US Military Dominance Brought 77 Years Of Peace. Now What? Welcome India! And Let The European Military-Industrial Complex Blossom!

The absence of new large scale war in the last 77 years was caused by US led military and diplomatic dominance of France-UK-USA (which control 2/3 of the United Nation Security Council Permanent Membership, and founded the UN, and its predecessor). The US, in particular, was the deus ex-machina of Pax Americana, having previously discreetly turned even Stalin’s USSR and China into client states (Putin and Xi were created by the established order). 

Not the sort of historical interpretation of reality that the establishment wants you to have.

The USA crucially and massively helped Stalin militarily in 1941, shortly after having refused to help the French Republic a year earlier in fighting Hitler (in spite of “guarantees” given by Roosevelt to France). According to expert Wehrmacht and Soviet generals, this US military help to Stalin saved the USSR from the Nazi onslaught. Moreover, Harriman had redeveloped Baku oil fields, offshore, insuring his colleague Stalin would have plenty of energy…

Why this apparently nonsensical behavior to those who believe the Shoah, or the Gulag, were very significant events? Because there is a deeper sense hidden below.

For the US Deep State, the French Republic was a world rival, co-leader with Britain of immense European empires. Demolish them, and the world would be an American oyster.  Stalin was just a Georgian, South Ossetian ex-bank robber, just a soldier of the US new order. So Stalin was given half of Europe at Yalta, by the US administration overruling an aghast Churchill, knowing full well that Stalin or his successors would ruin Europe and lose it and the Russian realm. As intended. 

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Then the US led the effort to develop China, followed enthusiastically by the naive Europeans, who didn’t understand that they were de-industrializing themselves… Under the pretext of “free markets”… the latter being not applied by US law to any US state business… that includes the giant US military-industrial complex… Indeed, the US was spared degenerating de-industrialization with gigantic military budgets: if you have got to have the best rockets, planes and ships, you will achieve some technical dominance where it matters most: at the edge of destruction. China, after suffering a rough millennium of successive invasions, has understood this.

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However, the US has been too successful in its dominance. Europe has adaopted a possum strategy: behave like a stinky corpse addicted to Putin gas. The US, led by Trump, has gone MAGA… But actually never stopped being MAGA: the cynical investment in SpaceX, a sort of private NASA, was a case in point. Under Elon Musk’s exalted leadership, SpceX went right ahead, and Obama financed him. Meanwhile, Europe degenerated. Germany taught China how to make cars, France taught China how to make trains, nuclear plants, and even planes. While the US kept up with a select immigration, Europe was more into illegal destitutes, and the European school system degenerated into teaching why it was so good to be destitute, invaded and PC. 

Thus the dominance of the West has eroded, due to the relative weakening of Europe… And the rise of many powers, worldwide, irrigated by the tax mitigating, “green” promoted investment of Europe anywhere but home.

Thus one should anticipate the return of large scale war… Except of course if the Kremlin’s attempt to boldly confront democracy and decency fails. Even then, European-American dominance will have to be strongly reasserted militarily. That means much more defense spending, with a balance between the US and Europe… 

Spending more on defense inside Europe with European companies is something many Europeans do not agree with, prefering instead to become obsequious clients of the US, a behavior that is so short-sighted, that even Donald Trump correctly insisted it should be discontinued… Trump may have missed the US Deep State’s sneaky strategy of making Europeans dependent on US Defense, hence US top notch technology. Trump tried to save Europe, so some in Europe insulted him. 

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Modi, India’s PM, said in public to Putin that he had told Vlad that this is not the age of war. However, unfortunately, as resources relatively shrink, even before sea level starts to rise in earnest, this is going to be the age of war… Except if a strong military coalition led by the less corrupt democracies can reassert itself. This is one of the reasons why a democracy like India should be vigorously encouraged to join the West in all ways. So give India the treatment which has been extended to China for decades: massive development through manufacturing.

What can be extended to India, because it’s a democracy, should be extended to Europe. Germany and other European powers have greedily bought US military systems, in the hope that US weapons make the US stakeholder in their realms. This policy would clearly backfire, if Trump returned as president. It is obviously backfiring under Biden too, but because Biden is more polite, Europeans did not notice that they are digging their own economic grave. The Germans, full of traditional Teutonic resentment, have said they will not finance French companies: they much prefer to finance US companies, even when the French firms’ products are superior to the US one. An example is the Aster/SAM T/Mamba air defense, a French interception rocket capable of 60 (sixty) gs (60 times the acceleration of gravity) maneuvering. Germany prefers US or US-Israel rockets… Which are less performing for realistic situations as encountered in Ukraine…

Why does Germany do this? Because Germany, under Prussian influence, has learned Machiavellian power politics as a morality play. It’s known under various names, such as “Realpolitik”… Which is ironic, as Germany was the most unrealistic state in the world for generations. The resulting catastrophic bouts with fascism in the Twentieth Century have not cured the German mentality completely: as it used to look up to the Kaiser, Hitler, Putin, now it wants to look up to, and take order from, and be dependent of… Trump? Is that the smart thing to do?

Germany is prostituting itself, going from Putin’s hydrocarbons to now the weapons and gas of the US of Biden (the mental contortions would be more amusing if Trump were in power). Prostitutes deoend upon pimps, and that’s not a job for the future… A future full of war, be it only against the rising ocean…

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No weapons, and the will to use them, no democracy. The rise of democracy was directly caused by the domination of the hoplites (heavy infantry) over aristocratic cavalry. Modern equivalent is control by We The People of dual use technologies, including debating power.

Patrice Ayme

The Taj Mahal is exemplary of the cultural wealth of India. It can be viewed as a Muslim monument. Commissioned in1631 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658) to house the tomb of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal; it also houses the tomb of Shah Jahan himself. The tomb is the centrepiece of a 17-hectare (42-acre) complex, which includes a mosque and a guest house, and is set in formal gardens bounded on three sides by a crenellated wall.

The Mughal Empire ruled much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries.For some two hundred years, the empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus river basin in the west, northern Afghanistan in the northwest, and Kashmir in the north, to the highlands of present-day Assam and Bangladesh in the east, and the uplands of the Deccan Plateau in South India (Kerala to the extreme south stayed independent). It was founded in 1526 by the Uzbek Babur.

Nuclear Decapitation Strikes: How Putin Wins With Nukes

PUTIN HAS NOTHING TO LOSE BY GOING NUCLEAR, AND A WORLD TO SURPRISE, SO THAT’S WHAT HE DESIRES: 

Since February 2022, Putin and his helpers have said, and repeated that, if they don’t get their way, humanity should go. The idea that if a tyrant does not get his way, humanity should disappear is new: on n’arrête pas le progrès. It’s found in some religious texts where angry, jealous gods get rid of humanity. Putin is the first tyrant who expressed the will to destroy all, and has the means to do so.

Putin drew nuclear red lines, assesses the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), and they have been crossed since, and Putin did nothing spectacular. See: SPECIAL REPORT: ASSESSING PUTIN’S IMPLICIT NUCLEAR THREATS AFTER ANNEXATION, Sep 30, 2022, observes that Putin did not renew immediate nuclear threats when he annexed four provinces of Ukraine, September 30, 2022. This gives a false feeling of security, and opens humanity to a Putin surprise.

However, ISW concludes that: “The more confident Putin is that nuclear use will not achieve decisive effects but will draw direct Western conventional military intervention in the conflict, the less likely he is to conduct a nuclear attack.” Indeed, indeed… As long as the “West” has somebody to talk to.

However the following is true:

1. Without Putin using nuclear weapons, Ukraine will recover all her lost territories, including Crimea.
2. Such an Ukrainian victory will be accompanied with huge losses for the Kremlin, in all ways. 
3. The catastrophic losses will bring regime change in the Kremlin.
4. Putin, although otherwise a complete idiot, may be smart enough to guess the preceding. So:

Let’s explore the unthinkable, where Putin does exactly what the “West” does not expect him to do.

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Helping Ukraine is not just a moral necessity, it’s a survival necessity. We can’t let inhumanity win, it will come for all of us, ultimately.

The United Nation determined in September 2022 that children as young as 4 were raped, tortured and killed in Ukraine, by Putin forces, in significant numbers. It is the necessity of survival for  humanity to fight against inhumanity.

We are going down an apocalyptic decision tree. In the short run, Putin is going to try to overwhelm Ukrainians with human waves… at least so goes the conventional thinking. As Putin sent mainly minorities to fight, this has the advantage of a genocide against minorities, for example the Crimean Tartars. Ultimately, though, this traditional Kremlin method will fail, against experienced, increasingly well armed, extrmely motivated Ukraine. 

And Putin should know this.

At that point, the best outcome, for non-Putin civilization, is that the Russian  military eliminates Putin. Putin also knows this. Putin should also know this. So Putin knows he does not have forever to win. 

So let’s suppose that Putin is not eliminated (while praying to all known divinities, and other imaginable, that he will be). 

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VLAD THE MAD’S BEST OPTION IS NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON:

Putin then must terrify Ukraine into submission, by submitting it to nuclear bombing… and sooner rather than later. Terrifying Zelinsky and his government looks impossible, so the only solution is to eliminate them. 

