On January 23 this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set their famous “Doomsday Clock” at 100 seconds to midnight – midnight signifying the outbreak of thermonuclear world war. In the 73 years since the famed and fearful symbol was first created in 1947, this setting was – and remains – the closest to Armageddon this supreme symbol of warning to the world has ever been set.
Yet were the Doomsday Clock to be reset today, eight months after that last announcement, the time gap to midnight would have to be further reduced, perhaps to a little more than one minute, but not by much – 70 or 75 seconds before midnight probably – or even less.
For the remorseless escalation of tension between the United States and Russia – a process built on a long-rising tsunami of 25 years of shattered pledges, and double crosses by the West of supposedly solemn binding agreements – cannot be turned on a dime, to use the famous American saying. Though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thinks it can.
On July 23, Pompeo gave a speech at the Nixon Center in California that assured his place alongside Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright as the most fatuous and stupid of all U.S. secretaries of state.
Even Frank Kellogg, who in the 1920s really thought he had outlawed war when Hirohito already ruled in Tokyo and Hitler was rising fast in Germany, did not sink so far.
Pompeo imagined that he could persuade President Vladimir Putin to take him at his word and turn against China, when the United States and not China has remorselessly eroded Russia’s margins of security in the West ever since the end of the Cold War . And the process continues with Pompeo’s eager indeed fervent support to this day.
The U.S. Mainstream Media – run by arrogant, self-righteous fools to lead hundreds of millions of complacent, ignorant sheep – blandly continues to ignore the ever hostile probing of Russia’s defensive airspace by nuclear-armed, long-range bombers equipped withstand off weapons from the north, the west and the south. But when Russia scrambles its own defensive combat fighters to buzz the intruders and serve due warning of their vulnerability, they are invariably cast in the aggressor’s role.
This is a far more deadly, terrifying state of affairs than any that occurred between the development of thermonuclear hydrogen bomb super-weapons of unlimited power by both the United States and Soviet Union in the period 1952 to 1954. For over the next two decades, the dangers of Armageddon were vividly recognized and well understood in both Moscow and Washington and by the populations of both superpowers alike.
But today, the leaders of the West have totally repressed the dangers of thermonuclear Armageddon.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both houses of Congress vie with each other in striking fake macho roles of fraudulent heroism and non-existent principle to support ever more reckless and simply insane adventures on behalf of Neo-Nazi and other racist gangster cliques in Ukraine and Georgia.
Outright clowns like President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul – a particular favorite of former Secretary of State Clinton – are sent to insult the leader of one of the world’s premier thermonuclear superpowers and to embrace openly those who hate the leaders of their own country and seek to topple him, and this behavior is seen as perfectly normal, acceptable and even admirable by the thousands of cockroaches who staff the great “think tanks” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) in the city of Washington.
The 100 Seconds to Midnight warning was announced on January 23 – a full eight months ago. Yet I have no doubt that no more than five of the 100 sitting United States senators from both parties know that fact – or take it seriously for a second. It is this astonishing ignorance, a psychological mechanism of willful ignorance and denial that Sigmund Freud himself would be hard put to explain, that is our greatest danger.
In late August, a U.S. B-52H Superfortress strategic bomber carried out a simulated bombing of the Russian Baltic Fleet’s base in the exclave of Kaliningrad, the aircraft monitoring resource Plane Radar has reported, citing tracking data.
Every year, NATO regularly carries out full-scale military exercises unabashedly aimed against Russia with such reassuring titles as “Anaconda.”
What is an anaconda? It is a colossal 20 to 30 foot long fearful snake in the Amazon jungle that first encircles its prey, then crushes and devours it, often still alive. This then, is the strategic message we have been sending to Russia, one of the two most powerful nuclear powers on our planet.
Russia has responded. The development of hypersonic weapons that the West cannot yet match is one loud tolling of Thomas Jefferson’s Fire Bell in the Night. A second, and most grave development is the shifting of Russian strategic forces to a potential first strike posture.
The Russians do not seek to conquer the West or the World. But they are truly fearful that the West is determined to conquer and destroy them. And every message that flows out of the Republican and Democratic national leaderships alike in Congress and the U.S. media and think tanks is consistent with this message.
Western leaders, policymakers and so-called “pundits” – in reality a tame cheering section of trained hyenas – should not therefore be surprised that the Russians have responded as they have.
The Sputnik News Agency noted earlier this month, “Recently, episodes of aircraft interception over the Baltic, the Black and the Barents seas have become more frequent.
“On 31 August,” the Sputnik report continued, “three Russian Su-27 fighters were scrambled as three U.S. B-52 strategic bombers approached the Russian state border over the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea. The bombers were accompanied until they changed course and moved away from the Russian border. On 1 September, a Russian Northern Fleet MiG-31 was scrambled to accompany a Norwegian P-3C Orion reconnaissance aircraft.”
Hysterical, always unsubstantiated claims that Russia is intervening in the U.S. domestic election cycle could not be more misplaced. In 1996, the Clinton administration proudly and openly boasted of decisively swinging the Russian presidential election to re-elect Boris Yeltsin.
The Russians remember this. They are determined not to let it happen again. They are determined not to let their country be dismembered. Yet the U.S. body politic, its policy-shaping institutions and media remain locked on their mad suicidal course of needless confrontation and childish fake-macho bullying and posturing towards Russia.
President Donald Trump, for all the calumnies thrown against him, has made repeatedly clear he does recognize the imminent dangers of world war. Every time he tries to reduce tensions and open new lines of dialogue with Moscow however, some new wave of slander and outright lies is concocted against him, each as outrageous, shameless, ridiculous and virulent as anything Joseph Goebbels ever concocted.
On the other side, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, personally the most humane and decent of men, went along with the mad and wicked Hillary Clinton warmongering that sought to topple stable, lawful governments across the Middle East, Latin America and Eurasia at a cost of millions of lives without a whisper of protest. It is too much to hope for anything better if he is elected in November.
Indeed, all we can reasonably look forward to is a resetting of the symbolic Doomsday Clock by 10 or 20 seconds over the next few months. That really isn’t going to be enough. The Cause of warning the West not to risk setting off a thermonuclear world war certainly demands a bit more.
