Russia and Ukraine
Two days after I founded this Substack page and my posting plans have already been overtaken by events – in this case Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Does this relate to the systemic corruption of the United States government by Big Dough? Indeed it does and the relationship is both intimate and pervasive, but we’ll get to that later. Aside from Big Dough then is this about Ukraine? Yes, but only because that’s where the broader issue came to a head. That issue is that Russia, understandably, refuses to backed into a corner that would force them to maintain their armed forces permanently in a state of readiness comparable with the USA”s DEFCON 2. DEFCON 1 is war. DEFCON 2 is the equivalent of having a loaded gun in your hand 24/7 with all the safety latches off. In other words, Russia’s goal is to minimize the chances of the world stumbling into nuclear war.
Things began coming to a head in mid-December last year, 2021, when Russia published drafts of two treaties, between itself and NATO. For two decades plus since the US went back on it’s word that it wouldn’t push for expanding NATO following the USSR’s demise, Russia had finally had enough trying to use diplomacy to get through to the USA that the gradual encroachment had to stop. The draft treaties explicitly identified Russia’s red lines, and in conveying them they essentially asked for a response to the question, “Do you agree to them or not?” by a specific date. The Russians did indicate there was some room for negotiation around the edges but not much. If the answer is no, or if there is no explicit reply, Russia made clear she would take action as necessary to assure her own national security. Paul Craig Roberts who, as a senior US Treasury was closely involved in the weapons negotiations with the USSR during the Reagan administration, has written they would have jumped at an agreement like what the Russians were offering until yesterday.
Some of us remember as young adults the only time the US of A was on DEFCON 2 for any length of time. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we vividly recall the visceral fear that gripped us 24/7 during that final week it was public knowledge before it was resolved. Since the fragmentation of the Soviet Union in 1991 remembrances began trickling out from both Russia and America have revealed we weren’t nearly as terrified as we should have been. In 1989, during a rapprochement between the USA and USSR a colloquium was held in Moscow to which were invited people who had been involved in the crisis as senior officials of the former USSR and the USA. Two salient facts that emerged from the discussion, the first of which is the Americans were working on the basis of an alarmingly flawed intelligence. We knew from U-2 flyover intelligence there were missiles on Cuba, but launch sites for them were still under construction. However the intelligence assessment was that all warheads for them were either still in the USSR or at sea, not yet arrived on the island. During the conference the Americans learned there were in fact about 75 warheads already on the island, and furthermore at least fifteen of them were mounted and ready to fire on 100 mile range ballistic missiles. More than enough t o reach far south Florida, not to mention the huge fleet with which the US was surrounding the island.
The other important fact to come out of the conference is the only adult, senior decision makers in the situation rooms were the premier of the USSR and the president of the United States. Aside from a few people at junior levels, everyone else, and especially the military brass, advocated throwing down the gauntlets. Based on information available in Daniel Elsberg’s 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, tens of millions of people would have died within hours and probably a billion or two more as a result of the ensuing several years of nuclear winter – a phenomenon unknown until two decades later when computer technology had advanced enough to enable climate modeling. Billions of people likely owe the length of their lives to the cool heads of John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev, as do billions more who’d never have been born.
The other incident took place off the shore of Cuba when a USSR submarine came close to launching a nuclear tipped torpedo aimed at the USS Randolph, an Essex class aircraft carrier. I first read of this in The Guardian several years ago and when searching for it today found another source, Russia Beyond, that disagreed with my recollection of several important details. I finally found the Guardian link and I’m quite sure it’s been edited. The original was clear that Vasily Arkhipov was the executive officer of the USSR B-59, not the commander of the flotilla of which the submarine was a part. In naval speak the “XO” is the number 2 person in the chain of command on a boat. The original Guardian piece stated that when a nuclear armed sub was out of communication with headquarters, the three senior people aboard – the captain, the XO, and the political officer – had to unanimously agree the USSR was at war, and that XO Vasily Arkhipov was the only one who voted no. The revised Guardian piece does not explicitly identify Arkhipov’s role aboard the B-59, nor address how the decision to surface instead of fire the torpedo was made. As for the Russia Beyond piece, if the writer was unfamiliar with naval terminology he or she may have assumed the executive office outranked the captain.
Now let’s turn to the role of Big Dough in all this, and begin by going back in history a ways. Much has been made of a passage included by President Eisenhower in his Farewell Address since it was presented on national television sixty two years ago.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
A little known fact is initial drafts of the speech referred to the “military-industrial-Congressional” complex, the last word being struck on the advice of the administration’s political advisors who thought it wouldn’t god down well on Capitol Hill. Several years ago former CIA official Ray McGovern came up with a new and improved acronym that reflects the extent to which President Eisenhower’s concern has metastasized far beyond his worst fears: MICIMATTC – Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think-Tank Complex. The whole thing is fueled with the Big Doughnations the candidates and office holders of the two Big Dough parties receive from the defense manufacturing industries and the proliferation of contractors who sell services to the government ranging from mercenary soldiers to kitchen help on military bases. Congress and the administration then turn around and approve programs for weapons and grants to the think tanks and their confreres in the academy to develop justifications for new weapons and ever more interventions. Meanwhile the neoconservative ideology of foreign relations has come to dominate the complex to the exclusion of almost all other voices. This has led it to fall into a swamp of group think that has rendered them impervious to reality based analysis. Who could have predicted the corrupt Afghan regime we’d enabled would fall apart within days from our departure from the country after more than two decades? Who could have predicted the Russians would take action in the interest of their own national security?