OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #131, JUNE 21, 2023

 

OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #131, JUNE 21,  2023.

·       Arkansas Resistance to Nuclear War and Global Warming.
OMNI has a table at Farmer’s Market for the next six Saturdays, through July 29, to join our voice with others around the world opposing wars, WWIII, nuclear holocaust, and seeking to contain fossil fuels and rising temperature causing climate change.  

·       Art Hobson, UAF professor, on the danger of nuclear holocaust in the Ukraine War.

·       Wikipedia.  Arkansas’ Betty Bumpers’ Nuclear Peacemaking.

 

“Russia's attack was not ‘unprovoked’ Where will the stalemate end?” 

Art Hobson, ahobson@uark.edu   NWADG, 20 June 2023

     . . . In order to prevent having yet another NATO-armed nation on its border, Russia threatened to invade.  When it became clear that the West would not settle for neutrality and would insist on Ukrainian membership in NATO, Russia invaded.  This was a political mistake and a moral catastrophe, but it was not unprovoked. . . .

                    Meanwhile, Russia will continue destroying Ukraine's infrastructure and economy in order to render it dysfunctional in the future.  The war continues escalating and will probably continue indefinitely. 

          There is what Mearsheimer calls a "nontrivial chance" that Russia will use tactical nuclear weapons either to break the logjam or because it is backed into a corner.  The great paradox is that the more the West does to guarantee Ukraine's victory, the more likely it is that Russia will resort to tactical nuclear weapons.  Russia's reasoning is that Ukraine has no nuclear weapons, so Russia's nuclear use could not be answered in kind by Ukraine. 

          On May 25, Russia announced it is moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, outside the homeland for the first time since 1991.  They could be launched by missiles or dropped from airplanes.  The U.S. has 100 tactical B61 nuclear gravity bombs stored in 5 European nations.  Their variable yield can be set anywhere from 0.3 kilotons (10 times the largest conventional bomb) to 340 kilotons (20 times the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima). 

          If Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons, I hope the Western response will be a military freeze in place and the beginning of serious peace negotiations.  But Biden could instead up the ante by sending NATO troops into the Ukraine War, making it NATO versus Russia. 

          It wouldn't take much for this to escalate into an all-out strategic nuclear war.  As I have described in several previous op-eds, this would doom Europe, America, Russia, and perhaps civilization.  The living will envy the dead. 

          America must awaken to the dark situation we helped create.  We must stop giving Ukraine unlimited assistance and press it to engage Russia in serious negotiations.

 

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References: 

1.  History of NATO expansion including Kennan's statement:  Article by the renowned Jeffrey Sachs (see his bio at the end of the article), https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/the-war-in-ukraine-was-provoked-and-why-that-matters-if-we-want-peace. 

2. Comments by John Meersheimer:  Excellent interveiw with him at https://youtu.be/HBiV1h7Dm5E.  I highly recommend this interview, you only have to listen to the first 60%, about Ukraine. 

3.  Russian and U.S. nuclear weapons in Belarus and Europe:  A simple web search on "US B61 bomb," and "Russia sends nuclear weapons to Belarus" will verify these facts.   The story about Russia's nukes in Belarus was also in the NWADG on 10 June 2023, page 8.

 Attachments area

Preview YouTube video John Mearsheimer: The West is playing Russian roulette

 Arkansas’ Betty Bumpers and Peace Links (from Wikipedia)

A 1981 conversation with her college-student daughter Brooke inspired Bumpers to become a peace activist, focused on ending the nuclear weapons race.^[3] While driving together to Washington, D.C., they crossed the Clinch River, the namesake of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project, leading Brooke to ask her mother what the family would do in a nuclear war or the aftermath of a nuclear disaster.^[9] Bumpers' light-hearted response of "Well, honey, I guess we’d just go back to Arkansas" did not silence her daughter, who responded "Don’t be so stupid, Mother," and asked what would happen if Arkansas was destroyed.^[9] The realization her daughter considered nuclear war to be a real threat to her future motivated Bumpers to start a campaign for peace.^[9][12]

After discussing the matter with her fellow Senate wives and other like-minded women in Washington, Bumpers decided to work to bring mainstream American women into the campaign for a nuclear weapons freeze, building on her earlier experience with grassroots volunteer activism.^[3] She started the organization Peace Links in Little Rock in 1982, Peace Links worked with established women's groups such as garden clubs, parent teacher associations, and church organizations to educate women about the consequences of the nuclear arms race and to engage them in campaigning for world peace.^[9][12][13] Within a short time, Peace Links expanded beyond Arkansas and counted some 30,000 members around the United States.^[3][9] It operated as a national organization for nearly 20 years, disbanding in 2001 after the end of the Cold War.^[3][9]

[But the Cold War was neither cold nor ended, and we should learn from our nuclear peacemakers, US and Soviet women who created links.--Dick]