- Most in the civilized world are blissfully unaware that
we are marching ineluctably towards an increasingly likely pre-emptive
nuclear war. No, it's not at all about Iran and Israel. It's about the
decision of Washington and the Pentagon to push Moscow up against the wall
with what is euphemistically called Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD).
-
- On November 23, a normally low-keyed Russian President
Dmitry Medvedev told the world in clear terms that Russia was prepared
to deploy its missiles on the border to the EU between Poland and Lithuania,
and possibly in the south near Georgia and NATO member Turkey to counter
the advanced construction process of the US ballistic missile defense shield:
"The Russian Federation will deploy in the west and the south of the
country modern weapons systems that could be used to destroy the European
component of the US missile defense," he announced on Russian television.
"One of these steps could be the deployment of the Iskander missile
systems in Kaliningrad." Those would be theatre ballistic missile
systems. The latest version of Iskander, the Iskander-K, whose details
remain top secret, reportedly has a range up to 2000 km and carries cruise
missiles and a target accuracy to 7 meters or less.
-
- Medvedev declared he has ordered the Russian defense
ministry to "immediately" put radar systems in Kaliningrad that
warn of incoming missile attacks on a state of combat readiness. He called
for extending the targeting range of Russia's strategic nuclear missile
forces and re-equipping Russia's nuclear arsenal with new warheads capable
of piercing the US/NATO defense shield due to become operational in six
years, by 2018. Medvedev also threatened to pull Russia out of the New
START missile reduction treaty if the United States moves as announced.
-
- Medvedev then correctly pointed to the inevitable link
between "defensive" missiles and "offensive" missiles:
"Given the intrinsic link between strategic offensive and defensive
arms, conditions for our withdrawal from the New Start treaty could also
arise," he said.
-
- The Russian President didn't mince words: "I have
ordered the armed forces to develop measures to ensure, if necessary, that
we can destroy the command and control systems" of the US shield,
Medvedev said. "These measures are appropriate, effective and low-cost."
Russia has repeatedly warned that the US BMD global shield is designed
to destabilize the nuclear balance and risks provoking a new arms race.
The Russian President said that rather than take the Russian concerns seriously,
Washington has instead been "accelerating" its BMD development.
-
- It was not the first time Medvedev threatened to take
countermeasures to the increasing Pentagon military encirclement pressure
on Russia. Back in November 2008 as the US BMD threat was first made known
to the world, Medvedev made a televised address to the Russian people in
which he declared, "I would add something about what we have had to
face in recent years: what is it? It is the construction of a global missile
defense system, the installation of military bases around Russia, the unbridled
expansion of NATO and other similar 'presents' for Russia - we therefore
have every reason to believe that they are simply testing our strength."
That threat was dropped some months later when the Obama Administration
offered the now-clearly deceptive olive branch of reversing the BMD decision
to deploy in Poland and the Czech Republic.
-
-
- Russia is threatening to deploy its Iskander anti-BMD
missiles in Kaliningrad
-
-
- This time around Washington lost no time signaling it
was in the developing game of thermonuclear chicken to stay. No more pretty
words about "reset" in US-Russia relations. A spokesman for the
Obama National Security Council declared, "we will not in any way
limit or change our deployment plans for Europe." The US Administration
continues to insist on the implausible argument that the missile defense
installations are aimed at a threat from a possible Iranian nuclear launch,
something hardly credible. The real risk of Iranian nuclear missile attack
on Europe given the reality of the global US as well as Israeli BMD installations
and the reality of Iran's nuclear delivery capabilities, is by best impartial
accounts, near zero.
-
- Two days earlier on November 21, Washington had thrown
a small carrot to Moscow. US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen
Tauscher said that Washington was ready to provide information about the
missile's speed after it uses up all of its fuel. This information, referred
to as burnout velocity (VBO), helps to determine how to target it. That
clearly was not seen as a serious concession by Moscow, which demands a
full hands-on partnership with the US/NATO missile deployment to insure
it will never be used against Russia. After all, given Washington's track
record of lies and broken promises, there is no guarantee the speeds would
even be true.
