EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2021

Biden-Putin Talk Did Not Stop ‘the Real Possibility of Escalation to Nuclear War’

Dec. 13, 2021 (EIRNS)—Whoever thought that U.S.-Russia tension, and the threat of war between the superpowers, would diminish naturally with the Dec. 7 video-conference between Presidents Biden and Putin, hoped in vain. Despite remarks by President Biden himself, the extreme belligerence of Secretary of State Blinken and British Foreign Minister Liz Truss at the G7 meeting Dec. 10, and their refusal to step back regarding Ukraine joining NATO, have combined with a wild nuclear bombardment threat by Senate Armed Forces Committee second ranking Republican Roger Wicker, to keep the crisis just as intense, and even to raise its pre-war-like temperature. The inevitable Russian response came today.

No citizen can assume that war will be averted except with the strength of his or her own efforts in the direction pointed by Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Dec. 11 statement, “Psychopaths Are Threatening Our Existence! Germany Must Leave NATO!” which cites former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s sharp call for sanity on Twitter.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned today, Dec. 13, that Russia would be forced to deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe in response to its conviction that NATO will do the same in Ukraine after placing “ABM” missile launchers in Poland and Romania. “It will be a confrontation, this will be the next round, the appearance of such resources on our side,” he said in an interview with RIA Novosti news agency. Ryabkov said Russia would do this if NATO continued refusing to engage with it to prevent that escalation. He cited “indirect indications” that NATO was closing in on re-deploying intermediate range nukes for the first time since the 1980s—including NATO’s restoring last month the 56th Artillery Command which operated nuclear-capable Pershing missiles during the Cold War. And Russian President Putin told British Prime Minister Boris Johnson today, according to Reuters, that NATO was directly threatening Russia with potential war by expanding military activity in Ukraine.

In late 1962 President John F. Kennedy, fully committed to scientific, technological and economic progress among nations, refused to let the Cuban Missiles Crisis go from the brink into actual nuclear world war. In the early 1980s millions of young people took to the streets in Europe and on American campuses because the deployment of very same intermediate-range nuclear missiles had created a “nuclear launch on warning” nightmare with European cities as the targets. President Ronald Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative policy he understood from Lyndon LaRouche, and Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated the end of those shorter-range nuclear missiles with their targets just a few minutes flight from their launchers.

Until now. The United States has abandoned that treaty which banned these destabilizing missiles; Russia today says it will have to do the same if it cannot be sure Ukraine will not be in NATO; NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg talks of “moving nuclear weapons to the East” from Germany; and the commander of U.S. Strategic Command Adm. Charles Richard wrote Proceedings in February of this year that “The U.S. military must shift its principal assumption from ‘nuclear employment is not possible’ to ‘nuclear employment is a very real possibility.’ ”

As Tulsi Gabbard said on Dec. 8, the claim among elected officials like Senator Wicker, that “we need to strike Russia” over Ukraine or China over Taiwan, is based on lies from the same people who “justified” war in Syria, Iraq, Libya..., but in this case war which will destroy Europe and America.

As Lyndon LaRouche offered Reagan’s presidency the pathway out of war and into rapid scientific and economic progress, Helga LaRouche calls on leaders and elected officials to take immediate action. Provide assurances that Ukraine will not enter NATO and will not have INF missiles on its territory.

Equally immediately, the United States, Russia and China should join in the most urgent development mission in the world at this very moment. Prevent the death of millions in Afghanistan by releasing its reserves and development funds, reopening and building new hospitals and clinics, providing vaccines, engineering power and water infrastructure, and funding food aid and seed. This is the beginning to a mission to provide modern healthcare and public health systems against this and future pandemics, to every nation in the world.

We are, as The LaRouche Organization headlined its webcast Manhattan Project Meeting, Dec. 11, “On the Brink of War— or of Peace Through Economic Development.”