The ouster of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House may bring the Ukraine-Russia war to an inglorious (for the U.S. and NATO) end. From Gilbert Doctorow at gilbertdoctorow.substack.com:
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was the most widely known and discussed ‘near miss’ which the world had with a nuclear war in the 20th century. At its peaceful conclusion, several safeguard procedures, or as we now call them, “guard rails,” were put in place to ensure that the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for control of human destiny would not suddenly escalate to a hot war. A “red line” telephone was set up to ensure that the heads of state could contact one another in case actions of one or the other side could be misconstrued as a nuclear attack. This was famously mocked in the anti-war movie Dr. Strangelove.
Decade by decade, during the last century other procedural safeguards came in the form of treaties on arms limitations and then on reduction of nuclear arsenals, with on-site inspections, all with the intent of raising trust between the two hostile and suspicious sides.
Nonetheless, there were several occasions when it was only the cool head of an officer with power to launch missiles, whether Russian or American, that prevented false radar readings on missile activity of the other side to result in a “preventive” strike, applying the principle of “use them or lose them” with respect to the arsenal under his control. That we made it through the 20th century unscathed may well be considered as “dumb luck” as they say in American English, or “miraculous,” as people with faith in God would say.
In this context, I contend that what happened in the U.S. Congress yesterday was an act of divine intervention to save us from ourselves. The thirty minutes warning time before an incoming ICBM hits or an hours long warning time before a nuclear armed bomber would reach target, as in the case of Dr Strangelove, is a luxury that no longer exists. The existence of nuclear armed intermediate range U.S. missiles at Russia’s borders and hypersonic Russian missiles housed on small surface vessels or submarines in international waters off the shores of the United States, means that the warning time has been cut to five or ten minutes, which is to say, there is no longer a buffer against false alarms and automated launches. If the United States were to continue its escalation policy in Ukraine, aided and abetted by the British and the Germans, with their own newly announced plans for introducing Typhoon jets or TAURUS missiles into the war in Ukraine, then we would have hardly a chance of averting a shift by NATO or by Russia to tactical and then to strategic nuclear weapons, meaning the end of civilization on earth.
