, which are war. These attacks do not allow countries to develop their economies or to use their resources for the good of their people. Sanctions and blockades enforce the hegemony of the world’s biggest corporations, which are also the world’s biggest polluters.
If we combine these four pillars, which bring together the war at home and abroad, this is how we can build an anti-imperialist movement, how we can move from just being against war to also being against imperialism. I think we cannot build an effective anti-war movement without centralizing and emphasizing the slogan of self-determination for all oppressed nations.
I will say that I think this slogan of self-determination for all oppressed nations is as important as “Workers of the world unite,” from Marx and Engels.
People of oppressed nations face war and occupation and the denial of self-determination, which unites them in the fight against imperialism. The common struggle that unites workers is their exploitation by the capitalist class and the denial of their rights.
Within the antiwar and the climate justice movement, we must also emphasize that we are building an international movement, one that is also internationalist in character. The struggles of people against massive resource extraction projects are similar in Standing Rock in North Dakota or the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. The struggle for a sustainable world requires international cooperation between oppressed people. It requires solidarity and, more importantly, unity across borders to become powerful and effective.
There are many opportunities for antiwar activists to bring the antiwar movement to the climate justice movement. There were massive protests around the world in September 2019; over 9 million people participated in global climate strike actions. And I think we need to continue to take advantage of that mobilization on the streets. We need to strategically bring the antiwar movement and the environmental movement together. Fighting against war is fighting against the degradation of the environment and fighting for climate justice is fighting against war and occupation. We are in an era of history that these two causes have become two struggles for one purpose, to save our lives and the planet.
I think we are now facing the opportunity to build a better and sustainable world. We must not feel inactive or depressed about the climate crisis or endless wars and occupations around us. In the face of this devastation, we have no choice but to take up the call and fight back.
People marching on the streets today against climate change can also be very capable of understanding that it is not just a clean planet we are fighting for. It will not matter if we have a clean planet if the earth is still full of poverty and human suffering and wars and occupations. The antiwar and climate justice movement now more than ever has one cause: Save the planet.
United we will win!
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
First printed in Fire This Time Newspaper Volume 14, Issue 3–5: www.firethistime.net
Alison Bodine is a social justice activist, author and researcher in Vancouver, Canada. She is the Chair of Vancouver’s peace coalition Mobilization Against War and Occupation (MAWO) and a central organizer with the grassroots climate justice coalition Climate Convergence in Vancouver, Canada. Alison is also on the Editorial Board of the Fire This Time newspaper.
Last month, I completed work on my first film, writing and directing a documentary titled Atomic Cover-up. Below you can watch via a link four brief clips. The story for me began, however, thirty-eight years ago this month. That day also helped set me on the path to spending four weeks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon after, and subsequently writing three books on the subject (including one to be published in July), hundreds of articles, and a lifelong engagement with political and ethical issues surrounding nuclear warfare.
In June 1982, the grassroots antinuclear movement in the U.S. (and much of the world) was cresting. The June 12th march and rally in New York City would draw well over half a million protesters, with some observers calling it the largest such gathering in the country’s history. Many new films with nuclear themes suddenly appeared, including the popular Atomic Cafe.
The Atomic Cafe (1982) – Re-Release Trailer
As someone who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, I had experienced the terror of the most dangerous years of the nuclear arms race, but I had never attended an “anti-bomb” protest. My knowledge of the debate surrounding the dropping of two atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 was only skin-deep.
But one day in June 1982, I took notice when the Japan Society in New York announced it would screen the first movie drawing on footage shot in vivid color in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by an elite American military team, then suppressed for decades by the U.S. government. One of the U.S. Army officers who was part of that team would discuss the film and its suppression for the first time. I was a member of the Japan Society–they had even arranged my recent interview with film director Akira Kurosawa–and always loved a good “cover-up.” So I attended the event a few days later.
The film, produced in Japan, was called Prophecy. Someone connected with it introduced former Army lieutenant Herbert Sussan, who went on to a long career as a producer/director in the emerging television industry. He described being recruited near the end of 1945 from the Army’s famous wartime film studio in Hollywood (where he had met Ronald Reagan, among others) to join a major U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey project to shoot the first and only color footage documenting the destruction of Japanese cities from the air during the war. It seemed to offer a free, triumphant, trip for the young man until the crew arrived by train at their first stop: Nagasaki. He would be haunted by what he saw there, and then in Hiroshima, for the rest of his life.
The Prophecy (Part 1 of 6)
I suppose, no doubt to a lesser degree, I could say that I would be haunted by his words, and the film we would see, for the rest of my life.
Sussan described filming, in blazing color–still rarely used by documentarians at the time–the badly injured, burned or radiation-plagued patients in hospitals. The cameraman was often Akira “Harry” Mimura, from the major Toho studio who had shot Kurosawa’s first film, Sanshiro Sugata, and also worked in Hollywood.
