Washington wants you to warm up to the idea of war with Russia. Don’t.
As tensions on the border of Russia and Ukraine escalate, the United States is getting more deeply involved. Over the last two weeks, US cargo planes have delivered nearly 600 tons of military equipment to Ukraine. Last week, President Biden announced the deployment of 3,000 US troops to eastern Europe. The United States is pushing toward a nuclear World War III, and American citizens must raise their voices to stop it.
The problem need not concern us at all. Ukraine sits on the southwest border of Russia and was part of the Soviet Union until declaring independence in 1991. In the decades since, Ukraine’s turbulent politics have been heavily influenced by far-right and neo-Nazi factions. In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, a peninsula in the south of Ukraine, and in 2021, he began a military buildup on the Ukrainian border.
American media frequently accuses Putin of wanting to expand the Russian empire. It’s a rich criticism coming from us. Our real fear is not that Putin may extend his empire — it’s that he may encroach on ours.
Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, recently offered some insight into how Washington views the world when she described Ukraine as one of “our eastern flank countries.” As a NATO ally, Ukraine is afforded protections. But NATO is, essentially, the US empire in disguise. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have repeatedly broken promises to Russia by expanding NATO closer to their border. Russia is understandably concerned that we have placed nuclear weapons within easy striking distance of them.
Russia has threatened to use nukes in response to NATO expansion. But we have moved towards their borders, not the other way around. Defending Ukraine isn’t about lofty principles like freedom or sovereignty. Washington is simply unwilling to suffer any dent in its international armor. If Ukraine is taken by force and falls under Russian rule again, it will be a tragedy. If World War III happens, it’ll be the end of human civilization.
It’s impossible to appreciate just how dangerous this moment is without fully understanding the power of nuclear weapons. In 1945, the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, killing as many as 250,000 people and causing innumerable diseases and deformities. Today’s nukes are around 80 times more powerful than those bombs, and there are some 12,000 of them in the US and Russian arsenals. A single modern nuke detonated in Manhattan could kill nearly 2 million people and spread fallout for hundreds of miles. Dropped in the right places, 12,000 nukes could kill almost everyone in the US and Russia.
For 77 years, humanity has lived under the specter of extinction by nuclear war. So far, we have avoided it — but sometimes only narrowly. There’s been an uneasy presumption that nobody is suicidal enough to start a nuclear war, a philosophy appropriately known as MAD — mutually assured destruction. The theory holds that a nuclear attack will trigger a never-ending series of deadlier counterattacks until every nuke has been launched and both sides are completely destroyed.
Now, a growing number of voices in the US defense sector are challenging that long-held conventional wisdom. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists explains how the Pentagon’s internal messaging now insists that a nuclear war can be won. As the Biden Administration conducts its Nuclear Posture Review, most of Congress and the Pentagon is insistent that the US retain first-strike nuclear attacks as foreign policy options. Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, pushed for a ground war with Russia in December and warned that, “We don’t rule out first-use nuclear action.”
American history shows we may be the world’s most dangerous nuclear power. We are the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in war. Since World War II, we have been in a constant state of war, perpetually conducting regime changes, military operations and invasions around the globe. Now, Washington is earnestly trying to sell war with Russia, even as Ukraine’s defense minister accuses the US of “spread[ing] panic and fear in our society.”
There is a theory that the Ukrainian tensions are a distraction to cover Putin’s and Biden’s respective domestic problems. It’s possible this will blow over. But even if it does, we cannot allow leaders to continually ratchet up tensions that put us at ever-greater risk of nuclear annihilation.
Only about 15 percent of Americans want American soldiers involved if Russia invades Ukraine. Washington can’t go to war without our permission — or, at least, our complacency. Every citizen must be prepared to unite in opposition to nuclear war. We should be prepared to cause widespread disruptions, stage strikes, shut down the economy, and clog the streets to demand a peaceful resolution. Further than that, we should demand that the US adopt a no-use policy on nuclear weapons and lead the world in nuclear disarmament.
The biggest nuclear threat doesn’t come from Russia — it comes from us. Given all that our leaders have said, it is naïve to assume that they have the wisdom to refrain from using nuclear weapons. Our collective power may be the only thing that can stop the greed of Washington and the recklessness of the defense industry from risking extinction over a territorial dispute on the other side of the planet. All the pain and suffering of the last 20 years — the War on Terror, the Great Recession, COVID-19 — will evaporate into quaintness if we allow nuclear war to begin.
