“She [the United States] has seen that probably for centuries to come, contests of inveterate power, and emerging right [will persist]…But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy…She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own…she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…”

– speech in 1821 by John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-1829), and the first American Ambassador to Russia in 1809.

This three part series will discuss how American foreign policy and ideology came to be what Eisenhower would refer to in his farewell address on January 17th, 1961 as the “military-industrial complex” that held whether sought or unsought, the power to acquire unwarranted influence, and that such a “power exists, and will persist,” leaving the following generations of Americans “a legacy of ashes,” for a once great nation.

This series will explain how in particular, the philosophy of the American establishment, including that of the military, formed their “understanding” of nuclear strategy which continues to influence thought today such as in the belief in the winnability of a limited nuclear war. It will also explain the reasons for why the Vietnam war was fought with the approach used as well as the War on Terror, and most importantly why.

A Foreign Attack on American Soil

On December 7th, 1941, the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was attacked by the Japanese navy, killing 2,403 Americans and wounding 1,178. However, the Americans would only begin their military air campaign against Japan by mid-1944.

General MacArthur estimated that a million Americans would die in only the first phase of the Pacific War. The Russians were being heavily courted by the Americans to break their Neutrality Pact with Japan and enter into the Pacific War for the very straightforward reason that fewer Americans would die.

After three years of the most savage warfare against the German Nazis, where over 25 million Russian soldiers and civilians died, Russia was now prepared to enter into another war with Japan, only months later, to offer military support to the U.S., a country that had suffered minute losses in comparison.

When Admiral King, chief of naval operations, was informed that the Russians would definitely enter the fight against Japan, he was immensely relieved commenting “We’ve just saved two million Americans.”

* * *

On April 12th, 1945 President Roosevelt passed away and much of the American-Russian partnership with him.

On July 16th, 1945, the first successful atomic bomb was tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Seven days later, Stalin was informed at the Potsdam conference by Truman that America now had the bomb.

Truman, contrary to what he was advised to do, made no mention of collaboration, no mention of making the world peaceful and safe, and no offer to share information with the Russians, not even in return for any quid pro quo. Simply that America now had the bomb.

On August 6th, 1945, Little Boy, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

On August 9th at 1:00 am, one million Soviet troops crossed the border into eastern Manchuria to face the Kwantung, the culmination of ten months of coordinated planning. Later that same day a second atomic bomb, Fat Man (named after Churchill), was dropped on Nagasaki.

The Russians were completely taken aback. They had not been notified of this plan, and it was certainly not a “friendly” message that the U.S. was sending to their supposed allies.

On August 15th, six days later, Japan surrendered. Many historians have agreed that the Russian attack in Manchuria had the greater weight in causing the Japanese to surrender. (1) But it did not matter.

Most in the West would either never know or would soon forget about the Russian sacrifice.

The decision to drop the bomb, Truman would write in a letter to his daughter Margaret, was “no great decision…not any decision you would have to worry about.”

Nuclear physicist Yuli Khariton would voice a common Russian reaction when he wrote that the two bombs that were dropped on Japan were used “as atomic blackmail against the USSR, as a threat to unleash a new, even more terrible and devastating war,” if Russia refused to play by the rules decided for her.

By the end of WWII, the contrast between the United States and Soviet Union were enormous. The U.S. was supplying over half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, more than half of the world’s electricity, holding two-thirds of the world’s gold stocks and half of all the monetary reserves. It had suffered 405,000 casualties, 2.9 percent of its population (The size of the American population in 1945 was approximately 140 million).

Russia suffered 27 million casualties, 16 percent of its population. The Germans burned 70,000 Russian villages to the ground and destroyed 100,000 farms. Twenty-five million Russians were homeless. 32,000 factories and 65,000 railroad tracks were destroyed. And its major cities: Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow were in shambles.

The Godfather of RAND: Air Force General Curtis LeMay

“If we had lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

– Air Force General Curtis LeMay in “The Fog of War”

On October 1st, 1945, less than two months after the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan, Commanding General Henry Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces, inspired by what the scientists under the Manhattan Project could do, met with Franklin R. Collbohm, Arthur E. Raymond, Donald Douglas, and Edward Bowles. This was the pioneering team that would create RAND.

Franklin R. Collbohm was the right-hand man of Donald Douglas, head of Douglas Aircraft, America’s largest airplane manufacturer, and the special assistant to Arthur E. Raymond, the company’s vice president and head of engineering. Edward Bowles, a consultant from MIT, worked with Collbohm on the notorious B-29 Special Bombardment Project against Japan in 1944.

After witnessing the atomic bomb, Arnold foresaw that the future in warfare would revolve around the technology of long-distance missiles and was adamant that only the Air Force and no other branch of armed forces should control the new weapon. Arnold pledged $10 million from unspent wartime research money to set up the research group and keep it running independently for a few years. (2) Collbohm nominated himself to head the group, which he did for the next 20 years.

Air Force Deputy Chief Curtis LeMay of Air Staff for Research and Development, was soon after brought in by General Arnold and tasked with supervising the new research group.

LeMay, whom it is said Kubrick based his military brass off of in “Dr. Strangelove,” was known for many military “feats” but the most notorious of these was when Arnold sent LeMay to the Mariana, to head the 21st Bomber Command that would execute the inhumane raids over Japanese cities in 1945.

It was there that LeMay first worked with Collbohm, Raymond and Bowles. It was because of Collbohm’s team that the B-29 bombers were able to inflict maximum damage. These incendiary bombs were dropped on the civilian population of Japan, burning alive hundreds of thousands of people. Homes, shops, and buildings of no apparent military value were consumed by the fiery rain that fell from the low-flying B-29s night after night.

This was the same tactic that had been used in Dresden by the European Allies, killing 25,000 civilians (3) but it had never before been used by the Americans who had up until this point avoided civilian populations.

As would occur during the Korean and Vietnam wars, the concept of the enemy was beginning to become blurred for the Americans. They were finding it harder and harder to combat a clearly defined opponent, rather, the “enemy” was increasingly looking like the vague unfamiliarity of an entire people, a whole population of seemingly soulless faces not like their own.

Unlike all the other countries involved in the world war, the Pearl Harbour attack was the first direct foreign offense against the United States other than the war of 1812. It did not matter how much more damage or destruction the Americans would inflict upon the Japanese in response to this, for it was justified as self-defence. An attempt to ensure that such an attack would never dare be repeated against the United States. It was an outlook that would continue on into the war arenas of Korea and Vietnam.

Because of the Pearl Harbor attack, many in the United States began to see large swaths of the world population like a swarming mountain of flesh-eating ants, wishing nothing more than to destroy American values and liberty. It was thought by many that the only way to save oneself and loved ones was to scourge the earth of them.

As General Arnold wrote, “We must not get soft. War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.” (4)

Alex Abella writes in his “Soldiers of Reason”:

“…the carpet bombing of Japan left the founding fathers of RAND and the future secretary of defense Robert McNamara, who also collaborated on the B-29 project – with the reputation of looking only to the practical aspect of a problem without concern for morality. Their numbers-driven perspective had the effect, intentional or not, of divorcing ethical questions from the job at hand. Eventually RAND doctrine would come to view scientists and researchers as facilitators, not independent judges. As LeMay himself said, ‘All war is immoral. If you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.’ “

On March 1st, 1946, RAND had an official charter:

“Project RAND is a continuing program of scientific study and research on the broad subject of air warfare with the object of recommending to the Air Force preferred methods, techniques and instrumentalities for this purpose.” (5)

Unlike other government contractors, RAND would be exempt from reporting to a contracting command. Instead, the unfiltered results would be delivered straight to LeMay. (6)

Within a few years, a new mind-set would take hold in government: science, rather than diplomacy, could provide the answers needed to cope with threats to national security.

Rather than nationalize key military industries, as the UK and France had done, the U.S. government opted to contract out scientific research development to the private sector, which was not bounded by the Pentagon. RAND would be a bridge between the two worlds of military planning and civilian development.

And in a very real way, this great country with an island philosophy went into a fit of madness over the realisation that they were not invulnerable to an outside attack. This realisation, though they were to suffer minor losses compared to that in Europe and Asia during the two world wars, turned into a gaping wound of constant “what ifs,” a never-ending barrage of paranoid suppositions.

