In the interest of making genuine news available to anyone who wants it, I came across this article a short time ago and have decided to link it here. It’s not so much that I believe every word that Putin says, so much as I despise censorship and I haven’t seen this stuff anywhere locally.
The upshot: the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia is accelerating and the prospects for reducing it are grim. The transcript of Valdamir Putin’s interview is there, and it hasn’t appeared anywhere in the main stream media that I can determine (though a couple of nifty articles about how Russia is "planning to aim nuclear missiles at Europe" have been widely distributed.) I’m not here to analyze the contents, but you should read it and decide for yourself how close we are to actually seeing WWIII (in the now-oldskool MAD sense) in the next few years (maybe months, who the heck knows anymore?) Matt Savinar did post a fair analysis of his own here, and while he may sound alarmist to some, I don’t think alarm is unwarranted.
When I was a kid, maybe 9 years old, I sat and watched a movie with my parents one summer night. The name of the movie was "On the Beach," which was more or less based on the book of the same name written by Nevil Shute. The premise is grim: a full frontal nuclear exchange between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. wipes out the northern hemisphere and the fallout from all the weapons used wipes out all life on the planet. The book takes place in Australia and while everyone there is going about their daily lives, they’re really just waiting to die as the fallout clouds travel south.
Shute’s weapons were juiced up for the book, laced with cobalt to produce higher-than usual fallout content, which doesn’t work in real life. The point was that WWIII = the Death of Planet Earth. Even if the science was wrong, the image worked to communicate the message behind the words. And it was an image that most people involved in the arms race between us the the Russian subscribed to or at least had in the back of their minds when their words "nuclear war" came to mind. God knows that’s how we civvies thought of it.
Clearly that image is gone from the minds of those who hold the power these days. At any rate they are gone from the minds of those Americans currently running the show. And to my mind, that can’t be good for anyone, because if twentieth century history tell us anything it tells us that you can’t bully Russia. Stalin purged 30 million of his own people to satisfy his paranoid fantasies of assassination and later, his visions of an imminent invasion by Japan. Putin, an ex-KGB guy, has eradicated entire towns in Chechnya in the name of counter-terrorism. In the past we could trade with them, bribe them, and refuse to help at all if we thought we had nothing to gain, but we never actually bullied them. (I realize that putting our defenses on high alert after they’d done the same is something else.) The Russians are the ones who absorbed the bulk of battlefield deaths in WWII and kept on going despite shortages of literally everything, including hope. They are obstinate, observant, and fatalistic. Point a knife at one and he’ll laugh at you because he knows that even if you kill him, a half dozen of his friends will find you and kill you in return. Point 3,000 nuclear missiles at them and they’ll do whatever they think they have to just to make sure you don’t get to go the funeral. (I admit being married into a Russian family by way of my sister-in-law might be coloring my views.)
Anyway, read the transcript, maybe spare a few minutes to wonder what comes next, and perhaps take a few precautions and make a few plans. (I did.)
But if the world does not blow up in the near future, I’ll be starting as the new Tech Services Librarian at Metropolitan College of NY on Monday. Wish me luck!