EDITORIAL

‘Dr. Strangelove’ Doesn’t Have Anything on NATO, When It Comes to Nuclear Insanity

by Dennis Small

[Print version of this editorial]

Aug. 28—What is it going to take to get the people of the United States and Europe to wake up and realize that their so-called “elected” governments are intentionally trying to corner Russia into launching nuclear weapons, to prevent its national extinction at the hands of NATO?

The facts on the ground in the Ukraine war speak for themselves. Ukrainian forces, with critical backing from NATO weapons, equipment and personnel, invaded Russia’s Kursk region on Aug. 6. They are now flying nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets in nearby airspace. And Ukraine, the U.S., and NATO are actively planning to use long-range missiles to strike deep into Russian territory.

Speaking louder still is the recent flurry of urgent statements by high-level Russian military officials and government figures:

On Aug. 19, General-Major Apti Alaudinov, the commander of the Chechen Akhmat special forces, warned Americans and Europeans that “you probably do not see or hear that your leadership is doing all it can to launch a nuclear war…. [They have] been trying with all means to make Russia cross the red line and start protecting itself using all these nuclear weapons…. If you don’t want this to happen, speak out! Go to the streets and stop your government!” he urged.

That same day, Aug. 19, the President of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, told Rossiya-1 TV channel: “Ukraine’s escalation in the Kursk region is an attempt to push Russia into asymmetric actions, let’s say the use of nuclear weapons.”

On Aug. 27, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that the escalating attacks against Russia are forcing it to modify its nuclear doctrine: “We have our nuclear doctrine, which is being refined at the moment, by the way, and which the Americans are well aware of.” As for the line that Washington is trying to avoid escalation, Lavrov stated: “This is a ruse. The West does not want to avoid escalation. The West is, as they say, asking for trouble.”

Also on Aug. 27, Frants Klintsevich, a retired military officer and leader of the Russian Union of Veterans of Afghanistan, and a former Senator in the Federation Council, warned that the Kursk invasion could escalate quickly to a nuclear confrontation. In presenting Klintsevich’s analysis, strategic specialist Gilbert Doctorow wrote: “But let us not have any illusions: if the Russians sense that the United States is about to pounce on them, to use the assets in Ukraine and beyond … then a preventive Russian attack on NATO, on the continental United States, not to mince words, is entirely conceivable.”

And yet there is a shocking gap—an insistent psychological disconnect—between this reality and the awareness of the vast majority of Americans and Europeans of the imminence of a nuclear exchange.

“The first step to avoid a catastrophe,” Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche told listeners on her weekly live dialogue webcast Aug. 28, “is that the populations all over the world—not just on both sides of the Atlantic but, emphatically, also in the Global South—have to wake up to the absolutely urgent fact that we are on the verge of nuclear war.”

Particularly provocative, Zepp-LaRouche stated, was the July 11 announcement by U.S. President Joe Biden at the NATO summit, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz standing limply at his side, that the U.S. will deploy long-range missiles on German territory, missiles capable of nuclear strikes against Russia. No sovereign decision was made by Germany nor by any other European country to do this, even though their security is immediately and vitally affected by it. This is already raising historical memories that will not sit well with Europeans, she noted, and could lead to serious trouble inside the EU.

Zepp-LaRouche urged her listeners to act. “The instigator of this present Ukraine crisis is the British…. Their Empire is what is at stake. That is why we are in the mess we’re in. The reason why we are in such a crisis is because we are experiencing the end-phase of an Empire.

“I can only say that I do not believe that the leading institutions will change. I think it does require the absolute mobilization of the masses of the people to go in the streets. I don’t think there is any way you can solve it without that. But I don’t think that that will be the only thing that is required, which is why I have called for the creation of a Council of Reason.”

Zepp-LaRouche has also issued a proposal of Ten Principles to guide the creation of a new international security and development architecture worthy of the dignity of Man.