[D66] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns of “civilization-ending nuclear war”

[A.OUT]

wsws.org:

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns of “civilization-ending nuclear war”
24 January 2020

On Wednesday, Congressman Adam Schiff, speaking from the Senate floor 
during the second day of the impeachment of President Donald Trump, said 
“the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight 
Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

For most of the American population, the assertion that “we” are 
fighting Russia will come as a surprise.

For years, the media has laughed off the danger of a war between the 
United States and Russia or China as a “conspiracy theory.” But Schiff 
raised the United States fighting Russia not just as a possibility, but 
as a statement of present fact.

The United States and Russia each possess over 6,000 nuclear weapons. 
Just a fraction of these are sufficient to kill billions of people and 
destroy human society. A war between these two countries, in other 
words, would be a cataclysmic disaster.

And yet, the entire political establishment, from the Democrats with 
their anti-Russian hysteria, to Trump with his bullying threats against 
the whole world, are preparing for military conflict on a scale not seen 
since World War II.

On Thursday, the Bulletin of American Scientists, which for more than 
seven decades has maintained a Doomsday Clock, warned that human 
civilization is closer to midnight, i.e., total destruction, than at any 
other period in history, including the Cuban Missile Crisis at the 
height of the Cold war.

“Civilization-ending nuclear war—whether started by design, blunder, or 
simple miscommunication— is a genuine possibility,” the group said in 
its annual report. “Any belief that the threat of nuclear war has been 
vanquished is a mirage.”

The report adds, “To say the world is nearer to doomsday today than 
during the Cold War … is to make a profound assertion that demands 
serious explanation.”

It adds, “the international political infrastructure for controlling 
existential risk is degrading, leaving the world in a situation of high 
and rising threat. Global leaders are not responding appropriately to 
reduce this threat level and counteract the hollowing-out of 
international political institutions, negotiations, and agreements that 
aim to contain it. The result is a heightened and growing risk of disaster.”

Last year, the United States withdrew from the INF treaty, which 
prohibited the deployment of land-based missiles, including nuclear 
missiles, with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.

Led by the United States, the world’s nuclear powers are massively 
expanding and modernizing their arsenals. In December, the US tested a 
ballistic missile that would have violated the treaty.

These moves are part of US preparations for what Defense Secretary Mark 
Esper called “high-intensity conflicts against competitors such as 
Russia and China.”

The latest missile test came just days after House Democrats voted for a 
massive military spending bill that stripped out language limiting the 
Trump administration’s ability to develop and deploy new nuclear 
weapons, while handing the president the largest military budget in US 
history.

After withdrawing from the INF treaty in August, the Trump White House 
is moving rapidly ahead with a $1 trillion plan to expand, “modernize” 
and miniaturize the US nuclear arsenal, effectively putting US nuclear 
forces on a hair trigger.

The expansion of US nuclear forces is central to the Trump 
Administration’s refocus on preparation for “great-power conflict” with 
Russia and China in line with its doctrine, announced in 2018, that 
“Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary 
concern in U.S. national security.”

Elbridge A. Colby, one of the principal authors of the National Defense 
Strategy published by the Pentagon in January, commented in Foreign Affairs:

When future historians look back at the actions of the United States in 
the early twenty-first century, by far the most consequential story will 
be the way Washington refocused its attention on great-power competition.

It was time to call a spade a spade. The Trump administration, more 
realistic and blunter than its predecessors, did just that. “Trump,” as 
Henry Kissinger pointed out in the Financial Times in 2018, “may be one 
of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the 
end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.”

The U.S. military has made clear that its overriding concern today is 
how to effectively defend the likes of Taiwan and the Baltic states 
against a potential Chinese or Russian attack.

It is clear that any such conflict risks escalation into nuclear war. 
Last year, Colby penned an article in Foreign Affairs titled, “If You 
Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War.”

The risks of nuclear brinkmanship may be enormous, but so is the payoff 
from gaining a nuclear advantage over an opponent.

Any future confrontation with Russia or China could go nuclear… In a 
harder-fought, more uncertain struggle, each combatant may be tempted to 
reach for the nuclear saber to up the ante and test the other side’s 
resolve, or even just to keep fighting.

“The best way to avoid a nuclear war,” Colby writes, “is to be ready to 
fight a limited one.” In this dangerous world, “US officials,” Colby 
writes, must demonstrate that “the United States is prepared to conduct 
limited, effective nuclear operations.”

All of these policies are mad, and the people advocating them are 
criminals. But the universality of these plans—the fact that every major 
power is rearming—makes clear that this is the insanity not of 
individuals, but of a social class and a social order. It symptomatic of 
a crisis-ridden capitalist system, which is the root cause of war and 
attacks on democratic rights.

But all over the world, the working class, the only social force capable 
of stopping the resurgence of capitalist barbarism, is engaged in a wave 
of strikes and social upheavals. It is urgently necessary for workers 
entering into struggle against social inequality to take up the fight 
against imperialist war as a critical and inseparable part of the fight 
for socialism.

Andre Damon