Hiroshima after the bombing, 1945
Americans back home, to this point, he pointed out, had only been allowed to see grainy, black and white images of rubble in the atomic cities, never the victims, who were mainly women, elderly men and children. The U.S. had also seized, or banned publication in Japan of photographs of bombing victims taken by Japanese, a ban that remained throughout the Occupation years to 1952.
When he returned to New York after filming in numerous other bomb-ravaged Japanese cities, Sussan was determined to show the world what he had experienced, hoping that this might halt the building of new and bigger weapons and prevent a dangerous nuclear arms race with the Russians.
Instead, he found that all of the footage had been classified top secret and buried by the U.S. military. Some of it would eventually be used in training films, but none of it was shown to the public. The color images were just too revealing not only of unfathomable destruction of buildings, but above all the long-lasting damage to human bodies.
Sussan tried for twenty years to find and make use of his footage–Americans still had not been exposed to color images of any kind from Hiroshima and Nagasaki–but he got nowhere, even after personally approaching everyone from famed newsman Edward R. Murrow to former President Harry S. Truman.
Image on the right: Frame from color footage that Sussan saw at photo exhibit.
Finally, he would, almost by accident, play a central role in the footage becoming known to the world. Around 1979 he attended an exhibit of photos from the atomic cities at the United Nations near his apartment. To his dismay, he spotted several color enlargements of frames from the footage his team had shot in 1946.. He said to a Japanese man, Iwakura Tsotumu, who had helped arrange the exhibit, something to the effect, “I shot the footage this photo is taken from.”
Imagine Iwakura’s surprise. Iwakura did some digging at the National Archives in Washington and discovered that the color footage had been declassified, very quietly, a few years earlier. If no one knew about this, it was just the same as still being classified.
Iwakura went back to Japan and launched what became known as the “10 Feet Movement,” a grassroots project that encouraged people (including school kids) to raise and contribute funds to buy back copies of all of the color footage in increments of ten feet. When they reached their goal in 1980, he made the footage available to Japanese filmmakers, who soon completed two documentaries, with more in the works.
Sussan was gravely ill (one of his doctors would tell him it was at least possible that his lymphoma stemmed from radiation exposure in 1946). But my interest had been sparked by listening to him and watching Prophecy. Later in 1982, when I became the editor of the leading American magazine for the anti-nuclear movement, Nuclear Times, the first feature I assigned was on Herbert Sussan. I joined in the interview and became a friend.
I also tracked down in California the man who led the U.S. filming project, Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern. On why the footage was suppressed, McGovern informed me that officials and the military “were fearful because of the horror it contained. …because it showed effects on men, women and children…They didn’t want that material out because they were working on new nuclear weapons.” He also sent to me dozens of pages of formerly secret documents from his files, including the original military orders to shoot the footage, his attempts to use the Japanese and/or American footage in films for the public, and the official orders denying that, plus logs of all the classified footage.
I would also talk with Erik Barnouw, the legendary writer on documentary films who in 1970 had created the first film to make use of the long-suppressed black and white Nippon Eiga Sha footage, Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945. It aired over public television in the U.S. at its full sixteen-minute length, and drew wide attention, although at least one local station refused to air it.
Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945: The Original Footage
Aiming to gain firsthand experience, I secured a journalism grant via Akiba Tadatoshi (much later the mayor of Hiroshima) to spend a month in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meeting among others some of those filmed by Sussan and McGovern. Then I wrote articles on various aspects of that trip for The New York Times and Washington Post, among others, and dozens of articles about the atomic bombings for numerous other outlets. I would even interview Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, which deposited the bomb over Hiroshima, and meet his counterpart on the Nagasaki mission, Charles Sweeney.
A decade later, I penned a small section on the color footage in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America. A few years later, I wrote a book about the saga of the footage, Atomic Cover-up, which was excerpted here at The Asia-Pacific Journal.
It even plays a role in my new book to be published next month, The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood–and America–Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, on the MGM docudrama of that name, also shot in 1946. The MGM movie was directly inspired by warnings from the atomic scientists against building bigger bombs and an arms race with the Russians, but was soon transformed into falsified, pro-bomb propaganda under pressure from the White House and the military. Any mention of Nagasaki, for example, was left on the cutting room floor.
Finally, last year, I set out to fulfill the vision I had, decades ago, of paying tribute to those who shot both the Japanese newsreel and U.S. military footage in 1945-1946. I arranged for the first super-high definition transfers of the Japanese footage and several reels of the color footage from the National Archives. I also obtained relevant portions of books by or about several of the cameramen and producers of the Japanese footage, and the memoir of Harry Mimura, and had key sections translated from the Japanese. (Abe Markus Nornes, the leading American authority on the Japanese footage, served as an advisor.)
