By John LaForge

The only winners in the war in Ukraine are weapons manufacturers. This is according to William Hartung and Julia Gledhill for the Quincy Institute in April, Paula Reisdorf writing for CorpWatch in May, Shlomo Ben-Ami for Project Syndicate in September, and Jeremy Scahill for the Intercept in December. The numbers prove it.

Between February and April this year, Hartung and Gledhill note, the US committed to giving approximately $2.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine, bringing the Biden administration spending to more than $3.2 billion and rising, according to Pentagon reports (“How Pentagon Contractors Are Cashing in on the Ukraine Crisis”).

“Weapons companies were already receiving a massive amount of money from the US government before the war in Ukraine began — some $768 billion in 2021. In [May], the US Congress approved a $40 billion spending package for the Ukraine war, with a big chunk going to arms companies,” Reisdorf wrote (“Weapons Makers Profit Handsomely off Ukraine War”). That chunk amounted to $10 billion, with the lion’s share going to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, according to Scahill’s piece, “The War Caucus Always Wins.”

BAE Corp. makes the M-777 howitzer. Lockheed Martin and Raytheon make Javelin anti-tank missiles; Raytheon makes Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Northrop Grumman produces the RQ-4 Global Hawk aircraft which is making surveillance flights over Ukraine.

Scahill reports that some of the latest contracts include: $1.2 billion to Raytheon to produce six National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems in support of the efforts in Ukraine; $431 million for Lockheed to produce M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers to replenish those sent to Kyiv; and a separate $521 million for Lockheed to replace Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems going to Ukraine.

Reisdorf reports that by May Northrop Grumman’s stocks were up by about 16 percent, and shares of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies had increased by 28 and 20 percent respectively by March.

The Wall St. Journal updated the profiteering news November 24, noting that Lockheed shares are up 36 percent since the start of the year, General Dynamics’ are up 22 percent, and Raytheon jumped 12 percent.

Kristen Bayes, a spokesperson for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade in London told Sky News the transfer of weapons to Ukraine is “not problem-free,” and warned, “You might think you’re handing over weapons to people you know and like, but then they get sold on to people you don’t.” Even US Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin, has “acknowledged that some weapons given to Ukraine have also been ending up in the hands of Russians,” Bayes said.

By John LaForge

Is it possible that all the press about the highly elevated the risk of nuclear weapons being detonated in Ukraine is a lot of smoke? US political and military leaders have downplayed the risk of nuclear attacks in Ukraine many times.

The United States, Russia, France, China, and the United Kingdom possess most of the world’s nuclear weapons. Last January 3rd, these five states jointly declared, “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Consequently the five governments should be racing to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and to redirect the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on nuclearism after defunding their vast nuclear weapons infrastructures.

Instead, most are spending enormous sums on expanding their nuclear arsenals, and publicly announcing plans for the “first use” of the devices under certain conditions. The spending and strategies flatly contradict their public pledge that nuclear weapons can’t win anything and must never be used.

Yet it is possible that the military and political authorities in control of nuclear weapons know they must not explode them. It could be that nuclear attack planners understand that the effects of such detonations boomerang and bite back, poisoning and killing their own forces, contaminating the sought-after territories and that of neutral states.

The White House, the Pentagon and other experts have repeatedly assured the world they don’t think nuclear attacks are likely.

November 30:“Why Zelensky thinks Putin won’t use nukes on Ukraine” (Axios)

November 2: “US sees no indications Russia readying nuclear weapons, White House says.” (Reuters)

October 24: “No indication Russia has decided to use nuclear weapon in Ukraine, says senior US official.” (The Guardian & Financial Times)

October 9: “White House Sees No Indication Russia Is Preparing Nuclear Attack After Biden’s ‘Armageddon’ Warning.” (Forbes)
October 9: “…the White House emphasized on Friday that the United States has seen no signs that Russia is gearing up to use nuclear weapons.” (New York Times)

October 9: “Pentagon spokesperson tamps down concerns over nuclear ‘Armageddon.’” (The Guardian)

October 7: “Pentagon: No sign Putin is planning to use nukes after Biden’s ‘Armageddon’ comment.” (Politico)

Sept. 30: “US has not seen acts indicating Russia contemplating nuclear attack.” (Reuters)

Sept. 28:“US believes it’s unlikely Putin will use a nuclear weapon but threat has ‘elevated.’” (CNN)

Sept. 24: “The US says Russia isn’t preparing to use nuclear weapons, yet.” (New York Times)

Sept. 16: “I don’t see Putin using nuclear weapons” [says] British military strategist Sir Lawrence Freedman. (Euromaidan Press)

When asked about it on October 28, 2022 before the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow, even Russian President Vladimir Putin himself made clear that it’s useless to detonate nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Putin answered, “There is no point in that, neither political, nor military.”