Indeed, the smartest way for Putin to nuclear bomb his enemy is not by using nukes on the battlefield: Ukrainian forces are dispersed, armored, entrenched, mobile, Putin would have to use several nukes on a concentrated front, and on Ground Line Of Communications behind. The military advantage would be slim, if any; the world outrage would be great; NATO’s “devastating response” would consist into opening the spigot of full military help to Ukraine [1].Putin would argue he is using nukes on (just annexed) Russian soil to defend from a Neo-Nazi invasion, but the whole world would turn against him.

So using nukes as ISW expects him to do, striking troop concentrations and GLOCs, with several nukes, would bring more of the same to Putin, just worse. Alleging, as Putin did, that the US was the first to nuclear bomb, and so “created a precedent” is irrelevant: the US did not launch an invasion of Japan, and eben after Japan surrendered, did not invade Japan nor a fortiori annex it territory and claim that Japan had no right to exist. Instead of annexing territory, the US imposed the vote of Japanese women (immediately)…   

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DECAPITATION STRIKES ON UKRAINE: 

The war aim of Putin, expressed for decades, is to destroy the Ukrainian state. We saw above that he can’t do it conventionally, or with a dozen nukes… That leaves us with another obvious possibility, which would achieve the element of surprise. In his Art Of War, Sun Tzu wrote: In conflict, direct confrontation will lead to engagement and surprise will lead to victory. Those who are skilled in producing surprises will win. Such tacticians are as versatile as the changes in heaven and earth.

By trying a nuclear decapitation strike on the Ukrainian state, killing the Ukrainian leadership, Putin would achieve surprise.

How far from each other are the presidency, national assembly, department of defense and regalian ministries of Ukraine? The presidency and Rada (national assembly) are 500 meters apart. And so on. Putin could use a MIRVed rocket with one warhead going to the presidency, the other to the Rada, etc… Putin could launch one of his “Satan 2” missiles (the RS-28 Sarmat), and be done with the leadership of Ukraine. The warheads could be programmed to explode after impact, causing tremendous shockwaves which would destroy all very deep underground installations in Kvyiv. Then Putin would appear on TV, completely enraged, and accuse the “West” to have done it. 

The way Putin could pretend to look at such a war crime, is a win-win: he would have killed the “Neo-Nazi” leadership, and intimidated Ukraine into submission. After the decapitation strike on Kyiv, Putin could contact individual army commands in Ukraine, and order them to surrender, or to see the cities they are in, or next, be submitted to similar nuclear bombardment. 

What would NATO do? Well, nothing, because NATO DID NOT THINK ABOUT PUTIN GOING FULL WACKO.

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HOW TO PREVENT NUCLEAR DECAPITATION STRIKES:

First, imagine the scenario presented here, and feel its likelihood. 

Putin is a malefactor with only one concern: reconstitute the old Kremlin empire, and anything else is not tolerable. Only victory will bring him survival… another similarity with Adolf Hitler. 

It is a modern tragedy surpassing anything written in the past. One is dizzy, just contemplating the consequences. 

The Ukrainian government, and NATO, should keep this in mind, the possibility of a nuclear decapitation strike. Thus they should get ready, and MUST be blatant about it. The Russian military has to understand decapitation strikes would probably not work, ONCE COUNTERMEASURES are taken. Faced with this, the Russian military would perhaps draw the conclusion that it is the Kremlin which needs decapitation.

So the focus should be on dispersing the Ukrainian government, and military commands make them mobile… Well sheltered, and yet not too associated with large conurbations. Also the West should scramble to produce massively anti-missiles and anti-ballistic systems. There are a number of these systems in existence, but insufficient numbers, or developed by the US, France and Israel. Early versions of these systems should be sent to Ukraine, ASAP. 

If Ukraine and NATO take those precautions, and the option of decapitation strikes will turn into a probable ineffective nuclear slaughter all over Ukraine, the decapitation strikes option would be closed. 

Putin will then be reduced to multiple use of nukes on the battlefield, hoping that would scare Ukraine into submission. The problem of NATO and Ukraine will then be to make this nuclear battlefield behavior unsustainable [2].

But that would be a a lesser problem.

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PUTIN’S CRIMINAL DEMENTIA WAS LONG OBVIOUS, STOP UNDERESTIMATING IT… Especially when evaluating the future:

The present situation with Putin is no surprise to me: I wrote many essays comparing in detail Putin with Hitler for very good and deep reasons, the fundamental oligarchic organization of the world, more than a decade ago. Most “leaders” pretended to be surprised about Putin’s behavior in 2022. However, they egged Putin on, for decades, just as Hlter had been egged on, by western oligarchic predecessors. Self-declared “leader” Obama used to be Putin’s accomplice, a mafioso talking to another, through Medvedev, then “president” of Russia, in 2012:”Tell Vladimir I will be freer to do whatever he wants me to do, after the election,” said the corrupt “leader” over a hot mike… Obama, and Merkel, and the other corrupt ones led into “satanism”, Putin himself declared on September 30, 2022, knowing all too well what he was talking about. 

The satanic mood Putin was part of is extensive. An ex-friend of mine, Philip Short wrote a glowing biography of tyrant Putin, exonerating him for the crimes related to Chechnya in 1999, when Putin was already in charge.

I am sure Philip Short, once a big man at the BBC, was paid… Hey mortgages, you know, properties all over, castles in the Provencal sky… So were thousands of others… And, implicitly, they like the privileges, the money, the power, but they also would hate to fall victims of accidents, as happened to many oligarchs who did not faithful obey the nuclear Czar… Don’t we all…

So, if civilization wants to avoid being surprised by nuclear decapitation strikes, get ready for them…

Let me repeat slowly: Putin and his criminal oligarchic clique have lost the conventional war with Ukraine and democracy. Thus, Putin is tempted by a nuclear decapitation strike against what he calls the “Neo-Nazis” in Ukraine and the “neocolonial” “satanism” of “the West”. Nuclear strikes would be effective, because the West would have no answer. Ukraine and the West have to expect, take countermeasures, and thus, prevent this.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Notice that, in this scenario, NATO would have had to switch to massive war production of sophisticated anti-missile systems… but that is neither easy, nor fast to do. France is ramping up the production of Rafale fighter-bomber, but many subcontrators find it very hard to do so. Production of the US HIMARS rockets is 9,000 a year. Ukraine is rumored to use 6,000 a month. Even expanding production lines for old-fashioned, unguided 155 mm howitzer shells can take more than a year. Guided and submunitions shells, as France and the US produce, take much longer to ramp up.

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[2] That would mean to enable the Ukrainian to hit Russian cities with conventional means.

Hypersonic Russian missile strike on Lviv, Western Ukraine, fired from Russia, 20 March 2022. Such missiles can carry thermonuclear warheads. Having a high probability to intercept them, as soon as they are fired from over Russia, would be a formidable deterrent, because Russian-made nuclear material would fall over the Russian empire.

Franco-British Strategic Nuclear Deterrence Is Considerable

Nuclear war may be around the corner, the deluded Putin, tail between his legs, is that crazy that he may not realize that his “escalate to de-escalate” insanity would be of no advantage to him and his criminal entourage. So it’s a good point to consider the main deterrent of the West: the strategic nuclear forces of the US, Britain and France (3 of the 5 powers allowed nuclear weapons under UN law). It turns out that, in a strategic nuclear exchange involving the ultimate weapon, the strategic nuclear submarines, the Franco-British contribution is equivalent to 50% of the US… No doubt that complicates considerably the computation of nuclear war planners who are criminal enough to work for Putin…

Who has a stronger navy: the United Kingdom or France (not counting nuclear submarines)?

Both European navies have Strategic Submarines Ballistic Nuclear. Four of them each. The French ones carry an armament of 16 M51 SLBM missiles manufactured by the Aérospatiale (now Airbus Defence and Space), plus conventional torpedoes and Exocet anti-ship missiles. The M51 missiles carries on a “bus” 6 to 10 MIRV warheads of 110 kiloton (kt) each, 8 times Hiroshima, with penetration aids, and a precision of 150–200 meters. One such missile could annihilate all the decision centers in Moscow (and millions of deluded Moscovites who watch too much Putin TV). The range of the M51 is secret, but believed to be around 10,000 kilometers (the same tech is used on the Ariane rocket).