From then on, the United States would become obsessed with thwarting the next enemy attack, which they were certain was always in the works.

In Search of a Prophet: Enter the RAND Mathematicians

By March 1st, 1946 there were but four full-time RAND employees. Collbohm’s fifth hire to RAND was John Davis Williams who was to serve as director of the newly created Mathematics Division and would become Collbohm’s right-hand man. (7)

In 1947, Ed Paxson, a RAND engineer created the term “systems analysis” when Williams placed him in charge of the Evaluation of Military Worth Section. Paxson had been a scientific adviser to the U.S. Army Air Forces and a consultant to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945-46.

During WWII, the considered shortcomings of operational research (OR) was that it could not function without hard data, what was already known about a system.

As Alex Abella puts it in his “Soldiers of Reason”:

“RAND’s systems analysis…refused to be constrained by existing reality…Systems analysis was the freedom to dream and to dream big, to turn away from the idea that reality is a limited set of choices, to strive to bend to the world to one’s will…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract. Sadly, most RAND analysts failed to perceive this inherent flaw in their wondrous construct. Not only that, the methodology of systems analysis required that all the aspects of a particular problem be broken down into quantities…Those things that could not be eased into a mathematical formula…were left out of the analysis… By extension, if a subject could not be measured, ranged, and classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.”

On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet nuclear test RDS-1 was conducted, with the yield of 22 kilotons.

With this advent, there was mounting concern over what were the intentions of the Soviet bloc. Did they create their own atomic bomb as simply a defensive manoeuvre or was there the possibility they were planning an offensive?

In response to these questions, RAND put forward the doctrine of “rational choice theory,” developed by a 29 year old economist named Kenneth Arrow. The bulk of Arrow’s work at RAND is still classified top secret to this day. (8)

Arrow was tasked with establishing a collective “utility function” for the Soviet Union. In other words, “rational choice theory” meant to establish mathematically a fixed set of preferences in order to determine what were the best actions that would yield the greatest service to the Soviet leadership’s collective interests.

Since there was a lack of hard evidence, western policy makers became increasingly reliant on mathematical and also psychoanalytical speculation in order to create hypothetical scenarios, such that counter-strategies could be formed. RAND needed Arrow’s “utility function” so its analysts could simulate the actions of the Soviets during a nuclear conflict in order to justify increased funding and military buildup.

As long as somewhat complex mathematical explanations could be used to create such speculations, it was considered under the domain of “science,” and there was no need to cross-check the validity or accuracy of such speculations.

Arrow’s paradox, otherwise known as Arrow’s impossibility theorem, had demonstrated through a mathematical argument that collective rational group decisions are logically impossible.

Abella writes:

“Arrow utilized his findings to concoct a value system based on economics that destroyed the Marxist notion of a collective will. To achieve this result, Arrow borrowed freely from elements of positivist philosophy, such as its concern for axiomization, universally objective scientific truth and the belief that social processes can be reduced to interactions between individuals.” (9)

Arrow’s impossibility theorem lay a theoretical foundation for universal scientific objectivity, individualism and “rational choice.” That the so called “science,” in the form of a mathematical argument, has determined the collective is nothing, the individual is all.

And if we are all just reduced to our petty individual selfish self-interests, who is to challenge the players of the game who wish to shape the world stage?

As Abella phrased it, “Put in everyday terms, RAND’s rational choice theory is the Matrix code of the West.”

In 1950, William’s fascination with game theory peaked after the success of Arrow’s rational choice theory for RAND, and he hired John von Neumann, the father of game theory as a full-time staffer for RAND. Like Williams, von Neumann was an advocate of an all-out pre-emptive nuclear war on the Soviet Union. (10)

Together with Oskar Morgenstern, Neumann cowrote the book that lay the foundation for the field, “Theory Games and Economic Behavior,” published in 1944. Morgenstern and Neumann assumed that players in every game are rational (motivated by selfish self-interests) and that any given situation has a rational outcome. It was Neumann who coined the term “zero-sum game,” referring to a set of circumstances in which a player stands to gain only if his opponent loses.

By the mid-1950s, RAND became the world center for game theory.

Years later RANDites would ruefully acknowledge the futility of attempting to reduce human behavior to numbers. Yet, that has not deterred its continued use in military strategy as well as in numerous fields in academia to this day.

Out of the “science” of systems analysis, governed by a rational choice outlook, a plan to strike pre-emptively at the Soviet Union was born in the halls of RAND.

First Strike: The Revenge of the Technocrats

“Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

– Bhagavad Gita

In seeking out further independence from its exclusive client the Air Force, RAND under the direction of Collbohm, would be reborn as a non-profit corporation.

1956. Rowan Gaither, the attorney who was drafting the RAND articles of incorporation, contacted the Ford Foundation about funding RAND. Gaither obtained not only close to half a million dollars from the Ford Foundation for RAND but he also became Ford Foundation’s president from 1953 to 1956. (11)

It was a steamy love affair in the midst of a Cold War. Ford Foundation was the largest philanthropic organization of the time and was in the process of reorganizing itself to lend financial support for world peace and the advancement of scientific knowledge. What better benefactor than RAND for such noble endeavours?

In a statement Gaither crafted after assuming the presidency of the Ford Foundation, he stated as his goal a society where technocrats ruled using objective analysis, stating:

“This very non-partisanship and objectivity gives the [Ford] foundation a great positive force, and enables it to play a unique and effective role in the difficult and sometimes controversial task of helping to realize democracy’s goals.” (12)

By 1950 administration policy had changed from the theory of containment advocated by George F. Kennan to open military competition. A notable RAND associate, Paul Nitze brought about that change almost single-handedly.

On January 1st, 1950, Paul Nitze replaced Kennan as head of the president’s Policy Planning Staff and wrote a memorandum for the NSC on how to conduct foreign policy in the nuclear age. The paper called NSC-68 warned apocalyptically about the “Kremlin’s design for world domination.”

NSC-68 declared that the U.S. was in the moral equivalent of war with the Soviet Union and called for a massive military buildup to be completed by 1954 dubbed the “year of maximum danger,” the year JIC-502 (drafted January 20th, 1950) claimed the Soviets would achieve military superiority and be able to launch war against the United States.

President Truman accepted NSC 68 as the official policy and increased the national defense budget by almost $40 billion.

It is now known that such a prediction of the Soviet threat was indeed baseless, yet nonetheless, managed to create a deranged positive feedback loop in the ceaseless striving for the largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal. It entered the United States into the maniacal mindset that one must always have the greater firing power in order to have the greatest number of options in a nuclear scenario.

This was considered the only option, and not only put the Soviet Union in a difficult position, but the rest of the world as well, for who could withstand such a mighty force if it wished to inflict its will, let alone its paranoia, on any nation?

It is no wonder that the Soviet publication Pravda at this time (late 1950s) famously called RAND “the academy of science and death.” (13)

The Father of all technocrats at RAND, was Albert Wohlstetter.

Albert would be recruited into the dysfunctional RAND family in 1951 by Charles J. Hitch, the head of the RAND economics department. Within a very short period of time Albert would rise to the very top of the RAND food chain.

In achieving this king of the unruly jungle status, he first had to battle with RAND colleague Bernard Brodie. Brodie was an advocate of nuclear deterrence, he was the true developer of the “second-strike capability” doctrine as the ultimate agent of deterrence and the key to global stability in the thermonuclear age.

The only alternative to such mutually assured destruction, Brodie argued, was a fundamental shift in humanity’s understanding of warfare.

This thought had established Brodie in 1951 as a major strategist of nuclear war. However, this status was short-lived, in large part because he simply could not play the game as well as Albert. That is, Brodie did not understand something that was at the fundamental core of RAND philosophy, to “win” at all costs.

What was the game? To ascend and conquer…no matter the game and no matter the terms.

Albert endorsed the idea of creating a strategy for controlled and discriminate warfare in which nuclear weapons would play an active role. He would take Brodie’s second-strike stratagem and turn it into a justification for what he would term a “the delicate balance of terror.” Counterforce, Albert’s version of Brodie’s second-strike, advocated for engaging a gradual, precisely controlled use of nuclear weapons against strictly military targets.

