Commentary by John LaForge
NATO’s standing threat to attack Russia with nuclear weapons is put on parade every autumn. This year’s thermonuclear dry run — dubbed Steadfast Noon — got started October 13 according to NATO’s press office and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, or SHAPE, in Mons, Belgium.
NATO’s euphemism for its yearly doomsday rehearsal is “exercise,” and this year’s dress Armageddon included warplanes from fourteen of NATO’s 32 states, 71 aircraft (11 more than last year), and 2,000 military personnel.
In the words of NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte, the run-through is “to make sure that our nuclear deterrent remains as credible … and as effective as possible.” Translation: We’re testing our readiness to commit mass destruction.
Photo: zuercher-presse.com.
NATO’s Oct. 13 announcement had more gibberish: “Service members will rehearse the procedures related to the deployment of dual-capable [nuclear & non-nuclear] aircraft and the employment of conventional support assets in nuclear operations, ensuring all participating forces can coordinate effectively in a nuclear scenario.” Translation: We’re going to prepare for war using thermonuclear blasts, firestorms, and radiation.
Col. Daniel Bunch, Chief of Nuclear Operations at SHAPE, said to the press: “There is focus in … getting the strikes planned, … getting … all of those elements synchronized to deliver…” Translation: Steadfast Noon’s purpose is to plan a complex, coordinated radioactive mass attack.
As if to put readers at ease, NATO said, “No live nuclear weapons will be used.” Evidently only dummies would be in the fighter jets.
The nuclear attack drill took place at Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands, Lakenheath base in
England, Kleine-Brogel in Belgium, and Skrydstrup in Denmark, while Finland, Poland, the U.S., Germany, and others also dressed up as executioners.
The Netherlands Air Force recently debuted its newly purchased F-35A jet fighter-bombers which have been “certified” to carry the new U.S. B61-12 air-dropped H-bombs, which have reportedly now been stationed in Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, England, and Germany.
NATO’s annual exercise includes the use of non-nuclear aircraft, like surveillance planes, reconnaissance planes, refueling planes (for the long haul to Moscow), and giant KC-135 Stratotankers, all of which, according to NATO, “serve in a conventional support to nuclear operations.” Translation: “Nuclear operations” means attacking with uncontrollable, indiscriminate, poisoned warheads.
NATO’s inclusion of non-nuclear “support” personnel means the whole Air Force can share the ethical burden of risking the obliteration of civilization, so it isn’t carried only by the trigger men and pilots.
Is the planning and preparing of nuclear attacks sane, or is it suicidal ideation and madness?
No less an authority than Gen. George L. Butler (USAF Ret.), a former head of Strategic Air Command — which controls all U.S. nuclear weapons — has condemned all such nuclear attack preparedness, which he himself molded and rehearsed for years. Gen. Butler is the first SAC commander to reject and abandon nuclear “deterrence” — in dozens of speeches, articles, and a memoir Uncommon Cause — and to call for abolition.
Lambasting “the obscene power of a single nuclear weapon,” Gen. Butler wrote in the Fall 1996 and Spring 1999 journal of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation that the military’s nuclear attack plans are “a pernicious anachronism.”
Gen. Butler wrote, “Nuclear weapons are not weapons at all. They are insanely destructive agents of physical and genetic terror… They’re some species of biological time bombs whose effects transcend time and space, poisoning the Earth and its inhabitants for generations to come.”
NATO’s ceaseless nuclear attack threats were on parade in Europe, and its ring leaders talk as if they are rational. Gen. Butler, who is one of dozens of retired nuclear war planners who disagree, says, “Deterrence suspended rational thinking in the Nuclear Age.”
The commander denounced deterrence, in theory and practice, using words that could still stir desertion or mutiny among the nuclearists: “The likely consequences of nuclear war have no politically, militarily, or morally acceptable justification, and therefore the threat to use nuclear weapons is indefensible.”
