Wow! Weren’t you blown out of your tree by the report in WND this week of the cooperative deployment in the former Soviet Union of Russian and U.S. nukes?
Presidents Bush and Putin agreed days after Sept. 11 to the deployment of U.S. tactical nukes at former Soviet bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – which border Afghanistan – and to Russian deployment of Russian tactical nukes near the Republic of Chechnya.
The “official” rationale for this almost unbelievable U.S.-Russian cooperative deployment is for us to be ready to counter any “weapons-of-mass-destruction” attack, made by Osama bin Laden and his followers not just in Afghanistan and Chechnya, but on anyone, anywhere in the world!
As you know, bin Laden does not now have any weapons of mass destruction. In fact, about the only weapons the followers of bin Laden are known to have in Afghanistan are assault rifles and cheap, shoulder-mounted, heat-seeking, anti-aircraft missiles. Elsewhere, the only other weapons of mass destruction bin Laden is known to have are barrels of fertilizer and cardboard box-cutters.
So, if Disney World gets nuked, who are we going to nuke?
Well, we’re deployed at former Soviet bases, but there are certainly no targets in Afghanistan worth a nuke. In any case, we could more easily have deployed – without asking Putin’s consent – our tactical nukes on the U.S. aircraft carriers, guided missile cruisers and submarines now off the coast of Pakistan, where there are targets worth a nuke.
So what are Bush and Putin up to?
Apparently, they are announcing to the world that there has now occurred a truly historic global realignment of power, a new “correlation of forces.”
Bush and President Putin had already agreed – at least in principle – to cooperatively develop a global defense against strategic nukes delivered by ballistic missile. In the 21st century, there will be no more Mutual Assured Destruction. Neither the United States nor our allies will remain deliberately defenseless against attack by nuke-tipped ICBMs. The United States and Russia now intend to keep just enough strategic nukes to deter attack and to cooperatively assure the destruction of any nation-state which intentionally launches nuke-tipped ICBMs at any other nation-state, anywhere in the world.
As for tactical nukes, when Bush, the elder, was president, we and the Russians essentially unilaterally decided to get rid of almost all the tens of thousands of tactical – or battlefield – nukes. These nukes had been designed to be used in a NATO-Warsaw Pact mother-of-all tank battles in the Fulda Gap of Central Europe.
But, in 1989, the Soviets withdrew their tanks from Afghanistan, where they had gone to support a communist regime. The Warsaw Pact also collapsed. Next year came the Gulf War – where the mother-of-all tank battles actually occurred. But tactical nukes that had been designed for just such a battle, were not used. Finally, in 1991, the Soviet Union, itself, disintegrated.
NATO still survived, but Russian armies were now separated from NATO armies by half-a-dozen former Warsaw Pact nation-states. So Russia began to get rid of all those tactical nukes. Senators Nunn, Lugar, Domenici and others immediately realized that tactical nukes were exactly what terrorists and rogue states wanted. So, within weeks of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Senate authorized Bush, the elder, to provide such financial and technical assistance as the Russians would accept to help keep Soviet nukes from getting loose. President Bush also withdrew all our deployed tactical nukes – overseas and at sea – and began to get rid of most of them.
It needs to be emphasized over and over that the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici programs were never intended to be disarmament programs. Nor did Bush, the elder, intend for the United States to disarm.
Unfortunately, Bush, the elder, was not re-elected and the Clinton-Gore administration seized on the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici programs as levers to force both Russian and U.S. nuke disarmament. And, as if that wasn’t enough, Clinton-Gore began to push the boundaries of NATO eastward, in an apparent attempt to accomplish what neither Hitler nor Napoleon could. Clinton-Gore also bashed the Russians for their efforts to suppress Islamic terrorist activities in Chechnya, and essentially took the side of other Islamic terrorists in Kosovo.
So, what did the Russians do in reaction to Clinton-Gore? They reconsidered their decision to get rid of all their tactical nukes. In fact, they decided – as have Bush-Cheney – that a new class of mini-nukes was needed.
Actually, it is remarkable how similar the Bush and Putin views are on nukes. They both intend to keep only the nukes needed for defense. Unlike Clinton-Gore, they do not seek to disarm themselves or anyone else. If – for example – the Pakistanis and the Indians wish to keep their strategic nuke forces as deterrents, that’s their business. But they have to understand that once we and the Russians get our global ICBM launch-detection and umbrella ABM system in place, if either the Pakistanis or the Indians launch nuke-tipped ICBMs at each other, we’ll first knock down as many of them as we can, and then we’ll probably take out the remaining nuke infrastructure.
So much for strategic nukes. How about tactical nukes?
That’s the mind-blowing part. Bush and Putin have just put certain nation-states on notice that if they can’t – or won’t – prevent their nukes from getting loose, we’ll do it for them. If terrorists detonate a nuke near the White House or the Kremlin, our nuke-weapon scientists can, from a rad-chem analysis of the fission products, tell you almost in real time how the nuke was made and who made it.
So, if it turns out to be a Pakistani nuke, then the message seems to be that Islam can kiss their remaining Islamic bombs and infrastructure “goodbye.”