These SSBNs are really Armageddon weapons… Yes Putin has them, sort of, namely at least on paper; but the devil is in the details: nukes have to work, and subs have to be undetected. France, the US, and the UK have dozens of hunter subs… Keeping nukes in good, that is explosive, order, cost a fortune (it’s unlikely all the 6,200 nukes of Putin work; it’s more likely that most of them, don’t work…)

To come back to France and Britain,

the two Navies are roughly comparable, and, the French having dutifully forgotten the tragedy of Mers El Kebir, and the Brits more than contrite about it, the two navies are more than friendly to each other. If Scotland seceded, British subs would use French bases. France Naval Group has launched its second 100 meter long nuclear powered Barracuda attack submarine, arguably the world’s most modern and silent sub. It is using a type of propulsion the US Navy plans to have around 2030… The Barracuda class subs can silence their nuclear reactors for long periods, something no other nuclear sub can do (yet). Hot nuclear reactors have always circulating water and tend to be noisy… whereas air independent diesel subs can made much more silent… and can be much more silent for a full month under water! The Barracudas have the best of the two technologies…
Although not directly strategic, such subs can hunt and destroy Putin and Xi’s subs…

One of the British SSBN used to be without nukes, but, considering the increasing Sino-Russian war noises, that has been reversed (nukes cost a lot of money to just keep ready to function; French nukes cost 5 billion dollars a year, just to keep them ready to explode with enough fresh Tritium, etc.). Also the French SSBNs have 100% French equipment, including French equivalents of the US Trident II. UK subs have US systems, US missiles, Trident II… Also the UK Navy uses Thales and other French electronics all over, for the UK subs and the UK ships. Thales is French (originally)… Thales also makes 24/7 in Belfast, Ireland, the British “NLAW” antitank weapons which have destroyed so many of Putin’s tanks.

British carriers are restricted to F35s, since they do not have catapults (which make the French carrier interoperable with the US ones; CATOBAR enables it to launch heavier, more capable planes).

The real defect of Franco-British defense is not quality, which is top notch, but having too few weapons. Macron, following Biden by a few months, has called the French military-industrial complex to go into a war mode. However the expanded French military budget has not been voted on yet, and it takes time to ramp up. Thales is producing nearly enough electronics for five Rafales a month.

All the British nuclear deterrent is in its 4 SSBNs… the French have the same number of SSBNs, but also also nuclear bombers and supersonic standoff 300kt nuclear missiles). So Franco-Britannia has 8 strategic nuclear subs so silent once two collided with each other while deep in the ocean… whereas the US has 14 such submarines… In other words, the nuclear strategic strike capability of the West is considerably augmented by the Franco-British arsenal. Just one of these 22 subs could kill of the order of 50 million people in 20 minutes, and as a French general officer commented:”We think that’s enough!”.

However, tyrant Putin has definitively demonstrated that this is not enough, because threatening the enemy with Armageddon does not help fight a conventional war.

British SSBN going back home in Scotland…

War Tech: SAMs and Stealth

Would American aircraft suffer the same losses of jets and helicopters as Russia is experiencing, if they were engaged in a similar conflict such as Russia’s attack on Ukraine?

It depends: the devil is in the details and those who operate them. Everything indicates that the Ukrainians are extremely well trained and very smart. They may be poor in GDP per capita, due to a number of actors out of their control, but they are first world in engineering. Ukrainians are not illiterates from the desert, just the opposite, and have been building their own planes for generations.

Well operated, S300 category missiles can be devastating. During the war against Serbia, a single Serb S300 SAM battery escaped destruction for many weeks, by moving around the country, observing the patterns of NATO planes, and turning on its radar at the last instant. It shot down at least two US planes, one “stealth” …and was never destroyed. Its commander later retired, became a baker and friend with the F117 pilot he had shot down.

Reciprocally, twenty years later, the French air force in Libya attacked ten hours before US SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses), using French Rafales fighter bombers to suppress flak while killing Qaddafi’s armor entering Benghazi. The bombing itself was done by Mirage fighter bombers that the Rafales protected with their active stealth (basically counter frequency jamming).

The action in Ukraine seems to show that high maneuverability of fighter planes is extremely useful. Narratives from Ukrainian pilots show that old dogfighting techniques change everything. Just like the legendary Serb SAM commander, they turn on their missiles at the last moment. Time is at such a premium that some basic commands are just one word, such as the command to get in the plane and take off. 

Another important fact coming out of Ukraine is that the small but lethal Bayraktar TB2 Turkish drones, which seems to have a radar return larger than a Rafale, are hard to spot for Russian SAMs. This means several things: Rafale passive stealth is enough. F35 passive stealth is overkill, especially as it comes while inflicting losses of carrying capacity and lack of maneuverability (a slow going F35 with a giant fiery exhaust will be perfect for Stinger style MANPADs; reciprocally if it does not approach the ground, to avoid MANPADs, it will be ineffective for its measly bombing and fall prey to S300 style SAM).

Unsurprisingly, two months into the world war, Ukrainian ace pilots ask for F16s, F18s, and… Rafales. Conventional, highly maneuverable fighter bombers with plenty of radar absorbing material without reduction of capability.  They do not ask for F35s… (Nor do the Ukrainians ask for Typhoons or F15s… which have their own problems, being too much of high altitude interceptors…)  

Thus the West should augment the production of these highly capable jets. Unfortunately, to please Uncle Sam located in Washington DC, every country in the West is ordering F35s, which, all seem to indicate, would not be very useful in Ukraine fighting Putin’s forces.

Russian Cruiser Moskva burning after being hit by two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles, in combination with “other equipment” (probably spotting and distraction by BT2 Turkish made drones). The ship later capsized and sank. The Moskva was one of the three carrier-killers cruiser of the Russian Navy. It was also the flagship of the Russians in the Black Sea. Its anti-aircraft capabilities had been used earlier off Syria, and were probably used off the Ukrainian costs, where Ukraine said it shot down Russian superiority fighters in the past… This is the largest capital ship sunk since World War Two (the Argentinan cruiser sank by UK nuclear submarine 200 miles from the Falklands, 40 years ago, was much smaller…)

When the US engaged the North Vietnamese, it suffered heavy aircraft losses, due to confrontation with experienced pilots (some Russian instructors) in nimble planes. Another problem was that the US planes depended too much on missiles (F4 Phantom had no canon, so found themselves in dog fight with armed Migs, while having no weapons). Ukrainian pilots claim they can out maneuver Russian missiles, and in particular outrun them (this is in theory possible with many missiles, given a fast jet, and if the missile exchange start at large distances… F35 partisans mumble arguments about non detectability, but France, for example has long range infrared missiles… And then it becomes a question of how fast can the prey run away, radar stealth or no radar stealth…).

So it may be that the F35 doctrine is another silly idea which has overcome the US Air Force. One notices that recent orders for F35s were cancelled and replaced by orders for F15 (a large, but fast third generation jet).

Not to say the F35 is useless: it could be very useful in some situations, in a role somewhat reminscent of the Growler… But as the end-all, be-all? Big mistake, for sure.

Patrice Ayme

I sink therefore I special… The jets of water in the back are from fire fighting equipment of a tug behind…

KREMLIN NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL: GO TO HELL (where you belong!)

If a lunatic threatens to blow up the planet, is it wise to do what he wants, and what he expects? Some think so, and they pontificate. What is certain: the genocidal war launched by Putin will wreck Ukraine and Russia. The Kremlin tyrant will be victorious only because of his usage of nuclear blackmail which makes cowards tremble. 

Indeed Ukraine is resisting as much as it can, only weapons of mass destruction can overwhelm it. Ukraine’s spineless allies, afraid of Russia’s army, which is bogged down in Ukraine, are not giving Ukraine weapons equivalent to those of the genocidal invader… Only because they are afraid of Putin’s gesticulations with nuclear weapons. 

The Russians have used nuclear blackmail before: during the Suez Canal crisis, Krutschev, the Soviet dictator, threatened to atom bomb London and Paris. In that particular crisis, the USSR was allied with the USA (So-called “decolonization”!). US foreign policy and the CIA were led by the Dulles brothers, who made their fortune as corporate lawyers for the Nazis before WW2 (and then went on to lead a pseudo-“denazification” from Berlin, and the CIA from Washington). 

The reason why these two, USSR and USA were allied, was a pursuit of a policy going all the way back to Lenin, an alliance between the most powerful US plutocrats and the Bolshevik gang, developing in common the Baku oil fields, and industrializing the USSR. 

***

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russian ambassador threatened France with nuclear annihilation, if France sided with the USA. To which French president De Gaulle, a general who led an armored division against seven Nazi armored divisions in WW2, replied gaily: “Et bien, dans ce cas, nous mourrons ensemble. Au revoir,  monsieur l’ambassadeur,”[1].

In this case, we will die together, bye.  

This is the only answer Putin deserves: in this case, tyrant, we will die together.

Kremlin potentates cannot be empowered by taking seriously their demented discourses and outrageous demands. Kremlin potentates invaded a major democracy, democratic leaders should not obey the orders the invaders give, to enable tthem to go around and destroy the country they invaded.

Kremlin potentates are doing now exactly what the Nazis did in Ukraine, 81 years ago: besiege and cut the food, water and power of the cities to starve populations into submission; floowed by massive shelling. 

The Kremlin potentates and their servants are the Nazis in Ukraine, as Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president pointed out, because they behave like Nazis. In WW2 Zelinskyy’s Jewish family fought Nazism, and was nearly entirely killed [2].

It is crucial that, in this Third World War, the US is on the side of democracy, from the start, in complete contrast with WW1 and WW2, where US help to its parents, UK and France, happened years too late (and deliberately so). 

