Symposium at National Press club designed to mobilize support for a new nuclear weapons freeze movement reminiscent of the one in the 1980s
On December 7th, former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter hosted a panel entitled “No Nuclear War: A Call for Reason” at the National Press Club in the nation’s capital.
The three-part symposium brought together a range of anti-war speakers to address the growing threat of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia. Trepidation over that increasingly likely scenario has only mounted following the reckless brinkmanship by the lame duck Biden administration in supplying long-range ATACMs (Army Tactical Missile Systems, pronounced “attack-’ems”) to Ukraine.
Not only do the precision-guided munitions give Kyiv the ability to strike deep within Russian territory, but the U.S.-made missiles must be launched with the help of Western personnel, something that will be interpreted by Moscow as an attack by NATO. While the live-streamed discussion was overshadowed by the earth-shattering news of the fall of Damascus to Western-backed jihadists, the catastrophic developments in the Middle East only made the apocalyptic theme more pertinent.
Participants in the forum included former Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich, retired Army colonel and Washington insider-turned-critic Lawrence Wilkerson, Code Pink organizer Medea Benjamin, The Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal, his wife and fellow journalist Anya Parampil, Black Agenda Report editor Margaret Kimberley, broadcast host Wilmer Leon of (now defunct) Sputnik radio, political commentator Garland Nixon, author and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik, MIT physicist Theodore Postol, and 25-year-old LaRouche Party agitator Jose Vega.
The inclusion of Vega, a congressional candidate in New York’s 15th District who has made a name for himself by publicly heckling politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) over her vote to arm Ukraine, was perhaps the most controversial.
However, it was refreshing to see Benjamin willing to appear alongside the young LaRoucheite, after previously dropping out of last year’s “Rage Against the War Machine” rally at the Lincoln Memorial because Code Pink objected to the appearance of incendiary social media influencer Jackson Hinkle as a speaker. As Dr. Wilmer Leon joked, radioactive isotopes in a fallout do not discriminate based on political affiliation.
Ritter, who came to national attention when he sounded the alarm that Saddam Hussein did not possess Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in the lead-up to the Iraq War, began by underscoring the imminent danger of the crisis between the U.S. and Russia due to a complete breakdown in diplomacy. The ex-Marine Corps intelligence officer argued the current deteriorated state of relations surpasses even that of the Cuban Missile Crisis, because at least there was a dialogue between Washington and Moscow back in October 1962.
Larry Wilkerson then told an anecdote from his days as Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff of how the U.S. and China successfully deescalated an international incident in April 2001 after a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea, thanks to hotline communications.
As several panelists noted, perhaps more worrying is that the public today is seemingly oblivious to the likelihood of annihilation, a fear that preoccupied Americans at the height of the Cold War.
Professor Ted Postol, who has previously exposed U.S. deception over chemical weapons attacks in Syria and the effectiveness of Patriot missiles during the Gulf War, gave an unnerving slideshow presentation of what the detonation of a single nuclear warhead over D.C. would look like to startle the audience. To put things in perspective, the MIT scholar compared the hypothetical blast to the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as atomic weapons today are far more advanced than the A-bombs used to vaporize Japanese cities in 1945.
Unfortunately, that prospect is frighteningly real. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has proceeded to tear up every non-proliferation agreement that brought the arms race to an end, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty canceled by the Trump administration in 2019.
Signed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, the two statesmen agreed that “a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought”, a joint declaration Dr. Wilmer Leon helped the crowd remember. Even though the USSR ceased to exist just a few years later, Washington decided it still needed to preserve a nuclear advantage over a non-existent foe — or so we thought.
During the 1990s, the Clinton administration made NATO enlargement a cornerstone of its foreign policy and acceded several Warsaw Pact countries as member states. Clinton in the process ignored Russia’s objections and the previous verbal guarantee made by Bush-era Secretary of State James Baker to Gorbachev that the alliance would not move “one inch to the east” past a reunified Germany.
