The din of war in the trans-Atlantic media, the drumbeat of “Russian attack and invasion,” has now reached a crescendo. Can there still be some Leonard Bernstein of London who will raise the orchestra of the intelligence services to a still louder pitch, until American and European publics actually believe that a Russian military invasion of Ukraine is underway? Will some stiff-necked journalists continue to demand actual evidence?
On Feb. 5 the Financial Times took the podium, with “U.S. Believes Russia Plans Nuclear Exercise To Warn West over Ukraine.” It declared with the London media’s usual evidence-freedom that “U.S. military and intelligence officials believe Russia is planning a major nuclear weapons exercise this month as a warning to NATO not to intervene if President Vladimir Putin decides to invade.” This nuclear weapons exercise should be in September, the FT decides, but the bully Putin is going to hold it in February or March instead to intimidate NATO when the invasion goes ahead. The invasion that, according to NBC on Sunday, Biden Administration officials believe is coming “any day now.”
“Russia generally holds its annual nuclear exercises—which involve testing intercontinental ballistic missiles from land, sea and air—in the fall,” wrote the FT. “But the U.S. believes Putin has decided to hold them earlier this year as a show of strength in the event that he orders his military to further invade Ukraine” probably in “mid-February to the end of March.” Then a somewhat unintelligible—perhaps crazy—analyst from the Hudson Institute is quoted, of this hypothesized February nuclear exercise, “It would be an incredibly provocative and foreboding message if they did that simultaneously with an invasion of Ukraine.”
What the FT presented as its war scoop—similar to Bloomberg News’ short-lived headline, “Russia Invades Ukraine,” on Feb. 4—actually was already apparently stated to the Congress Feb. 3 in closed-door, classified testimony by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and DNI Avril Haines, and then leaked to Fleet Street.
What about the fact that the United States right now is holding nuclear weapons exercises, called Global Lightning 2022, which exercises are intended to simulate an extended nuclear war, with first strikes—nuclear and conventional—retaliatory second strikes, responses to those strikes, and on, with more and more of the nuclear arsenals being fired? Nothing such inconveniently directed threat matters, facing the “Russia is invading Ukraine” drumbeat.
But it does matter to its real target, the human race. Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a new article said of Global Lightning, “This nuclear war plan includes not only nuclear weapons but various other lethal systems such as missile defense systems, directed energy weapons such as electromagnetic pulse weapons and lasers, cyberattacks, and Space Force attacks from space. Who would be able to survive such a prolonged nuclear war?”
There are some signs of motion toward a solution: French President Emmanuel Macron’s negotiation with Russian President Vladimir Putin gave signs of immediate, possibly productive follow-up from both sides. But the real solution can only be found in the direction Zepp-LaRouche indicated. The financial system is an immense mass of unpayable debts preparing to crash again, worse than in 2008, and the City of London and Wall Street can survive it only if they beat down Russia and/or China before it crashes, distracting millions in the process from perceiving the failing monetarist system. A new paradigm of economic as well as moral and cultural relations among the great powers is the antidote both to the coming financial crash, and to the resort to unsurvivable war. A New Bretton Woods credit system is urgently needed which can save Afghanistan and other war-destroyed nations, and build modern healthcare systems in every country to save people from pandemics.