***

Some congratulate themselves already about winning the present war. But, in the end, the problem with Munich was not just that Hitler was appeased, thus encouraged; Hitler in the end conquered Czechoslovakia: that was the problem. 

Consider France. France was on the side of democracy in 1936 (while Britain and the US collaborated with Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco)… But France did not do enough (it was hard for the Jewish French Prime Minister, Léon Blum, a Socialist, to contradict the mildly pro-Nazi Anglo-Saxon plutocrats in power in London and Washington; Blum preferred to give priority to his socialist agenda of paid vacations, etc.).

***

Nuclear blackmail, if successful, will be repeated, because Putin plutocracy will have to satisfy its military enablers (who would have suffered, while being empowered)… and Putin’s realm will be wrecked. 

So ultimately, NATO will have to surrender to Putin plutocracy, or then finally fight… After Putin plutocracy gets much more powerful than it is today, with Xi’s China by its side, under the umbrella of 6,257 Russian nukes. 

***

So, in recapitulation, living under Putin nuclear blackmail is impossible. Russia has around 1,600 warheads deployed, ready for us. Let’s hope NATO has every single one of them targeted. 

In the Cuban crisis, De Gaulle thought, correctly enough, that “there will be no war”. This time, the situation is grave: we already have a war, and it’s starting with a tyrant obsessed by “genocide” and “cleansing”… Both concepts of genocide and cleansing have been used repeatedly, obsessively by nuclear tyrant Putin. He is trying to inure us, including himself and his own captive audience, to their use.

It is also a world war: 141 countries voted at the United Nations against Russia. The resolution, which needed 90 votes to pass, demands that Russia “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.”

Submission to genocide and cleansing is not sustainable, thus not moral. And so spoke wisdom. Tough, but there is no alternative. Wisdom under tyrants such as Putin is not possible. 

It is high time to lock up the sky above Ukraine (and thus ramp up the production of anti-ballistic missile missiles…) It can be done without pilot involvement initially. 

If we prefer to die quietly on our knees, than to resist infamy while standing, civilization will not survive nihilistic brutes drawn by power and the evil seduction of total destruction, because those monsters coallesce and know nothing else.

Yet, civilization is worth saving. In the present state of technology, only civilization enables us to live.

Patrice Ayme 

***

[1] The French were fully supportive of the US in the Cuba missile crisis, no question asked, De Gaulle took Kennedy at his word. Not so the British. PM Macmillan suggested his public thought the US exaggerated the Castro threat.

French scientists discovered and fabricated radioactive isotopes (Nobel 1935), and then the U 235 nuclear reaction. De Gaulle knew about the atom bomb, “une bombe, une ville”, a full year before US president Truman became aware of nuclear bombs. The French were shunted out of the main Manhattan effort for cause of the French nuclear patents and the usual anti-French racism.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_programme_nucl%C3%A9aire_militaire_de_la_France

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[2] In January 2020, during the commemoration in Israel of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Zelenskyy told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu two stories of some of his country’s bravest heroes during the war: a Crimean Muslim woman and a Catholic priest who each saved scores of Jewish children. (My own family saved more than 100 Jews…)

Then, Zelinskyy said, he had one more story “about a family of four brothers.”

“Three of them, their parents and their families became victims of the Holocaust. All of them were shot by German occupiers who invaded Ukraine,” he said. “The fourth brother survived. … Two years after the war, he had a son, and in 31 years, he had a grandson. In 40 more years, that grandson became president, and he is standing before you today, Mr. Prime Minister.”

A grandmother escaped in an evacuation of Jews to Kazakhstan, Zelinskyy said. She returned to the large city of Kryvyi Rih in southern Ukraine after the war and became a teacher. Zelensky said he grew up in an “ordinary Soviet Jewish family,” , not very religious, since “religion didn’t exist in the Soviet state as such.”

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying Putin had “misrepresented and misappropriated Holocaust history.” More than one million Jewish Ukrainians were killed by the Nazis during WW2, most of them simply because they belonged to a category the Nazis had invented and hated.

Sedan test, Nevada, 1962: 104 kilotons TNT at 194 meters depth. 11 million metric tons of sediments thrown up in the air. Minimum nuclear warheads in NATO arsenal are of this power. A French nuclear sub carries 16 missiles with ten warheads each and a precision of 100 meters. Ohio class US subs carry 24 missiles with 12 warheads each (so 264)… and there are 18 of these subs… The US warheads are a minimum of 100KT but can be up to 475 KT…

Why Iran Can’t Have Nuclear Weapons

I talked to a young US citizen, who is also an Iranian citizen. He studies International Relations. He used to visit Iran continually (his family has various property in Iran, including farmland up north). But now no more: he is old enough to be drafted in the Iranian army, and he doesn’t want that to happen. He is secular, and not thrilled with the theologists in Iran. However, considering nuclear weapons, he said: “why can’t we have them?” As most Iranians, he feels that to be deprived of nuclear weapons is a strident injustice. Who doesn’t want to partake in nuclear fun?

For reference, the Japanese, who were smarter than the Nazis, knew perfectly well that nuclear bombs could be made, and had three programs, using different techniques, to make them (one was located in North Korea, rich in hydro, then Jap occupied). One idea was to have a bomb ready to drop on GIs gathered on a beach. However the crazed maniacs who had bullied their way at the top of Japan got a taste of that medicine before they got their own ready:

Nagasaki Bomb Explosion. The Christian city and its cathedral were not the primary objectives. Clouds got in the way. The shipyards initially targeted in another city were switched at the last moment. The bluff was to persuade the crazed maniacs leading Japan that there would be such a bomb every three days. They capitulated before the largest city of the northern island of Japan got atom bombed too. Ultimately, the atomic bombings saved millions of lives, mostly civilians in China being killed by the system the Jap invaders had set up…

In the 1960s, there was an important movement against nuclear weapons. The threat was clear: as weapons were not precise then, war planners had advised to make giant bombs: may be they could not land where intended, but then they would destroy everything in a giant radius, that was good enough. Standard equipment on bombers were bombs in the megaton range. The USSR produced up to 50,000 thermonuclear bombs or so.

A semblance of sanity prevailed later and thanks to Reagan (!) and Gorbachev, arsenals got reduced by 90% or so. (Compare with my useless friend Obama, who achieved no arm reduction, just the opposite…)

However, even after reductions, nuclear weapon systems are still formidable.

A French defense minister pointed out in the last few years:”We can kill 50 million people in twenty minutes, and we think that’s enough.”[1]

No solution was found to world denuclearization. The balance of terror is all the parental guidance the world is getting. [2] 

In the 1950-60s, because of the existential threat to Israel, France helped Israel develop nuclear weapons. At some point 5,000 French engineers were at Dimona, the top Israeli nuclear site. Israeli scientists took part in the French nuclear bomb program, all the more as rabid pacifism was rampant in the French intellectual community, and most French  physicists refused to develop nukes (ironically enough the same who hated the bomb in 1960 wanted it in 1938; but the enemy was not the same!)

It has been said by those who should know, that Israel has of the order of 200 nuclear warheads. During the Yom Kippur war, using nukes was considered. It didn’t come to that, in part because high precision US weapons arrived in a timely manner.

Since then Pakistan and India have developed large nuclear arsenals. Their main potential effect will be to reduce considerably the overcrowding of South Asia.

So most Iranians want nuclear weapons: why can’t we have them?

After all, Iran has existed for longer than India… (Lore and archeology indicate.)

But then is Islamized Iran really Iran? Even the Iranians don’t know from one moment to the next. Thus most of Iranian feasts are gloomy, except for Norouz (which is at least 5,000 years old).

The reason is that if Iran gets nukes, surely so will Arabia, and then why not Egypt, Algeria, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. And of course Japan could have thousands of nukes, any time, it’s just a small constitutional change away.

Nuclear Armageddon would be guaranteed.

So, unfortunately, the balance of terror and nuclear strike supremacy of the Permanent Members of the Security Council has to stay in place: only them should have nukes.

***

Why The UNSC (UN Security Council) and its five members?

One has to go back to history. China is the oldest civilization with the Western Cradle (the Indo-European civilization). Either have had organized sedentary, agricultural, states for five thousand years. Overall, France and China have been the most prominent military powers of the last two millennia. France was the modernized form of the Roman state and its continuation, and pretty much created Europe, while China created Japan, Vietnam, etc.

Chinese defenses mostly failed in the last millenium, and China spent most of the time occupied by Mongols, Jurgens, and Manchus. (OK, arguably only the Mongols (=Yuans) were really not Chinese.) In the first half of the 20C, Japan tried to invade China, and became crazed fascist from trying too hard.

Meanwhile Germany’s fascist plutocracy tried to seize all of Europe as colony, and was defeated by France and Britain. Their progeniture, the US, caused Europe more problems than it solved, and flew to the rescue of victory in wars it had contributed to launch, organize and maintain. Twice. (Yes, most historians would disagree, but they are paid to say what they say, whereas I am only rewarded with expressing the truth, a fundamental human instinct and pleasure.)  

