Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who never engages in idle speculation or hyperbole, dropped a bombshell when he announced that Russia is in the process of revising its nuclear doctrine. Lavrov, whose stature as a senior statesman is such that he is often referred to as the “grown up in the room,” compared US leaders to kids playing with matches. “They are playing with fire,” he said.
For many years, it was Russian policy that Moscow would never engage in the first use of nuclear weapons. Evidently the doctrine is now being revised to allow for first use under extraordinary circumstances, should the Kremlin become convinced that its principal adversary i.e., the US (or NATO), is preparing to launch a decapitating nuclear first strike on Russia. Prolonged incredibly stupid and reckless US behavior in Ukraine and elsewhere surely accounts for the policy change, but is not the only factor as I will attempt to show.
Nuclear war may not be winnable, but the slim chance for survival definitely favors the side that strikes first.
Although the change in doctrine has been brewing for years, the last straw may have been the attack last May by US proxies in Ukraine on two Russian strategic radar sites. On May 22, Ukrainian long-range drones struck a twin pair of Russian strategic radars at Armavir, located near the Black Sea, in Russia’s Krasnodar region. Several days later, the same proxies attacked a second radar site at Orsk, located a thousand miles to the east, near the border with Kazakhstan.
With these attacks, the two ongoing world crises, one in Ukraine, the other in the Mideast, began to merge into a single world enveloping maelstrom…
Although a subsequent photo of the Armavir facility shows substantial damage, fortunately for Russia, the attack on the much more distant Orsk facility may have failed, according to MIT expert Ted Postol.
Because neither of the Russian radar sites has relevance to the ongoing Ukraine war, the drone attacks raise a swarm of troubling questions. There was no military benefit to Ukraine by attacking them. The Russian strategic radars do not rotate. They are fixed and uni-directional, providing no coverage of the battlefields in eastern and northern Ukraine, nor of the recent incursion in Kursk. An attached graphic map labeled in Cyrillic shows the geographic coverage for each of Russia’s ten strategic radar sites. (The Armavir facility is designated as APMABNP and the Orsk facility as OPCK.) As the geographic wedges plainly show, the view sheds of both radars are well to the south and east of Ukraine. Assuming the damaged Armavir radars are still out of service and undergoing repair, the yellow-colored area on the map indicates that Mother Russia is currently blind in the direction of the Mideast, hence, is vulnerable to a surprise US Trident II submarine missile attack from the eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea.
Although the US relies on comprehensive look-down satellites for early warning of launches of enemy ICBMs, Russian scientists have not yet perfected the highly specialized technology necessary for satellite coverage. Instead, Russia relies on stationary line-of-sight radars that cannot see over the horizon, hence, provide less early warning time. Whereas the superior US satellite system can deliver a half-hour of warning, the Russian ground-based system provides only half as much, about 15 minutes. It’s no wonder the Russians are concerned. They were already at a disadvantage before the drone attacks last May. The margin will shrink to six minutes warning time if the US covertly installs medium range offensive missiles at its radar/ABM stations in Poland and Romania.
For all of these reasons Russian concerns about a decapitating US nuclear first strike are well grounded. But other current events must also be considered. No sooner did Israeli PM Netanyahu return to Israel in July after delivering his belligerent war speech to Congress during which, I might add, he was fawned over by both sides of the aisle, than Bibi ordered up two assassinations. The first to die was senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, blown up in Beirut. Next was Ismail Haniyeh, the top Hamas diplomat who had been involved in negotiations for a cease fire and hostage release in Gaza. At the time, Haniyeh was in Tehran for the swearing in of the new Iranian president. The location of the successive hits in capital cities was no coincidence. Both were conspicuously choreographed incitements, literally hand-delivered signed invitations for a wider Mideast war.
True to his savage instincts, Netanyahu was following the letter of the Zionist terror playbook, rising up to decapitate his enemy. It was an encore performance of Israel’s old strategy of assassinating every last PLO commander, including Arafat. The formula is familiar but has become stale bait. It is unlikely to deter Iran and Hezbollah. The axis of resistance has matured. Predictability has become Israel’s Achilles heel. People who think their own shit doesn’t stink are living in profound denial.
