Global warming is threatening our nation and planet with rising oceans, increasingly violent weather, floods, droughts, wildfires, and an increase in life-endangering temperatures. By 2050, hundreds of millions are likely to be internally displaced or attempt to cross international borders to escape the effects of weather calamities, inundated seashores, desertification and freshwater scarcity. Even school children around the world have hit the streets to warn the 'adults' that a massive international effort is needed NOW to address the unfolding environmental disaster.
Instead of using the U.S.'s immense wealth and power to organize this international campaign, the Biden administration is spending $228 million per day to fuel a proxy war with Russia that is splitting Europe into hostile blocs. War is always evil, but this is the worst possible time to be destroying the lives and resources of warring nations. Compounding the evil, this was a war of choice, unnecessarily and deliberately provoked by the U.S. policy of expanding NATO--an anti-Russian military alliance--to the borders of Russia itself, including Ukraine. Russia's military response was like ours would have been if Mexico (or Cuba!) joined an anti-American military alliance which engaged in war games and deployed missiles close to our border.
The provocation, and the proxy war, actually started in February of 2014 when the Obama administration intervened in Ukrainian politics by actively promoting the so-called Maidan revolution. This violent rebellion overthrew the government of democratically elected, Russia-friendly President Victor Yanukovych. There was widespread opposition to the revolution in the south and east of Ukraine--Yanukovych's political base and an area mostly Russian-speaking with a significant ethnic Russian minority.
Map of Ukraine with Cities.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Lencer) Details Source DMCA
In Crimea, where two-thirds of the population is ethnically Russian, the Crimean parliament reacted to the U.S.-sponsored coup by voting on March 6, 2014, to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. A referendum on March 16 returned a 97% vote in favor of joining Russia. This result was not accepted by Ukraine or most other nations. But Gallup and other polls record overwhelming approval of Russian annexation by Crimeans.
In the Donbas region, sporadic battles broke out between Ukrainian government and separatist forces. This became a proxy war between Russia supporting the rebels and the U.S./NATO assisting the Kyiv government. As of late 2021, the war had taken 14,000 lives. U.S. military assistance totaled $2.5 billion. On September 30, 2022, Russia annexed The Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts. Kherson is just north of Crimea, forming a continuous strip of formerly Ukrainian territory from Luhansk to the southern tip of Crimea now proclaimed by Putin to be part of Russia "forever."
President Zelensky immediately declared that negotiations with Putin were now impossible. Before these annexations, there had been a possible basis for a negotiated settlement if Ukraine were willing to grant a measure of autonomy to the Donbas, agree to become a neutral nation like Finland, and give up its claim to Crimea. It is now hard to see an exit for Ukraine or NATO from this war. It's ironic that, just six months after giving up on their endless war in Afghanistan, the U.S. and NATO became embroiled in another war with no apparent end. Ukrainians and Russians will go on dying. Raytheon, Lockheed Martine, Boeing, and other war corporations will harvest immense profits free of American corpses. Russia will be fought to the last Ukrainian.
Unless....
Unlike the Taliban, Russia is a world-class military power with a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons. It has 1588 strategic warheads deployed on intercontinental missiles and at heavy bomber bases. The U.S. total is 1644. The destructive power of these arsenals is insane. As The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists tells us:
One detonation of a modern-day, 300-kiloton nuclear warhead--that is, a warhead nearly 10 times the power of the atomic bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined--on a city like New York would lead to over one million people dead and about twice as many people with serious injuries in the first 24 hours after the explosion. There would be almost no survivors within a radius of several kilometers from the explosion site.
Russia and the U.S. have a combined total of 3223 such warheads ready to be launched at each other in an all-out war. The Bulletin estimates that within two years after such a war, the direct effects together with collateral effects such as starvation and social collapse could result in more than 5 billion deaths. Instead of the overheated planet threatened by global warming, a strategic nuclear war would bring on a "nuclear winter": countless conflagrations would veil the sky with 165 million tons of soot, blocking sunlight and drastically lowering temperatures and crop yields, resulting in mass starvation.
The tide of war now seems to be turning against Russia in Ukraine. The Nord Stream gas pipeline supplying natural gas from Russia to Germany has been blown up, depriving Russia of an important source of income and making Europe much more dependent on U.S. liquefied natural gas. The bridge connecting the Russian mainland to Crimea has been badly damaged by explosions. Both these attacks almost certainly were engineered by NATO or U.S. actors, though no one is taking credit. The encirclement of Russia by NATO now includes Finland and Sweden.
Russia is losing battles in areas (such as Kherson) that it now considers part of Russia itself. Reacting to these setbacks, Russia seems to be increasing the scale of urban destruction in Ukraine with artillery and missiles. As the British Defense Ministry said in a recent statement, "As it faces setbacks on the front lines, Russia has likely extended the locations it is prepared to strike in an attempt to directly undermine the morale of the Ukrainian people and government." What if the war goes even worse for Russia and it starts flattening Ukrainian cities? Would NATO attack Russia to halt the massacre? Now that Russian annexations have made the price of a negotiated peace too high, would the U.S. or Russia resort to nuclear weapons to avert humiliating defeat?
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