Move by incoming administration to insure Republican predictions in January 2016 come true.
(Reuters - Whiteman Air Force Base, MO) Air Force officials here received notice to prepare for a nuclear weapons transfer to Iran in 2021 should they fail to produce their own weapons.
Citing Republican predictions in January 2016 that insisted Iran would be guaranteed to have nuclear weapons by 2021 thanks to Obama’s Iran deal, Donald Trump said that he was left with no choice but to safeguard the credibility and trustworthiness of conservative politicians and pundits by giving Iran the nukes they have thus far failed to make for themselves.
When asked why the long lead-time, Brigadier General Paul Tibbets IV, commander of Whiteman AFB, explained that it takes time for American nuclear stockpile transfers to take place.
“Also, we do not have the confidence that Iran would be able to mount the warhead on their Emad IRBM (Arabic: عماد, meaning “pillar”), so we have to do the integration here at Whiteman before delivery. While it might take Iranian scientists 10-20 years to accomplish this under the best of circumstances, our nuclear weapons scientists have it down to an art-form and we’re sure we can get it done in 3-4 years.”
“It’s important to recognize that this will ONLY happen if Iran doesn’t otherwise deploy their own nuclear weapons,” said Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson, “We fully expect them to be able to get this done on their own. In that case, we won’t have wasted time because we would have learned a lot from mounting the warhead ourselves, enabling President Trump to counter their aggressive use of nuclear weapons with a preëmptive strike.”
When confronted with this plan by Reuters, Obama looked surprised, indicating that, as expected, he is entirely out of the loop when it comes to Iran. Calling the Vice President into the office, asking him to comment, aghast, Biden said, “This is a Big Fucking Deal.”
The Iranian Embassy did not immediately return requests for comment.
An earlier version of this report incorrectly identified General Tibbets as Brigadier Tibbets.
As President Trump meets with Russian President Putin in Helsinki, we host a debate on U.S.-Russia relations. Joe Cirincione, the president of Ploughshares Fund, calls the summit “a danger to America and to the West.” In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Glenn Greenwald joins us, one of the founding editors of The Intercept. Greenwald calls the Trump-Putin meeting “excellent” and says it’s “lunacy” to paint alleged Russian meddling in U.S. elections as the biggest threat to U.S. democracy.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s extremely enjoyable to watch him get his comeuppance (and all that that implies) but Kent Mansley is seriously one of the most tragic ‘villains’ in Hollywood, certainly children’s entertainment, and more people need to talk about him (and The Iron Giant) more.
Because what made Mansley so great is that his character isn’t portrayedas a tragic villain. But it’s one of those things where you could watch the movie for the first time and then a few months later, find yourself taking a shower at 7:21 PM thinking about said movie when you realize just how tragic his story is.
So here’s this guy, this pencil-pushing, people-pleasing government official in the middle of a Cold War during a time of mass hysteria!
Like I don’t think people realize how horrible the Cold War actually got. Hundreds of propaganda films were created because the nation genuinely thought that Russia was spying on us and was going to destroy us all and that it could happen any time, anywhere, by anyone, under any circumstances.
And who was creating these films?
The government. Well, okay Disney, MGM, and other major animation studios, but the government commissioned them.
Which means Kent was smack dab in the middle of a paranoid government with connections to a military (I can’t remember if Kent was actually a part of the army or if he was just affiliated due to his governmental position but still…) and we all know what sort of paranoid shoot-first-ask-questions later mindset the military had in the 1950s (and…you know…now).
So then this guy gets called in to check some routine strangeness, as part of his everyday job. Only it’s stranger than strange. And even though he was originally calm, cool, and even dismissive of the local people’s paranoia, he eventually succumbs to it when he sees actual evidence that this giant exists.
From that point on, this guy is on pure instinct. His entire mission in life is to protect his country from the threats that Russia or any other foreign nation are presenting. (Yes we know that the giant is from space but he doesn’t.) And so the movie slowly shows him doing one desperate measure after another, becoming more and more desperate as the stakes become higher and higher.
And in the end, in the end, the giant turns into a massive weapon and begins (almost) killing everyone!
I mean yes, okay, Hogarth helped him through the power of love but Kent’s looking at the logistics of this. I love the giant too but if he started shooting and nearly killing dozens of people, I wouldn’t just step down because a small boy got him to calm down.
And in this peak of panic and paranoia, Kent ends up screaming for the missile to be launched so that the threat can be neutralized. And he realizes a second too late that this means that everyone in the town will, in fact, die.
And yes, that is obviously horrible, but you have to feel for the guy and really there wasa sound logic to all of his actions.
And of course he’s arrested because the movie wantshim to be the bad guy but in the end, the real bad guy wasn’t Kent Mansley, it was the generic paranoia of the Cold War.
The Iron Giant is basically this odd retelling of The Crucible and Kent Mansley was just a guy who happened to get sucked up in the side of the mob and took things a bit too far. It doesn’t make it right but like I said, you really do feel for the guy. And all that that implies.
I mean I still hate the dude personally, but the thing that does get me is the moment right after Mansley’s “oh shit” moment when he starts talking about how “we can duck and cover!”
Like, look at his face. He looks so fucking earnest, and he’s got this sort of relieved smile while he’s talking. For a moment he thought that he’d doomed them all, but then he remembered it’s fine and okay because all they have to do is follow government advice to duck and cover!
And then the general’s reply, which is as much angry as it is disgusted that anyone would think that. “There’s no way to survive this, you idiot!”