Insane? Yes.

Albert would put forward “Insofar as we can limit the damage to ourselves we reduce his [the Soviets] ability to deter us and, therefore, his confidence that we will not strike first. But decreasing his confidence in our not striking increases the likelihood of his doing so, since striking first is nearly always preferable to striking second. And so any attempt to contain the catastrophe if it comes also in some degree invites it.”

For those who are unfamiliar with Albert’s proposed theories or of the greater majority of those who worked at RAND, which was mostly made up of mathematicians devoid of hearts, the purpose of anything they do is simply to win, to get what is desired. Thus if a certain theory works in a certain case, use this theory, if not in another case, simply use another theory.

They view the world quite literally as a game. It is all about justifying the means to the goal in which you ultimately seek for. It is like starting with the desired answer and working backwards to justify the proof and hypothesis.

Albert argued for an American strategy based on “possibilities”— the entire spectrum of enemy options, both rational and irrational — rather than “probabilities,” the latter being the dominant characteristic in game theory.

Ron Robin writes in his “The Cold World They Made”:

“Albert now rejected that premise [of rational theory], proposing instead a theory of ‘limited irrationality,’ the notion that when faced with existential dilemmas, ‘people aren’t always irrational.’ One had to prepare for contingencies based on the assumption that the enemy may behave irrationally in contemplating a nuclear strike, but that the enemy is also ‘sometimes rational enough to be able to see that there is a grossly greater danger in taking the course of using nuclear weapons than if he takes the next course.’”

It is like a short-circuiting to the mentally constipated challenge of the so-called “prisoner’s dilemma,” in the end even game theorists said all options were “rational,” and couldn’t even agree which option was more rational vs. irrational.

For Albert, the Soviets were entirely to blame for the Cold War due to their assumed aggressive motives and predatory behavior, rather than the fact that the atomic bomb was created by the Americans in the first place.

Albert’s Soviets were cruel despots who would willingly sacrifice tens of millions of their citizens for the price of strategic advantage and world domination. Thus, it was the responsibility of the United States to prevent such a calamity as their primary objective, and that this could only be achieved, according to Albert, through an unrelenting investment in nuclear arms development and improvement.

Fred Kaplan writes in his “The Wizards of Armageddon”:

“Echoing his colleague Herman Kahn, he [Albert] wondered what the difference was ‘between two such unimaginable disasters as sixty and 160 million Americans dead? The only answer to that is ‘100 million.’ Starting from the smaller losses, it would be possible to recover the industrial and political power of the United States. Even smaller differences would justify an attempt to reduce the damage to our society in the event of war.’” (14)

According to Albert, the 25 million sacrifice of the Soviets in fighting WWII was nothing valiant or noble, but rather showed how coldly and callously the Soviet leadership regarded their own people that they could sacrifice them, without any apparent concern, into the burning furnace of war as nothing but cheap fuel for the military engine.

Ironically (or perhaps not…), this Soviet monstrosity that Albert had convinced himself, was used as the very justification for Albert’s push towards a nuclear confrontation, that would sacrifice many more lives.

Strangely Albert justifies the sacrifice of what he ultimately regards as just a number, whether it be 60 or 160 million (the population size of the U.S. in 1954 was 161,881,000). Thus, the possibility of 100 million Americans dead as the number Albert lands upon, was at the time 62% of the American population. This is not even taking into account how many Russians would die in such a scenario.

It appears what Albert is saying is that the United States is justified in becoming the greatest monstrosity in the world such that it can end all other monstrosities, whether real or merely speculative.

However, we are expected to believe that our sacrifice and murder in such numbers will be the most noble of all?

Together, Paul Nizte, Albert and his wife Roberta Wohlstetter (all RAND associates) would dominate the theory and policy surrounding nuclear strategy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In Nov. 1985, Reagan would award all three with the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Roberta, an authority on the “academic historical” work around the attack on Pearl Harbour and the psychological uses this had, had great insight into what could stir the sleeping madness that slumbered within the most powerful nation in the world.

Her work was used, by Albert and others at RAND, in scare-mongering and manipulating the mind-set of the military and the American population into thinking another Pearl Harbour was always just around the corner. It would be the foundation upon which Albert based all of his “hypotheses” and “revelations” in nuclear strategy.

It is difficult not to wonder where America would be today in its understanding of Russia along with its relations and orientation in nuclear policy if Albert Wohlstetter, the principal architect of American nuclear strategy, had been exposed as a “former” Trotskyist…

[Shortly to follow: Part 2 of this series titled “Albert Wohlstetter’s ‘Delicate Balance of Terror’: The Story of How a Trotskyist Became the Authority on Nuclear Strategy for America.”]

The author can be reached at https://cynthiachung.substack.com

(1) Susan Butler, Portrait of a Partnership: Roosevelt and Stalin
(2) Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason, pg 13
(3) Ibid, pg 18
(4) Ibid, pg 10
(5) Ibid, pg 14
(6) Ibid, pg 14
(7) Ibid, pg 21
(8) Ibid, pg 49
(9) Ibid, pg 51
(10) Ibid, pg 53
(11) Ibid, pg 32
(12) Ibid, pg 32
(13) Ibid, pg 92
(14) Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, pg 368

Media reports from the U.S. this week – regurgitated by the European press – highlighted concerns that China is embarking on a massive scale-up of underground silos for launching nuclear weapons.

Hundreds of silos are alleged to be under construction in the western regions of Xinjiang and Gansu, according to U.S. media reports citing commercial satellite data. American military officials and State Department diplomats are quoted as saying they are “deeply concerned” by the purported expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal.

For its part, Beijing has not yet commented on the claims of new nuclear silos. Some Chinese media reports say that the excavation could be due to something else entirely – the construction of large-scale wind farms. A Global Times dismissed the U.S. claims as “hyped”.

Context, as ever, is crucial. For a start, the U.S. headlines are equivocal and heavily qualified, indicating that the information is far from conclusive.

The Wall Street Journal reported: “China Appears to Be Building New Silos for Nuclear Missiles, Researchers Say”.

While CNN headlined: “China appears to be expanding its nuclear capabilities, U.S. researchers say in new report”.

Despite the lack of definite information that didn’t stop Pentagon and government officials from saying they were “deeply concerned”, thus adding a veneer of factuality to reports that were speculative.

Here’s another consideration. So what if China is expanding its nuclear arsenal with new silos? The People’s Republic of China has a stockpile of warheads numbering 350. The United States has a stockpile of some 5,550 warheads, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The U.S. has a nuclear offensive power 15 times greater than China. So even if China is planning to double its arsenal of nuclear weapons, according to the Pentagon, that increase is still a fraction of American destructive capability.

Beijing maintains that the onus is on Washington to de-escalate its nuclear arsenal. The United States and Russia have resumed talks this week in Geneva on renewing arms-control efforts – efforts that have been put on hold by Washington since the Trump administration. Washington and Moscow – both possessing over 90 percent of the world’s total nuclear warheads – need to get on with their obligations for disarmament before China is reasonably brought into the discussion, along with other minor nuclear powers, such as Britain and France.

Another consideration for context is the ramping up of hostility by the United States towards China. The Biden administration is continuing the aggressive agenda of its Trump and Obama predecessors. Arming the renegade Chinese island territory of Taiwan, sailing warships into the South China Sea, media vilification of China over allegations of human rights abuses, genocide, malign conduct in trade, cyberattacks, and the Covid-19 pandemic. All of this speaks of stoking confrontation with China and inflaming U.S. public opinion to accept war with China.

Pentagon officials tell Congressional hearings that they consider war with China a distinct possibility in the near term.

Given this context, it would be reasonable to expect China to expand its nuclear defenses in order to shift the American calculation away from contemplating a war. The problem is not the alleged Chinese military buildup. It is Washington’s criminal policy of hostility towards Beijing that is fueling the risk of war.

But here is another key factor: the United States is undergoing a trillion-dollar upgrade of its nuclear arsenal. That began under Obama and was continued under Trump and now Biden. That puts alleged Chinese expansion into perspective. The United States has already nuclear power that dwarfs China’s and yet the U.S. is expanding what is a provocative threat to China.