-
- After the early October Brussels NATO defense ministers
meeting, NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in regard to the nominally
NATO European Missile Defense Program, "We would expect it to be fully
operational in 2018." Spain just announced it plans to join the US-controlled
missile program, joining Romania, Poland, the Netherlands and Turkey, which
have already agreed to deploy key components of the future missile defense
network on their territories.
-
- The concerns of Russia are caused by the dramatic improvement
of an entire system of missile defense by Washington, which is taking the
form of a global BMD system encircling Russia on all sides.
-
- Full Spectrum Dominance
-
- The last time Washington's Missile Defense "Shield"
made headlines was in September 2009 early in the Obama Administration
when the US President offered to downgrade the provocative stationing of
US special radar and anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic.
That was a clear tactic to prepare the way for what Hillary Clinton ludicrously
called the "reset" in US-Russian relations from the tense Bush-Putin
days. However the strategic goal of encircling the one nuclear potential
opponent in the world with credible missile defense remained US strategy.
-
- Barack Obama announced back then that the US was altering
Bush Administration plans to station US anti-ballistic missiles in Poland
and sophisticated radar in the Czech Republic. The news was greeted in
Moscow as an important concession. Subsequent developments clearly show
that far from ditching its plans for a missile shield that could cripple
any potential Russian nuclear launch, the US was merely opting for a more
effective global system, whose feasibility had been proven in the meantime.
-
- To assuage the Poles, the Obama Administration also agreed
to provide Poland with US Patriot missiles. Poland's Foreign Minister then
and now is Radek Sikorski. From 2002 to 2005 he was in Washington as a
resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a noted neo-conservative
hawkish think-tank, and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative,
a project to bring as many former communist countries of eastern Europe
into NATO as possible. Little wonder Moscow did not view US missiles in
Poland as friendly, nor does it today.
-
- In May 2011 the Obama Administration announced that the
missiles it would now give Poland consisted of new Raytheon (RTN) SM-3
missile defense systems at the Redzikowo military base in Poland (see map),
roughly 50 miles from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, a unique piece
of Russian real estate not connected to mainland Russia, but adjacent to
the Baltic Sea and Lithuania. That puts US missiles closer to Russia than
during the 1961 Cuba Missile Crisis when Washington placed ICBM's at sites
in Turkey aimed at key Soviet nuclear sites.
-
- The new Raytheon SM-3 missile is part of the Aegis Ballistic
Missile Defense System that will be aimed at intercepting short to intermediate
range ballistic missiles. The SM-3 Kinetic Warhead intercepts incoming
ballistic missiles outside the earth's atmosphere. Lockheed Martin Maritime
Systems and Sensors developed the Aegis BMD Weapon System. The SM-3 comes
from Raytheon Missile Systems.
-
- The Polish SM-3 missile deployment is but one part of
a global web encircling Russia's nuclear capacities. One should not forget
that official Pentagon military strategy is called Full Spectrum Dominance-control
of pretty much the entire universe. This past September the US and Romania,
another new NATO member, signed an agreement to deploy a US-controlled
Missile Defense System on the Deveselu Air Base in Romania using the SM-3
missiles.
-
- As well Washington has signed an agreement with NATO
member Turkey to place a sophisticated missile tracking radar atop a high
mountain in the Kuluncak district of Malatya province in south-eastern
Turkey. Though the Pentagon insists its radar is pointed at Iran, a look
at a map reveals how easily the focal direction could cover key Russian
nuclear sites such as Stevastopol where the bulk of the Russian Navy's
Black Sea Fleet is stationed or to the vital Russian Krasnodar radar installation.
-
- The Malataya radar will send data to US ships equipped
with the Aegis combat system that will intercept "Iranian" ballistic
missiles. According to Russian military experts, one of the main aims of
that radar, which targets at a range up to 2000 kilometers, will also be
the surveillance and control of the air space of the South Caucasus, part
of Central Asia as well as the south of Russia, in particular tracking
the experimental launches of the Russian missiles at their test ranges.
-
- Further, the US-controlled BMD deployment now also includes
sea-based "Aegis" systems in the Black Sea near Russia's Sevastopol
Naval Base, as well as possible deployment of intermediate range missiles
in Black Sea and Caspian region.