The truly terrifying threat from nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war is the risk of an accidental or unintentional detonation. Nearby nuclear weapons are in the hands of Russia, France, Britain, and the United States, which deploy them on submarines, bombers, fighter jets and in “nuclear sharing” with NATO members Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and Turkey — which station US B61 H-bombs at six separate bases. Computer glitches, false alarms, mistakes identifying shooters (as happened November 15 when Ukraine blamed Russia in error for a blast caused by one its own air-defense missiles striking Poland), or panicked commanders misreading communications, could all lead to catastrophe; a good reason to demand universal denuclearization.

The other truly consequential nuclear threats in Ukraine stem from the country’s 15 operational nuclear power reactors, those sitting-duck time bombs in this first-ever reactors-in-a-war zone conflict. These radiation grenades with their pins ready to be pulled should spark global anti-nuclear militancy — as did the Chernobyl reactor catastrophe in the same place 36 years ago.

 

— A version of this opinion ran at Counterpunch.org on November 21, and at L.A. Progressive December 2, 2022

By John LaForge

According to a recent news release from “ResearchandMarkets.com,” worldwide sales of nuclear bombs and missiles is a growth market expanding by leaps and bounds. The report, “Nuclear Bombs and Missiles Market,” claims the field was worth $72.64 billion in 2020, and will reach $126.34 billion by 2030, “growing at a compound annual growth rate of 5.4%.” While the United States “dominated the global nuclear bombs and missiles market share in 2020,” this year the Asia-Pacific dominates, followed by Europe, North America and Latin America, Middle East and Africa. The report reads like the profiteers’ version of recent research by Don’t Bank on the Bomb, a project of PAX in The Netherlands that tracks nuclear weapons funding.
Sounding upbeat, the report says donations to “think tanks” from the weapons industry result in white papers about the urgent need for new weapons. It describes the corruption without irony: “Think tanks are research and analytical bodies that demonstrate future needs and reasons to have nuclear arsenals. … Twelve think tanks across the globe have disclosed funding of [$]5.5 million to [$]10.2 million in 2020 from corporate giants who are manufacturing nuclear weapons.” The cynicism extends to the current war in Ukraine, as the report shamelessly says: “Factors such as the rise in geopolitical conflicts … are expected to support the nuclear bombs and missiles market growth.” “Key market players” named in the document are familiar: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, Airbus, and BAE. — PR Newswire, News from Research and Markets, Sept. 20, 2022

Economic Times, Sept. 12, 2022

By Greg Mello

 

The drums of war are getting louder by the day here in the West, and we should be criticizing them. Joining the shrill voices demonizing Russia has a cowardly ring to it.

The US and its NATO allies are now bombing Russia. Let that sink in. Not every day, but often enough. This, after scuttling peace talks in March. The US and its NATO allies are running a war against Ukrainian provinces with millions of ethnic Russians who look to Russia for protection and safety from years of persecution and mass murder — over 10,000 have died; the usual estimate is 14,000 — by neo-Nazi formations and genocidal national laws that outlaw the Russian language and culture. A US artillery shell was aimed at a busy spot in Donetsk [in late September]. The US and its NATO allies have sunk a Russian warship, aging but still the flagship of its Black Sea fleet…. Let that sink in, so to speak. The US and its NATO allies are shelling the grounds of a large nuclear power complex and have conducted terrorist operations in Russia proper. With NATO training and assistance, Ukraine launched an amphibious operation against a nuclear reactor site [Zaporizhzhia] while International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors were present. Total US aid to Ukraine, in dollars, looks like it exceeds the total military budgets of all but two countries in the world.

This is a major war effort by NATO. It is not defensive. It is not aimed at “protecting Ukraine” or the dragooned, poorly-trained and equipped cannon fodder that Zelensky is sending to be chewed up on the front lines. NATO’s 50-country “Ukraine Defense Contact Group” supplies the arms, Ukraine supplies the bodies.

NATO worked hard to widen the eight-year conflict in Ukraine, building up Ukraine as a kind of “anti-Russia” — a conflict which the Minsk [agreement to end the conflict] guarantor states did nothing to stop, for years. NATO continued to expand — why? Missile launchers were installed a few minutes from Moscow. What did anybody think would happen? Well lots of people, like us, knew more or less exactly what would come of this — war. Western leaders and many NGOs were blinded by chauvinism and group-think. Finally the US neocons, which now control US foreign policy, succeeded in getting the war they have worked toward and have said all along that they wanted.

