Dr Strangelove rides again.

The announcement today by James Mattis, the US Secretary of Defence, that opposing China and Russia is now the priority in US defence, is a dangerous retreat to Cold War thinking. It will encourage the further expansion of the US nuclear arsenal, which is already large enough to render humanity extinct. To refer to this arsenal, as Mattis did, as a "nuclear deterrent", is pure newspeak. It is not a deterrent, it is a simple threat, not only to China and Russia, but to every human on the planet.

The terrifying reality of US nuclear policies is too little understood. Consider the Nuclear Posture Review recently released by the Trump administration. The main thrust of this document is to lower the threshold at which the US would initiate a nuclear response to an attack by Russia or China. While it does not explicitly state so, it implies that this could include cyberattacks.

We should be clear about exactly what is at stake here. A nuclear response by the US would, beyond any doubt, trigger a nuclear war. The arsenals involved, all of which could be deployed within a very short time frame, are beyond comprehension. To quote Daniel Ellsberg from his recent book " The Doomsday Machine".

" The bottom line is that arrangements made in Russia and the United States have long made it likely, if not virtually certain, that a single Hiroshima-type fission weapon exploding on either Washington or Moscow - whether deliberate or the result of a mistaken attack or as a result of an independent terrorist action - would lead to the end of human civilisation (and most other species)."

The world has lived largely in ignorance of the very real risk of a nuclear holocaust for over 60 years. Ellsberg's book, and numerous other histories, biographies and memoirs of the period, reveal that our survival has been much more by good luck than good management. Consider that under the Eisenhower administration, an attack by Russia on the US would have instantly unleashed the entire US nuclear arsenal against not only Russia, but also China. This was a potential genocide in which every substantial city in both nations would have been destroyed. At the same time, command and control procedures were so lax that a nuclear war could have been triggered by an error of judgement by a single US pilot.

Now we have Trump in charge. He is a narcissist of unprecedented intensity with a track record of delusional thinking, not only about his own very limited abilities, but about reality itself. He is a man who can convince himself that he did not say things that have clearly been recorded coming out of his mouth. This is the creature that has been placed in charge of the capacity to end human life. It is time to ask our politicians the hard questions and demand that they address an issue which must now rate as the greatest threat to our continued existence.

Coaster the review lowers the threshold for a nuclear response. With any use of nuclear weapons there is a huge risk of an escalation to all out nuclear war. The certain outcome of that is the end of civilisation and there is a very strong possibility that it would render humans extinct. In these circumstances there is no situation which justifies the use of nuclear weapons.

Blowin if you think for a minute you should come up with a reason why Trump would happily blow Putin up. More later

Guilty or not he has motive Blowin. Truth doesn't matter. Perception is all. He is a very unpopular president partly because of the perception that Putin has kompromat of some kind, probably related to money laundering, on him.

Blowin, here is the link (again) to the Brookings report on the evidence against him on obstruction of justice. This is 100 pages In which every statement is referenced and the relevant laws analysed in detail. If you genuinely believe that this does not constitute evidence then ........ I am speechless. But what the hell I scored some pretty fine waves this week. What about you?
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/presidential-obstru...

Coaster it has taken me a while to get back to your point about the Nuclear Posture Review. A couple of points. First the US has never renounced first use of nuclear weapons. The second is in lines 898-900.
" Potential adversaries must understand that: 1)........2) we will defeat non-nuclear strategic attacks 3)"
The key point here is that the US could not defeat non-nuclear attacks either in the Baltic or in East Asia with conventional forces. So the take away message is that any attack in those areas will be turned into a nuclear war by US first use. So the judgement of Russia and China in assessing how hard they can push the US before it reacts is now the only real protection against nuclear war. It is easy to criticise the behaviour of both Russia and China but, in the context of the historical and current abuse of US power globally, they are insignificant. Do you really think the US would tolerate having its major shipping lanes surrounded by Chinese bases without acting? The US has large military bases in Japan, South Korea and the Phillipines. China, as a rising power, has taken aggressive action to make it clear to the US at that they are no longer the dominant power in the area. We are perfectly entitled to condemn this just as US aggression should be condemned, but the Chinese will pay no more attention to our condemnation than the US does. Russia has even less justification than China for its revanchist aggression, but is in a strong strategic position. The US and NATO cannot match its conventional forces and it has a nuclear arsenal equal or larger than the US.

Interesting points Coaster. India currently has a no first use policy. China also has a no first use policy and has repeatedly approached the US to agree to a bilateral arrangement which the US continues to reject. Russia renounced first use briefly under Brezhnev but now will go to first use of the survival of the state is threatened. The question of regional aggression is worth deep consideration. Do you honestly believe that the results of a US nuclear strike to protect the Ukraine would end in anything less than a full scale nuclear war with, at best billions of dead, and at worst human extinction? In that case the equation is save the Ukraine from a Russian invasion by destroying the world or let the Russians have it. Reapolitik is that, until now we could be confident that no US President would be stupid enough to do it. Now who knows. An interesting note is that in the Cuban missile crisis both Kennedy and Khrushchev were desperately trying to avoid a nuclear war, but it nearly happened anyway as command and control procedures were so poor. I could go on but hopefully you get the picture.

