This article appears in the October 11, 2024 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
‘Another Step Closer to Nuclear Armageddon’—
Schiller Institute German Strategic Conference
[Print version of this article]
Oct. 2—On the eve of Germany’s Oct. 3 Unity Day and a demonstration in Berlin against NATO’s war with Russia, the Schiller Institute took action to push Germany’s volatile political situation further, toward national opposition to the escalating NATO war. It sponsored an emergency online conference, moderated in both the United States and Germany, titled “Another Step Closer to Nuclear Armageddon—Germany Needs a New Security Architecture.”
Senior American and German diplomats and military intelligence experts, along with Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, warned that Germany, under NATO pressure, has been sleepwalking toward national suicide. One of them, Jack Matlock, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, made clear that the U.S. lying to Soviet and Russian leaders about NATO’s expansion, and movement of NATO missiles toward Russia’s borders, has been “a huge mistake” now reaching its endgame: the approach of a nuclear war, with Germany a central target.
Another speaker, the leading nuclear weapons expert Dr. Theodore Postol, Professor Emeritus at MIT, mapped out the terrible picture of what will happen to German cities and towns if American nuclear-capable “typhoon” missile launchers are stationed there to threaten Russia, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has agreed they will be. And CIA veteran Ray McGovern detailed how U.S. President Joe Biden’s apparent commitment of “no deep-strike missiles in Ukraine” to Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2022, was renounced by Biden’s own Secretary of State.
After the opening presentations, Zepp-LaRouche expressed her deep gratitude to the speakers for helping to educate Germans and others to stop the dangerous policy of accepting the placement of U.S. missiles on German territory. She said she would get their reports out far and wide and, contrary to Defense Secretary Boris Pistorius’s policy of making Germany “war-ready” in the next few years, she vowed that she would do everything in her power to “make Germany peace-ready!”
An organizer of the next day’s Berlin rally asked for video of the Schiller Institute forum to show to the demonstrators. Viewers of the conference were urged to participate in the peace demonstrations, which marked the Oct. 3 commemoration of German reunification in 1990.
Zepp-LaRouche specified a follow-up Schiller Institute meeting, to address the urgency of a “new security and development architecture”—including bringing in the Global South, whose BRICS representative nations meet Oct. 22-24 in Russia.
Germany’s Lost Optimism of 1989
In keynoting the extraordinary conference, Helga Zepp-LaRouche reviewed the “cascading events which are spinning out of control,” including recent ghastly developments in Israel’s attacks on its neighbors, and posed the question: If it comes to an escalation against Iran, what will Russia and China do? She reminded the viewers that Russia recently announced possible changes to its nuclear doctrine, so that if there is a significant air attack on Russia that is backed by a nuclear power, Russia could resort to first use of nuclear weapons. Comparing this dire situation to the optimistic picture that emerged after the dissolution of the Comecon bloc, she said, “It turns my stomach to see how in only 34 years, that has been forgotten completely.”
She mentioned the book she published in German under the title Die verpasste Chance von 1989-90 (The Lost Chance of 1989-90), and contrasted the document published by then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl which admitted that Germany had had no plan for reunification, to Lyndon LaRouche’s 1989 Productive Triangle/Eurasian Land-Bridge proposed plans for a “Peace Order for the 21st Century.” Subsequently, in September 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative, which transformed the world. Today, the Global South is building a new economic system “which the West is foolishly regarding as an enemy which has to be contained and suppressed,” Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche said.
Ambassador Matlock began his remarks by praising Zepp-LaRouche’s presentation, “which so thoroughly and accurately” painted the picture he was intimately familiar with as an active participant at the time the Soviet Union collapsed. He further addressed the failures of U.S. policies following the fall of the Soviet Union. At the end of the Cold War, we should have insisted that an architecture be built that took into account the security needs of all nations. Instead, we expanded NATO, “a huge mistake … when there was no threat from the East.” We now know from historical records that the USSR had never intended to invade Western Europe. The U.S. began to walk out of all the arms control agreements. Unlike during the Cold War, there was no public debate over these decisions.
Dr. Ted Postol warned that the proposed introduction of missiles to Germany by the United States would be a hair-trigger for nuclear war, because those missiles of necessity would carry nuclear warheads, and because of the extremely short warning times (3 minutes or so!) for Russian detection of their launch. Hypersonic delivery vehicles don’t have an arc trajectory like conventional missiles, and they would be much more difficult to detect after launch. Therefore the Russians will likely have a “pre-delegated authority” for response in case communications are lost.