Furthermore, Washington’s nuclear upgrade of its triad of submarines, silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers is hurtling out of control financially.

A recent report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office warned that the trillion-dollar nuclear upgrade was ballooning with “stupefyingly expensive” cost overruns. In just two years, the cost was over-budget by $140 billion and the upgrade program is to run for a total of three decades.

This eye-watering waste of taxpayers’ money has led some U.S. lawmakers to call for drastic cuts in nuclear arms expenditure. Senator Ed Markey and others have decried “our bloated nuclear weapons budget”. Given the crumbling state of America’s civilian infrastructure, popular opposition to exorbitant military spending is potentially a major political problem for the Pentagon and its industrial complex.

The U.S. media hype over the alleged expansion of Chinese silos begins to look like déjà vu of the alleged “missile gap” with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In the 1950s and 60s, Washington and the compliant corporate media became animated by CIA data that purported to show the Soviet Union outpacing the U.S. in the numbers of nuclear missiles. It turned out that the “missile gap” was non-existent. But the fear-mongering it engendered, in turn, created public acceptance of massive military expenditure by Washington that has become structural and chronic to this day. The warped allocation of financial resources is a parasitical drain on American society. Any rational, democratic mind would abhor the grotesque priorities.

China today is providing the equivalent scaremongering of the Soviet “missile gap” in order to sustain America’s militarist-dependent capitalist economy.

U.S. and Russian senior officials met this week in Geneva to discuss strategic stability. The American side said it was “committed to stability even at times of tensions” as if seeking praise for engaging. But on every score, it is Washington that has incited dangerous tensions.

The meeting in the Swiss city was a follow-up to the summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 16 in the same location. That summit saw a more engaged diplomatic tone from the Americans and a willingness to pursue dialogue on a range of issues, in particular nuclear arms control.

This week, Wendy Sherman, the Deputy Secretary of State (the second most senior U.S. diplomat), met with her Russian counterpart Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. The diplomats greeted each other in a cordial manner before the talks commenced on Wednesday.

The precise agenda for the formally titled “strategic stability dialogue” was not publicly disclosed, but it is understood that a priority issue was nuclear arms control and extension of the New START treaty limiting the deployment of intercontinental nuclear weapons. When Biden took office in January this year, one of the first executive decisions he took was maintaining the 10-year-old accord. His predecessor Donald Trump was about to let that treaty lapse.

However, for long-term stability, the New START needs to be formally extended for at least another decade and beyond. That is what the American and Russian diplomats were discussing this week. Their next meeting is scheduled for the end of September.

The American ambiguity over New START follows the move by Trump to abandon the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty limiting short and medium-range missiles. Russia subsequently withdrew from the INF accord in response to the American move. Trump also jettisoned the Open Skies Treaty which had allowed each side to fly over respective territories to monitor nuclear weapon deployments. Again, Russia withdrew from the OST in response to the American move.

Further back, in 2002 under George W Bush, Washington resiled from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, thus paving the way for American deployment of so-called missile shields in Europe. That move was highly destabilizing to the strategic balance as it raises the threat of a preemptive strike on Russia by potentially limiting Russia’s defense capability.

Thus, multiple treaties that had provided an architecture of nuclear arms control have been dismantled unilaterally by Washington. The New START treaty is the only remaining accord. And that was in jeopardy of collapsing until Biden entered the White House. His renewal of the treaty is at this stage on an ad hoc basis. There is a need for a formal agreement on the long-term extension of the treaty. It is hoped that both sides can resolve that in coming discussions.

Given this background, it is rather contemptible how the American side characterized the talks this week in Geneva.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said just before the meeting: “We remain committed, even in times of tension, to ensuring predictability and reducing the risk of armed conflict and threat of nuclear war.”

The intimation of U.S. virtuous commitment “even in times of tension” is derisory. For it is the Americans who have wantonly undermined strategic stability by unpicking treaty after treaty. The tensions between the U.S. and Russia (which mirror American tensions with China) have been multifaceted and are not just due to the realm of nuclear arms control. There is a pattern here. And it’s all one-way stemming from American imperialist ambitions for global hegemony.

U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe commented on the talks in Geneva this week, saying: “Already strained relations between Moscow and Washington have deteriorated further since Biden took office in January, with the United States sanctioning Russia over cyberattacks, election meddling, and the poisoning and jailing of opposition politician and Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny.”

Note how these baseless assertions are casually cited as if facts, as is the common practice of the U.S. media and most of its politicians. Biden, as admitted above, has exacerbated tensions by accentuating the American claims – in truth, provocative slanders – against Russia.

At Strategic Culture Foundation, we have demonstrated in numerous articles over the past several years that none of the U.S. claims hold water. Cyberattacks? Where’s the evidence? None. Election meddling? No evidence. Poisoning of Navalny? That saga a preposterous set-up.

We can add much more to the U.S. list of tendentious talking-points that are fundamentally all assertions with no factual or evidentiary basis: aggression towards Ukraine, shooting down of a Malaysian civilian airliner, annexation of Crimea, threatening Europe with the Nord Stream 2 gas project, aiding and abetting a dictator in Syria.

Let’s just deal with one of those idiotic items. The truth is the U.S. fomented a violent coup in Ukraine in 2014 that brought to power a Neo-Nazi regime that is viciously anti-Russian. The U.S. has funded the Kiev regime with $2 billion in weaponry. The U.S. and its NATO allies are currently holding war exercises in Ukraine (and Georgia) right on Russia’s borders. We don’t recall Russia ever holding military exercises in Mexico!

American claims are not information nor journalism. They are disinformation and psychological operations. To the point of being absurd.

These false narratives have been debunked by many of our articles and by other commendable publications. But the Americans and some of their European allies continue to peddle these false narratives as if they are facts, and they have imposed dozens of rounds of sanctions against Russia on that illusory basis. Then they wonder why tensions have become so fraught?

Biden this week reiterated the groundless nonsense that Russia is preparing to “interfere” in the U.S. 2022 mid-term elections. He also repeated the allegation that Russia is conducting cyberattacks on American infrastructure which, he claimed, could provoke a military response from the U.S. That is insane and recklessly unhinged.

Recall, too, that Biden has reached into the gutter to call Putin a “killer”. That was before he met with the Russian leader in Geneva last month where his seemingly genial smiles betrayed the American president’s illogicality and duplicity. How can one comfortably shake hands and smile at an alleged killer?

Biden also this week disparaged Russia as a country that only possesses “nukes and oil”. His ignorance and uncouthness are abject. Lamentably, it is typical of the American political class. And this arrogant, miserable mindset is almost despairing for the prospect of peaceful relations.

For those paying attention to reality, the Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, disclosed some home truths this week. He revealed that Russia has been appealing to the U.S. for the past six years to join in forming security mechanisms against cyberattacks and foreign interference in internal affairs. Antonov said that Washington has never responded to any of the Russian initiatives.

Indeed, the United States and Russia need to dialogue earnestly about global security and mitigate dangerous tensions to ensure that war is prevented. But more than this, first of all, the Americans need to stop their relentless and systematic aggravation of tensions.

In January it was noted by a New York Times’ columnist that the nominated Secretary of the U.S. Defence Department, General Lloyd Austin, had “told the Senate he would keep a ‘laserlike focus’ on sharpening the country’s ‘competitive edge’ against China’s increasingly powerful military. Among other things, he called for new American strides in building ‘space-based platforms’ and repeatedly referred to space as a war-fighting domain.” This was not a surprising commitment by the about-to-be confirmed head of the Pentagon, which had already added the ominously named Space Force to its war-fighting assets.

Former White House incumbent, Donald Trump, announced creation of the Space Force in December 2019, stating it would be responsible for “the world’s newest war-fighting domain.” He considered that “Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. We’re leading, but we’re not leading by enough, but very shortly we’ll be leading by a lot. The Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground.” His explicit declaration that Washington is prepared to engage in warfare in yet another “domain” was not surprising, but it is regrettable that the Biden Administration shows no sign of reversing the intention to deploy weapons in space.