-
- But the European BMS deployments of the US Pentagon are
but a part of a huge global web. At the Fort Greeley Alaska Missile Field
the US has installed BMD ground-based missile interceptors, as well as
at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. And the Pentagon just opened
two missile sites at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii. To add
to it, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force has joined formally with the
US Missile Defense Agency to develop a system of so-called Aegis BMD deploying
the SM-3 Raytheon missiles on Japanese naval ships. That gives the US
a Pacific platform from which it can hit both China and Russia's Far East
as well as the Korean Peninsula. These are all a pretty long and curious
way to reach any Iranian threat.
-
- Origins of US Missile Defense
-
- The US program to build a global network of 'defense'
against possible enemy ballistic missile attacks began back in March 23,
1983 when then-President Ronald Reagan proposed the program popularly known
as Star Wars, formally called then the Strategic Defense Initiative.
-
- In 1994 at a private dinner discussion with this author
in Moscow, the former head of economic studies for the Soviet Union's Institute
of World Economy & International Relations, IMEMO, declared that it
had been the huge financial demands required by Russia to keep pace with
the multi-billion dollar US Star Wars effort that finally led to the economic
collapse of the Warsaw Pact and to German reunification in 1990. With a
losing war in Afghanistan, collapsing oil revenues caused by a 1986 US
policy of flooding the world market with Saudi oil, the military economy
of the USSR was unable to keep pace, short of risking massive civilian
unrest across the Warsaw Pact nations.
-
- This time around the US BMD deployment is designed to
bring Russia to her knees as well, only in the context of a US creation
of what military strategists call "Nuclear Primacy."
-
- Nuclear Primacy: Thinking the Unthinkable
-
- While the Soviet era armed forces have undergone a drastic
shrinking down since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russia has tenaciously
held on to the core of its strategic nuclear deterrent. That is something
that gives Washington pause when considering how to deal with Russia. The
potential for Russia to deepen its military and economic cooperation with
its Central Asian partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, above
all with China, is something Washington has gone to great lengths to frustrate.
Such a strategic cooperation is becoming increasingly a matter of life-or-death
for both China and Russia. China's nuclear arsenal is not yet strategic
as is Russia's.
-
- What the Pentagon is going for is what it has dreamed
of since the Soviets developed intercontinental ballistic missiles during
the 1950's. Weapons professionals term it Nuclear Primacy. Translated into
layman's language, Nuclear Primacy means that if one of two evenly-matched
nuclear foes is able to deploy even a crude anti-ballistic missile defense
system that can seriously damage the nuclear strike capacity of the other,
while he launches a full-scale nuclear barrage against that foe, he has
won the nuclear war.
-
- The darker side of that military-strategic Nuclear Primacy
coin is that the side without adequate offsetting BMD anti-missile defenses,
as he watches his national security vanish with each new BMD missile and
radar installation, is under growing pressure to launch a pre-emptive nuclear
or other devastating strike before the window closes. That in simple words
means that far from being "defensive" as Washington claims, BMD
is offensive and destabilizing in the extreme. Moreover, those nations
blissfully deluding themselves that by granting the Pentagon rights to
install BMS infrastructure, that they are buying the security umbrella
of the mighty United States Armed Forces, find that they have allowed their
territory to become a potential nuclear field of battle in an ever more
likely confrontation between Washington and Moscow.
-
- Dr. Robert Bowman, a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the
US Air Force and former head of President Reagan's BMD effort of the 1980's,
then dubbed derisively "Star Wars," noted the true nature of
Washington's current ballistic missile "defense" under what is
today called the Department of Defense Missile Defense Agency:
-
- Under Reagan and Bush I, it was the Strategic Defense
Initiative Organization (SDIO). Under Clinton, it became the Ballistic
Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). Now Bush II has made it the Missile
Defense Agency (MDA) and given it the freedom from oversight and audit
previously enjoyed only by the black programs. If Congress doesn't act
soon, this new independent agency may take their essentially unlimited
budget and spend it outside of public and Congressional scrutiny on weapons
that we won't know anything about until they're in space. In theory, then,
the space warriors would rule the world, able to destroy any target on
earth without warning. Will these new super weapons bring the American
people security? Hardly.
-
- During the Cold War, the ability of both sides-the Warsaw
Pact and NATO-to mutually annihilate one another, had led to a nuclear
stalemate dubbed by military strategists, MAD-Mutually Assured Destruction.