Thus France, Britain, the US, China, Russia could pose as the main combatants against barbarity, horror, and infamy in the 20C… and they were. Moreover the first three are the champion of democracy, human rights (France abolished slavery in 655 CE, imposing that to all of Europe and later the world; then formally re-established the “Renovatio Imperium Romanorum“ (Renovation of the Empire of the Romans), unwilded Germany, in 1066 CE France abolished slavery in England, and French imperialists there ended establishing the world’s most advanced democracy, the British Parliament, etc.)

***

So it is OK that those five have nuclear weapons: they are unlikely to engage in crazed world conquest. To those who moan that France had a giant empire, let them be reminded that it was a “Mission Civilisatrice”… Not a joke when you look at the details. French Canada was not the English Colony in the Americas: the later, founded by private investors, practiced genocide, whereas the French colony, under tight government control, didn’t.  (This is also why the English won the war… Nothing like genocide, when you want space, as Hitler pointed out cogently, yet idiotically… because those things are better left unsaid.)

Argentina and Brazil were persuaded to drop their atomic bomb program. South Africa, too, and accepted to dismantle seven already completed bombs.

The world order we have now is not the best imaginable… But it works. Some Germans moan they would like a Permanent Security Council seat. Well, they already have it… through France. Otherwise why not Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, etc.? The beauty of it all is that all these countries can, and have sieged at the UNSC. Just, they aren’t permanent and don’t have veto powers.

So Iran will not get nukes. Arabia and Israel are dead set against it. Arabia tolerated the nukes of its de facto ally Israel: everybody understands Israel is very small, very hated, and has been disappeared thrice already, once by the Babylonians, later by the Romans, and finally by the Nazis. One could say they have excuses to take existence seriously.

But Arabia will not tolerate to have Iran as local superpower. Not again: they have seen that movie before, several times.

***

Shah Abbas expanded Iran back into Iraq (as happened many times prior).

Iran Was Not Always Pacific:

A leitmotiv, out there, repeated by millions of parrots, is that Iran was always pacific.

In the early Seventh Century, Iran, then Sassanid Persia, conquered most of Arabia. The backlash is that god crazed Arabs destroyed the Sassanid empire a few years later (the Romans had done the heavy lift of destroyed the Sassanids before, literally a few years before the Arabs attacked, led by their great strategist Muhammad…)    

Using an army formed in part of ghulams—Christian slaves from Armenia and Georgia who had been converted to Islam—Shah ‘Abbas re-established Iran’s borders, defeating the Uzbeks in the northeast. He would eventually expand his empire, seizing the Kingdom of Hormuz from the Portuguese, on the other side of the Arabo-Persian Gulf, and defeating the Ottomans to take control of Baghdad (Iraq) in 1623 CE. These conquests allowed Shah ‘Abbas and Iranians access to the sacred Shi’i shrines of Kazimayn, Karbala and Najaf in Iraq. It also gave the Shah complete control of trade coming through the Persian Gulf. The Shah created a magnificent capital, Isfahan, in the south. A breathtaking city I had the good fortune to visit, with some of the world’s most beautiful building (blue and gold mosques).

Not again will the Arabs say. Conscious of the fact the present world order needs to be sustain, the US and the EU agree… And no, Russia and China are not stupid enough to come to the rescue of Iran in a significant way… That’s precisely why China and Russia are on the UNSC: because they aren’t crazed too much.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Standard US and French bombs are around 250 kilotons nowadays. But they are typically on a “bus” carrying up to nine other independently guided bombs. Thus one missile on just one nuclear sub missile could destroy the largest city. for example Teheran. France has 4 of these Armageddon subs, the UK has three (the fourth was denuclearized). The US has 14 such subs, each nearly 20,000 tons (!!!), carrying 24 Trident missiles with up to eight nuclear warheads… 4 other such subs were denuclearized…)

***

2] Accidental nuclear war from a short circuit is possible, as Launch-On-Warning systems are still in existence, in Russia or the USA (France doesn’t do launch-on-warning, as it depends upon aircraft and nuclear subs). Unbelievably, supposedly progressive politicians in the West have long stopped caring about Launch-On-Warning, although such systems can launch nuclear war, Terminator style, any day…. Another deep failure of the Clinton and Obama administrations (I didn’t expect progressive smarts from W. Bush or Trump! But when the self-declared progressives are not progressive, we have a serious problem…)

Superior Civilization Needs Superior Weapons (Collapse Series 1)

WHY THE WEST NEEDS TO REARM!

Military Non-Superiority Is The All Too Civilized Way To Collapse:

“Si vis pacem, para bellum!” (If you want peace, prepare war) the Romans used to say. Indeed, implementation of civilization, like sausage making, is no pretty sight to behold. It requires a stern consideration of the human condition, mind fully open… to the most awful possibilities, those which, precisely, can undo civilization. In recent years, the two oldest Republics, the USA and France have coldly executed some of the worst Jihadists… using legislative powers going back 25 centuries, to the beginning of the Roman Republic (the Consuls had the right to execute whoever they decided to execute when it had to do with military operations; thus US and French presidents have right of life and death against enemies of the Republic).  

If an advanced civilization has no crushing military superiority, contact with a vicious society can cause collapse. This happened many times. This happened to Egypt, more than once. Egypt recovered fully, more than once, until it didn’t, each time more diminished. First with the Achaemenid Persians, then the Romans, Christians, and most irretrievably, with the Muslims.

Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) warheads streaking to the ground at 16,000 kilometers per hour. They all come from one rocket. Against those only some weapons not yet in existence could be effective. Impacts of warheads from just one missile can be hundreds of kilometers apart. Each warhead can be 300 kilotons of TNT, 20 times the Hiroshima bomb. Precision is less than 100 meters.

An obvious example of collapse caused by the failure of military superiority is Rome. The Western Roman empire of 40 million people was ravaged, most of the population eradicated, by at most 150,000 barbarian savages ferociously invading, fighting and destroying as if their lives depended upon it, because it did.

Constantinople, the Eastern Roman empire, would know a similar fate, in slower motion. The Romans lost most of their territory to savage Islamized Arabs, and, four centuries later to the recently Islamized Turks, before being terminated by the later, another four centuries down the line. No wonder the flag of Saudi Arabia has a curved sword on it.

Roman Egypt surrendered to the Third Caliph, Omar, hoping for a promised lenient treatment. Three years later, Egypt realized that the Muslim conquerors had lied, and were most abusive. Egypt revolted. Too late: the library was burned by Omar and his ilk, and ever since Islamist terror has reigned therein, diminishing the minds so much, as Napoleon discovered to his dismay, that the very notion of progress had vanished in a superstitious, theocratic haze. 

Sophisticated, enormously populated (40 million?) Northern Song China fell to Genghis Khan’s Mongols, who were no more than 150,000 cavaliers. It had been invaded and occupied before. However, Mongol generals proposed to kill it all, and even change Chinese climate and ecology, but the conqueror in chief wisely rejected the suggestion. Two decades later all of China, and even Vietnam, ended down under the Mongol boot for a century.  

***

Superior Minds Need Superior Defenses:

A contributor to this site, SDM cogently asked: “Why make rearmament a priority when it would appear there are more than enough weapons already to destroy mankind? Are you implicitly promoting a revamping of military weaponry rather than just more of the same old stuff?

Answer: Yes, precisely. Precisely because we have all those terrible weapons to destroy mankind, we need smarter weapons to prevent the use of the most terrible ones. I am talking about superiority of weapons as factor of security.

Destruction of mankind is not a new thing. When the barbarians invaded the Western Roman empire they caused up to 90% eradication of the population. When the Mongols of Genghis Khan finally defeated the Western Xia empire, they killed 100% of the population, leaving only sands behind. When the Muslims invaded Spain, they eradicated 100% of the Goths, and 25% of the Catholics (except for a tiny corner of the Cantabrian mountains where they got blocked by heroic defenders). Ancient warfare could bring 100% exterminations, go ask the Assyrians (Babylon and its allies, unable to defeat the Assyrian field army, decided to destroy the Assyrian population first, to starve its army ).  

More precise weapons are needed. Take nukes. In the 1960s, the USA and the USSR made gigantic thermonuclear bombs, up to 25 megatons of TNT: if they wanted to destroy an objective, they were not sure of the precision of detonation, so they made giant bombs. Not only that, but they made more than 50,000 of them. Using a fraction of that arsenal would have killed billions.

For example the USA had planned, in case of war with the USSR, to explode giant bombs on the Soviet submarine pens found next to Leningrad. Their detonations were expected to destroy the populated part of Finland, as well. President JFK was informed of this collateral damage, for his eyes only. Later, precision of ballistics came down to one meter. At that point, a smaller nuke could take out the same sub pens, without taking out Finland. Standard French, British and US thermonuclear warheads are now around 200 kilotons.

China and Russia have developed very small nukes, which could destroy crucial military objectives, without too much collateral damage. Thus tempting to use: once one’s headquarters, or storage of weapons have been taken out, one may not feel inclined to escalate…   

Right now if some “leader” in a nuclear weapon state decides to do away with a large city, he has a good probability to succeed: only US cities, to some extent, and Moscow, have Anti Ballistic Missiles. Destroying missiles with missiles is a very expensive, even ruinous, and certainly chancy business.

