Since October 1962, the spectre of Nuclear War and the resulting extinction of most life on Mother Earth has never been more pronounced than today. The US-directed proxy war targeting Russia is the primary fuse burning toward the end of all things, with the US backing for Israel’s genocidal Middle East actions close behind, followed by its aggressive provocations of China. Given the precipice all life is on the edge of, the following is another level of the unthinkable being assembled that must be seen, challenged, and stopped. The Headline is my summary [emphasis added]:
Speaking at a Symposium in 1980 on Some Medical Causes and Consequences of Nuclear War: How Physicians Might Help to Prevent Nuclear War, John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D. noted the operative meaning of first-strike:
There are numerous factors taken into account by the planners for nuclear war, especially those working for a first-strike capability. I remind you that first-strike does not mean the ability to attack and receive no damage in return; it means the ability to attack and receive only “acceptable damage” in return. In evaluating “acceptable damage”, nuclear-war strategists consider economic recovery potential, capital equipment destruction, numbers of acute megadeaths, and other factors.
In 2023, Steven Starr was a guest on Hrvoje Morić’s Geopolitics and Empire with the focus being, We Are Already In World War III. Starr detailed how people in the White House like Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan “seem convinced that they can threaten Russia and Russia will back down. I think if they have in the back of their minds this basically false information that they can win a nuclear war with the first strike, then we’re really in trouble...” Citing Greg Mellow (who runs the Los Alamo Study Group [see We Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production]), Starr said, “he knew people that knew the people that make the decisions. And he said, No, they’ve rejected the idea of nuclear winter. They think it’s bad science. So that’s where we are. We have at least US leadership that does not believe in the peer reviewed forecasts of the long-term environmental destruction of the planet from nuclear war.”
In First Strike Capability: “The Power Disease” Dr. Gofman summarized circa 1980, the vital necessity to stop all efforts to develop first-strike force final solutions:
Even if you made an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons, but you left established power structure in the US and the USSR, they’d go on to research mind control or some chemical or biological thing. My view is, there exists a group of people in the world that have a disease. I call it the “power disease.” They want to rule and control other people. They are a more important plague than cancer, pneumonia, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and heart disease put together. They can only think how to obliterate, control, and use each other. They use people as nothing more than instruments to cast aside when they don’t need them any more....
In my opinion, what we need is to move toward being nauseated by people who want to be at the top, in power. Can you think of anything more ridiculous than that the Chinese, Russian, and American people let their governments play with superlethal toys and subject all of us to these hazards? The solution is not to replace one leader with another or to have more government. Society has to reorganize itself. The structure we have now is, the sicker you are socially, the more likely it is that you’ll come out at the top of the heap.
Nuclear weapons and nuclear power are simply two sides of the same coin. At a 28 March 1979 rally in Washington D.C. to Stop Nuclear Power, Dick Gregory summed up the imperative [recording] we must all answer the call to:
What we’re doing here today is more important than the Vietnamese war, it’s more important than dealing with racism, than dealing with sexism, than dealing with hunger. Because I can feel hunger. I can see war. I can feel racism. I can feel sexism. I cannot see radiation. I cannot smell radiation. I cannot hear radiation. I look around one day and I am dead. Somewhere, you have to.
So I say to you today, when you leave here, you have to give radiation an odor. You have to give radiation a sound. So go back into your communities. And be willing to go to jail if it comes to that. Because I’d rather see you in jail with the jails filled up, than the graveyards running over.
Addressing the UN in 1961, President Kennedy warned, “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” USG projects such as modeling the effects of nuclear war on agricultural systems, are neither accidental nor miscalculations. They are death-wish-madness beyond comprehension by the majority of our species seeking to live in peace and thrive through mutual cooperation and right relationship.
To respond to the life-annihilating, expanding madness requires exercising our birthright intelligence with clarity and coherence; it requires homework.
As it is, we find ourselves alive in the twilight era of rule of the corporate class, stretching back to the post-Civil War era. Richard Grossman termed corporations, subordinate legal fictions. In 2002 he wrote:
The rise of northern industrialists after the Civil War brought the end of slave master rule and the beginning of rule by corporate kings. As happened after the Revolution had been won, Southern and Northern men of property again united. They wrote slavery out of the Constitution with the “Civil War Amendments,”[7] and wrote corporations in. Industrialists then used government to defeat organized resistance by women, former slaves, farmers, workers and small businessmen seeking to reconstruct the nation as a democracy based on free labor and equal rights. They did the same to Native peoples seeking to preserve their independence.
That just plain people know nothing about the scourge of unconscionable global annihilation scenarios, planned and directed by USG officials, is a RED ALERT indicator of just how far corporate state-directed control of information and censorship has gone.
On July 9, Mike Benz summarized his read of understanding on the early 2017 formation of the US censorship industry, including referring to Google as, “our US national champion in the IT sector.”
On September 10, Robert Epstein reviewed his decades-long extensive research into manipulation of information by tech companies, particularly Google, and its implications for democracy. An aspect of this manipulation includes the heretofore unimagined suppression of the free exchange of ideas as well as corporate state-directed propaganda and censorship. As he explains one aspect of this work:
I’ve made at least 10 major discoveries about new forms of influence that the internet has made possible. These are controlled almost entirely by a couple of big tech companies affecting more than five billion people around the world every single day. I’ve discovered them. I’ve named them. I’ve quantified them. I’ve published randomized controlled studies to show how they work. Published them in peer-reviewed journals. We just had another paper accepted yesterday.
A central aspect of our homework is apprehending how this life-negating system operates so that it becomes possible to “share this flashlight” with others to illuminate what is being done In Our Name without any knowledge being received or consent being given by We The People. If left in the dark, this untenable situation will in the end lead to catastrophic cessation of Mother Earth’s ability to nurture and support corporeal life.
Opening minds to life-affirming change-course-pathways can be expanded by perspectives such as those presented by E. Martin Schotz, including Applying ‘The Great Rule’ in International Relations and Partners in Survival: Reviving the “McCloy-Zorin Agreement”.
Applying “The Great Rule” reflects back to 1963:
When I think about the process by which nuclear disarmament and conventional disarmament can be addressed, I think of President John F. Kennedy’s American University Speech of June 10, 1963. It isn’t perfect. There are things in it that are not true. But nevertheless, it reveals principles for making peace that are timeless and that we ignore at our peril. I urge my reader to go back to this speech and extract from it the principles that are relevant to today.
Partners in Survival’s focus covers the critical necessity of achieving General Disarmament which must include both nuclear and conventional weapons. For our Species Survival, moving toward peace and genuine international cooperation requires that people in the US must abandon the US American Exceptionalism mindset.
While we may feel the above goals are not possible and that humanity is doomed to follow the supposedly singular path that has led to this moment, there are sources to dispel this mindset. David Wengrow and Davie Graeber present an extraordinary analysis in their 2021 book, The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity. This book signals a paradigm shift, profoundly transforming our understanding of the human past and making space to imagine new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. It is a monumental work of formidable intellectual and political range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and hopefulness. One small example (the book is 704 pages) is the section on the Indus Civilization, describing the first urban culture in South Asia more than 4,000 years ago: “Here we will find further evidence that Bronze Age cities – the world’s first large-scale, planned human settlements – could emerge in the absence of ruling classes and managerial elites...”