Starting in March, working remotely with an editor in New York, I directed a subtle, perhaps artful, 47-minute documentary, with an original musical score, also titled Atomic Cover-up. It’s told completely through the once-buried Nippon Eiga Sha and American footage, and via the first-person accounts of those who shot or produced it in voice-overs.
The first features Lt. McGovern describing his arrival in Nagasaki and Hiroshima for the first time, accompanied by the striking color images.
The second reveals the seizure of the Nippon Eiga Sha footage by the U.S. occupation authorities and how the filmmakers responded–by hiding a print in the ceiling.
The third finds Lt. Sussan paying tribute to the doctors and nurses at the partly destroyed Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima, which has particular resonance today as health workers there and throughout the world cope with the still-horrendous Covid-19 crisis.
And the final one documents the beginning of Sussan’s attempts to locate the footage by approaching everyone from Truman to Robert F. Kennedy.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
The world does not need a new cold war, or does it?
The Cold War started before the hot war was over. It was put into motion when America dropped the ‘bomb’ and Stalin declared that the USSR should ramp up its efforts to have this technology as soon as possible. And even though the Soviet Atomic Bomb Project was initiated in 1942, the first Soviet test was conducted in 1949, four years after Hiroshima.
The blame here is not on Stalin. After all, if Stalin did not take this ‘pre-emptive’ move, the West was planning to take him down next. It’s quite likely that Stalin and the USSR were saved from a Western invasion by the nukes they developed.
If the USA had the wisdom to learn from history, it should have realized that the moment it revealed to the rest of the world that it has a new cutting-edge super weapon, a rival will come and demand to have the same. In retrospect therefore, the ‘Manhattan Project’ was the real underlying trigger point for initiating the Cold War.
With both the US and the USSR, and later on Britain and France and other nations becoming nuclear powers, overtly or secretively, the deterring effect of a major direct confrontation between superpowers became obvious, though not strong enough to prevent major regional conventional proxy and hybrid wars all over the globe.
Nations of the Middle East together with Korea, Vietnam and many others, cannot claim any benefit from the deterring effect of the Cold War, but perhaps the USA, Europe (including Russia) and even Cuba can.
Unlike the story that the West wishes to peddle to the rest of the world, America did not win the Cold War neither did the USSR lose it. In reality, this was a negotiated agreement that happened prior to the breakup of the USSR; not afterwards.
With all the fear, tension, nuclear pollution, waste and plundering of resources that the Cold War generated, the world community has by-and-large won it with flying colours. It did stop WWIII from eventuating and definitely did not allow for more A-Bombs to be dropped on more cities after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Upon the breakup of the USSR, the United States had an opportunity to change direction and embark on a trajectory of demonstrating good leadership and innovation in the international community. Instead it set about promoting and installing a self-declared New-World Order that rendered the USA the sole superpower, and at all costs, ensured it stayed that way by whatever means necessary.
Nearly thirty years on, there is definitely a new cold war underway even though no one wants to give it this name. The encroachment of NATO into Eastern Europe and stationing missiles in former Warsaw Pact countries, which resulted in the development of hypersonic Russian weapons, followed by America’s unilateral cancelation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, China’s home-built aircraft carriers, not to mention fighter jets, state-of-the art weaponry and rising tension in the South China Sea are all indicative of a new cold war irrespective what name the media and politicians want to give it.
Enter COVID-19.
I will not argue for or against the numerous theories that make different readings about its nature, scope, extent of danger and what mileage some parties are allegedly trying to achieve from it. COVID-19 however did expose a previously unseen and unspoken-about form of cold wars; the industrial dependence war.
Growing up in the Middle East in the 1960’s, I clearly remember how the then Egyptian President Nasser took great pride in industrializing Egypt. As a matter of fact, when Egypt built its car-assembly plant under license from Italian manufacturer Fiat, the brand name given to Egyptian product was Nasr; meaning victory.
On a much larger scale of course, who could forget the insatiable desire for Chairman Mao to industrialize China? I remember going to a Chinese industrial expo in Beirut in 1973. The manufacturing of heavy machinery in China was still in its infancy, but the Chinese officials manning the expo, as well as local supporters of Communist China, could not hide their broad smiles and feelings of pride and rejoice seeing the Chinese achievements.
And long before any of this, the manner in which European nations were able to conquer the rest of the world and turn it into colonies was because Europe was technologically advanced and industrialized; otherwise nations like Britain and the Netherlands would have never been able to conquer and rule much larger nations like India and Indonesia.
Presently whilst it is still a guarantee of quality to see the words ‘Made in Germany’ on a manufactured product, there was a time not long ago when similar assurance came from labels such as ‘Made in England’, or ‘Made in Great Britain’.