However, powerful laser batteries would destroy ballistic missiles cheaply, and at will. Thus lasers would annihilate MAD, the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine… which is a crime against humanity.

More practically, precision ammunition have proven to be a real progress. Recent battles against ISIL killed not even a tenth of what would have been before. In Mosul, it is said 12,000 civilians died. A conventional extirpation of the Islamist State would have killed many times that. Mosul has more than one million inhabitants. Instead, with advanced weapons, strikes could be directed exactly where the snipers were inside buildings.

Developing superior weapons means to invent new technology, in a way no other civilian demand will do. The car got invented because the French army of the Ancient Regime liked the idea of what we now call tanks. Black powder and rockets were perfected by the Mongols and Europeans, because they wanted superior weapons (China had a more festive approach to explosives than the Mongols and French). When they invaded Eastern Europe, the Mongols used field batteries of rockets. Soon Europeans found ways, thanks to saltpeter, to augment the explosive power of black powder. Around 1430 CE, two French brothers invented field guns, small enough to be rolled to a battlefield and beat English foot and archers into submission (that was the final phase of the “100 years war”). Some rabid pacifists will smirk. However, all this explosive tech not only built roads, but now it enable us to send robots around the solar system.  

***

Falling Behind What’s Needed, Or How Xi Became Crazy:

SDM asked: “Is it your position that the “West” is somehow behind the weapons technology curve in comparison to …..China? Russia? Anyone?

No doubt that the west is under the sway of corporate neoliberals to the detriment of the vast majority of the people because of climate change denial, austerity, tax giveaways, wage stagnation, lax financial regulation, etc. etc. Are there data that shows the US/EU weapons are inadequate?”

There are plenty of indications that the West is in military peril. Some of the West’s main weapon systems may be obsolete, vulnerable, or ill-conceived. Vulnerable and obsolete: the giant aircraft carriers of the USA may be vulnerable to ballistic missiles: the Chinese developed a specific carrier killer. Obsolete: the US Navy is supposed to use the F35, a “stealth” flying bathtub. The F35 may be fully visible to some radars.

Western Quantum radar goes up to 20 kms, the Chinese one 100 kms (from better detection of single photons, they said, so progress in fundamental physics)… A good quantum radar going 1,000 kms would make the F35 fighter completely inoperative. They are supposed to construct more than 3,500 of these turkeys, and defend the entire West with it (but for France).

Knowing that he will be able to deny the West air supremacy has got to have a bad effect on Xi’s psychology… Now he may think he can takeover the world, or at least the South China sea, Taiwan, hey, maybe Vietnam, which, after all was long Chinese…

China and Russia have stealth fighters. The Russian one is faster than the Western one. Russia has shown pictures of test firing of a HYPERsonic missile. Hypersonic missiles go too fast to be intercepted by any existing defenses (one can imagine more advanced lasers could do it). The point here is that the hypersonic missile could turn into the nightmare the Romans knew all too much: arrows from recurve bows, which the Parthians, Sassanids, Sarmatians, Alans and Huns had. They could penetrate Roman armor.

***

A civilization can get destroyed in a few hours:

Rome never recovered  of the battle of Hadrianopolis in 379 CE. The crucial part of the battle lasted minutes, not much longer than it took for the US Navy to set on fire the four finest fleet aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese navy at the Midway battle in 1942 (ending any hope of the Japs to avoid defeat in WWII).

At Hadrianopolis, Roman emperor Valens got killed, the Eastern Roman field army was annihilated, the victorious Goths were on the loose, the empire shaken in its deepest psychological foundations, the barbarians elated, and meanwhile enormous concessions had to be made to the Sassanids. The battle happened in a few hours, and by accident. The left Roman wing was in the process of destroying the Gothic foot and Gothic camp, when, suddenly, disaster struck: the rested Gothic cavalry, 15,000 strong, charged in the flank of the left Roman wing, which then fell on the Roman center compressing it to the point soldiers couldn’t use their weapons, let alone maneuver, like at Cannae, sic centuries earlier.

Skeptics may bleat that the Goths surrendered to the Romans in 382 CE, after sacrificing king Fritiggen and others culprit of the victory of Adrianopolis. Thus, those historians may insist, no untowards consequence from the crushing defeat. But the peace treaty is revealing: the Goths could settle, but as Goths, under Gothic law, not as Romans. It’s a bit as if Muslim Fundamentalists destroyed half of the US Army and then were allowed to settle in Ohio under Sharia. Sure enough, a generation later, the unassimilated Goths took great umbrage, and were on the march again. This time, in 410 CE, they sacked the city of Rome, and settled in Gaul and Spain.(The Goths got ejected from Gaul by Frankish king Clovis in 507 CE, after being crushed at the battle of Vouillé. To thank him, for having annihilated, at long last the Goths who had tortured Rome since the catastrophe of 379 CE, the emperor made Clovis into a Roman Consul for life!)

***

What was the world’s strongest army on May 10 1940?

The French army. Although the Nazi army had doubled its tank force with Czech tanks, the French army had 50% more tanks, and the French tanks were better: many were impervious to German artillery. The best French planes were equal in quality to the Nazi planes, and there were hundreds of them.  

However, by May 15, 1940, although the French army had lost just one division out of one hundred, it had lost the Battle of France: the “torrent of German tanks” (as the head of the French army said) was flowing towards the sea, unimpeded, and the main French armies, plus the British Expeditionary Force, had been cut from behind.

What happened?

The Allies didn’t see that the entire Nazi army had advanced on three small roads in the Ardennes forest, under a thick canopy of springtime leaves. One Spitfire pilot saw it, but he wasn’t believed.

Conclusion?

Accidents happen.

France was ultimately saved by her ungrateful brat of a child, the USA. The other brat, Britain, although helpful in 1940, had been derelict in 1933-1938, when it was more or less aligned with Hitler. The fact is, the British Second Armor division was supposed to be in the way of the Panzer thrust on May 10, 1940, just behind the French infantry B division, which was attacked by three Panzers… but the Brit 2nd Armor had not arrived! If it had, the battle would have been just the opposite, as the French would have had time to reconfigure their armor.

The French and British air crews couldn’t get their act together in the week after May 10, 1940. They  got it after that, but it was too late. The Nazis had been training in Spain where they had intervened in 1936, they knew how to operate with ground crews.

Another factor in May 1940 was that the US and Britain had 200,000 soldiers. France had six millions, and Nazi Germany ten millions. In other words, USA and UK were disarmed, the French Republic was supposed to do all the work. If Britain had in May 1940 as many soldiers as it had in 1944, the defeat of May-June 1940 wouldn’t have happened. That would have been a disaster for the USA, agreed…

***

Conclusion: Democracy has to be defended. Plutocracy is always around, conniving, eager to rise further. If plutocracy sees weakness, plutocracy will pounce. Just watch Putin and Xi. The latter may be much encouraged by what experts in the Chinese military perceive, correctly as weakness in the Western military, which is pretty much reduced to the USA, Britain and France… As in 1940. Weakness in democracies encourages fascist dictatorships, as Hitler himself said many times. When hell itself speaks, wisdom should listen.

Patrice Aymé

“Two Minutes To Midnight”: World As Dangerous As It Has Ever Been Since World War II

The idea of “LAUNCH ON WARNING” is that, should a nuclear strike look imminent, a warning would be ensued, and missiles would be launched, without waiting for impact(s) of incoming apparent warheads. We are living in a seriously, Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD world: several countries, or, at least the USA and Russia, maintain “Launch On Warning” (LOW) systems of nuclear bombs having the potential for killing 600 million people, or more, in 24 hours. Or more. From accident, short-circuit, wrong training tape, etc. That is, those systems can kill the equivalent of one hundred times more people than the much bemoaned holocaust of the Jews in WWII (it took four years to kill six million Jew). The elite bemoans Auschwitz, while having 100 Auschwitzes at the push of a button, and the ostriches out there see nothing wrong, deep in the sand they scrutinize every day.  

Not considering that hair-trigger, “Launch On Warning”, nuclear bomb systems are worthy even of a conversation, is a global moral and intellectual failure of the highest order ever seen. Advocating slavery, racism, dictatorship, Inquisition, theocracy, torture, pale in comparison!

There is no reason for those LOW, except as first strike. Even then, a first strike would cause a devastating counter-strike, a second strike, so, at first sight, it’s not clear what would be achieved (if one goes deep into nuclear war planning, though, debatable advantages of a first strike can be construed). 

Epic failure. After the rocket carried by a plane, an F4 Phantom, exploded, nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise caught fire, off Hawai’i. Had the fire extended to the main hangar, the carrier, carrying more than one hundred nuclear bombs and eight nuclear reactors, could have exploded. In several accidents with nuclear bombs, many safety mechanisms failed. At least in one case, only the last trigger didn’t trigger.., And those bombs were huge (one hundred times Hiroshima, or more…) Such incidents happened even inside the USA.

