Russia-Ukraine war: The western threat of
nuclear annihilation
It is the US and the imperialist West, not Iran
or Russia, who have posed and continue to pose
the largest possible threat to human survival
By Joseph Massad
September 01, 2022:
Information Clearing House-- Last week,
British Tory leadership frontrunner Liz
Truss
said she would be willing to unleash nuclear
war if she were to become prime minister.
She is not alone among political leaders in
the Western imperialist states to threaten
nuclear annihilation in the past few months if
their hegemony and imperial
profits were threatened by resistance to
their exploitation and control of the globe.
It was back in February that the West began
to threaten
Russia with
nuclear war in response to a statement given
by President Vladimir Putin.
Addressing western encroachments and threats
to Russian security,
ongoing since 1991 but increasing
significantly since 2014, Putin declared:
"Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so,
to create threats to our country, to our people,
should know that Russia's response will be
immediate. And it will lead you to such
consequences that you have never encountered in
your history."
Putin prefaced his
statements by averring that "even after the
dissolution of the USSR and losing a
considerable part of its capabilities, today's
Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear
states".
The French foreign minister subsequently
threatened Putin, who spoke of Russia's
nuclear capabilities as a defensive measure, by
declaring that
Nato, too, remained a "nuclear
alliance" and "that is all I will say about
this".
'Thinkable' nuclear war
By March,
The New York Times jumped on the bandwagon
and published an article about the possibility
that the Russians might use nuclear weapons if
threatened by the West. The article, ironically,
cited only western experts and officials who
spoke of a limited nuclear war against Russia as
"thinkable".
By March,
The New York Times jumped on the bandwagon
and published an article about the possibility
that the Russians might use nuclear weapons if
threatened by the West. The article, ironically,
cited only western experts and officials who
spoke of a limited nuclear war against Russia as
"thinkable".
The newspaper of record even quoted US
General James E Cartwright, the vice-chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Barack Obama, as
saying that the "reduced blast capability" of
the smaller nuclear devices in existence today
made breaking the nuclear taboo "more
thinkable".
It
added: "Nuclear war plans are one of
Washington's most deeply held secrets. Experts
say that the war-fighting plans in general go
from warning shots to single strikes to multiple
retaliations and that the hardest question is
whether there are reliable ways to prevent a
conflict from escalating."
It should be noted that the idea of a
"limited" nuclear war in Europe is not new. It
is a longstanding American fantasy - one that
Ronald Reagan, in particular,
nurtured.
In April, after the publication of The New
York Times article, Russian Foreign Minister
Sergey Lavrov expressed worry about the
implications of a nuclear war, emphasising that
while Russia did not want a nuclear war, "the
danger is serious". US
President Joe Biden's response to Lavrov was
to accuse the Russians of threatening nuclear
war rather than expressing anxiety that the US
and Nato could launch one.
Israeli threats
Indeed, in April,
CNN reported that the US had not seen "any
indication Russia has made any moves to prepare
nuclear weapons for use during the [Ukraine]
war". But by June, NBC News
joined the chorus of mainstream outlets
considering the possible use of American nuclear
weapons against Russia.
Earlier this month, Putin
issued a statement to a UN conference which
convened to review the
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons, affirming that "there can be no winners
in a nuclear war and it should never be
unleashed, and we stand for equal and
indivisible security for all members of the
world community".
Yet, that very same day, Israel's new prime
minister, Yair
Lapid, threatened
to use Israel's nuclear weapons against
Iran: "The operational arena in the invisible
dome above us is built on defensive capabilities
and offensive capabilities, and what the foreign
media tends to call 'other capabilities'. These
other capabilities keep us alive and will keep
us alive so long as we and our children are
here."
The Jerusalem Post, the conservative Israeli
newspaper, postulated that Lapid's not-so-veiled
threat to nuke Iran was akin to his saying:
"What exactly do you ayatollahs think you are
going to accomplish by trying to break out one
or two weapons which you probably could not hit
us with, and which might lead us to easily
incinerate large parts of your country?"
This is not the first time Israel has
threatened to use
nuclear weapons against its neighbours. In
fact, it had prepared to use its nukes twice
before, in
1967 and in
1973 when it readied its then 13 nuclear
bombs to be dropped on Cairo and Damascus.
Real or imagined
Of course, the only country on earth that has
ever used nuclear bombs deliberately against
civilians is none other than the US, which
dropped them on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 77 years ago
this month, in a genocidal act that the US
continues to
defend to this day as one that prevented
more casualties had the nukes not been dropped
and the war continued.
In essence, the US argues that its nuking
civilians was a high moral act to save more
civilians from being killed. This is
amazingly and horrifyingly the very same
logic the US
deploys today to justify its future use
of nuclear weapons.
While Hiroshima and
Nagasaki awakened most of the world to the
utter horror of nuclear weapons, it only
whetted American appetites to use them more.
Recently
revealed documents show the United
States seriously considered and made plans
to use nuclear weapons against China in
1958, during the so-called Taiwan Straits
crisis.
Yet, despite the US use of nuclear
weapons and the West's ongoing threats to
annihilate all humankind if their profits
and "security" interests are threatened, we
have been treated for years on end to
ceaseless Western propaganda about the
threat that allegedly Iran, which does not
possess any nuclear weapons, poses to the
West.
When Israel, which is in possession of
possibly as many as
200 nuclear devices (and which still
refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation
Treaty), threatened to nuke Iran a few weeks
ago, its threat was taken lightly, if even
considered, in the Western
press and by Western officials, who were
and remain too busy trying to eliminate a
phantasmatic nuclear threat that Iran
allegedly constitutes for Israel - a
phantasm that has prolonged interminably the
ongoing renegotiations of the nuclear treaty
between the US and Iran.
It is the US and the imperialist West,
not Iran or Russia, who have posed and
continue to pose the largest possible threat
to human existence and survival. What is
truly ironic, however, is that Western
leaders and the Western press can more
easily imagine and plan for the end of the
world, but not the end of the West's
imperial hegemony.
Joseph Massad is professor of modern
Arab politics and intellectual history
at Columbia University, New York. He is
the author of many books and academic
and journalistic articles. His books
include Colonial Effects: The Making of
National Identity in Jordan; Desiring
Arabs; The Persistence of the
Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism
and the Palestinians, and most recently
Islam in Liberalism. His books and
articles have been translated into a
dozen languages.
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