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- Boris Yeltsin flaunts Russia's nuclear arsenal while
visiting Communist China's rulers in Beijing. What's really going on? The
answers range from sobering to downright scary.
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- The picture being carried out
of Beijing by international
television coverage shows a seemingly
out-of-control Russian president.
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- One moment he is displayed
barely being able to stagger,
stand or sit.
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- The next, he is furiously
brandishing his nation's still-mighty
nuclear weapons at the United
States.
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- "Clinton permitted himself to put pressure on Russia,"
Yeltsin stormed on Thursday.
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- "He has forgotten Russia has a full arsenal of
nuclear
weapons. He has forgotten about that. Therefore he decided to
play with
his muscles, as they say."
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- From Washington, Clinton tried
to one-up him: "I
haven't forgotten that. You know, I didn't think
he'd forgotten America
was a great power when he disagreed with what I
did in Kosovo."
-
- In a remark that got lost in the crossfire, Prime
Minister
Vladimir Putin tried to calm the rough water of discourse,
saying he felt
sure neither president wanted to harm ties.
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- That's on the
surface. What's going on beneath is even
more disturbing:
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- Yeltsin is outraged
that President Clinton would have
the temerity to lecture him, as he
indeed did this week, about waging war
against Islamic rebels in
Chechnya.
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That's Russia's internal business and none of Clinton's,
Yeltsin
bristles, and he seems to have the military and much of his own
people
with him on that.
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- Clinton's admonitions about Chechnya and his own military
intervention via NATO in the civil war in Yugoslavia are, to Yeltsin, all
part of a menacing new United States policy of involvement beyond its own
traditional spheres of legitimate interest.
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- Russia's war in Chechnya is
drawing increasing criticism
in the international community. That
presents major problems for Yeltsin
and he resents it deeply.
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- Already, the
European Union is talking of imposing sanctions
on Russia, which needs
every scrap of trade to keep its foundering economy
from
sinking.
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-
Resentment about Chechnya is prompting pressure within
Congress to cut
off U.S. financial assistance to Russia, another crusher
for
Yeltsin.
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There are growing concerns among Yeltsin's political
opponents that he
may have sown the dragon's teeth in Chechnya that will
produce a
monster problem for Russia among the millions of resentful Muslims
within its borders and in neighboring states.
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- Agence France Presse reports
that a possible presidential
candidate challenging the Yeltsin faction
in next year's election, Konstantin
Titov, warned: "Will we not
then get from the Chechen people a new
messiah like Iran once got
Ayatollah Khomeini, a spiritual leader in exile."
Khomeini
returned from exile and installed an Islamic republic in that
Persian
Gulf state.
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- Against that background, Yeltsin went to Beijing, the
one
world capital where he knew he would find a warm welcome.
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- Communist China is
the only major nation to support
Yeltsin's war in Chechnya, and he got
it again, on the record, as soon
as he arrived in Beijing.
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- China's President
Jiang "completely understood
and fully supported Russia's actions
in combating terrorism and extremism
in Chechnya," Russian Foreign
Minister Igor Ivanov said.
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- With that kind of support, Yeltsin felt free to rattle
his nuclear missiles at the U.S., but that raised the question of just
how battle-ready they are.
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- Colonel-General Vladimir Yakovlev, who commands
Russia's
nuclear forces, said his atomic weapons are fully Y2K-ready.
He "guaranteed
" no accidental launches because its command
system is "impregnable
for any kind of intrusion."
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- But a Russian
magazine announced it had purchased top-secret
documents that indicate
just the opposite - a "horrifying" danger
that Russia's
Strategic Missile Troops will experience a millennium computer
failure.
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The Chinese don't seem to have any doubts about their
ability to wage,
or withstand, nuclear war. They've been on a roll.
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- In recent weeks, they have
staked out two new bases
along their coast for enough new-model
missiles to take out Taiwan.
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- They are building a new type of submarine capable of
launching missiles to land in any city within the U.S.
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- China's latest missiles are
equipped with warheads and
guidance systems based on top-secret
technology stolen from the U.S. -
and aimed right back at it.
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- The Institute for
Foreign Policy Analysis says China
already has 300 nuclear warheads and
expects 1,000 to 1,500 by 2025, roughly
the number the U.S. and Russia
would have.
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- The Chinese People's Liberation Army boasts its
strategic-missiles
corps is now able to hit targets with 100-percent
precision at any time,
under all climatic conditions.
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- This is no accident.
Through purchases of the latest
high-performance computers from the
U.S., China is able to guide even its
intercontinental ballistic
missiles with pinpoint accuracy.
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- At the same time, China has
been perfecting its ability
to endure a nuclear attack on its own
military and civilian targets.
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- According to the American Foreign Policy Council's
China
Reform Monitor, the PLA General Staff announced major
breakthroughs in
building elaborate defensive shelters - an underground
"Great Wall"
to enable China to survive a nuclear exchange
just as its ancient above-ground
Great Wall saved it from invading
Mongol armies.
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- There is increasing evidence of joint Chinese-Russian
military
operations and little doubt both countries will use Yeltsin's
visit to
Beijing to forge even closer military ties.
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- The upshot of all that is what
the world saw on television
was far more than an ailing, failing,
doddering old man venting his spleen.
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- Those grim developments off
camera are the real story
behind "Boris Yeltsin Goes to
Beijing."
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- They call up somber memories of a time when Communist
China and
the Soviet Union were allied militarily against the Free World,
and it
had good reason to be scared stiff.
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- http://www.newsmax.com
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