The intellectual and moral failure of preceding leaders has brought this situation: the USA and Russia should have dismantled the LOW systems. LOW nearly caused nuclear apocalypses several times, for reasons such as short-circuits, or the wrong training tape. Each time, nuclear catastrophe was avoided simply because officers on watch didn’t believe nuclear war had been launched, and acted forcefully, accordingly. So accidental nuclear war was avoided only because of the fortitude of a few individuals, some American, some Soviet.

The French Republic dismantled its LOW system (founded on dozens of ballistic missiles). French deterrence is now ensured with 300 thermonuclear nuclear warheads on four very silent nuclear ballistic submarines equipped with jet propulsion (with another 300 “tetes nucleaires oceaniques” ready as backup, should more strikes be needed in a prolonged nuclear war). France has also nuclear tipped supersonic cruise missiles launched from supersonic planes, and potentially nuclear tipped cruise missiles on board one hundred meter long Barracuda attack nuclear submarines. That’s enough firepower to destroy all Russian and Chinese cities. Plus ground hits on nuclear submarines pens (which presumably would come first, if the US or UK didn’t hit them yet). 

Because it didn’t happen yet, doesn’t mean it never will. Prime targets in a serious nuclear exchange would be thermonuclear ground bursts on submarine pens. Recently released Pentagon files show Finland was supposed to be annihilated by the fallout. Call that collateral damage.

The U.S. has 14 Ohio-class submarines carrying 24 Trident II SLBMs missiles. Each Trident, like the French missiles, have up to ten independent targetable nuclear warheads. The UK has three nuclear warhead equipped Trident subs. That’s a total of 21 Armageddon subs, which, all together, could terminate Russia and China several times over.

The subs are undetectable. A few years back, in 2009, French strategic sub Le Triomphant and British Trident sub HMS Vanguard collided in the Atlantic, “at very low speed”, while at great depth: they had detected nothing. That’s not very surprising as they are not only silent, but have anti-sonar devices. As the subs are undetectable (especially as they go hide in parts of the ocean where detection is especially hard), there is no reason to keep them on hair-trigger, ready to fire at the first alert..

So why does the USA keep 430 Minutemen Launch On Warning rockets at ready to launch within seconds, 24/7, at the first alert, in other words, ready to cause accidental nuclear war?   

Counter-intuitively (they are supposed by the “left” to be right-wing bastards), the two US president Bushes (I despise W), reduced nuclear weapons of the LOW type, considerably. Clinton and Obama did very little, aside from using their mouth parts in a way the gullible found admirable…

Here is what the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists think about the situation:

Founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The decision to move (or to leave in place) the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 15 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and new technologies emerging in other domains. A printable PDF of this statement, complete with the President and CEO’s statement and Science and Security Board biographies, is available here.

To: Leaders and citizens of the world Re: Two minutes to midnight. Date: January 25, 2018

In 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change, making the world security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago—and as dangerous as it has been since World War II.

The greatest risks last year arose in the nuclear realm. North Korea’s nuclear weapons program made remarkable progress in 2017, increasing risks to North Korea itself, other countries in the region, and the United States.Hyperbolic rhetoric and provocative actions by both sides have increased the possibility of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.

But the dangers brewing on the Korean Peninsula were not the only nuclear risks evident in 2017: The United States and Russia remained at odds, continuing military exercises along the borders of NATO, undermining the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), upgrading their nuclear arsenals, and eschewing arms control negotiations.

In the Asia-Pacific region, tensions over the South China Sea have increased, with relations between the United States and China insufficient to re-establish a stable security situation.

In South Asia, Pakistan and India have continued to build ever-larger arsenals of nuclear weapons.

And in the Middle East, uncertainty about continued US support for the landmark Iranian nuclear deal adds to a bleak overall picture.

To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger—and its immediacy.

After colliding with the deck of aircraft carrier USS Kennedy, during a storm, this US cruiser caught fire, off Sicily. The nuclear magazine would have probably exploded, had the fire got there.

On the climate change front, the danger may seem less immediate, but avoiding catastrophic temperature increases in the long run requires urgent attention now. Global carbon dioxide emissions have not yet shown the beginnings of the sustained decline towards zero that must occur if ever-greater warming is to be avoided. The nations of the world will have to significantly decrease their greenhouse gas emissions to keep climate risks manageable, and so far, the global response has fallen far short of meeting this challenge.

Beyond the nuclear and climate domains, technological change is disrupting democracies around the world as states seek and exploit opportunities to use information technologies as weapons, among them internet-based deception campaigns aimed at undermining elections and popular confidence in institutions essential to free thought and global security.

Did wars get started accidentally? Rarely so, but this was before. Now the technology has become faster, and immensely more powerful. A case in point is the explosion of the US battleship Maine in Havana’s harbor, in 1898. It was alleged at the time by the New York Journal and New York World, owned respectively by plutocrats William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, that Spain did it. They gave the Maine destruction intense press coverage, but employed tactics that would later be labeled “yellow journalism“… Fake news! That brought a mood which led to war of the US with Spain.

US Admiral Rickover, father of nuclear submarine deterrence,  launched an inquiry, seventy years later, in the Maine destruction (it is easy to construe a scenario with a nuclear sub exploding next to Saint Petersburg, with possible detonation of nuclear bombs). It was found to have been probably accidental, from methane built-up, most explosive at 10% CH4.

The much admired nuclear Nobel peace prize Obama didn’t do anything about reducing the danger of nuclear war happening by accident. No more than the lunatic Putin. That made them accomplices of the potential holocaust they managed. Trump? A bit too early to judge. Trump inherited a potentially disastrous military situation, especially with North Korea, but not only. Sometimes, there are no more nice exits.

Thanks to our amoral, imbecilic “leaders”, we are all in the situation of the crew of the Maine. When the battleship exploded, three quarter of the crew died. Many officers survived, as their quarters were far removed from the explosion. Similarly, crafty plutocrats buy land in New Zealand, a fully autonomous mini-continent, far removed from potential nuclear explosions.

In any case, those who value the most correct intellectual and moral positions, should exert pressure for an immediate worldwide dismantlement of “Launch On Warning” nuclear bomb systems.

Patrice Aymé  

P/S: The preceding essay, although full of data, is philosophical in nature. It may be a bit unfair to Obama, as it doesn’t mention the new START Treaty signed under that president. However, that treaty was way too timid, and didn’t eliminate LOW. Right now the USA has 399 Minutemen missiles deployed, ready to launch. 70% of existing nuclear warheads are deployed on the 14 strategic submarines of the USA, most of them deployed in Washington state. That gives an estimated 945 thermonuclear warheads deployed on US submarines (France has officially 300). All the details in:

https://fas.org/blogs/security/2018/01/new-start-full-data/

If there’s any doubt ….

Paul Handover from the site “Learning From Dogs” penned a very well written essay around some of the issues I worry most about and we should all worry most about. After I complained I had little energy to write essays, Paul replied:”But you inspire productive outcomes in others! My latest post is entirely down to you.”

Indeed it was. Paul’s essay is reblogged below, after my own, suitably apocalyptic, introduction.

Thanks Paul for helping with this problem, a problem potentially as big as one hundred world war twos, potentially unleashed anytime. Some will scoff, but Obama just took the largest sanctions since the cold war. (Against the advice of his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, Putin said he will not retaliate; Wikileaks is saying the leaks come from the USA, some hint they come from the NSA, as Podesta, Clinton’s chief of staff, is listed as a foreign agent).

I will reblog your entire essay, which is much better written than I can master, as soon as I have time….
Thanks again, and happy new year for you and your readers!
Patrice

People whine a lot about World War One and World War Two. Whining is good, as long as it leads to examination of the causes of what went wrong.

World War One was pretty much started, in first order of appearance, through the will of five men, five Prussians (one of them the Kaiser, a plutocrat, eldest grandson of queen Victoria, cousin to the Tsar Nicholas II). Those men actually had planned to attack within 18 months, on December 11, 1912.

Would they have engaged on that “preventive war” without the assassination in Sarajevo, and the subsequent ultimatum of Austria-Hungary to Serbia? We don’t know (the assassinated Archiduke was a strong, albeit grouchy, advocate of peace at nearly any cost, and a close friend of the Kaiser).

However a fact is carefully ignored by history textbooks and history university professors: on June 1, 1914, the adviser of racist US president Wilson, Colonel House, proposed to the Kaiser a world government, with the UK, explicitly adverse to the “racially inferior French”.
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/plot-against-france-1912-2013/

Little noticed by textbooks and historians is the fact that the USA, with the help of the “neutral” Netherlands, enabled the Kaiser to keep on fighting in spite of the Franco-British naval blockade (which was absolute). The Kaiser needed cotton for his high performance explosives, and it came from the US.

Conclusion? A trio of men can start a world war, if they have the power to do so: the Kaiser, the US president, and Von Moltke.

The usual conclusion of textbooks is that Europe was a powder keg ready to explode, and that’s good enough to explain what happened. It is basically a lie: Great Britain had no army, and the entire French government was on vacation in late July-early August 1914. So France and Britain were completely innocent. However, the fact remains one had built a machine which enabled a trio to assassinate world peace

The same general context was true for World War Two. through their actions, both the US and the UK rebuilt Germany as a war machine and an economic powerhouse, as a partially owned subsidiary. After the fall of Spain to the Nazis and fascists, Great Britain decided to support the French Republic in opposing Hitler by all means necessary (February 1939).