Russian reaction to establishment of the Space Force was President Putin’s observation that “The U.S. military-political leadership openly considers space as a military theatre and plans to conduct operations there” which is entirely against the letter and spirit of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, known generally as the Outer Space Treaty. In Article IV of this agreement of 1967, as recorded by the U.S. State Department, “States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.”

111 countries have agreed to abide by the treaty, and the 23 that have as yet failed to ratify it are unlikely to engage in space activities of any sort. The accord was a major step forward during the Cold War, and it was hoped that in later years its provisions might be extended and made more precise and binding, but this was not to be. The attraction of space as a war-fighting domain was too attractive to be ignored by Washington, and in 1982 the U.S. Air Force was directed by President Reagan to form Space Command, known as the “Guardians of the High Frontier” and it is not surprising that members of the new Space Force are also titled “Guardians”. The problem is the mission of these people includes “maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces to present to our Combatant Commands.”

There has been no rebuttal of Trump’s definition of space as “the world’s new war-fighting domain,” and no modification of the Space Command Mission to “enhance warfighting readiness and lethality through the integration of space capabilities with the joint force, allies, and inter-agency partners in all domains.” And there is rejection of international moves to reduce the possibility of confrontation in space that could lead to outright conflict.

Unconditional U.S. opposition to peace in space was exemplified by its 2014 rejection of a UN General Assembly resolution on the prevention of an arms race in that domain. It is extremely difficult to see how any government could object to a proposal that calls “on all states, in particular those with major space capabilities, to contribute actively to the peaceful use of outer space, prevent an arms race there, and refrain from actions contrary to that objective.” But sure enough, although 178 countries consider this to be a good thing for the future of the world, and voted for the resolution, the United States and Israel abstained. It is verging on the incredible that these countries would not endorse a proposal that there should be peaceful use of outer space.

There was worse to come in the saga of space militarisation, for in November 2020 the First Committee of the UN General Assembly received no support from the U.S. for further initiatives that could guide the world away from the disaster that will befall us if there is no check on movement to “war-fighting” in space. Five resolutions were put forward concerning the furtherance of peace in space, and the U.S. voted against four of them, including the one that specified there should be “No first placement of weapons in outer space.” It seemed that the then U.S. administration actually favoured placement of weapons in space, and it is woeful that the Biden administration has not made it policy to cease militarisation of Trump’s “war-fighting domain”.

April 12 is the International Day of Human Space Flight, marking an important anniversary, not only of technical achievement but of a hoped-for dawn of international cooperation. The UN notes that in 1961 there was “the first human space flight, carried out by Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet citizen. This historic event opened the way for space exploration for the benefit of all humanity.” Formalisation of the anniversary was declared by a UN General Assembly stressing that celebration is merited because of international desire “to maintain outer space for peaceful purposes,” and the U.S. representative declared that the “cold war space race is over and we have all won”.

Unfortunately, the Cold War has been resumed by Washington, and the “space race” has been re-established by creation of the Space Force intended to “control the ultimate high ground.”

The fact that the International Day of Human Space Flight involves remembrance of a Russian astronaut is enough to keep the anniversary out of the U.S. mainstream media, and this affected reporting of an important statement made on that day last month.

Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s space policy by stating “We consistently believe that only guaranteed prevention of an arms race in space will make it possible to use it for creative purposes, for the benefit of the entire mankind. We call for negotiations on the development of an international legally binding instrument that would prohibit the deployment of any types of weapons there, as well as the use of force or the threat of force.”

The policy could not be clearer. And it was followed by a similar declaration by China’s Zhao Lijian that “We are calling on the international community to start negotiations and reach agreement on arms control in order to ensure space safety as soon as possible. China has always been in favour of preventing an arms race in space; it has been actively promoting negotiations on a legally binding agreement on space arms control jointly with Russia.”

On February 22, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a speech in Geneva that the U.S. should “engage all countries, including Russia and China, on developing standards and norms of responsible behaviour in outer space.”

Even if Blinken’s words fall well short of equating “responsible behaviour” with any indication of a commitment to refrain from placing weapons in space, he did conclude that “I pledge that the United States is here to work, cooperate, and once again use the Conference on Disarmament to create bold, innovative agreements to protect ourselves and each other.”

Well: get on with it, Secretary Blinken. Start talking with people rather than at them. You might even manage to convince your own Space Guardians that peace is better than war.

The international signatories to the nuclear accord with Iran have now a three-month window to salvage that landmark deal. The onus is on the United States to return to the Joint Comprehension Plan of Action (JCPOA) – as the accord is formally titled. Washington must do this unconditionally, beginning with lifting its economic sanctions from Iran. The European states have a duty to advocate Washington to meet its obligations. And all of the Western powers have a duty to honor a treaty which bears their signatures. Castigating Iran for alleged breaches is a cowardly distraction from the real problem.

This week Iran averted a further serious breakdown in the JCPOA after negotiating an interim inspection compromise with the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran has suspended so-called short-notice inspections at nuclear and military sites for three months, but will continue recording video footage at the sites which it will then provide to the IAEA for monitoring and verification purposes as required under the JCPOA. If, however, the United States does not cancel its sanctions on Iran by this period then the surveillance videos will be destroyed, and one can assume that the JCPOA will be finally doomed.

Let’s recap on how we arrived at this impasse. The JCPOA was signed in July 2015 by the United States, Britain, France, Germany (the E3), Russia, China and Iran. It was subsequently ratified by the UN Security Council. The accord took several years of painstaking negotiations to complete and was widely seen as a landmark in diplomacy and an important achievement towards improving peace and security in the Middle East – Israel’s continued possession of nuclear weapons notwithstanding.

In exchange for Iran taking the unprecedented step of severely curtailing its civilian nuclear program (a program it is entitled to pursue as a signatory of the 1970 Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty), the other international powers were mandated to cancel a raft of Western and UN sanctions imposed on Iran.

Then Donald Trump got elected as US president in 2016 and set about sabotaging the JCPOA which he disparaged as the “worst deal ever”. Trump walked the US away from the accord unilaterally in May 2018 and promptly re-imposed crippling sanctions on Iran. This was part of a “maximum pressure” policy of aggression towards Iran by the Trump administration which was rationalized by citing baseless allegations that the Iranians were secretly building nuclear weapons and conducting malign operations in the region.

Not only that but the Trump administration threatened all other signatories to the JCPOA with extraterritorial “secondary sanctions” if they continued doing business with Iran. Russia and China have ignored those American threats, but lamentably the European Union has feebly caved in to Washington’s demands. Billions of euro-worth of investment and trade deals with Iran were scrapped by the Europeans in deference to Washington’s bullying diktat. In effect, as far as relations between Iran and the Western powers are concerned the JCPOA has delivered nothing of benefit to the Iranian people despite Tehran’s erstwhile full compliance with the accord.

The combination of the United States unilaterally abrogating an international treaty, and the Europeans complying with unlawful punitive measures against Iran, then resulted in Tehran taking subsequent steps to gradually wind down – but not revoking – its commitments to the JCPOA. Those steps include surpassing limits on enrichment of uranium and stockpiles of the enriched nuclear material. Iran is within its right to carry out these “remedial actions” under the provisions of the JCPOA if other signatories do not meet their obligations. And the US and EU have clearly not met their obligations.

The latest suspension by Iran of inspections from the IAEA must be seen in the wider context of responding to the Western powers reneging on the implementation of an international treaty to which they are signatories.

Newly inaugurated President Joe Biden has stated his intention to return the United States to the JCPOA. Biden has also dismissed the “maximum pressure” policy of his predecessor as a failure.

However, the Biden administration is insisting that it is Iran which must first return to full compliance with the nuclear accord.

It is somewhat disconcerting that the European trio of Britain, France and Germany issued a joint statement this week censoring Iran for halting inspections from the IAEA. The E3 urged Iran to resume “full compliance” of the JCPOA.

The Europeans would have more credibility and authority if they showed some backbone in censoring the United States for its egregious failure to honor the nuclear accord. The Europeans say little if nothing when it comes to holding the US to account. It is the Europeans who have aided and abetted Washington in its backsliding and abuse of sanctions.

Russia and China have, however, rightly kept the focus on the priority thing to do, which is for the US to return immediately and unconditionally to abiding by the JCPOA, including lifting all sanctions from Iran.