This is the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again, Postol said. In 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the U.S. reserves the right to put nuclear missiles in Ukraine. Imagine if Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had taken a similar stance regarding Cuba—the United States would surely have invaded Cuba.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity co-founder Ray McGovern intervened to present a more detailed chronology of the events which led to the Ukraine war. On Dec. 21, 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin convened his top military to warn them that America would station hypersonic missiles in Ukraine as soon as they got them. Shortly thereafter, in a telephone call, U.S. President Joe Biden promised Putin that the U.S. would not do that. Then on Jan. 21, 2022, Secretary of State Blinken contradicted Biden in a conversation with Putin, and refused to give guarantees that hypersonic missiles would not be placed in Ukraine. A few weeks later, Russia launched their special military operation in Ukraine.
McGovern added that one day before Putin announced the revised Russian nuclear doctrine, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova announced “the equivalent of a mutual defense treaty of Russia with China.”
A Nuclear Decapitation Strike
Additional comments were presented by Rainer Rupp, a German military and intelligence expert, and Col. (ret.) Alain Corvez, a French international strategy consultant. Rupp warned that Europe’s new military doctrine lowers the threshold for nuclear war. He said that the “old neocon madness of the 1980s” has resurfaced, which involves ordering a “decapitation” nuclear first strike. If the ability to detect an attack in a timely fashion is compromised, deterrence no longer functions. This is the reason for Russia’s new nuclear weapons doctrine.
Corvez lamented that since World War II, the European countries have been subordinated, or conquered without war, by the United States. He advocated the restoration of sovereignty to European nations in order to avoid war. America is pursuing an extremist policy in Ukraine and the Middle East, and Israel could use its own nuclear weapons, because it is in a dead-end situation.
German author Wolfgang Effenberger further explored this topic, reminding the viewers that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was already promoting his “Wolfowitz Doctrine” one year after the collapse of the USSR, transforming NATO into an offensive alliance. The Ukraine coup and subsequent civil war are part of a pattern of attacks on sovereign nations around the world by the NATO bloc, he said. The United States must reconcile itself with the world and abandon its quest for a unipolar world order.
Video Requested for Berlin Rally
A discussion with many viewers followed. One asked why Western leaders seem to care nothing for the safety and security of people, even in their own countries. Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche responded that she often asks herself that question—with the policies failing so badly and so obviously, why do leaders ignore the realities in the world? She has concluded that there are many reasons, but ultimately it is that they are attached to their privileges, and fear that any deviation would cost them those privileges.
Tatjana Ždanoka, an activist from Latvia committed to Eurasian cooperation, who had served in the European Parliament and in the Eurasian Forum, was disgusted that a new “Iron Curtain” was being constructed, and that she is attacked for wanting peace with Russia. She was particularly angry that the Greens, who were once for cooperation with Russia and China, had turned into war mongers against them.
Ambassador Matlock responded that it was not orders from the United States which turned the Greens, but rather that changes in America had been heavily influenced by the fact that many Eastern Europeans had emigrated there, and politicians are driven to pander to their prejudices against Russia and for NATO, in order to get their votes. Rainer Rupp added that from the time of George W. Bush and the post 9/11 regime-change wars, the Western countries were brought under a U.S. “rules-based order” in which nations gave up their sovereignty in order to be part of the system. Those countries that resisted, like Iraq, were subjected to sanctions and regime-change wars.
Effenberger noted that the century-old “geopolitics” of Halford Mackinder and Karl Haushofer on the need to control the “Heartland” was still in play, in the concerted campaign to prevent Germany and Russia from working together.
Dr. Helmut Kaess, one of the organizers for the peace demonstrations planned for Oct. 3 in Berlin, discussed the plans for the rally, and made an appeal that the video and the transcripts of this event be made available for the rally and widely distributed. Zepp-LaRouche responded that a leaflet was already in preparation, and that another, drawing on quotes from this event, should also be prepared. She called for help to distribute 100,000 leaflets around Germany.
The American independent Congressional candidate Jose Vega (CD-15, NY) asked whether the influence of such demonic thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski could ever come to an end. Effenberger accused the think-tanks of being responsible for creating such monsters, as Antony Blinken is a clear example. Rainer Rupp described the current time as a “Marie Antoinette” moment, where the Western leaders are telling their populations to “eat cake,” and to ignore the fact that nations are crumbling around them. He pointed to the United States, where there has not been a real President for four years, reporting that at a Cabinet meeting, called by Joe Biden for the first time in a year, he mumbled a few things and then “turned the meeting over to [First Lady] Jill!”
Helga Zepp-LaRouche concluded the meeting with her call for a follow-up. She called it very significant that the importance of political change in Germany has been identified. But the next meeting, she said, must address the urgency of a “new security and development architecture, which had not been discussed today.” She added that this is the content of the meetings in China and Russia which bring in the Global South.
