Operation Barbarossa (foto Never Was Magazine)

Why Russia and Belarus are Not Irrational to Fear Another ‘Operation Barbarossa’

Russia and Belarus fear another blitz invasion – a modernized version of Germany’s infamous Operation Barbarossa – but this time coming from NATO (instead of only from Germany, as in 1940), and they are preparing their forces for it.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a study, on 1 March 2017, which opened

The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing – boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three – and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.

Furthermore, the US Government’s plan to conquer Russia is based upon a belief in, and the fundamental plan to establish, “Nuclear Primacy” against Russia – an American ability to win a nuclear war against, and so conquer, Russia.

This concept became respectable in US academic and governmental policymaking circles when virtually simultaneously in 2006 a short form and a long form version of an article endorsing the concept of a nuclear blitz first strike, which the article’s two co authors there named “nuclear primacy,” were published respectively in the world’s two most influential journals of international affairs, Foreign Affairs from the Council on Foreign Relations, and International Security from Harvard. CFR got the more popular short version, titled “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy”, and Harvard got the more scholarly long version, which was titled “The End of MAD?”.

This article claimed that the central geostrategic concept during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Mutually Assured Destruction or “MAD” – in which there is no such thing as the US or the USSR conquering the other, because the first of the two to attack will itself also be destroyed by the surviving nuclear forces of the one responding to that attack – will soon be merely past history (like the Soviet Union itself already is); and, so, as the short form of the article said, “nuclear primacy remains a goal of the United States” (implying that it already was); and, as the long form said, “the United States now stands on the cusp of nuclear primacy.” In other words: arms control or no, the US should, and soon will, be able to grab Russia (the largest land mass of any country in the world, and also the one richest in natural resources).

Neither version of this article mentioned the key reason why nuclear victory is exceedingly dangerous even under the most favorable conditions, which reason is the concept (and the likely reality in the event of nuclear war between the two superpowers) “nuclear winter” – the scientific studies showing that a resulting sudden sharp cooling of the atmosphere after all those enormous explosions darkening the global skies would produce a global die off. America’s aristocracy and its vassal aristocracies controlling the US allied nations (billionaires, centi millionaires, and their top agents in both the public and private sectors) are buying and building deep underground nuclear shelters for themselves, but they wouldn’t be able to stay underground and survive on stored feedstuffs forever. As for everybody else, those other people are not involved in US geostrategic decision making, and so are being ignored by the US Government. Many of America’s (and associated) elite are paying those bomb shelter expenses, but none of the West’s elite are condemning the path toward nuclear war that their governments are on. Their Government represents them – not the public. So: buying or building nuclear war shelters is more acceptable to them than is stopping America’s planned conquest of Russia. The higher priority for them is to conquer Russia.

A far less influential scholarly journal, China Policy, published later in 2006 a critical article arguing against nuclear supremacy, but that article has had no impact upon policymaking. Its title was “The Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy” and it argued that, “American nuclear supremacy removes the root source of stability from the nuclear equation: mutual vulnerability.” It presented a moral argument: “US leaders might try to exploit its nuclear superiority (…) by actually launching a cold blooded nuclear attack against its nuclear rival in the midst of an intense crisis. The professors discount significantly the power of the nuclear taboo to restrain US leaders from crossing the fateful threshold. If crisis circumstances grow dire enough, the temptation to try to disarm their nuclear adversaries through a nuclear first strike may be too strong to resist, they argue.” The concept of “nuclear winter” wasn’t even so much as just mentioned (much less dealt with) in this article, just as it was ignored in the two that it was arguing against. Nuclear winter is virtually prohibited from being discussed in leading academic journals in the social sciences; but one article, in the 2 September 2019 Journal of Benefit Cost Analysis, “Nuclear War as a Global Catastrophic Risk” was published because it simply ignored the key question of who gets the benefits and who suffers the costs of America’s current meta strategy, Nuclear Primacy.

The co authors of (both versions of) the article that had proposed and endorsed nuclear primacy, then published in 2007 (this one also in International Security), a response to that critical article, which had attacked theirs. This reply’s title was “US Nuclear Primacy and the Future of the Chinese Deterrent”. But it made no more impact than did the obscure article it was arguing against. In the circles of power within the US, the matter was already settled.

Thus, Nuclear Primacy has tacitly become US policy, and MAD no longer is US policy (though it remains Russian policy). The US Government is planning to take over Russia (basically, to install a puppet regime there). That’s the reality.

Starting by no later than 2011, the Administration of US President Barack Obama was planning two operations in order to move forward especially against Russia, but also against all countries that were not hostile toward Russia (such as China, Russia, Venezuela, Syria, and Iran), and this included especially Ukraine, which has a 1,600 mile border with Russia, and also Syria, which ever since 1949 the US. CIA has been trying for the US Government to take over so as to advance oil pipeline projects that the Sauds wanted to be built through Syria into Europe. The Sauds are key allies of the U.S. Government.

In a moment of extraordinary candor, George Friedman, the founder and CEO of the ‘private CIA’ consulting firm Stratfor, once called the overthrow of the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, which had occurred in February 2014, “the most blatant coup in history”, and this was because it was the first coup ever to have been captured live on cellphone videos and uploaded to the internet as it happened, and it was afterward documented by interviewing some of the participants, in detailed accounts which fit perfectly with similar confessions from other participants (such as this, from one who didn’t even know about those other participants, but they all were carrying out the same plan, which they didn’t know about and which came from above  the US regime – they all were only following the orders that they had been given by agents of the US).

These realities were able to be reported outside the United States but not inside the United States. The top EU officials didn’t become so much as even aware that it had been a coup instead of an authentic revolution, until it was already finished, on 26 February 2014. By our own time, there is no longer any reasonable doubt that it had been led by the US regime, and that Barack Obama’s Administration had started planning the operation by no later than 2011, and the implementation phase started by no later than 1 March 2013 inside the US Embassy in Ukraine – well before the fairy tale ‘explanation’ of the coup (‘the Maidan Revolution’) started on 21 November 2013. Famously, after that ‘democratic revolution’ (which was instead a fascist coup that was hidden behind popular anti corruption demonstrations), came the breakaway of Crimea (which had voted over 75% for Yanukovych) and of Donbass (which had voted over 90% for him). And then came the Obama installed regime’s ethnic cleansing ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’ to eliminate as many of the voters in Donbass as possible, because if they stayed in Ukraine, then the newly installed regime in Kiev would soon be elected out of office. Hatred was needed in order for that ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’ or ‘ATO’ (the ethnic cleansing operation) to be able to achieve its purpose (of eliminating those voters but keeping the land), and this hatred was funded and promoted by American billionaires and the American Government – and American and allied media.