At a time of global pandemic and particular hardship for Iran it is morally imperative for the United States to end its unlawful and barbaric sanctions regime. The only way to build trust is for the Biden administration to reverse the violations. If the United States does not take the morally and legally honorable steps then the suspicion of an ulterior agenda will be fatal for resolving the impasse. The Biden team talks about “lengthening and strengthening” the accord. It sounds suspiciously like Washington is trying to extricate further concessions from Iran beyond the concessions that it had originally agreed to when the JCPOA was signed in 2015. Is the Biden administration pandering to its regional allies Israel and Saudi Arabia who are implacably opposed to the accord? Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken have both stated publicly that this US administration will consult closely with Israel on all regional policies.

It is being reported that Europe is trying to facilitate “informal” talks between Iran and the United States. There should be no need for such cloak and dagger shenanigans. The Western powers can salvage the nuclear deal in a much more straightforward way – by honoring it.

The Washington Post put it gleefully by headlining that as a result of the January 26 Biden-Putin telephone call “The Biden-Putin relationship is already on the rocks.” It was no surprise that the profoundly anti-Russia Post would take an entirely negative approach to the U.S.-Russia relationship, whatever the signals might have been, but its reporting of that phone call must have lit up smiles in offices in and all round Washington, from the Pentagon to the Boeing office in Arlington, via Raytheon in Pennsylvania Avenue, Lockheed Martin in Bethesda, Northrop in Falls Church and all the other members of the military-industrial complex who see even more profits looming.

Biden seems to have more heart than his predecessor (but then, most people do), and has concentrated on urgent domestic affairs in his first days in the White House. His desire to combat and overcome the pandemic is not simply political (as in the UK, for example), but seems to stem from a genuine feeling that people matter and that their well-being should be the most important consideration in his deliberations. His White House speech of January 26 was more compassionate than anything Trump ever uttered, and even though Biden did fall into the temptation of rubbishing the disgraceful fumbling of the mercifully-departed Mar-a-Lago man, he was positive and even mildly optimistic. But his approach to international affairs, notably in regard to China and Russia, is negative and pessimistic.

The signal he sent by appointing retired General Lloyd Austin III to be defence secretary was a decidedly mixed one. He obviously intended to attract approval by choosing a black person for the job, which was part of his understandable desire to bind the nation together, but picking a former general was unwise. Apart from anything else, none of these generals have even come close to winning a war, but the main thing is that the war machine should be headed by a civilian, therefore making it clear that the military are not top-guns in any administration.

But Austin is assuredly a top gun, and a rich one too, because he has been deeply involved with military contractor Raytheon, having served on its board and having substantial stock holdings in a company whose 195,000 employees, as reported by the New York Times, “make fighter jet engines, weapons, high-tech sensors and dozens of other military products” that it hawks for billions of dollars a year. And when Mr Austin sells his shares, as he is legally bound to do, he’ll get as much as 1.7 million dollars, which gives rise to the reasonable question that when Raytheon representatives come panting round the Pentagon to apply for another billion-dollar contract, just how can Mr Austin ignore them?

The NYT also noted that Austin “has served as a partner at an investment firm named Pine Island Capital, whose board he joined in July [2020]. The firm has been on a recent buying spree of small military contractors, including Precinmac Precision Machining, which sells specialized parts for rocket launching systems and machine guns”.

The military-industrial complex has just got itself a might ally in the top echelons of the new Administration in Washington, and given that Biden endorses confrontation with Russia and China, currently involving carrier strike groups roving off China’s coast, three U.S. Navy warships operating in the Black Sea, and U.S.-led Nato manoeuvres in the Arctic which U.S. Admiral Andrew Lewis declares to be “the new frontier of our homeland defence,” it is apparent that the new Biden Cold War will be lucrative for countless weapons’ manufacturers and a shot in the arm for the Pentagon, which is being given 740 billion dollars to spend in 2021.

The former Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, trotted out the usual platitudes about patriotism and declared that the money “looks after our brave men and women who volunteer to wear the uniform” while — of course — ensuring that “we keep pace with competitors like Russia and China.’’

Keep pace?  As recorded by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “the USA’s military spending in 2019 was over 11 times greater than Russia’s” and about three times that of China, which has four time the population of the U.S. and the longest land border in the world, at 22,117 kilometres / 13,743 miles. Russia has a land border of 20,241 km / 12,577 miles, the second largest in the world, and is faced to its west by hostile states which provide bases for air, naval and ground forces from countries of the U.S.-Nato military alliance. One might wonder why both China and Russia have been forced to focus on their armed forces at the expense of social improvements for their citizens — but when they are faced with a massive military empire that has declared its open hostility, there is little choice but to prepare for conflict.

Washington’s National Defence Strategy is designed specifically “to meet the challenges posed by a re-emergence of long-term strategic competition with China and Russia” but fails to mention that the U.S. has over 800 military bases around the world, strategically placed to menace Russia and China, and costing an estimated 150 billion dollars a year. This is in addition to the eleven carrier strike groups and countless B-52 nuclear bomber sorties that menace nations considered by Washington to merit confrontation.

The Watson Institute at Brown University has calculated that the U.S. has spent 6.4 trillion dollars in waging wars since the 9/11 atrocities gave rise to the “Global War on Terror” and all its spinoffs from Afghanistan to Libya, via Iraq, Syria and dozens of other unfortunate countries that have suffered catastrophic destruction and myriad deaths from the military actions of what President Biden calls the “beacon for the globe.”

Listening to the inauguration speech by President Biden was indeed uplifting, and his expressed sentiments were admirable. But since then the tenor has changed concerning external affairs, and although there is certainly a beacon on what President Reagan referred to as the “Shining City on the Hill”, it is beckoning to the wrong people.

President Biden’s beacon should be directed along avenues that lead to international dialogue, moderation and harmony. But it has been deflected to the rugged trails of aggression. It is a signal to the Pentagon and its stalwart supporters that power and profit lie ahead in the beacon-lit shopping malls of weapon manufacturing. President Eisenhower warned against “acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex,” but that is what is happening, and unless Uncle Joe has a rethink about his approach to Russia and China, there will be major rocks ahead.

There is no guarantee of successful outcome. But at the very least there must be a commitment to work together and to dialogue. Thus, New START is a step in the right direction.

The agreement this week by the United States and the Russian Federation to extend the New START arms control treaty is a symbolic step of reengagement by both sides. That has to be welcomed.

Bilateral relations have deteriorated so badly in recent years that if the treaty was allowed to expire – as it was slated to do next week – then the world was facing the danger of a new, destructive nuclear arms race. The US had already abrogated other arms control pacts. This was the last line of defense, so to speak, for global security.

The fact that President Joe Biden made a phone call to Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin – a week after his inauguration – and agreed to extend New START shows that the American side understands the vital importance of securing strategic stability.

Biden and Putin agreed to an immediate five-year extension of the treaty. Already both sides have now opened communications on arranging procedures and mechanisms.

Significantly, President Biden accepted Russia’s insistence that the treaty be extended without any conditions. Under Donald Trump, negotiations on New START had floundered because his administration was wrangling to have China included in the treaty. That was always a non-starter for Russia (and China). The New START is a bilateral treaty originally signed by the US and Russia in 2010. It has nothing to do with another party, but the wrangling by Trump was indicative of the low-caliber diplomacy of his administration and failure to appreciate issues of global security. His attitude was that of a real-estate hustler completely out of his depth.

In any case, there appears to be a return to professional diplomacy in Washington under Biden. On agreeing to a five-year extension, both sides will now have the breathing space and opportunity to formulate a longer-term accord. There may in time also evolve a means for a new broader comprehensive treaty involving other nuclear powers, including Britain, France and China.

For now though the main thing – and it is a crucial cornerstone – is that the United States and Russia have agreed to maintain limits on strategic nuclear weapons as stipulated by the New START. The two powers possess over 90 per cent of the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. It is therefore of paramount importance for them to engage in mutual agreement for the sake of global security.

Russia’s deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov described the decision this week as mutually beneficial and the only right one to take.

