EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR MONDAY, MAY 24, 2021

Nuclear War Is on the Table—and Not for the First Time

May 23, 2021 (EIRNS)—The British Empire’s classic imperial policy of “divide and conquer” was at the core of the “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) policy which the British established after the development of nuclear weapons by the U.S. First, the British demanded that the U.S. hurry up and use the atomic bomb, before the war ended—not because it was needed to defeat the Japanese, who were already defeated by General MacArthur’s strategy of cutting off their access to raw materials, but to show the world that the Anglo-American leaders were insane enough to mass murder innocent civilians. This was only possible due to the early death of Franklin Roosevelt and the coming to power of the British/Wall Street puppet Harry Truman.

Once that act of terror was complete, spokesmen for the Empire like Lord Bertrand Russell advised an immediate nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and the establishment of a One World Government—a revised version of the British Empire. The Soviets quickly developed their own nuclear weapons, however, so the MAD doctrine was devised, whose primary purpose was not to prevent a nuclear war, but to keep the world divided, to stop any chance of a return to Roosevelt’s policy of uniting the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and China in the noble task of developing the former colonies into modern industrial nations using American System methods.

But do not assume that the MAD doctrine means there is no chance that anyone would be crazy enough to use nuclear weapons in the world today. As EIR has reported, Adm. Charles Richard, the head of Strategic Command, the agency which would deploy such nuclear weapons, has openly declared that nuclear war is “likely,” and that we must prepare for it. “Consequently, the U.S. military,” he said in the February issue of U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, “must shift its principal assumption from ‘nuclear employment is not possible’ to ‘nuclear employment is a very real possibility,’ and act to meet and deter that reality.”

It was this statement which provoked Daniel Ellsberg, famous as the U.S. intelligence official who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the U.S. crimes in Vietnam, to again release classified documents, this time exposing the plan by leading U.S. military officers and the U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to use nuclear weapons against China in 1958, in defense of Taiwan. China had no nuclear weapons at the time, but the proponents acknowledged that the U.S.S.R. would potentially respond, and global nuclear war could result. Only President Eisenhower prevented such a holocaust, as a military leader who understood the horror of war, let alone nuclear war.

The publication of Ellsberg’s exposure by the New York Times on May 22, a week after Ellsberg’s release, prevented a general blackout of this explosive story, and it is now being reported widely. (Why the Times did so is not known, but perhaps it was in memory of the fact that they were the first to publish the Pentagon Papers in Juned 1971, fifty years earlier.)

It is worth taking note that this was not the only time the U.S. and their British friends advocated a nuclear war. In 1954, as the French colonial regime in Vietnam was about to be routed by the forces of Ho Chi Minh, Dulles proposed using U.S. nuclear weapons to bail out our “allies” (whom Roosevelt would have prevented from retaking their colony in the first place, or any of the European powers from returning to their colonies). When the U.S. took over the colonial wars for the British and the French, getting embroiled in the Indochina disaster, President Nixon proposed using nuclear weapons against Vietnam.

The current discussion of this potential horror is so openly being discussed that even National Public Radio today played a tape recording of Nixon and Henry Kissinger discussing using nuclear weapons to demolish North Korea. A memo from Kissinger (a leading proponent of the British MAD doctrine) to Nixon read:

“Should we be prepared to use nuclear weapons?... Since we cannot confidently predict the exact point at which Hanoi could be likely to respond positively, we must be prepared to play out whatever string necessary.... To achieve its full effect on Hanoi’s thinking, the action must be brutal.” [Emphasis in original.]

There is no separating the danger of nuclear war from the multi-pronged crisis facing the trans-Atlantic nations—a financial bubble unprecedented in history, beginning to hemorrhage; a self-imposed policy of economic destruction under the insane Green New Deal; a backlash in the developing nations, in Africa, in Central and South America, and in Asia, whereby a growing number of nations are declaring openly that they prefer development aid and cooperation coming from China in meeting the pandemic to the imperial demands from Washington. The Biden State Department is openly threatening developing nations that they must reject support from China or face a cutoff of markets and support from the U.S., and possible sanctions for being “undemocratic.”

A much greater backlash is required from within the U.S. and Europe. The Schiller Institute is mobilizing this positive potential within the U.S. population, and globally, and in particular among the youth, who, as in other periods of intense crisis, are beginning to look for real intellectual and moral leadership. Two Schiller Institute conferences this year, in March and in May, demonstrated the possibility of uniting leaders and patriots of nations around the world to address and resolve, together, the deadly challenges facing humanity as a whole—war, pandemic, famine, economic disintegration, cultural decay. Another such conference is being planned for the weeks ahead. It is only possible to overcome conflicts between nations and peoples by lifting the narrative to the level of the common aims of mankind—which is the meaning behind Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s founding of the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites. The geopoliticians do not believe there is such a thing as a common aim for mankind, but that mankind is defined by the Darwinian, Hobbesian view of man, as a beast fighting for superiority and survival at the expense of others. Prove them wrong.