It’s been announced that the symbolics Doomsday Clock that reflects how close the human race approached the ultimate annihilation has advanced by yet another 30 seconds, as it’s been reported by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The decision to advance the hands was made by a group of competent scientists that attempted to reflect new risks, provoked by a string of nuclear weapons related statements that US President Donald Trump has been making for a while now.
The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by American scientists and initially the midnight that it was showing was associated exclusively with a nuclear catastrophe, in particular, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 that triggered the “countdown”. The clock as the project shows the estimated probability of a global nuclear catastrophe – the closer its hands to midnight, the greater the probability of mutual assured destruction. As of now the dial is showing two minutes to midnight. Previously, the clock was advanced by 2 minutes ahead in January of 2015.
Today, the aggressive rhetorics and unfriendly actions of individual politicians, primarily of North Korea and the United States, have increased the likelihood that a nuclear war will break out at most any moment, both as a deliberate act of insanity or accidentally through some form of mistake.
It won’t be an exaggeration to say that recently Washington has been shaping international moods to plant the idea of an inevitable nuclear war with Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China in the head of every westerner. The Russophobic hysteria is a well-paid business these days, no wonder it’s been promoted by hawkish hawk-eyed politicians of the Baltic states, Ukraine, Poland and a number of other European countries.
Sadly, Britain is no exception as the UK Defense Secretary, Gavin Williamson has recently been reported saying that Moscow could cause “thousands and thousands and thousands” of deaths in Britain through an attack that would cripple British infrastructure and energy supply. In an interview with the Telegraph, Gavin Williamson would go as far as to announce that Russia has been researching the UK’s critical national infrastructure and how it connects to continental power supplies with a view of creating “panic” and “chaos” in Britain.
However, this sudden loss of sanity in a single individual politician has an explanation of its own, as it’s been reported that Williamson was caught cheating on his wife, so it’s only natural that he needed a way to distract the public attention from his unfaithfulness to his spouse.
However, the state of delirium that the Pentagon can be found in these days can hardly be explained by someone’s cheating nature, as the US armed forces are now moving to counter such countries as Russia and China, which has been highlighted in the recent National Defense Strategy paper. This is trend was echoed in a statement made by the former US Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter at the a statement World Economic Forum in Davos, where he would announce the need to draft a plan of a future war between NATO states and Russia.
It’s curious that preparations for such a war in the West have already begun. This, in particular, can be confirmed by the recent deployment of three B-52H strategic bombers carrying nuclear armed nuclear devices.
This trend is reflected in an unclassified draft of the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review just as well. One of the weapons proposed in this document is a “low-yield” nuclear weapon for the Trident missile, a submarine-launched ballistic missile. The Trident, which is capable of carrying multiple re-entry bodies equipped with nuclear warheads, is currently being deployed aboard Ohio-class submarines. The Pentagon is also looking to develop a new nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile in the “longer term.”
It’s been noted that Jon Wolfsthal, who served as a senior official for arms control on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council, described the NPR as a “schizophrenic document.” He would add that this paper lowers the nuclear threshold in the US, by giving the Pentagon “more options to use nuclear weapons that wouldn’t be as devastating, which in some ways makes them more tempting” to use. The NPR “definitely makes the nuclear risks greater,” Wofsthal contended. The plan increases “the risk of nuclear first-use and increasing the cost and consequences of a nuclear arms race with Russia,” he added in his interview.
Trump is all too willing to roll back on the efforts made by the previous administrations to back off from nuclear weapons, as he makes advances in nuclear technology. Trump has made many controversial remarks on nuclear weapons, often implying he’d be willing to use them if provoked.
One has to be mad to propose nuclear weapons as a counter measure against such threats as cyber attacks, yet the Pentagon suggests that this option is considered as a viable tactics of fighting hackers, as it’s been suggested in the New York Times.
To justify its nuclear doctrine aimed at unleashing what can become humanity’s last conflict, the Pentagon and the White House have already launched a massive propaganda campaign. For instance, the Wall Street Journal has recently announced that:
America’s nuclear weapons have underwritten international peace and stability for more than 70 years. As the world enters a second nuclear age, the U.S. needs to strengthen its posture accordingly to protect itself and its allies.
However, America’s nuclear aggression against the peaceful people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has clearly shown the world what this “posture” is all about. And it is unlikely that anyone will like this “posture” today, no matter how the West tries to persuade us that countries that haven’t been engaged in wars more 90% of the time, unlike the US, are somehow representing a threat to international peace and stability.
Grete Mautner is an independent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