“We now have a significant amount of time in order to launch and hold profound bilateral talks on the whole set of issues that influence strategic stability… So, we welcome the decision of the Biden administration to agree to our proposal of a five-year extension,” Ryabkov added.

Senior lawmaker Konstantin Kosachev, who is chair of the international affairs committee in the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, the Federation Council, said the agreement on New START was a promising development. He said it may “open doors to make progress on other problems”.

The phone call between Biden and Putin this week hardly marks a “reset” in the badly frayed relations. According to the White House version of the conversation, the American president brought up other subjects, including: allegations about Russian interference in US elections, as well as allegations of Russian cyber attacks, and running assassination plots in Afghanistan against US troops. Biden also raised the arrest of convicted Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

Russia has rejected all such allegations of malign conduct as unfounded. If the American side partake in genuine discussions it will find the truth of these matters in time.

But in the absence of any dialogue then the baleful result is that tensions, misunderstanding and distrust can only grow, sending relations into further downward spiral with potentially catastrophic consequences. There are a lot of issues that both sides need to engage on in order to dispel false and unnecessary problems.

President Biden and his team have shown serious misunderstanding and misconceptions about Russia. They are infected with Russophobia as is much of the American political class. This Russophobia has been allowed to fester in large part due to the lack of diplomatic engagement by the American side. The only remedy is to talk.

In a separate address this week, President Putin told the World Economic Forum that international powers must renew communication and partnership on a mutually respectful basis. Global security and many dangerous challenges depend on world powers abandoning Cold War-type mentality and animosities.

“We are open to the broadest international cooperation, while achieving our national goals, and we are confident that cooperation on matters of the global socioeconomic agenda would have a positive influence on the overall atmosphere in global affairs, and that interdependence in addressing acute current problems would also increase mutual trust which is particularly important and particularly topical today,” said Putin.

The first step mandates the engagement in dialogue. There is no guarantee of successful outcome. But at the very least there must be a commitment to work together and to dialogue. Thus, New START is a step in the right direction.

It must be made clear that there was no possibility this officer or any other single person could in some way commit the submarine to despatch of its weapons. It simply could not happen. But the squalid little incident did draw attention to the fact that a British nuclear submarine was in the United States for some reason and although the UK’s over-staffed and infamously incompetent Ministry of Defence condescendingly announced that “the Royal Navy does not comment on matters related to submarine operations” it was apparent that the boat was in port at the U.S. submarine base in Kings Bay, Georgia, probably to update and recalibrate technical devices and to load a number of Trident II D5 nuclear missiles.

The UK keeps insisting it has an independent nuclear weapons capability, so it has to be asked why the Royal Navy needs to send submarines to the U.S. to pick up missiles. But as with so many defence matters the government tries to keep the British public in the dark as much as possible. According to the U.S. Naval Institute, “Vigilant is one of four U.K. Vanguard-class boomers that the Royal Navy maintains as part of the British nuclear deterrent force. While the MoD maintains its own nuclear warheads, British and U.S. submarines share a common stockpile of Trident II D5 missiles stored at Kings Bay.”

It can also be asked why the United Kingdom government thinks the country needs nuclear weapons at all.

London’s reluctance to provide information to the public about nuclear weapons is likely based on the government’s desire to disguise the vast expenditure involved. When it is demanded by law that information be provided, it is released on a carefully timed basis. The public relations operators have it all planned, and choose a day when more exciting news can be either expected or manipulated, rather like the FBI’s notification of the preposterous allegations that “Iran and Russia Seek to Influence Election in Final Days” that — surprise, surprise! — were headlines on the same day that former President Obama gave a speech in support of presidential candidate Joe Biden.

But the Brits didn’t succeed in one particular case concerning vast expenditure on systems to replace the existing Trident nuclear missiles on its four submarines. It had been stated in the annual update to Parliament by the Ministry of Defence in December last year that “Work also continues to develop the evidence to support a government decision when replacing the warhead” and there matters rested — until in February Admiral Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, “told the Senate defence committee that there was a requirement for a new warhead, which would be called the W93 or Mk7. Richard said ‘This effort will also support a parallel replacement warhead programme in the United Kingdom’.”

The disclosure forced the underhand of the UK government, and on February 25 Defence News reported Defence Secretary Ben Wallace as stating that “To ensure the Government maintains an effective deterrent throughout the commission of the Dreadnought Class ballistic missile submarine we are replacing our existing nuclear warhead to respond to future threats and the security environment” which is a weasel-worded admission that did not mention the colossal sums of money involved.

(But then, Ben Wallace is no stranger to large sums of money, and during the 2009 revelations by the UK’s Daily Telegraph concerning fiddling and greed on the part of politicians it was revealed that in 2008 he had the fourth highest expenses of any Member of Parliament, claiming £175,523 (on top of his £63,000 salary), including £29,000 a year to employ his wife as a part-time research assistant.)

The cost of replacing Trident missiles by the “life extension programme” of the warheads is not known, as the only estimate available, given in a 2006 government paper on ‘The Future of the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Deterrent’, is £250 million which is obviously a small fraction of the true amount.

Not only is the UK committing massive sums to replace the weapons systems of existing nuclear submarines, it has embarked on an enormous programme to build four new ones to replace the Vanguard class vessels. A House of Commons research briefing of June 2020 (produced by the House Library whose researchers are not influenced by sleazy political fandangos) states that the programme involves “design, development and manufacture of four new Dreadnought class ballistic missile submarines (SSBN) that will maintain the UK’s nuclear posture of Continuous at Sea Deterrence” and that “the cost of the programme has been estimated at £31 billion, including defence inflation over the life of the programme.”

The United Kingdom is in a parlous economic state. The International Monetary Fund assesses that the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic will hit Britain’s economy much harder than much of the rest of the world, and while nobody can forecast what will befall the UK if it abandons trade negotiations with the European Union, it is certain that there can be no economic benefit from its current policies.

The last thing the UK needs to do is to commit billions of pounds to nuclear weapons. (Although its Members of Parliament do count the pennies on occasions. They’ve just been told they are to get a pay increase of over 3,000 pounds a year, and on October 21 voted overwhelmingly to reject a plan for poor children to receive midday school meals during school holidays in this period of extreme financial insecurity. They’re all heart.)

At the moment, UK nuclear policy is that “we are committed to maintaining the minimum amount of destructive power needed to deter any aggressor” and as noted by Scientists for Global Responsibility, “The UK’s nuclear warheads are carried on Trident missiles – leased from the USA – in nuclear-powered submarines. Currently, eight missiles can be fired, carrying 40 x 100kT warheads, with a few hours’ notice from a submerged submarine. The UK’s total nuclear weapons arsenal consists of 195 warheads.”

There is no doubt that 195 warheads would destroy enormous areas, but there is no point in going into detail, because if the submarines fired off any nuclear weapons at Russia (the only conceivable target), retaliation would ensure that the UK would cease to exist.

Just who does London imagine is being deterred by its expensive nuclear missiles? America is the only western country that would commit to firing nuclear weapons, and there is no possibility that Washington would consult London about its decision. Once Washington went to nuclear war, all that the UK could do would be to pop off its missiles to pile destruction on destruction. That’s not deterrence, and Britain would be well advised to refrain from spending countless billions on a new set of nuclear toys and commit its resources to betterment of its citizens.

The President of the United States has the power to fire off thousands of nuclear weapons and destroy the world. As succinctly explained by William Perry and Tom Collina in the New York Times, “Mr. Trump has the absolute authority to start a nuclear war. Within minutes, the president could unleash the equivalent of more than 10,000 Hiroshima bombs. He does not need a second opinion. The defense secretary has no say. Congress has no role.”

This is the Trump who contracted the Covid 19 virus and on October 2 was taken to hospital where he was drugged to the eyeballs, referred to the infliction as “a blessing from God”, and declared “I’m a perfect physical specimen.” He then was flown to a massive election rally in Florida on October 12, joining his supporters in shoulder-rubbing maskless happiness and announced “Now they say I’m immune. I feel so powerful. I’ll walk in there. I’ll kiss everyone in that audience. I’ll kiss the guys and the beautiful women, just give you a big fat kiss.”