Consider the unlikely story of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar who spent twenty years in Israeli prisons where he gained a reputation for intimidating prison guards who interrogated him. Sinwar made the most of his incarceration, learning Hebrew and studying Zionism/Judaism. The lowly prisoner figured out Israel’s weakness and exploited it to defeat the IDF in Gaza. Sinwar was thinking a dozen moves ahead when he correctly anticipated that Bibi would allow the Hamas attack to go forward on October 7th. The Palestinian freedom fighter was playing chess to Netanyahu’s checkers.
Without a doubt, Russian paranoia is a perfectly rational response to western perfidy. Russians understand deja vu. And they know about treachery. They have seen the likes of Antony Blinken, Jacob (Jake) Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, Avril Haines, Albert Bourla, Jeff Bezos etcetera in a former life, during the long dark night of the Russian soul that started in 1917 when the sun set on their nation. According to Russian writer Larry Romanoff, an estimated 80 – 90% of the Bolsheviks were atheist Jews. (Larry Romanoff, “Stalin’s Jews,” Unz Review, September 18, 2022)
They dominated Stalin’s government, ran the Cheka or secret police, and administered the vast prison system or Gulag. Estimates of the dead during those years vary widely, and range up to Nobel Prize winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s improbable figure of sixty million, a number that other Russians regard as wildly inflated (For example, see Andrei Martyanov, Losing Military Supremacy, 2018, pp. 102-108)
Probably no one knows the actual figure. But if we take Lazar Kaganovich, the first head of the Cheka, at his word, we are easily talking multiple Holocausts. Kaganovich, the brother of Stalin’s wife, apparently boasted of killing at least twenty million people, for which he took personal responsibility. (Romanoff, “Stalin’s Jews”) The unpleasant truth, despite what we have been told, is that atheist Jews were the greatest mass murderers of the twentieth century. Next to them Hitler was a rank amateur, a back bencher.
Somehow, the Russians survived the long nightmare, which ended in 1991 when they threw off communism. They are never going back. Early in his first presidential term, Vladimir Putin out of necessity came to terms with the Russian oligarchs. He was reflecting the hard won collective wisdom of the Russian people when he told them: “You can prosper in business. Fine. But stay out of politics.” Those who failed to heed the warning paid the price. When the banker Mikhail Khodorkovsky sought to buy a pathway to political power Putin made an example of him. This prompted the western media to lionize Khodorkovsky. Yet, had the oligarch attempted to do in the US what he did in Russia he would have ended up in a jail cell, even sooner. (For the details see my 2016 book, Black 9/11, pp. 135-137.)
During the last few years, as a result of the US-staged coup in Ukraine and the wholesale western sanctions, many of the Russian oligarchs lost their fortunes and/or were forced into exile. So it would appear that Putin ultimately prevailed in the battle of the oligarchs. And because there are presently only about 155,000 Jews in Russia there will never be another Russian revolution. The expression was always a misnomer. It was always the atheistic Jewish revolution against the people of Russia. (See Larry Romanoff, “Stalin’s Jews,” Unz Review, September 18, 2022)
We Americans would do well to learn from the Russian experience. It is the reality check we need for our own survival. We should embrace it. No doubt, all of this explains the nonstop demonization of Putin and hatred of Russia that became the new normal in the West about twenty years ago. Round-the-clock propaganda is the atheist controllers’ political mRNA vaxxine. The West must be inoculated with right-think to erase history, cloud facts, dumb us down, blind us to the truth, and prepare the way for the new version of communism that, it so happens, will be very much like the original.
Today, Russia is a Christian nation on the rebound. The God-fearing Russian people have learned to distrust the West for good reason and are solidly behind Putin. They are determined to defend their nation’s honor and sovereignty at all costs, even if this means martyrdom in a nuclear firestorm. The stone cold sober Russians understand what complacent self absorbed delusional Americans have yet to learn. We Americans have only just entered our long dark night.
When God is dead evil proliferates. When morality becomes expedience, any crime can be justified. Numbers no longer matter. As Stalin reputedly said: One man’s death is a tragedy. A million dead is a statistic. Since October 7th the death count of murdered Palestinians is around 200,000, soon to be two million. In the wreckage of Ukraine, destroyed less by the Russian army than by western psychopaths, the number of dead is somewhere north of 600,000, and rising rapidly. And, lest we forget, ~3,000 of our fellow countrymen and women perished on September 11, 2001, a false flag event staged by the US financial elite to hasten world empire. We have been at war ever since. Today the Mideast. Tomorrow the world.
The world maelstrom slowly escalates, then all at once.
Mark H. Gaffney is the author of six books. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]
