As Moscow proceeds, slowly but surely, to ensure the protection of its borders from an aggressive NATO, one observes a significant degree of hysteria coming from the Western media about Russia’s imminent deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. In order to understand the real background to Moscow’s moves, we must, as always, examine the historical background.
Since the American genocide of hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a development that prompted Moscow to take the risk of nuclear weapons seriously, much has been said about Henry Kissinger’s 1957 proposal not to rule out limited nuclear war in Europe as an option. In a notorious book, Kissinger sees Europe as a staging post in an East-West conflict. Kissinger sees Europe only in the context of NATO and as a concentration site for American nuclear missiles. Although Britain was initially skeptical, arguing that adopting a theory of limited warfare in Europe could lead to the destruction of the deterrent’s effectiveness, many countries eventually succumbed to the installation of short- and medium-range missiles on their territory, including the erstwhile pro-independence Netherlands.
Even before the current de facto war between NATO and Russia, it is estimated that the US had 100 nuclear warheads stored through Europe, at air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Immediately after President Trump unilaterally suspended U.S. participation in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, Moscow had no choice but to do likewise, with the U.S. withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty to follow shortly thereafter. Moscow watched the undermining of international law and the chaos that resulted from irrational American behavior, just as it watched Washington and its British servant use the EU as a human shield, à la Kissinger.
Moscow apparently felt it needed to restore some degree of strategic discretion, especially after Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, signaled that it intended to push the nuclear button if necessary — even if it meant global havoc. It should come as little surprise that Moscow suspended its participation in the new Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (START), two days before the start of its military operations in Ukraine. The final straw was the announcement by the United Kingdom of sending depleted uranium shells to Ukraine, despite evidence that these cause not only long-term environmental damage but also cancer, as happened in the illegal attack on Belgrade in 1999.
There is a natural tendency to compare the current nuclear hysteria of the Western media to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when a direct nuclear exchange between Washington and Moscow was barely avoided. One obvious difference is that Moscow has not reciprocated by installing U.S. nuclear missiles near its borders by installing its own missiles in Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico and/or Brazil, preferring for now simply to increase its military and economic cooperation with these countries.
Moscow, however, is responding to the US nuclear threat in Europe in the hope that the EU will understand that Washington is using it as a human shield, and that the former will realise, at some point, that it is nothing but a pawn and thus may push for an end to hostilities in Ukraine, despite the irrational and atavistic hatred of the UK leaderships. Poland and the Baltic Länder for Russia.
The problem is that today there is no John F. Kennedy, but a rather increasingly bigoted and irrational core of neoconservatives and neoliberals around an unfit president in the early stages of dementia, who has not yet fully understood that Russia has begun to consider its very existence threatened. Hence the possibility of a nuclear-armed Belarus. Moscow has long realized that NATO’s “humanitarian” wars are nothing more than a pretext for continuing its megalomaniacal policy of controlling the world, if possible over the corpse of Europe.
A final factor to consider in this potential nuclear stalemate is that most EU governments feed anti-Russian propaganda to the docile mainstream media simply to stay in power. Anti-NATO protests are rarely covered. This, however, could change as more and more Europeans begin to realize that they are suffering financially in order to protect American shareholders.
William Mullinson
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