Full Speed Ahead on the Global Titanic - TomDispatch.com

Full Speed Ahead on the Global Titanic - TomDispatch.com Tom writes: Norman Solomon, Everything at Risk Posted on February 8, 2024 Consider this strange: Seventy-eight years after the first and only nuclear weapons were used on Planet Earth, anyone with half a brain knows that a nuclear war would be an incomparable disaster for this planet and everyone living on it. So, remind me, why the endless nuclear pantomime? Why, as last year wound down, for instance, did the U.S. decide to station some weapons from its nuclear arsenal in England — ones three times as powerful as the two atomic bombs it dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II — after an absence of 15 years? (If you didn’t even know this was happening, that’s because it’s barely been mentioned in the American media, though Russia’s Tass angrily denounced it and threatened an escalatory response.) This was undoubtedly passed off as a move to protect the United Kingdom and other European countries from a post-Ukraine attempt by Vladimir Putin to conquer the rest of Europe, nuclear attacks included, right? Now, mind you, even if you assume Putin is truly a madman and would launch nuclear strikes against Europe, what use would American nukes be in England when Washington could reach Russia with its vast nuclear arsenal from the U.S. or its nuclear subs patrolling the planet? No need to put them in Britain anyway, since that country already has nukes. It was the third nuclear power ever and still has a “nuclear deterrent” fitted out on submarines, at least one of which is at sea at any moment. So why is Washington upping the ante in such an obviously symbolic, yet all too real way? And why up that particular ante when even a relatively “modest” nuclear exchange could easily lead to the destruction of life as we’ve known it on Planet Earth? In that grim context, let TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon, author most recently of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, explain just what it means to “modernize” your nuclear arsenal. Of course, given weaponry that could rob us of any future, the very act of modernization is undoubtedly also one of all too human madness. Tom Full Speed Ahead on the Global Titanic Going Along with the Utter Madness of Nuclear Weapons By Norman Solomon Yes, the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking -- it's now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists -- but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century’s many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras. Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew the United States from vital pacts between the U.S. and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, shutting down the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Open Skies, and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. And despite promising otherwise, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden did nothing to revive them. Click here to read more of this dispatch. https://tomdispatch.com/full-speed-ahead-on-the-global-titanic/#more