After France and Britain declared war to Hitler for his invasion of Poland, US President Roosevelt could have made the war stop early by delivering on the “guarantees” he had given France. But he did not. As a result, what should have been a short war against the Nazis, turned into a vast holocaust.

Conclusion: if one sets up a situation where things can go very wrong, given enough time, they will. The Obama administration engaged in a one trillion dollars nuclear weapons program, but did nothing to reduce the nuclear weapon threat. An obvious strategy for peace would have been to withdraw the land based ICBMs (Britain never had any. France dismantled its own; only three countries have them now, including the USA). Those are launched on warning, and are extremely dangerous.

In this, as in so many other matters, Obama has been an immense disappointment. People who want progress, should push for progressive ideas under the Trump administration. We cannot just hope that Trump will trump his critics (as he did so far). We have to push him in the right direction. The fate of humanity is at stake. And it could be gone in a flash, thanks to our previous, highly criminally derelict leaders.
Happy New Year To All!

Learning from Dogs

…. there’s no doubt!

My title and sub-title comes from commercial aviation. It’s one aspect of the safety culture that safely the millions of passengers who embark on a commercial flight each year. (IATA estimate that it will be 3.6 billion in 2016.) In other words, if the flight crew have even an inkling of an issue with the aircraft while in flight they will make an immediate decision to land.

Why I chose this title will become clearer as you read on.

The end of the Second World War so far as Europe was concerned came on May 8th, 1945. In other words: VE Day. London was not a pretty sight in 1945.

Toni Frissell’s famous image of an abandoned boy clutching a stuffed animal in the rubble of 1945 London. (Image taken from this website page.)

What’s the relevance of May 8th, 1945 to me?…

View original post 1,799 more words

Why NO APOLOGY For HIROSHIMA

Yes, the fate of children in Hiroshima brings tears to one’s eyes. However… However optimizing morality is not just about crying about what happened. Optimizing morality consists in doing the best one can do, to influence the course of future events, for the better, considering the circumstances.

And the best, at the time, in August 1945, was, clearly, and in retrospect, to use atomic weapons exactly as they were used. It was a rolling of the dice which came out optimally, considering the actors involved. Thanks to a bit of luck, it worked splendidly.

The nuclear bombs shortened the war by several months and several million dead, minimum. Inside Japan, the military had been mostly untouched and ready to inflict millions of deaths, in the greatest battle. The fanatical general officers leading Japan knew when, and where the Allied invasion was going to happen, destiny had been written by history and geography, there was no choice.

The US army knew Japanese generals knew, and “Operation Olympic“, D-Day for Japan, was going to involve possibly millions of casualties, and the use of nerve gas and atomic bombs.

Moreover 10,000 civilians were dying each day, from the Japanese occupation in China.

A shock treatment was needed. The atom bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki avoided all this by giving to the war criminal, emperor Hirohito, the opening he needed to redeem himself, and he courageously terminated the war by ordering the suicidal fanatics at the head of the military to stand down, and surrender (many of his underlings relished suicide: the entire kamikaze command, 60 planes of them, would disobey the formal order, and kill itself at sea; so would the commander in chief, who, after vaguely trying a coup, also committed suicide).

***

Obama is talking (live) to the US Marines, next to Hiroshima as this is published (“I will visit this afternoon, Hiroshima!”). Obama, correctly, will not apologize for the nuclear bombings of Japan in 1945. However, it’s a good time to reiterate my old position on this subject.

The “Hitler line” had been erected across very mountainous ground in Italy, south of Rome. It was a natural barrier, the last one for hundreds of kilometers. It stopped the Allies for six months. The Commonwealth troops, Poles, British and American armies had suffered immense losses. And not advanced a mile. In 1944, the French army broke through it near Monte Cassino.

French General Juin, was nicknamed “Hannibal” by the American command for his ferocity, calm and strategic cunning. After a first test and diversion, the French army pierced in two days through the twenty miles thick with Nazis, fascists and mountains, like a hot knife through butter. This was really a Franco-North African army. And its ferocity was unequalled. Ferocity starts, but also wins wars. And the ferocity of the just always surpasses that of the unjust.

Want Peace? Don’t Make War For the Worst Reasons. Hiroshima Roasted, 8 September 1945.

Stabbed in the center and through the heart, the entire Nazi line soon collapsed. However, the American powers-that-be got soon worried that the “French”, those racially impure Franco-Africans, were committing acts of war going over the line of what they considered proper. The American generals went to see the French generals… who laughed to their face: ”C’est la guerre!” The French explained they had no love lost for the treacherous Italians. In June 1940, fascist Italy joined Hitler in attacking the French Republic. Thus the honor of Italian women was not high on the list, considering that the Italians had shown they had no honor. After covering 50 kilometers in a few days, through the mountains, giving no quarters, killing the most contemptible forces in the world, love acquired the same old meaning that real war calls for. Real tough love!

And, as far as the French were concerned, a good Nazi, was a dead Nazi. The French army would keep that relaxed attitude through the rest of the war (the US Army had a pretty similar attitude, and the Nazis were dismayed to be out-Nazified, so to speak…) In the last few weeks of the Second World War in Europe, in April-May 1945, the First French army charged through the two German states of Bade Wurttemberg and Bavaria, suffering more than 5,000 dead in combat… while destroying all Nazi units in south Germany, killing untold thousands. That’s war! Although Nazism was clearly already finished then, an unforgettable  lesson still had to be taught, a punishment for the ages (the Nazis had sent all the armies they had to try to stop the French, whom they hated the most among those they confronted in 1945; they feared the Russians more, but the French had declared war, and brought the destruction of the 1,000 year Reich).

Punishing the Nazis was the moral thing to do. The French finished the war by killing as many Nazis as they could, precisely because a hard, cruel and thorough finish was needed. The sort of hard, unforgettable finish that German racist fascism was not given in World War One. And thus it did it again, as it felt that lack of punishment meant approbation!

The German Republic we all enjoy now was born in the blood and ashes of prior fascism and barbarity.

By summer 1944, the American generals learned, indeed, and learned from the French, that ferocity was called for. During the (mostly failed) Operation Market Garden, the Nazi command bitterly complained that the Americans were taking no prisoners, even when the SS surrendered. Why not? Was not the idea of the SS that there should be no surrender?

Although technically France had declared war to Nazi Germany (with the United Kingdom and its puny army in tow), it was the Nazis who had decided to destroy civilization. They had started the war (contrarily to what they pretended later).

Who had started the war in Asia? The Japanese military command. A coup was actually attempted against it, by lower officers (in 1937). The coup failed and was repressed in (a lot of) blood. However, the fact remains that Japanese society, like the German one, or even Italy, engaged in collective mass murder.

The Japanese army massacred at least 15 times more (innocent) people than the total of Japanese (mostly military, mostly by their own hand) who died. Japan losses were of the order of two millions, mostly troops dead from bad treatment by… the Japanese high command (yes, this is a slightly biased description, but only very slightly: most Japanese who died in the war were Japanese soldiers mistreated by the conditions their command put them in!)

True, a two month old Japanese baby was innocent. And maybe her parents, too. However, collectively, all of Japanese society was culprit. Proof? The US could atom bomb, and it was the highest moral way.

Yes, I know perfectly well that the “collective responsibility” doctrine was rejected in 1945. That was clearly idiotic (and a political manoeuver, thinking of Stalin and Mao).

On the island of Okinawa, the civilian population resisted with a fanaticism that the Islamist State envies, no doubt. A consequence is that most of the civilian population of Okinawa died (I have covered all these arguments, with detailed numbers, in the past).

Hiroshima killed 70,000 right away, and for a total of 140,000 later. Nagasaki killed much less. And  the war was over within three days.

And that high rate of atrocious atom bombing was all a lie, a make-belief.

Bombing August 6, and again August 9, should have induced the Japanese High Command to believe that a bomb would be coming every three days. Several Japanese cities, including Kyoto, were still untouched. All Japanese industry was within those cities. Clearly, Japan could not sustain an atomic bombing every three days.

In truth, there were no more bombs at the ready. A few could have been dropped over the next few months. Not enough to have a big military impact. Japan could have held into 1946. The landing prepared for Fall 1945 was expected, in light of what had happened at Okinawa, to kill at least one million.

Announcing a demonstration atomic bombing would have been a very bad idea, for a variety of reasons.

So, considering the situation, the atomic bombing were morally optimal. Those who don’t want to be atom bombed, better not start a world war.

A lesson for the future, averse to war. Those who got zapped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not get zapped in vain: they gave their lives, and a lesson. Yes, it was horrible. But so is surgery without anesthesia. It doesn’t mean it’s not necessary.

Let’s help, and get help from, the Bhagavad Gita

‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds and evils’

You want to be moral? Start by not being an idiot. (Or the sort of fascist robots Japanese and Germans had turned into in the 1930s and 1940s.)

Patrice Ayme’