What Russian President Putin and Defense Minister Shoigu said Sept. 21st [“When the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will use all the means at our disposal to defend Russia and our people…Those who are trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the winds may blow in their direction.”], was nothing more than what is implied, or stated, in Washington, DC every day. Have you been in the conferences when nuclear weapons executives and Air Force generals start spontaneous war whoops at the stirring patriotic videos of the day when US nuclear missiles are finally launched at their targets? The US has made countless nuclear threats, from congressional hearings all the way down to speeches at Chambers of Commerce. Everybody involved in the enterprise understands that if conventional means of deterrence fail, the nuclear triad can and will be used. That’s the nature of the beast,in every country that has these weapons. That’s why nuclear weapons are built.

More specifically, Putin and Shoigu said they were responding to US nuclear threats with their own nuclear deterrence. What happens when or if NATO loses this war? What will NATO do? I have no idea. We have seen plenty of US nuclear threats, including at the UN.

Why was the W76-2 “low-yield” Trident warhead just built and deployed? What is the B61-12 for? People should know that there is now a 24/7 rush to build nuclear weapons here in the US, with plants in Missouri, Texas, and New Mexico among those with regular graveyard shifts. Why do German and Dutch and Italian and Belgian pilots train to drop those tactical weapons? Why were nuclear-capable B-52s just brought to RAF Fairford in the UK? What do you think that was? Fun and games? Where was the outcry then, or now? Why aren’t we all over the enduring problem of US nuclear weapons deployments in Europe, as Europeans were in the 1980s? Or is NATO a “good nuclear alliance?” Where are the nuclear umbrella relationships today? How many, with which countries? It’s a bit one-sided, isn’t it? What about the “missile defense” installations in Poland and Romania? All these are very real nuclear threats.

If you want to oppose nuclear weapons, you have to oppose them in your own country, not join in your country’s propaganda against other countries.

Putin and Shoigu are absolutely right in noting that the objective of the West, since long before the current conflict — and as a cause of it — is to “break” Russia, as the aged [former Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger put it. It’s a real threat, now voiced from many sources in the West, with hundreds of billions of dollars invested in it, and it’s visibly ramping up week by week. You can see the blood lust in the mainstream press. Something has to be done to cool that lust, and in the absence of opposition in the West, we are going to get nuclear warnings from those being targeted.

Russia, like any other country, would not have launched such a high-risk, high-cost operation unless its ruling political elites were sufficiently united in understanding that there was an existential threat to the Russian Federation. If a hostile army — by 2022 the most potent in Europe — was being groomed on the US border, my country would not have waited eight years to act.

The broader point is that nuclear weapons cannot be seen in a narrow silo. For disarmament, peace is needed. You can’t existentially threaten a country from a position of enormous military and hybrid war advantage (NATO spends more on armaments than the entire rest of the world combined, plus all its economic power and soft power), and then expect to have fruitful nuclear disarmament talks. If you threaten any creature and their offspring, or any country, with annihilation — which is what has been going on — you will see teeth and claws.

I would go further to say that what we are seeing is a reawakening of an aggressive form of European colonialism. NATO, which the US leads by the nose, or wallet, is an aggressive alliance that has been bombing here and there for far too long, serving as cover for a US imperial project that is now meeting resistance in Ukraine and many other places. The dying US empire is dangerous, as dying empires always are. When the purpose of NATO was expanded a few years back to include gaining or protecting access to energy resources, it was an important admission.

With the likely annexation of parts of Ukraine — which perhaps should have been done in 2014 — the war there is entering a new phase. Again Russia is drawing a line. “Ukraine” as an independent state ended in the 2014 coup; now it will shrink further, territoriality, from the boundaries that Lenin and others negotiated back in the day.

If the West can stop fanning the flames of war, and shipping more and more weapons into Ukraine, providing targeting services etc., there could be peace. That would be more likely if there was a peace movement.

Europe is now going to be much poorer, permanently, thanks to the war fever that has gripped its elites, which masks growing global energy scarcity.

We need to get our feet on firmer ground and work for peace, not just join the chorus condemning Russia.

Now go back to the beginning. The US and NATO are bombing Russia and sinking Russian ships. Let the implications of that sink in.

— Greg Mello is the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group in Albuquerque, New Mexico.