By Nicholas C. Arguimbau

Paul Craig Roberts is not a fool. Nor is he a card-carrying Communist. His conservative credentials at least once were impeccable - a senior researcher at the Hoover Institute, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, one of the economists responsible for President Reagan’s supply-side economics, and Reagan’s Assistant Treasury Secretary for economic policy, working for development of the tax policies that were central to everything that followed in the US http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/pages/about-paul-craig-roberts/.

That is why he cannot be dismissed lightly when he says the United States and Russia are already at war over the Ukraine, and the US is planning nuclear war, based upon a transparent pretense. He is not alone. Now there are almost daily expressions of concern that the US is positioning itself to take the first strike in a nuclear war with Russia; see, e.g. Stern, "Threats Against Russia Increase Danger Of Nuclear War," http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/30/ukra-a30.html | http://youtu.be/9PkvrYaXqWg.

Nuclear war between the United States and Russia has been hanging over our heads now for over half a century. The great majority of the world’s humans have had that possibility lurking in the background of everything they do for all their lives - the knowledge that if they live in any major urban area they are subject to annihilation by nuclear weapons on perhaps half an hour’s notice., and that those who are far enough away from urban centers to survive that half hour are facing unknown terrors such as the abrupt disappearance of modern civilization and/or "nuclear winter." This is totally insane, and is pretty much proof positive that President Kennedy was wrong in his immortal American University speech (perhaps not coincidentally shortly before he was assassinated,) .

Kennedy described the insanity as all of us have lived with it for most of our lives:

"Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the Allied air forces in the second world war. [The US and Russia are now in possession of comparable numbers, with a total of ninety thousand Allied World War IIs, by Kennedy’s count, http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat.] It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn."

And he gave his prognosis for ending the insanity:

"Our problems are man-made. Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings." http://www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau150614.htm

In the last half century, little has changed about the insanity of nuclear war, but our ability and determination to solve the problem has waned and it no longer appears within our capacity. We are no longer certain man-made problems can be solved by man, and in particular, the worst of all, that we may be unable to undo catastrophic global warming, which threatens to turn our lush, green, beautiful world into a hot, dry uninhabitable wasteland.. But let’s leave that aside for the moment and focus on nuclear war.

We have all lived with the threat of nuclear war for all or most of our lives, but it has only been a threat. What Kennedy described has always been a threat to winner and loser alike. Realistic visions of the outcome include destruction of all the major cities of both Russia and the United States, followed by possible "nuclear winter" everywhere - instant destruction of the urban half of each nation involved, and slow destruction by starvation and undoubted socioeconomic chaos of much of the other half in months and years to follow. Not most folks’ idea of a win, even for the sociopaths presumably involved in the planning of our wars.

"Our" wars? Perhaps not. We have "outsourced" to China millions of jobs that will never come back because we cannot compete with Chinese wages. We have given to China, with the resettlement of the likes of Pfizer, rights to uncounted numbers of patents developed as a result of centuries of carefully nurtured American ingenuity. . We left in Afghanistan and Iraq, after "our" wars, hand chosen pawns who sold Afghanistan’s immense copper resources at pennies on the dollar, the great preponderance of Iraq’s petroleum, and who knows what else, to China. We have left troops in both countries to provide security for Chinese industrial establishments. "China won the war," as the Kabul press said, made possible by a trillion dollars in bonds sold to China. See Arguimbau, "That much petroleum is that much bullshit," http://www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau150614.htm, and "The War – Did We Sacrifice A Million Lives And A $Trillion Cash Just To Hand Our Jobs To China?" http://www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau310111A.htm (URL for Part 3 with links to Parts 1, 2, and 4),

So if "we" gave away our jobs, gave away our major corporations, gave away our trade secrets, gave away access to the natural resources assumed to be the spoils of war, donated our military men to protect Chinese industry in Afghanistan and Iraq, and charged our taxpayers over a trillion dollars for accomplishment of these tasks, then who will determine the use of our nukes? A fair question, isn’t it? A nuclear war between the United States and Russia would likely leave China and our emigrated industry, the corrupters of Congress, untouched, at least physically, and would make it overnight the unquestioned dominant economic power in the world. So perhaps we cannot assume that our government is giving full consideration to the dangers to the US itself of nuclear war with Russia.

American politics of both parties at this time portray a nation bent on self-destruction. For instance, the Republican Party, which as a practical matter is the controlling party today, "is divided between the ‘hope America fails’ Republicans, who appear to actively want joblessness to rise to seek political gain, and the radical Republicans who adore Ayn Rand, like Paul and Ryan, who favor extremist economic policies that would make America fail ." Budowsky, " July 4 Infamy: Republicans Try to Destroy America’s Economy," http://www.laprogressive.com/republicans-destroy-economy/ And the Democrats, with as much or more support from Wall Street than the Republicans, elected a candidate for two terms whose political strategies (e.g. assertion of the existence of a Senate "super majority") have assured Republican control, whose name alone uniquely qualifies him to be controversial and misunderstood, and whose very first day in office was spent openly and deliberately rejecting central campaign promises that he could as easily have kept, "What Fools We Are," http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35552.htm. Has it not come to anyone’s mind that Wall Street may have intentionally engineered a politics of failure for the United States, and that the Republicans’ willingness to destroy the American economy is Wall Street’s as well?

And how better quickly to engineer a lasting failure of America, than to steer it into a nuclear first strike after resettling the great corporations thousands of miles away, leaving them free to pick up the spoils in two or three newly-vacated subcontinents? Doesn’t that make this nuclear confrontation uniquely dangerous?

These are insane questions, and one who poses them must question his own sanity, but they are no more nor less insane than the question, to which we now casually assume the answer: "Aren’t Wall Street and the world’s political and corporate leaders steering us into ultimately catastrophic climate change?"

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I know the people had better regain control of the nuclear weapons, and fast.

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The author is an "inactive" member of the California Bar, now residing in western Massachusetts, whose concentration was in environmental and death penalty cases.

Key words and phrases: nuclear weapons, nuclear war, nuclear winter, Paul Craig Roberts, American University speech, global warming, Afghanistan, Iraq, regime change, outsourcing.