Professor Explains How US Policy in Ukraine is Bringing us Closer to Nuclear War
Sociology Professor John Bellamy Foster is doing important work to highlight how close we are once again swerving towards the destruction of organized human life, via nuclear war.
Sociology Professor John Bellamy Foster is doing important work to highlight how close we are once again swerving towards the destruction of organized human life, via nuclear war. In an essay for The Monthly Review and an interview with Breakthrough News, Dr. Foster gives essential context to the dangerous moves being made by the United States right now in its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, context that is occluded by the mainstream press.
With the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991, the nuclear threat that had loomed over the post-Second World War world seemed to subside. Consequently, most subsequent considerations of Thompson’s exterminism thesis have considered it primarily in the context of the planetary ecological crisis, itself a source of “the extermination of multitudes.”5 But the advent over the last decade of the New Cold War has brought the threat of nuclear holocaust back into the center of world concerns. The 2022 Ukraine War, the origins of which date back to the 2014 U.S.-engineered Maidan coup and the resulting Ukrainian Civil War fought between Kyiv and the breakaway republics of the Russian-speaking Donbass region in Ukraine, has now evolved into a full-scale war between Moscow and Kyiv. This took on an ominous worldwide significance on February 27, 2022, with Russia, three days into its military offensive in Ukraine, placing its nuclear forces on high alert as a warning against a direct NATO intervention in the war, non-nuclear or nuclear.6 The potential for a global thermonuclear war between the leading nuclear powers is now greater than at any time in the post-Cold War world.
As the most respected newspapers in the English language push the irresponsible, suicidal, and counterfactual notion that the United States could “win” a nuclear war, and also that we should engage in war with not just one but two nuclear powers, Russia and China, Dr. Foster's essay presents concepts like Nuclear Winter, and exterminism that are important for all of us to understand.
He also details the terrifying and undemocratic policy shift of the U.S. in the past three decades from mutually assured destruction serving as a deterrence to the even more mad counterforce and nuclear primacy values, that hold that the United States could and should seek to strike other nations first with nuclear bombs, because we could take out their arsenal before they strike back. Our involvement in Ukraine, from backing a coup there eight years ago to sending their people to die in a war against Russia right now, is a key component of our nuclear primacy and counterforce strategies of delusion.
The United States has already used NATO to surround Russia with nuclear weapons that are so close that Russia would not have time to defend itself should the U.S. and NATO strike first. The U.S. now wants to put such weapons in Ukraine, right on Russia’s border, presenting an existential threat to a country which has been under constant threat of invasion for the two centuries.
Read Dr. Foster’s essay and watch his interview, and get a better appreciation for the United States’ primary role in causing the war in Ukraine, as well as for how this war of our own making is bringing us closer to nuclear annihilation.