Paul Craig Roberts on Why, We Are on the Brink of Nuclear War

Dec. 12, 2022 (EIRNS)—That is the stark reality the world faces as a result of the U.S.’s aggressive nuclear policy and posture, which has driven Russia to consider adopting a nuclear first-strike doctrine like that of the United States, author, professor, and former Reagan-era Treasury official Paul Craig Roberts warned in his Dec. 12 column, “A Hair Trigger on Endgame.”

“The insouciance of Washington and its European puppets toward the dangerous situation they are provoking with Russia is frightening. The Western world is now led by people who have made it clear that they will risk nuclear war in their pursuit of American hegemony. Evil has clearly triumphed in the Western world,”

Roberts writes.

He references President Putin’s Dec. 9 discussion of the U.S.’s preemptive nuclear strike doctrine (unfortunately quoting AP’s mistranslation of Putin’s press conference, rather than the official translation from the President’s website), and how Russia should choose to respond to that, and warns that trust between the two nations has reached the lowest point ever, following decades of NATO expansion and lying propaganda. In the event of a false nuclear warning today, Russia has no reason to trust the United States, therefore putting the world in an unspeakably dangerous situation. “We are now on the brink of a nuclear holocaust. One false warning of nuclear attack, believed to be true, could cause Russia to launch a full-scale nuclear attack against the U.S. and Europe.”

And rather than take Putin’s comments seriously, we have the “provocative idiocy of U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin who mischaracterizes Putin’s warning about the extremely dangerous situation as ‘Russian saber-rattling.’ With utter fools like Austin making decisions, there is a zero chance of avoiding Armageddon.”

He concludes: “We are on the brink of nuclear war, and we do not have a John F. Kennedy in the White House to stop it. Instead, we have insane neoconservatives committed to U.S. hegemony at all cost.”