Isn’t this what the industrial revolution was all about, or has the world forgotten?
When Asian products began to appear in the Western markets, their quality was shockingly inferior. They were competing on price and price only. Japan took the lead, and in a short time produced high quality goods, especially in the areas of photography, sound equipment and motor vehicles; and the rest is history.
The West often ridicules ‘totalitarian regimes’ and advocates the principles of capitalism, private enterprise, and recently globalism. These principles, alongside democracy, are considered sacrosanct. Criticizing them is tantamount to blasphemy and reflects tendencies of Communism and even Fascism.
For fairness, for as long as the Western nations had viable economies that were underpinned by highly developed industrial prowess, the above doctrines proved to be successful. However, it seems that the initial efforts behind the Western rise were forgotten and that Westerners in general expect on-going success to come effortlessly.
Western manufacturers were eventually unable to compete, and many of them either closed down or moved their manufacturing base to Asia.
The model that the West developed over the last three decades or so was structured on turning its economy into one that is based on finance and service. In almost no time at all, the concept of manufacturing took a backstep and was regarded as something that only developing nations need to do in order to develop their own economies. This in fact reflects a Western covert arrogant elitist supremist vision of manufacturing as being tantamount to slavery; something that should only be done in foreign cheap labour camps. And a new type of slavery did develop indeed. Sports shoes sold in the West for $200 a pair were manufactured in sweat shops in Asia by workers paid around $2 a day.
Western industrialists were drawn to the benefits of paying for manufacturing in Yuans and Rupees and selling the goods in Green Backs. And when an imported T-shirt bought from Asia for $1 gets sold in the West for $20, it makes its own humble contribution to the national economy, and it is little wonder therefore as to why Western governments were joyful to partake in the spoils, after all, such arrangements produced high GDP’s, albeit that they were not based on actual domestic productivity.
Once again, enter COVID-19.
All of a sudden, the West found that it was crippled and unable to provide its citizens with basic hygiene necessities any faster that it could import them from China. But importation meant having to compete with other importers, and ‘begging’ suppliers for priority status, and when all failed, shipments going to other clients were confiscated and hijacked.
In an instant, the Western economic giant found itself in dire need of the manufactured goods it had considered itself too superior to produce.
Unable to produce ventilators, unable to provide facial masks for its citizens; the repercussions of the downfall of Western de-industrialization have never before been made so obvious for all to see.
And when President Trump enacted the Defense Production Act to demand that 3M should produce more masks, the production had to be done in 3M’s factories in China. How ridiculous is this!
These revelations certainly indicate that the West may not only be dependent on China for imports of the above. Certainly, this should shock the West into urgently examining the multi-faceted vulnerable position it has put itself in.
COVID-19 has exposed the West as a paper tiger with dependence on China on multiple levels. But the real questions to ask are the ones that haven’t yet surfaced.
What other vital supplies does the West depend on China for? And if the West was unable to deal with COVID-19 -related supplies in peacetime, how will it be able to deal with supplying its citizens with basic needs in wartime?
What about food security? What about pharmaceutical security?
Fleets, aircraft carriers, air-forces and off-shore military bases do not put food on the tables of citizens in wartime.
And speaking of military hardware, how do we know for certain whether or not Western military hardware does not use imported components? After all, even in peacetime, the USA buys Russian-made rockets to put satellites into orbit because it is unable to manufacture its own. But what other simple commodities is America no longer able to produce? This begs the question of what would America have to rely on for China in wartime? Socks? Blankets?
What is interesting to note here is that whilst the West was scrambling to import its needed supplies from China, almost overnight Russia was able to reach self-sufficiency and even be able to extend aid to other nations. And when Italy was expecting to receive such aid from its EU and NATO allies, those allies were too inept to even be able to look after themselves, and the aid ended up coming from Russia. Russian aid included the USA, with little appreciation from the receiver.
With free economy and free enterprise considered sacred in the dictionary of Western modus operandi, Western governments can neither fill in the missing industrial gap nor coerce private companies to do so. Will the West reflect on where they went wrong with their once successful model? Such self-examination is unlikely to happen because any Western political party that evaluates and proposes solutions to this failure will be accused of Socialism and even Fascism. One of the biggest ironies here is that Western political rivals are only interested in making political scores against each other; scores that can get them elected. They are not at all necessarily interested in what is good for their nations.
The world certainly does not need a new cold war, but the West is unknowingly deeply engaged in one already. If lessons are to be learnt is for the future to reveal. COVID-19 did not trigger a war. It did however expose the reality of an existing and on-going war, a cold war, a war no one paid much attention to before, one not based on buildup of military arsenals, but rather one of industrial dependence; a war the West has already lost to China.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 