In the 70s the Frankfurt-based radio station American Forces Network ran a road safety ad: “Rushin’, rushin’, rushin’ down the motorway is Russian, Russian roulette!”
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and thanks to the arms-industry-lobbied crazies in the US we have been rushin’ towards a major European war - one that a writer at RUSI (a British think-tank) says the West cannot sustain, because it no longer has the industrial capacity.
One alternative to a prolonged conventional armed conflict is a negotiated settlement - which American hawks seem not to want. Prime Minister Boris Johnson (we pay him, but who is he working for?) recently broke engagements to fly to Ukraine and urge President Zelenskyy to continue fighting, as though (given Zel’s own right-wing hawks) he has a choice.
The other option is to escalate to nuclear war. The expansion of NATO to include Baltic states Sweden and Finland, plus Lithuania’s recent rail blockade of Kaliningrad (raising concern in Germany) widens the potential theatre of combat. The Russians are already responding to what they see is a tooling-up for nuclear attack.
This is insanity, and always was:
In a meeting at the Kremlin, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned Sir Frank Roberts, the British Ambassador, that Britain and France should avoid joining the United States in going to war over West Berlin, telling him, "Six hydrogen bombs would be quite enough to annihilate the British Isles."
That was 61 years ago today. How many would suffice now?
Some lunatics in Washington must be gambling that it won’t happen; or maybe, that it will ‘only’ affect Europe. Perhaps like our Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who tries to channel Margaret Thatcher but can’t tell the difference between the Baltic and the Black Sea, they are thunderingly ignorant, for example about ‘nuclear winter’ (take that, global warming!)
After the two atom bombs dropped in Japan in 1945, there has been no further use of such weapons in anger. So mutual deterrence has worked, so far, as two soldiers who were in Burma in 1945 hoped: until ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ were detonated, the ‘Forgotten Army’ in the Far East had expected to fight on for anything up to ten years after victory in Europe.
John Masters, commander of a Gurkha battalion, learned of Hiroshima two weeks later, having been hiking in the Himalayas… ‘I believed with instant conviction that there could be no more war. No more tactics, no more strategy, only total destruction – or peace.’
George MacDonald Fraser, then a private in Cumbria’s Border Regiment, ended his 1992 war memoir with a reflection on what he would do to protect or avenge his children and grandchildren: ‘For those nine lives I would pull the plug on the whole Japanese nation and never even blink. And so, I dare suggest, would you. And if you wouldn’t, you may be nearer to the divine than I am but you sure as hell aren’t fit to be parents or grandparents.’
But with the development of tactical nuclear weapons we may be edging towards a different future, envisaged in 1956 by the Fourteenth Army’s General, William ‘Bill’ Slim. In the final chapter of his Burma account he foresaw future armies, facing enemies in possession of battlefield nuclear weapons that could wipe out whole units at a stroke, fighting in a dispersed, semi-autonomous fashion in order to complete their campaigns.
Everything must be done to avoid setting a precedent and ushering in an Age of Nukes. Russian Premier Leonid Brezhnev’s 1982 pledge not to be the first to use the Bomb was dropped after the USSR fell apart and NATO began its creeping towards Russia’s borders; the US, UK and other countries also refuse to commit to ‘No First Use.’
It may begin with the need to stop a mass tank advance, but can it stop there? The rationalisations will pile up. For example, some will note that the ‘conventional’ firebombing of Tokyo claimed more lives than the atomic bombing of Nagasaki; others will say that the thermobaric (‘vacuum’) bomb is similarly devastating and, it is claimed, has already been used in Ukraine.
There are so many nuke versions now, from man-portable to artillery to torpedoes and hypersonic cruise missiles, right up to the ‘1,600 active deployed strategic nuclear warheads’ that the US and Russia each possess. After Hiroshima a Scots engineer wrote in his diary: ‘There is no hope in man . . . The end is near – perhaps some years only.’ He was wrong, and I hope will forever be so.
Our oaf of a Prime Minister should not be helping the conventional military escalation and intense provocation fomented by NATO/EU/US; he should be working to get everyone’s feet off the first step of the atomic ladder.
Here’s a different Johnson from 1964, using the nuclear issue to frame rival Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as a ‘genocidal maniac who threatened the world’s future.’ I know which Johnson I’d prefer, on this subject: