The End of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) — The Beginning of Madness
By Eric Zuesse
First there was the red-line announcement. On Friday [May 27th] in
Athens there was the cross-hairs statement. By the month of October,
the month before the US presidential election, there will be the trigger
point.
The US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies
are going to war with Russia, accelerating the inevitability that Russia
will strike in self-defence. This is what the first and second
statements by President Vladimir Putin warn. There will be no statement
of warning.
News media in the West treat any such report — that Russia might be
placed into a situation in which a blitz nuclear attack against the
West would (and maybe even will) be Russia’s rational response to
Western operations to surround Russia with hostile forces on its borders
— as if there’s something kooky about any such opinion: they treat it as if the West weren’t ruled by people who are that
evil, as if recognizing such evil in a ruler in the West is to be
prohibited (especially if that ruler is America’s President, instead of,
for example, Turkey’s President, whom apparently one is allowed to
impute to be evil). On the present occasion, however, they should pay
close attention to the situation Helmer describes, and they should
report about the matter, while there might still be time enough to avert
an unimaginable catastrophe, which (as Helmer explains in detail) could
quite possibly happen this year.
The West is in stark reality-denial. Whereas the Cuban Missile
Crisis in 1962, between JFK and Khrushchev, was accompanied by an
appropriate public fear on both sides, the even more dangerous situation this time, between Putin and Obama, elicits such fear only among the Russian people, not at all among Americans and other Westerners.
Mutually Assured Destruction, or M.A.D., isn’t only a reality in a
nuclearly armed multipolar world, but it is also, and equally
importantly, also a mass-psychology, of belief that there cannot
be any winner of a nuclear war — that (especially regarding a nuclear
conflict between the two nuclear superpowers) any nuclear war will
destroy the planet we all share. This sense of a shared fate on both
sides, is central to M.A.D., as what it was — the
foundation-stone of the post-world-war era, the era in which existed the
longest extended period without a global war, since the advent of
global war in 1914.
That era is, tragically, now over.
