News / Brèves Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente Top US, Russian Retired Generals: ’How to Avert a Nuclear War’ 24 April 2015 EIRNS —The world is on the verge of thermonuclear World War III. The reasons usually given for the confrontation between the US and Russia are bullshit. Rather, there are some people who intend for this to happen. "We are on the verge of virtual extinction, as the result of chain-reaction effects" of the madness of the British Empire and their Wall Street lackies faced with the end of their bankrupt system, Lyndon LaRouche said on April 21. Their failure to surrender their weakening grip on power, will drive them, in desperation, to have Obama launch World War III. "This is the first threat of human extinction in modern history," LaRouche concluded. Former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright, and retired Russian General Vladimir Dvorkin, warned, in an April 19 op-ed in the New York Times entitled "How To Avert a Nuclear War," against one highly likely scenario for how World War III might happen. Cartwright, prior to joining the Joint Chiefs, was commander of US Strategic Command. Dvorkin, in a long career that spanned from 1958 until 2001, played a key role in the 1960’s development of Russia’s submarine-based nuclear deterrent, and later in the strategic arms talks of the 1970’s. These are two men intimately familiar with the strategic nuclear forces of their respective countries, including the command and control systems over those forces. In their op-ed, Cartwright and Dvorkin proposed that both the US and Russia should eliminate the launch-on-warning concept from their nuclear strategies. They note, at the outset, the increasing strategic tensions between the US and Russia—tensions that diplomacy has done little to ease. "This makes it all the more critical for Russia and the United States to talk, to relieve the pressures to `use or lose’ nuclear forces during a crisis, and minimize the risk of a mistaken launch," they write. "The fact is that we are still living with the nuclear-strike doctrine of the Cold War, which dictated three strategic options: first strike, launch on warning, and post-attack retaliation." From there, they focus their attention on launch-on-warning, for which the potential of an accidental launch, or a launch based on false information, is very high,— aggravated by short warning times and Russia’s compromised warning systems (Russia currently has no operating early warning satellites, depends only on ground-based radar systems). As a result, the time-lines, they write, "are very compressed and the opportunities for ill-considered decisions very real." "This risk should motivate the presidents of Russia and the United States to decide in tandem to eliminate the launch-on-warning concept from their nuclear strategies," they write. "They should re-institute military-to-military talks, which were suspended over the Ukraine crisis, to pursue this stand-down as an urgent priority." Such talks, however, are very unlikely as long as the insane Barack Obama is president of the United States. "In periods of heightened tensions and reduced decision times, the likelihood of human and technical error in control systems increases," they conclude. "Launch-on-warning is a relic of Cold War strategy whose risk today far exceeds its value. Our leaders urgently need to talk and, we hope, agree to scrap this obsolete protocol before a devastating error occurs." Now you can’t say that you weren’t warned. Carl J. Osgood