Nov. 2—The Russian government today issued a formal statement through its Foreign Ministry, urging the “nuclear five” nations—the U.S., U.K., France, China and Russia—to each restate their commitment to the bottom-line policy that “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Russia did this in a policy statement, which we reprint in full below, urging that “the most immediate task is to avoid any military clash of nuclear powers,” which could have “catastrophic consequences” for all of humanity. They insisted that de-escalation of the current crisis is the “top-priority task” for everyone.
That phrase (“a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”) first became famous as the Reagan-Gorbachev Formula of 1985, which helped contain the Cold War, and it was most recently restated by the “nuclear five” themselves on Jan. 3, 2022. Russia today announced that “we fully reaffirm our commitment to the Joint statement of the leaders of the five nuclear-weapon states on preventing nuclear war and avoiding arms races of January 3, 2022.”
This Foreign Ministry statement is one element in a set of major strategic initiatives undertaken by the Russian government over the last 24 hours, to try to break the seemingly ineluctable descent into war.
Additionally, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova announced today that the Russian Defense Ministry’s earlier charges that British military forces had played a central role in “masterminding” both the Oct. 29 Ukrainian drone attack against Russia’s Sevastopol naval base, as well as the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, had been presented with full evidentiary backing before a closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council on Oct. 31. Zakharova also reported that the British Ambassador to Russia, Deborah Bronnert, would be summoned to the Foreign Ministry “shortly” to the same end. The explosive Russian revelations about Britain’s role have been almost totally blacked out of the Western media—at least until now.
Furthermore, Russia today also resumed the international agreement permitting grain exports from Ukraine, which Russia had suspended after the Oct. 29 Ukrainian drone attack against Russia’s naval base in Sevastopol, which made use of the safe-passage corridor meant for grain exports only. They did so not as a “surprising U-turn in policy,” as much of the media claim, but after having a) presented their case to the UN Security Council on Monday, including the evidence of British military involvement in “masterminding” the drone attack on Sevastopol; and b) obtained written assurances from Kiev that the corridor would only be used for grain.
The British and American responses to the exposé of Britain’s role have been most revealing. The British government has only stated that Russia is “peddling false claims of an epic scale”; Washington, however, chose to send a different kind of message to Moscow with the highly unusual step of surfacing a normally secretive U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarine—i.e., one of the three components of the “nuclear triad” capable of annihilating Russia—for the second time in two weeks. The first one, USS West Virginia, was ostentatiously surfaced in the Arabian Sea on Oct. 19; this second time it was the USS Rhode Island, which yesterday sailed into the port of Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory. To make the message perfectly clear, U.S. Navy spokesman Capt. John Craddock stated: “The U.S. and U.K. share a strong history of cooperation, through exercises, operations, and cooperation activities such as this” (emphasis added).
So who is playing nuclear “chicken?” The answer is pretty clear.
As to why, that may, at first glance, seem less evident to some of our fellow citizens.
In her Oct. 25 speech to the “International Scientific and Practical Conference ‘Scientific-Technological and Innovative Cooperation of BRICS countries,’” hosted by the [Russian] National Committee on BRICS Research, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche went to the heart of the matter:
“It is the systemic failure of the neoliberal system, which is the real dynamic behind the Anglo-Saxon geopolitical confrontation against Russia and China…. Events in London signal the definite arrival of the global systemic crisis, of which my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, has warned 51 years ago, when President Nixon replaced the fixed exchange rates of the Bretton Woods System with floating ones. He warned at the time that a continuation of that monetarist system oriented towards the maximization of profits for the speculators would necessarily lead to a new depression, a new fascism, and the danger of a new World War—or, a completely new world economic system.”
It is for that elementary reason that the Declaration “Stop the Danger of Nuclear War Now,” which is circulating widely to convoke a third international seminar of political and social leaders of the world, states unequivocally:
“We call on people of good will around the world—notwithstanding our diverse and natural differences—to participate in this process of deliberation and search for peaceful solutions, including a thorough examination of the alternative economic policies to replace speculation, which has generated so much poverty and suffering, with a system of production and progress to meet the needs of a growing world population.”
It is for that same reason that Diane Sare’s campaign for Senate from New York is of such strategic importance. As the voice of Lyndon LaRouche on today’s U.S. political scene, Sare’s clear denunciation of the pressing danger of nuclear war and her presentation of LaRouche’s policy solutions, remains decisive in these final days before the Nov. 8 election.
