[D66] Russian President Putin says Ukraine crisis threatens nuclear war

[J.N.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/03/17/nucl-m17.html

Russian President Putin says Ukraine crisis threatens nuclear war
By Alex Lantier
17 March 2015

According to a documentary aired Sunday on Russian public television,
featuring interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia
prepared for nuclear war after last year’s pro-Western putsch on
February 21-22 in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

After an all-night meeting with Russian security officials, Putin
decided at dawn on February 23 to prepare the return of Crimea to
Russia. Fearing that far-right Ukrainian nationalist militias would
attack the largely ethnic Russian population of Crimea and the strategic
Russian naval base at Sevastopol, Russia mobilized forces it stationed
in Crimea, under the terms of Russia’s lease of the Sevastopol base.

The Crimean population ultimately voted to rejoin Russia, and pro-Kiev
forces in Crimea did not resist and were allowed to escape Crimea
unharmed. “We monitored the situation and had to bring in our
equipment,” Putin said. “They would have been wiped out after the first
salvo.”

According to Putin, however, as the Kremlin and the Russian military
began their planning, they did not know whether NATO would react by
going to war: “This could not be understood immediately, therefore at
the first stage of work, I was accordingly forced to provide guidance to
our Armed Forces. And not just provide guidance, but issue direct
instructions, orders regarding the possible conduct of Russia and our
armed forces given any development of events.”

Putin said he was ready for “the most adverse development of events.” As
the interview makes clear, this referred to all-out nuclear war with
NATO. The Kremlin prepared to arm its nuclear forces, Putin said: “We
were prepared to do this. I was talking with Western colleagues and
saying to them that [Crimea] is our historical territory, that Russian
people live there, that they were in danger, and that we could not
abandon them.”

He later added, “As for our nuclear forces, they, as always, are in a
state of full combat readiness.”

The implications of Putin’s statement that he prepared Russia’s army for
any possible development are staggering. Washington has always refused
to issue a so-called “no first use” pledge not to launch a first nuclear
strike. It must be assumed Russia’s nuclear forces were placed on a hair
trigger, prepared for a full-scale response to signs of a US-led NATO
nuclear attack on Russia.

While the details are naturally classified, such a response would
involve mass launches of Russian missiles in minutes, before they were
caught on the ground and annihilated by incoming NATO missiles.
Thousands of missiles—each far more powerful than the US bombs that
destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing hundreds of
thousands—would rain down on army bases, industrial infrastructure, and
communications and control centers across North America and Europe.

Putin’s remarks confirm the warnings made by the World Socialist Web
Site throughout the Ukraine crisis. In the midst of the US provocations
following the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, the WSWS wrote,
“Are you ready for war—including possibly nuclear war—between the United
States, Europe, and Russia? That is the question that everyone should be
asking…”

>From the beginning, the driving force in the Ukraine crisis has been the
intervention of Washington and Berlin to back a putsch against
pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and install a far-right regime
in Kiev. This has been part of a broader, aggressive agenda for
asserting US hegemony over Eurasia that poses the risk of a nuclear
conflagration threatening the survival of humanity itself.

The response of the Putin regime to the imperialist offensive, based on
nationalism and the defense of capitalist property, is reactionary and
politically bankruptcy. The corrupt Russian business oligarchy that
emerged from the restoration of capitalism in the USSR in 1991 is
incapable of appealing to mass opposition to war internationally. It
oscillates between threatening nuclear war and seeking an accommodation
with imperialism.

The TV interview suggested that Putin initially faced pressure from the
Russian military for a more aggressive course of action. It cited
reports from the Russian Defense Ministry that “military specialists”
proposed using “all available means” to demonstrate Russia’s readiness
to defend itself.

In the interview, however, Putin downplayed the crisis. He said,
“Despite the complexity and dramatic nature of the situation, the Cold
War has ended, and we do not need international crises like the one in
the Caribbean [the 1962 Cuban missile crisis]. All the more so since the
current situation has not prompted the need for such actions, and that
would contradict our own interests.”

Even as Putin charged Washington with plotting the Kiev putsch and laid
out Russian fears of nuclear annihilation at the hands of NATO, he
grotesquely referred to US officials as “our American friends and partners.”

In fact, if anything the situation is more dangerous now than during
most of the Cold War. Last year, a London think tank issued a report
stating that, amid the NATO military buildup in Eastern Europe after the
Kiev putsch, forty “near misses” brought NATO and Russian planes close
to direct conflict. German news magazine Der Spiegel and former Soviet
premier Mikhail Gorbachev have warned of the risk of world war.

The aggressive role of imperialism is highlighted by discussion in US
ruling circles of adopting a policy of aggressive nuclear war. This was
summarized in a 2006 article by two professors, Keir Lieber and Daryl
Press, in Foreign Affairs, the US political establishment’s leading
foreign policy journal.

“It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the
long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia and China with a first strike,”
they wrote. Due to the disintegration of Russian infrastructure after
the restoration of capitalism, Russia had only a few nuclear bomber
bases or mobile missile launchers; its ballistic missile submarines
largely spent their time motionless in port. These could all be
obliterated by a massive, preemptive US nuclear strike.

Washington could now contemplate a preemptive nuclear strike to disarm
Russia and China, according to Lieber and Press. Citing computer models
of nuclear war, they wrote that a “surprise [nuclear] attack would have
a good chance of destroying every Russian bomber base, submarine, and
ICBM.” They added that China’s nuclear arsenal, lacking mobile
land-based nuclear missiles or effective ballistic missile submarines,
“is even more vulnerable to a US attack.”

They did also note, however, concerns about such a policy in some US
foreign policy circles: “Russia and China will work furiously to reduce
their vulnerability by building more missiles, submarines, and bombers;
putting more warheads on each weapon; keeping their nuclear forces on
higher peacetime levels of alert; and adopting hair-trigger retaliatory
policies… [T]he risk of accidental, unauthorized, or even intentional
nuclear war—especially during moments of crisis—may climb to levels not
seen for decades.”

Putin’s remarks on the Ukraine crisis make clear that such risks have
indeed come to pass. The nuclear arms race is intensifying in line with
the risk of war.

Before the US and Russia formally announced that they would end their
collaboration on nuclear disarmament in January, the Obama
administration unveiled plans last year to spend more than $1 trillion
in upgrading the US nuclear arsenal.

Russia and China are also pouring billions of dollars into their nuclear
arsenals, hoping to develop the ability to deter a US first nuclear
strike. Russia has begun a comprehensive modernization of its nuclear
arsenal that is expected to come to fruition early in the next decade.
The proportion of nuclear missiles housed on mobile launchers is
expected to pass from 15 to 70 percent, and Russia is launching a new
Borei class of nuclear missile submarines.

China is introducing DF-31 ballistic missiles, housed on mobile
launchers, that are solid-fueled and therefore quicker to prepare for
launch. It has also built the Yulin Naval Base, which houses new
Type-094 ballistic missile submarine on Hainan Island in the South China
Sea. It is working to increase the range of its submarine-launched
nuclear ballistic missiles, which still lack the range to threaten a
retaliatory strike against United States from launch points in the South
China Sea.

These developments underscore the immense dangers to the population of
the entire world produced by the reckless and incendiary operations of
US imperialism. The question of nuclear war is not simply a theoretical
possibility, but an increasingly immediate danger. This danger must be
answered through the building of a powerful movement of the
international working class, based on the perspective of international
socialism.