The mental instability evident in these and many other utterances of that “perfect physical specimen” is disturbing. And the fact that it exists in a man who could destroy the world is terrifying.

The immediacy of nuclear danger is evident in Trump’s attitude to the presidential election itself. As the Financial Times noted, he “has refused to commit himself to a peaceful transfer of power if he were to lose on November 3, citing unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud. He told one rightwing group, the Proud Boys, to ‘stand back and standby’ during last month’s presidential debate.” His ‘Proud Boys’ supporters constitute one of the armed and deeply bigoted militias that have recently surfaced in the U.S., and nobody knows how they will react in the event of a Trump defeat. It is of some concern that “Facebook has taken down at least 6,500 pages and groups linked to more than 300 U.S. militias [emphasis added] after it announced in mid-August that it was culling groups that host ‘discussions of potential violence’ on its platform, including ‘when they use veiled language and symbols’.”

If Trump refuses to stand down and get out of the White House in January in the event of a Biden victory, what happens to the nuclear football that is carried by the military aide who is always the president’s closest shadow? Would Trump insist on retaining possession of the case containing the essentials required for ordering nuclear war? Would the military officer carrying the football obey such an order? What would the rifle-toting ‘Proud Boys’ or other armed militias do about it?

Trump told CNN that “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if this election is rigged” and on October 7 tweeted “This will be the most corrupt Election in American History!” but did not elaborate on what he might do if in his own judgement he lost the election by alleged fraud. The interregnum, the period between announcement of the result and the Inauguration of the 46^th President on January 20, will be fraught with uncertainty because Trump will still be in a position of power — power to issue executive orders that do not require Congressional approval and, above all, the power to commit his country to war.

Given Trump’s mental condition and likely reaction to electoral defeat, the immediate future looks dark indeed, but the one certain thing is that Trump will not lift a finger to help the poor and unemployed who are struggling against the effects of the pandemic. It is recorded that in 2019 there were 34 million Americans living in poverty. There were countless millions of children actually going hungry in the world’s richest country and their lives have got immeasurably worse since the virus struck, but the bankers haven’t been suffering, any more than suppliers of nuclear weapons and associated gadgetry.

On October 14 the New York Times reported that the bank Goldman Sachs “had a significantly more profitable quarter than expected, lifted by continued strength in the trading of stocks and bonds and gains from certain investments. The bank reported earnings of $3.62 billion, far higher than Wall Street analysts had projected, and revenue of $10.78 billion for the third quarter.” Just along the road, JPMorgan Chase enjoyed third-quarter profits of $9.44 billion which was a mighty increase on its $4.76 billion last quarter and even better than the $9.08 billion it raked in the same quarter a year ago.

This year in the United States, while children starve and banks are making vast profits, the nuclear arms’ industry is being given $28.9 billion for “modernisation” of its vast assets, including $7 billion for command, control and communications, $4.4 billion for Columbus Class nuclear submarines, and $2.8 billion for B-21 long range strike bombers. What is ignored by the war boys is that the $4.4 billion committed to nuclear submarines could, for example, build 40 hospitals each with 120 beds and all associated facilities.

So Trump is assured of much support from the money kings, and great approval from the military of which he is Commander-in-Chief. He behaves erratically to the point of psychosis, but has many millions of supporters who chant adulatory slogans in the middle of his unhinged diatribes.

Mitt Romney is a longtime Republican who was the party’s selection to run for president against Barack Obama in 2012. Now a Senator, he is ferociously opposed to such humanitarian schemes as Social Security and Medicare, insisting that even the poorest of the poor should pay for medical attention. He is committed to increasing military spending and opposes reform of the financial sector of the economy. In short, he is a card-carrying, ultra-rightwing authoritarian near-copy of President Trump.

But Romney has realised what is happening in America and unlike other Republicans who have similar sentiments has spoken out against its current state. On October 13 he tweeted that the country “has moved away from spirited debate to a vile, vituperative, hate-filled morass, that is unbecoming of any free nation. The world is watching America with abject horror.” He now admits that Trump has spent four years confronting and insulting fellow-Americans as well as nations that have even mildly opposed his disjointed foreign policy.

America is suffering from instability in the White House and carnage on its streets. While poverty is rife and the pandemic is killing thousands in the richest country in the world its nuclear weapons are under jurisdiction of an unhinged egotistical sociopath. Given Trump’s public pronouncements it is likely he will not accept defeat in the November 3 election. The country will then descend even further into what Romney calls a “hate-filled morass” — but the main international anxiety concerns control of nuclear weapons. Is this unstable man in the White House going to be allowed to continue to wield his present authority to start a nuclear war?

It is not surprising that the world is “watching America with abject horror”, and it must be hoped that there is planning proceeding in world capitals concerning the range of Trump intentions.

Similarly optimistic, if not delusional, remarks of an “agreement in principle” were made this week separately by Mike Pompeo, the U.S.’ top diplomat, as well as Trump’s special envoy on arms control, Marshall Billingslea.

The sanguine posturing by the Trump administration amounts to absurd grandstanding. It’s obvious that with three weeks to the presidential election there is an attempt to inflate the image of Trump into a master deal-maker and hence to score some “good news” for the American people in a bid to boost his re-election ambitions.

What’s going on here is unscrupulous and shabby gimmicking around with the onerous matter of global security. The main issue at hand is the New START accord governing limitations on strategic nuclear weapons. The treaty came into effect in 2011 and is due to expire in February next year, only four months away. It is the last-remaining arms-control treaty between the U.S. and Russia, specifically limiting the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles deployed by either side. Given that the U.S. and Russia together possess over 90 per cent of the world’s total stockpile of these weapons, it is incumbent on both to secure the landmark treaty.

It should be noted that Washington has already abandoned several arms-control treaties: the Anti-Ballistic Missile accord, the INF treaty, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Open Skies Treaty.

However, there is no need for dramatics seen this week from the U.S. side. The New START accord allows for a five-year extension if both sides simply agree to it. The Trump administration seems to be creating an illusion of “breakthrough” in deal-making when all that is required is for both sides to calmly agree to an extension. Russia has consistently advocated for an extension of the New START without preconditions as a bridge towards a longer-term, more comprehensive regime of arms control taking into account new concerns about strategic stability, such as weaponization of space and missile defense systems.

It is the Trump administration which is using the issue of extension as leverage for demanding conditions. It is withholding extension to extract concessions from Russia, such as including China into negotiations (but not American NATO allies) and latterly demanding a freeze on short-range nuclear weapons. It should be noted that there was already a treaty on limiting short-range, or tactical, nuclear warheads – the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) accord, which the Trump administration resiled from last year.

Despite earlier warnings from Russia, as well as from some European and American politicians, that the New START was in danger of falling into obsolescence, the Trump administration had adopted a cavalier indifference towards negotiations. It was only until this summer that the White House began to engage in negotiations to renew the treaty. But even then it became clear that the Americans were playing cheap politics. The opening of bilateral talks in Vienna in June involved a facetious propaganda stunt by U.S. negotiators aimed at shaming China into joining discussions. Such a ridiculous drama and fabrication purporting to show empty Chinese seats at the venue was nevertheless an eye-opener into the lack of professionalism and integrity on the U.S. side as an honest partner.

It is evident that the U.S. side has been using the threat of an arms race as pressure on the Russian side to capitulate to its unilateral demands. Russia has stood firm on its position that it will not sign up to unilateral conditions set by Washington for New START. It is because of unethical and puerile politicking by the U.S. which has resulted in the New START heading for expiry. Global security is gravely being undermined precisely because of American shenanigans.

Democrat contender Joe Biden has indicated that if he is elected to the White House on November 3, he will sign an immediate five-year extension to New START. That may well turn out to be a vote-winner for Biden. But it shouldn’t come down this, whereby global security is being jeopardized because of American bad faith.

A major contemporary talking-point across the globe is the rapid decline in American international standing. There are many ways to illustrate the waning of U.S. power and reputation, from backsliding on international agreements, to the imposition of callous sanctions against stricken nations, to the uncouth squabbling in its so-called presidential debates. But the grubby duplicity and irresponsible conduct of the Trump administration regarding its obligations on nuclear-arms control and global security is a particularly lamentable demonstration of American disgrace.