Russia and nuclear war

[Wayne Hall]

www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/04/14/the-kremlin-has-missed-the-opportunity-to-end-the-provocations-of-russia-that-are-bringing-the-world-to-nuclear-war/


What Paul Craig Roberts says is the direct opposite of what I tried to say, following the lead of the Western "non-aligned" anti-nuclear-weapons movements:


againstthecurrent.org/wayne-hall/


www.globalresearch.ca/nuclear-weapons-and-representative-democracy/1806

[Wayne Hall]

The Cuban missile crisis:


This is something I wrote to a friend who tells me how much she appreciates Armstrong Economics as an information source.

An article by Martin Armstrong that I read at Global Research: www.globalresearch.ca/hidden-truth-behind-war-russia/5777995

"It is a convincing article but there is one line of thought in it that I would like to challenge: Martin Armstrong writes: "(W)e are now heading into war over fake news. Obama had refused to provide military aid to Ukraine and the entire Russiagate was to box in Trump who was then advised to provide military weapons to Ukraine to prove he was not a puppet of Putin. It was the Neocons who were trying to push Trump into an eye-to-eye confrontation. What Kennedy did to the Neocons was reject their advice and in the Cuban Missle Crisis, this resulted in a monumental shift in US-Russian relations. It forced both parties to realize that they needed each other and that confrontation was not the answer...... By creating Russiagate, the main objective was to prevent Trump from working any peace deal with Russia. That was the same objective of McCain and Graham running to Ukraine now that Trump was elected to promise aid to the Ukrainian Nazis to keep up their war against Russians. Can you imagine if the Cuban Missile Crisis took place during the Trump Administration, the Neocons would have been in their glory warning Trump any peace deal would confirm he was just a puppet of Putin. That would have guaranteed war – not peace. This was the strategic move – a checkmate against Trump seeking peace as did Kennedy."


The idea that the Cuban Missile Crisis forced both parties (Khrushchev and Kennedy) to "realize that they needed each other and that confrontation was not the answer" and/or that Trump had to be prevented from "seeking peace as did Kennedy" is an idea that willy nilly creates misconceptions on both sides of the USA's party-political divide. Among leftists and liberals it reinforces the idea of Kennedy as the benevolent peacemaker willing to "be fair" towards the Soviets (an idea that did not persuade a minority of hard-line leftists who continued to see Kennedy as a warmonger like his Secretary of State Macnamara). Among militantly anti-Communist Republicans it confirms the idea of Kennedy as an unacceptably dovish liberal lacking the guts required to stand up to totalitarian tyranny. (Someone who deserved to be assassinated?). It seems that the facts of the matter were as follows: the advice that Kennedy was getting from the Pentagon was that he should attack Cuba and remove the Soviet missiles from America's doorstep. He chose not to follow that advice. But what did he say to Khrushchev? ("We should realize that we need each other. Confrontation is not the answer.")? No. It seems that what he said was in effect "Get those missiles out of Cuba or I will wipe the Soviet Union off the face of the earth!"

Khrushchev differed from Stalin in a number of ways. One of those ways was his degree of faith in the "deterrent" power of nuclear weapons. Faced with the post-Hiroshima nuclear threats from Secretary of State Byrnes over the borders of Poland Stalin (who was at that time without nuclear weapons of his own) evidently shared with Mao Zedong the idea that nuclear weapons are "a paper tiger". His specific formulation was that they are "for frightening people with weak nerves". Khrushchev by contrast was evidently intoxicated by the idea that under his leadership the Soviet Union was acquiring "a nuclear deterrent". Who could not be deterred by the fifty and hundred megaton bombs the Soviets were testing? And after all nuclear deterrence in the form of "Mutually Assured Destruction" was being sold to the media audiences of the world as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Kennedy's reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis clearly brought Khrushchev down to earth. But was Kennedy less of a hawk or more of a hawk than his Pentagon advisors? The formula "we should realize that we need each other" disguises the reality, serving no visible purpose other than (it seems) that of preventing the world's clueless plebs from realizing what Khrushchev was being forced to realize.

Should Martin Armstrong have written a different article?

W. Hall"