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Opening a column with statistics and dates may not be the best way to get your attention, but these three statistics and single date are important, so please take note:
- The median age in the US is 38.5 years.
- The median age in Russia is 39.8 years.
- The median age worldwide is 31 years.
The Cold War ended, more or less, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, 31 years ago.
To put it a different way, half of humanity and close to half of Americans and Russians in general can’t remember the days of “Mutual Assured Destruction.”
Put simply, MAD was a situation in which at least two world powers (the US and the USSR) possessed enough nuclear weapons, in enough locations, to ensure that if one of the two decided to go nuclear on the other, both countries (and likely the world) would be reduced to lifeless, radioactive wastelands.
Those of us who came to adulthood before 1991 grew up in constant knowledge of our own prospective annihilation on, at most, a few minutes’ notice.
It wasn’t a good feeling.
On the other hand, I guess it worked. We’re still here, anyway.
Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about the possibility of “limited” nuclear war using “tactical” weapons. That talk is based in speculation that Vladimir Putin might resort to a nuclear strike in Ukraine. Whether that speculation is really warranted is an interesting question and one I can’t answer for you, since I don’t work at the Kremlin.
What’s far more dangerous than that speculation is additional speculation over what the response from other nuclear powers would be if the Ukraine war DID “go nuclear,” even in a small way.
The problem with nukes is that the genie is out of the bottle. They’ve been around since 1945 and used twice (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). They’re not going to get un-invented, nor are the regimes which possess them likely to give them up (we should work toward that, but don’t bet the ranch on it happening).
That being the case, the notion that hey, maybe we could live with nukes being used here and there, in very special cases, by very special regimes, and just pile on some more sanctions or throw a non-nuclear cruise missile or two at the rogue state to express displeasure, is madness … which is the opposite of MADness.
The way — the ONLY way — to get through this crisis or any other without popping the cork on Armageddon is for every regime decision-maker in the world to know, down in their guts, beyond a shadow of doubt, that if they use nukes, nukes will be used on them.
Even that might not work, but it’s the only thing that ever HAS worked.
If any one regime goes nuclear, even in a small way, and gets away with it, every other nuclear power on earth will consider itself free to do the same, and sooner or later it will exercise that option.
There must not be a third time.
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Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War”
by Michel Chossudovsky
Available to order from Global Research!
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