Well let's assume Putin is of the same opinion as you, that is he knows that the US will not use their arsenal in those circumstances. So where is the deterrent? What is the point of all those nuclear weapons which no-one wants to use and which their enemies believe will not be used unless they use first, which they have no intention of doing? This is collective madness and historically the blame rests with the US. They developed them first. They are the only ones to have used them and they led the arms race which has brought us to the present absurd situation.

The whole point of my previous post was that no-one has anything to gain by starting a nuclear war......and if there is to be one, then someone has to start it. Bottom line, before Trump Russia knew that the US would not use its weapons first and the US knew that Russia would not use its weapons first. Regardless of the degree of conventional conflict, nuclear weapons were off the table as both sides understood the catastrophic consequences of using them. The reality then has been that in any realistic scenario there has never been a nuclear deterrent. As for US responsibility, the history is clear. Khrushchev spent the entire time he was in office trying to talk the US into mutual nuclear disarmament. This was when neither side had anything like the destructive power that came later. The US completely ignored him, just as they have totally ignored Chinese offers of a bilateral no first use agreement. Further, US war plans in the late 1940s and early 1950s were to annihilate Russia AND China if Russia started a non nuclear war. We now know that had that happened, the following nuclear winter, in all probability, would have rendered humans extinct. It was only when Kennedy came to power that these plans were slightly modified. This is not paranoia or over-statement it is the well documented history of the times.

The "We will bury you" has been widely misunderstood. From William Taubman's Pulitzer Prize winning biography.
" The context, a reference to the Soviet idea of peaceful coexistence, suggested that he was referring to victory in economic and political competition but many in the West took the remark literally." This is clearly true if you follow his career. He was obsessed with raising living standards in the USSR to those prevailing in the US at the time. To categorise him as a successor of Stalin is to miss the significance of his achievement in, almost overnight, ending Stalinism. The statement about the understanding that nuclear weapons would not be used is historically accurate and is documented for US Presidents from Kennedy to Bush Snr. There is no reason to believe that this changed prior to Trump. My reading of the NPR is that it is a clear weakening of that position, for the reason I posted above. This is destabilising and increases the risk of nuclear war. It is also worth considering the difference between a terrorist weapon or a few weapons used by a rogue state compared to an unleashing of the thousands of weapons that the US and RussIa possess. The first scenario is an unprecedented disaster. The second is human extinction. The stakes are simply too high for either side playing games, particularly when one of the players Is a narcissistic, cognitively challenged incompetent and the other is an ex-KGB macho murderer capable of blowing up apartment buildings in his own capital for political gain.

Coaster it is hard to overstate the degree of recklessness shown by both scientists, military leaders and politicians during the nuclear era. Consider that when the first atomic bomb was exploded the scientists were unable to rule out the possibility that it would trigger fusion reactions in the atmosphere and ocean turning the entire planet into a fireball. The risk was calculated by some physicists as high as 10%, and they didn't even bother to tell the politicians.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists stated that the new NPR lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. A little further reading!

Some excepts from "The Doomsday Machine" Daniel Ellsberg

On the nuclear winter.

" It is the smoke, after all (not the fallout, which would remain mostly limited to the northern hemisphere), that would do it worldwide : smoke and soot lofted by fierce fire storms in hundreds of burning cities into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and would remain for a decade or more, enveloping the globe and blocking most sunlight , lowering annual global temperatures to the level of the last Ice Age and killing all harvests worldwide, causing near-universal starvation within a year or two.
US plans for thermonuclear war in the early sixties, if carried out in the Berlin or Cuban missile crises, would have killed many times more than the six hundred million people predicted by the JCS (joint chiefs of staff). ............. even a fraction of the existing smaller arsenals would be enough to cause a nuclear winter today."

About Nixon's threats to use nuclear weapons against North Vietnam in 1969 during which he kept SAC bombers armed with nuclear weapons flying around the clock knowing that this would be detected by the Soviets.

"This was, after all, exemplary of what I understand to have been the major purpose of US strategic weapons since the early fifties: to deter, with confidence, Soviet second use retaliation to US first use of tactical (nuclear) weapons against Soviet forces or their allies by threatening that if the Soviets made a response in kind with its own tactical weapons SAC (Stategic Air Command) might escalate to a full first strike against the Soviet Union."

A full first strike, at that time, meant the unleashing of thousands of thermonuclear warheads against every major Soviet city.

From an account of a National Security Council in 1953, discussing planning for the Korean War.

" Secretary Dulles discussed the moral problem and the inhibitions on the use of the A-bomb and Soviet success to date in setting atomic weapons apart from all other weapons as being in a special category. It was his opinion that we should try to break down this false distinction."

" Among military planners in the US government , thinking about nuclear war has in fact been continuous over the last 72 years: and not only, or even mainly, with respect to deterring or responding to a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States or its forces or allies. Preparations and commitments to initiate nuclear war ' if necessary ' have been the basis of fundamental, longstanding US policies and crisis declarations and actions not only in Europe but in Asia and the Middle East as well. "

" In reality, every President from Truman to Clinton has felt compelled at some point in his time in office - usually in great secrecy - to threaten and/or discuss with the Joint Chiefs of Staff plans and preparations for possible imminent US initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare, in the midst of an on-going non-nuclear conflict or crisis." followed by a list of 25 occasions when this occurred.

Did someone fart?