It was scary but, in a bizarre sense, more stable than what Washington
now pursues relentlessly with its Ballistic Missile Defense in Europe,
Asia and globally in unilateral pursuit of US nuclear primacy. MAD was
based on the prospect of mutual nuclear annihilation with no decisive advantage
for either side; it led to a world in which nuclear war had been 'unthinkable.'
Now, the US was pursuing the possibility of nuclear war as 'thinkable.'
-
- Lt. Colonel Bowman, in a telephone interview with this
author called missile defense, "the missing link to a First Strike."
-
- The fact is that Washington hides behind a NATO facade
with its deployment of the European BMD, while keeping absolute US control
over it. Russia's NATO envoy Dmitry Rogozin recently called the European
portion of the US BMD a fig leaf for "a missile defense umbrella that
says 'Made in USA. European NATO members will have neither a button to
push nor a finger to push it with."
-
- That's clearly why Russia continues to insist on guarantees
- from the United States - that the shield is not directed against Russia.
Worryingly enough, to date Washington has categorically refused that. Could
it be that the dear souls in Washington entrusted with maintaining world
peace have gone bonkers? In any case the fact that Washington continues
to tear up solemn international arms treaties and illegally proceed to
install its global missile shield is basis enough for those in Moscow,
Beijing or elsewhere to regard US promises, even treaties as not worth
the paper they were written on.
-
-
- F. William Engdahl may be contacted through his website
at HYPERLINK "http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net" www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
His newest book on oil geopolitics, titled Myths, Lies and Oil Wars is
due out by spring of 2012.
-
- Notes
-
-
- David M. Herszenhorn, Russia Elevates Warning About
U.S. Missile-Defense Plan in Europe, The New York Times, November 23,
2011.
-
- Ibid.
-
- Ibid.
-
- Misha, Medvedev: Russia will Deploy Iskanders in Kaliningrad
to Neutralize New US Missile Threat, Misha's Russian Blog, December 30,
2008, accessed in HYPERLINK "http://mishasrussiablog.blogspot.com/2008/11/medevev-russia-will-deploy-iskanders-in.html"
http://mishasrussiablog.blogspot.com/2008/11/medevev-russia-will-deploy-iskanders-in.html.
-
- RIA Novosti, US ready to provide Russia with missile
shield details, Moscow, November 21, 2011, accessed in HYPERLINK "http://en.rian.ru/russia/20111121/168883920.html"
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20111121/168883920.html.
-
- RIA Novosti, NATO's missile defense program to be fully
operational in 2018 Rasmussen, 5 October, 2011, accessed in HYPERLINK
"http://en.rian.ru/world/20111005/167417252.html" http://en.rian.ru/world/20111005/167417252.html.
-
- CNN, U.S. scraps missile defense shield plans, September
17, 2009, accessed in HYPERLINK "http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/09/17/united.states.missile.shield/index.html"
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/09/17/united.states.missile.shield/index.html
-
- Kenneth Repoza, Obama's Cold War? Raytheon Missiles
On Russia's Border By 2018, Forbes, September 15, 2011, accessed in HYPERLINK
"http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/09/15/obamas-cold-war-raytheon-missiles-on-russias-border-by-2018/"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/09/15/obamas-cold-war-raytheon-missiles-on-russias-border-by-2018/
-
- Missile Defense Agency, News and Resources various press
releases and program descriptions, accessed in HYPERLINK "http://www.mda.mil/news/news.html"
http://www.mda.mil/news/news.html
-
- Sergey Sargsyan, Turkey in the US Missile Defense System:
Primary Assessment and Possible Prospects, 13 October, 2011, Center for
Political Studies, "Noravank" Foundation, accessed in HYPERLINK
"http://noravank.am/eng/articles/detail.php?ELEMENT_ID=6051"
http://noravank.am/eng/articles/detail.php?ELEMENT_ID=6051
-
- Ibid.
-
- Missile Defense Agency, op. cit.
-
- F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian
Democracy in the New World Order, Wiesbaden, 2010, edition.engdahl, p.
145.
-
- Robert Bowman, cited in F. William Engdahl, op.cit.,
p. 161.
-
- Ibid., p. 162
-
- RIA Novosti, Nato Is Figleaf, November 1, 2011.
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