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?????????????????????????????????????????????????Thursday, July 6, 2017
Playing Chicken with Nuclear Annihilation
Much of Official Washington wants to escalate the confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia, ignoring the terrifying reality that this game of chicken could end life on the planet, as Norman Solomon observes.
( July 5, 2017, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) Any
truthful way to say it will sound worse than ghastly: We live in a
world where one person could decide to begin a nuclear war — quickly
killing several hundred million people and condemning vast numbers of
others to slower painful deaths.
Given the macabre insanity of this ongoing situation, most people don’t
like to talk about it or even think about it. In that zone of denial,
U.S. news media keep detouring around a crucial reality: No matter what
you think of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, they hold the whole world
in their hands with a nuclear button.
If the presidents of the United States and Russia spiral into escalating
conflicts between the two countries, the world is much more likely to
blow up. Yet many American critics of Trump have gotten into baiting him
as Putin’s flunky while goading him to prove otherwise. A new barrage
of that baiting and goading is now about to begin — taking aim at any
wisps of possible détente — in connection with the announced meeting
between Trump and Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany at the end of this
week.
Big picture: This moment in human history is not about Trump. It’s not
about Putin. It’s not about whether you despise either or neither or
both. What’s at stake in the dynamics between them is life on this
planet.
Over the weekend, more than 10,000 people signed a petition under the
heading “Tell Trump and Putin: Negotiate, Don’t Escalate.” The petition
was written by RootsAction to be concise and to the point: “We
vehemently urge you to take a constructive approach to your planned
meeting at the G-20 summit. Whatever our differences, we must reduce
rather than increase the risks of nuclear war. The future of humanity is
at stake.”
A war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers could extinguish human life on a gigantic scale while plunging the Earth into cataclysmic “nuclear winter.”
“Recent scientific studies have found that a war fought with the
deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals would leave Earth virtually
uninhabitable,” wrote Steven Starr,
a senior scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility. “In fact,
NASA computer models have shown that even a ‘successful’ first strike
by Washington or Moscow would inflict catastrophic environmental damage
that would make agriculture impossible and cause mass starvation.”
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists explains why,
since last year, it has moved the risk-estimate “Doomsday Clock” even
closer to apocalyptic midnight — citing as a major factor the escalation
of tensions between the U.S. and Russian governments.
So, the imminent meeting between Trump and Putin will affect the chances
that the young people we love — and so many others around the world —
will have a future. And whether later generations will even exist.
I put it this way in a recent article for
The Nation: “Whatever the truth may be about Russian interference in
the U.S. election last year, an overarching truth continues to bind the
fates of Russians, Americans and the rest of humanity. No matter how
much we might wish to forget or deny it, we are tied together by a
fraying thread of relations between two nations that possess 93 percent
of the world’s nuclear weapons. Right now it is not popular to say so,
but we desperately need each other to enhance the odds of human
survival.”
In that overall context, stoking hostility toward Russia is, uh, rather
short-sighted. Wouldn’t it be much better for the meeting between Trump
and Putin to bring Washington and Moscow closer to détente rather than
bringing us closer to nuclear annihilation?
Norman Solomon is
the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org and the
executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the
author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.