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World War Could Be Close Right Now—Here’s What Must Be Done
1 March 2022
EIRNS—Large steps down the slope toward a world war—a thermonuclear war—were taken over this weekend. The most widely publicized was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement this morning that he had told his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Military Staff Valery Gerasimov to put the Russian strategic nuclear forces on high alert. He made his announcement following economic attacks on the Russian banking system, attempting to freeze and steal Russia’s financial reserves and crash its currency and banks, and bans on all Russian flights and all Russian media, while European high-tech arms and soldiers of fortune poured into Ukraine to fight. RIA Novosti quoted Putin as follows: “Western countries are not only taking hostile actions towards our country in the economic realm, by which I mean the illegitimate sanctions everybody knows about very well, but the highest officials of leading NATO countries are also making aggressive statements towards our country. Therefore I order the Minister of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff to place the [nuclear] deterrent forces of the Russian Armed Forces onto a special alert status.” We are now clearly in a form of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, nearer than anyone alive then, ever wanted to come to nuclear war. U.S. military leaders wanted then to launch war on Cuba; had President Kennedy not stopped them and negotiated a solution, nuclear missiles would have rained down on America’s Eastern cities. Now U.S. and European political and military leaders, accustomed for decades to brutalizing smaller countries by wars and economic strangulation, want to provoke Russia to war and destroy it. These leaders have surrounded Russia with hostile military—including nuclear—capabilities to a point it could not accept. They moved to make Ukraine—reaching deep into Russia itself—their ultimate anti-Russia military platform. President Putin warned them 15 years ago in a 2007 speech in at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, that Russia could not tolerate indefinitely being surrounded and enveloped by hostile arms. But having lit that fuse of war, they’re now fanning it to the point it may go nuclear. (See Putin’s speech, EIR, Feb. 23, 2007.) Once nuclear weapon attacks begin anywhere, they will envelop the globe. Now an entirely different approach must be taken, where strategic stability is put on the basis of economic development. Now the economic and scientific development policies of Lyndon LaRouche must be on the agenda. They have long been neglected as impossible (like returning to the principles of Franklin Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods credit system); or unnecessary (like crash development of laser and fusion plasma technologies in every nation); or even ridiculous (like nations cooperating to colonize the Moon and explore Mars). Those policies are the last available chance for peace now—the very last chance. The Schiller Institute on Feb. 25 launched a petition in this crisis, “Convoke an International Conference To Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations.“ Every person,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche urged today, “should deploy with every capability to distribute this petition and to discuss it.” Get others to discuss it, and to write about it in everything from Internet commentaries to simple letters to the editor. “Just 50 leading individuals in the world promoting this idea could convene an important conference.” Ask why so many millions, 60 years ago this October, were so alarmed that nuclear war was staring them in the face; and now, after 25 years of war and with the world’s second-largest nuclear missile force on high alert, people pretend it cannot happen. Perhaps we were then more morally fit to survive. A real, broad mobilization for this petition and this conference is the only issue which can bring about an alternative to the further slide down toward world war. The petition is literally drawn so that civilization will survive. |