Simultaneously, NATO launched military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo to justify its obsolete existence, further outraging the Kremlin with attacks on Moscow’s historic Serbian ally. As his successor Vladimir Putin recently reminded a BBC reporter, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had come to power with the help of Western meddling and it was only when he denounced the bombing of Belgrade as a violation of international law that the U.S. suddenly acknowledged his inebriated and feckless state.
Following 9/11, the George W. Bush administration unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that put a guardrail on the development of missile defense systems and guaranteed mutually-assured destruction. The neoconservative Bush Doctrine held that the realpolitik strategy of containment was obsolete and that American adversaries must be destroyed preemptively.
As Ritter explained, offensive nuclear war planning was reintroduced into military doctrine under the pretext of preventing another catastrophic attack — but the so-called War on Terror wasn’t the endgame. By the time of Bush’s second term, Moscow found itself in the crosshairs of Western imperialism despite the earlier bromance between Putin and his American counterpart in which the latter claimed to have looked into the Russian President’s eyes and glimpsed “his soul.”
Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference marked a turning point, as he both condemned America’s misadventures in the Middle East and cautioned NATO about its eastward expansion on Russia’s doorstep. The very next year, Moscow gave a helping hand militarily to the breakaway republics in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in their rebellions against Georgia, which had been transformed into a belligerent NATO cat’s paw in the wake of a Western-financed color revolution.
Part of a wave of Russian-bordering nations that underwent regime change after disputed elections and mass protests calling for European Union integration, the unrest in Georgia’s Rose Revolution was fomented by foreign-funded civil society groups and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Soon, a major stretch of highway leading to the Tbilisi airport would bear George W. Bush’s name.
When Barack Obama assumed the White House, there was ostensibly supposed to be a reset in U.S.-Russia relations, resulting in a memorable diplomatic blunder between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during a photo-op in Geneva, Switzerland.
In hindsight, it should have been a warning sign that the gimmicky ‘reset’ button presented by the former First Lady to the seasoned diplomat was mislabeled with the Russian word for “overload.” Nevertheless, Obama and then-President Dmitry Medvedev ratified the New START Treaty in 2010 and agreed to a reduction in their arsenals.
Meanwhile, the neocon cabal hiding in plain sight within the Obama administration led by Hillary and her State Department apprentice, Victoria Nuland, had other plans.
During the 2012 presidential debates with Republican nominee Mitt Romney, Obama mocked his GOP opponent for singling out Russia as the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, saying “the 1980s called and want their foreign policy back — because the Cold War’s been over for twenty years.” Obama’s zinger successfully cast his rival as an out of touch neo-Cold Warrior living in the past, but it wouldn’t be long before the Democratic Party would adopt his mentality.
Romney had attempted to pounce on a hot mic exchange caught earlier in the year between Obama and Medvedev at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea, where the nation’s first black president suggested he was open to a post-election compromise with Moscow. As per usual, Obama was talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Not only did the Nobel Peace laureate continue Washington’s illegal wars against foreign states that didn’t follow its dictates — as had already occurred in the NATO-led overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya — in 2014 the U.S. orchestrated a coup d’état in Kyiv to install a fanatically Russophobic government.
With the Russian intervention in Syria the subsequent year, Moscow (temporarily) thwarted the U.S. attempt to topple Bashar al-Assad and the fight against the Islamist insurgency became a proxy conflict with Washington. By the time of Donald Trump’s incumbency, the notion that the Kremlin interfered in the American democratic process to ensure his surprise victory was an article of faith within the establishment and any hope of salvaging U.S.-Russia ties vanished.
Trump was persona non grata for merely suggesting reconciliation with Moscow as a candidate, but as Commander-in-Chief he withdrew the U.S. from the INF and Open Skies treaties, pushing the world closer to the brink of doomsday.
Trump also opted to send lethal arms to Ukraine in its war with pro-Russian separatists in Donbass, a decision Obama had reluctantly declined. A 2019 document authored by the highly influential RAND Corporation think tank, which boasts of its role in the strategic planning that won the Cold War, prognosticated the furnishing of military aid to Kyiv as the first step in “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.” The deliberate provocation, which Western media uniformly refers to as “unprovoked”, achieved its initial objective when Russia was forced to finally launch its special military operation in Ukraine a year into Joe Biden’s tenure.
