Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium, and the Netherlands … with more on the way? I wouldn’t put it past Biden to eventually include Ukraine in this list of nuclear armed NATO countries. Because of the nukes, Putin has reason to worry about Ukraine in NATO. He always had reason to worry about Ukraine in NATO. That’s why he promised for over a decade that he wouldn’t tolerate Ukraine as a NATO country (any more than we’d tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba). That’s why he signed the agreement to withdraw all Russian troops from Ukraine if it remained neutral, an agreement nixed by the U.S.

I’ve started reading Annie Jacobsen’s terrifying new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. It seems like a good time to review what many of my generation think we know about the destructiveness of thermonuclear bombs (each typically equivalent to at least 1000 Hiroshima bombs), just one of which (if aimed at, for instance Wasington DC or New York or Moscow) could trigger a civilization-ending nuclear war. As early as the 1950s, thanks to the nuclear spy Klaus Fuchs, the U.S. and Soviet Russia were in an insane arms race to outproduce the other in nuclear bombs, as described by Annie Jacobsen: 

“What came next was a mad, mad rush to stockpile thermonuclear weapons, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands. In 1952 there were 841 nuclear bombs. The next years there were 1169.

[…]

“By 1967, it reached an all-time high of 31,255 bombs. Thirty-one thousand two hundred and fifty-five bombs.

“Why stockpile 1,000 or 18,000 or 31,255 nuclear bombs when a single one of them the size of Ivy Mike [the nickname for the first thermonuclear bomb when it was invented], dropped on New York City or Moscow, could leave some 10 million people dead? Why continue to mass-produce thousands of these weapons when the use of a single thermonuclear bomb will almost certainly ignite a wider, unstoppable, civilization-ending nuclear war?

“A new term was afoot. A figure of speech known as “deterrence.” To keep something from happening. But what does that even mean?”

I suppose the strategy of deterrence is meant to keep us safe and reassure us, but now that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists‘ Doomsday Clock is closer to Doomsday than ever since its creation in 1947, I’m more than ever frightened by Biden’s diplomacy-free warmongering foreign-policy. And you should be too. [Don]

Here’s an article worth reading, followed by the link to Annie Jacobsen’s book on Amazon:

Campaigners Decry ‘Dangerous Escalation’ as NATO Chief Floats Nuclear Deployment

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons said both NATO and Russia must “reverse course” and end their nuclear brinkmanship.

By Jake Johnson
Reprinted under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Nuclear disarmament campaigners on Monday implored NATO and Russia to step back from the brink after the head of the Western military alliance said its members are considering deploying additional atomic weapons to counter Moscow and Beijing.

“This is the dangerous escalation inherent to the deterrence doctrine,” the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) wrote on social media, referring to the notion that the threat of catastrophic nuclear retaliation prevents nations from using atomic weaponry.

The U.S., which spent more on its atomic weapons arsenal than every other nuclear-armed nation combined last year, currently has nukes deployed in five NATO countries—Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Russia, meanwhile, recently deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus, which said earlier this month that it would join Moscow’s nuclear exercises.

ICAN said Monday that “it’s time for both to reverse course.”

“NATO countries hosting U.S. nuclear weapons should admit to their citizens they have weapons of mass destruction on their soil with no public say,” ICAN added. “But neither Belarus nor NATO allies should flaunt being prepared to indiscriminately kill millions of people.”

“The risk of nuclear weapons use, and public attention to this danger, is at an all-time high.”

The group’s warning came after NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told The Telegraph on Sunday that members of the military alliance are in the process of deliberating over “how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored.”

“NATO’s aim is, of course, a world without nuclear weapons, but as long as nuclear weapons exist, we will remain a nuclear alliance, because a world where Russia, China, and North Korea have nuclear weapons, and NATO does not, is a more dangerous world,” Stoltenberg continued.

The NATO chief’s remarks drew a swift response from Moscow. Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for the Kremlin, condemned Stoltenberg’s comments as “nothing else but an escalation” and claimed that whenever Russian President Vladimir Putin “comments on the issue of nuclear arms, he does so taking someone’s questions or questions from reporters, including foreign ones.”

A report published Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found that “nearly all” of the world’s 2,100 deployed nuclear warheads that were “kept in a state of high operational alert” as of January 2024 belonged to the U.S. or Russia.

Separately, ICAN released an analysis Monday showing that the U.S., Russia, and China were the world’s largest spenders on nuclear weapons last year. The U.S. and Russia control about 90% of the world’s arsenal of atomic weapons. According to experts, a nuclear conflict between the two countries would likely kill tens of millions of people within hours and set off a devastating global famine.

“The risk of nuclear weapons use, and public attention to this danger, is at an all-time high,” ICAN’s new report warns. “Explicit and implicit threats to use nuclear weapons, including in the context of ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, combined with the Oppenheimer blockbuster, Fallout TV show (and possible video game reboot), and bestselling book ‘Nuclear War: A Scenario,’ mean the world is talking about the bomb.”

Book: Nuclear War: A Scenario