There was a tiny shred of optimism when Biden first took office with his willingness to extend New START another five years, the last remaining arms limitation agreement between the U.S. and Russia. Unfortunately, the Western sanctions placed in retaliation for the SMO in Ukraine made the inspection protocols unenforceable on Moscow’s end, prompting Russia to suspend its participation in the accord (albeit without a formal withdrawal).
The pact is now practically null and void with the latest $895 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill passed by Congress that restores the capacity of B-52 bombers to carry nukes, an alarming reversal of the New START limits set to expire in February 2026.
For Biden to green light Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied ATACMs, shortly after Putin approved revisions to Moscow’s nuclear doctrine, is sheer madness. After all, the decree warns that an attack on Russian soil by a non-nuclear state (Ukraine denuclearized in the 1990s) with the backing of a nuclear-armed power will be considered a joint attack. Trump has pledged to negotiate an end to the Ukraine quagmire in his non-consecutive second term and his re-election was a resounding protest vote by the American people against interminable war.
Biden’s game of chicken is an affront to the nation’s democratic wish to broker peace with Moscow, a desire shared by an increasing number of Ukrainians polled who are being forced into conscription by press gangs. Biden has shown he is willing to put the very existence of humanity at risk in order to undermine the incoming administration.
In Oliver Stone’s 2017 documentary series The Putin Interviews, one of the most memorable segments was when the veteran Hollywood filmmaker screened Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic political satire Dr. Strangelove for the Russian leader. Putin had given Stone a history lesson on how the Soviets entered the arms race, reminding him that the American couple Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were merely couriers of the top-secret information provided to the KGB.
The source of the classified documents given to Soviet intelligence by the Rosenbergs, who were convicted of espionage in 1951 and executed two years later, had been the Manhattan Project scientists at Los Alamos themselves (including Theodore Hall, subject of the documentary A Compassionate Spy). Unlike those in power, Ted Hall and fellow physicist Klaus Fuchs understood the importance of nuclear deterrence and counterbalancing America’s exclusive possession of atomic weaponry at the time, an equilibrium now once again in jeopardy.
Another movie made in Tinseltown at the peak of the arms buildup was Stanley Kramer’s 1959 post-apocalyptic drama On The Beach (starring Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire, and Ava Gardner), based on British author Nevil Shute’s novel about the sole remaining survivors of World War III in Australia awaiting nuclear winter. Many military analysts, including Ritter, argue that the balance of power militarily currently lies in Russia’s favor with the advent of its cutting-edge hypersonic weapons capability.
Yet even if some were to survive the immediate effects of a nuclear holocaust, it goes without saying there would be no real ‘winner’ of such a conflict and humankind would meet the same fate as the characters in On The Beach. According to a simulation of a nuclear war between NATO and Russia by academic researchers at Princeton University, there would be over 90 million casualties within the first few hours alone.
Some might call Ritter an alarmist, particularly amid speculation that behind closed doors Moscow hammered out a deal to sacrifice the Syrian government in exchange for retention of eastern Ukraine to avoid a standoff that could lead to nuclear war.
But can the world really afford to take the chance to be dismissive?
Quite literally, the future of life on earth has been hinging on the restraint of the much-maligned Putin, who appears to be the lone voice of reason in this terrifying stalemate.
Even if true, there is no guarantee Trump will follow through on his election promise and things may only get worse. The powers that be seem intent on silencing Ritter, with an FBI raid on his home in upstate New York in August and his passport revoked by the State Department after being dragged off a plane by authorities on his way to Russia earlier in the summer.
At a minimum, the appeal by the conference to support H.R. 10218 introduced by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) to prohibit the transfer of ATACMs to Ukraine is the least that can be done while we stand on the precipice of Armageddon.
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About the Author
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst based in Baltimore.
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