And then we get this face:
This look of utter shock and terror, and you realise that Mansley genuinely believed it all.
The duck and cover film they showed Hogarth watching at school was deliberately ludicrous (even accounting for it being a propaganda film) and the kids are shown to be talking through it and not paying attention. It’s played as a background joke, about the ridiculousness of Cold War propaganda.
But Mansley believed it. Mansley believes in the myth of the Cold War more than anyone else in this film.
He believes that this is a fight where there are Good Guys and Bad Guys, and that if the Good Guys just shoot hard enough at the Bad Guys then they will all go away and the problem will be solved. And of course there won’t be any repercussions for the Good Guys if this happens, because they’re the Good Guys!
It’s the same as the games we see Hogarth playing throughout the film with his toy guns, pretending to be Superman or a space captain or whatever, fighting against Evil.
But Hogarth, despite being a kid, is able to understand that these are just games, and that his gun is just a toy, and that in reality good vs evil is not a black and white concept and guns are dangerous and not to be messed with.
Mansley doesn’t. Mansley is still playing war games and this scene happens because, on a fundamental level, he never truly understood the magnitude and irreversibility of what he was playing with.
And I love how up to this point the scene has been very dramatic, with a lot of rushing around and shouting and high tension music. And then, the moment Mansley orders the missile strike, and we cut to the submarine captain firing the nuke, all that fucking stops.
The people stop rushing around. Everyone goes silent and, crucially, the music stops. The only sound is the General yelling at Mansley, explaining to him that it’s too late to do anything, the shelters were always just props and he’s just killed them all.
The soundtrack resumes when Mansley runs for the car and tries to escape and the scene starts up again, but for about a minute they let the whole thing go quiet and characters, and the audience, are really made to sit with the reality of the Cold War. It’s a really fucking stellar directing decision.
Because up to now the Cold War stuff has largely been in the background, with the fantasy scenario of the Iron Giant— serving as a child-friendly metaphor for the crisis— distracting from the true horror of it all. Kent’s paranoia is cartoonish and frequently played for laughs.
But this moment, this scene, is where it suddenly stops all being a fantasy. Because the Iron Giant is fiction, but the idea of one impulsive moron, in a fit of paranoid xenophobia, killing everybody at once by accident, was at several points in this time period a very real possibility.
And I find it fascinating that right after this is when Kent chooses to try and make his escape. In ten seconds he goes from the kind of guy who lectures Hogarth about the importance of destroying anything new “because we didn’t make it, and that’s reason enough!”, to “screw our country— I wanna live!”
Dude finally had his faith in the US government and military shattered, and it happened just a moment too late.
On May 12th, Russia’s RT bannered “Finland’s NATO membership will trigger response – Moscow”, and reported that
Moscow has warned that Finland joining NATO would pose a direct threat to Russia’s security and its acceptance to the military alliance would prompt Russia to develop measures to ensure its safety. That’s after Finnish officials confirmed on Thursday their commitment to join the US-led…
Throughout this series of articles, which began a month and a half before the war in Ukraine, I have been developing the idea that the Straussians, the small group of Leo Strauss followers in the US administration, were planning a confrontation against Russia and China. However, in the tenth episode of this series, I related how the Azov regiment became the paramilitary pillar of the Ukrainian…
The American Government explains its thefts from other countries as being justifiable because the U.S. Government has slapped sanctions upon those countries, and because these sanctions authorize the U.S. Government to steal whatever it wants to steal, from them, that it can grab. Here are just a few such examples: On May 26th, Reuters headlined “U.S. seizes Iranian oil cargo near Greek island”,…
We took a day trip to Hiroshima today to visit the Atomic Bomb Dome, Peace Park and museum.
There are very few words that can convey accurately just how one feels when walking about the place. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more moved in my life. I made particular point of reading all of the plaques featured next to artefacts in the museum, telling the stories of their (more often than not) child owners.
I highly recommend a visit, if only in the hope that more people walk away from the experience with the realisation that nuclear weapons are horrific things that no one should ever be allowed to possess.
A shame that they don’t show any pics here, but recently I found out that in September of 1969, the US Government and a Texas oil company decided to experiment in my home state with two rather problematic technologies, namely, fracking for natural gas with nuclear weapons.
“Today, thanks to the escalating bloodshed in Ukraine, the planet is probably closer to nuclear conflict than at any time since the darkest days of the Cold War.
And it may not be an exaggeration to say that our future depends on a single, volatile, unpredictable and — if the rumours are to believed — increasingly sick man.
Since the first days of his attack on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly raised the spectre of nuclear war. He began his campaign by putting Russia’s nuclear forces on ‘special alert’ against Western intervention, and in recent days his rhetoric has reached ever more paranoid heights.
Last Wednesday, after the test of the massive new Sarmat nuclear missile, which can carry 15 warheads and reportedly wipe out an area the size of Britain, he told Russian politicians that he would be 'lightning-fast’ to use it if the West dared to meddle in Ukraine.
Other signs are equally worrying. In recent days there has been a marked change in the Kremlin’s rhetoric, casting its operation as an existential struggle against Nato and the West rather than a 'special operation’ against Ukrainian nationalists.
Russian state television, too, has become positively hysterical. Putin’s chief propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, told millions of viewers this week that 'one Sarmat means minus one Great Britain’.
And in a truly deranged segment on Sunday evening, Channel One anchor Dmitry Kiselyov said on his prime-time news show that Moscow could wipe out Britain with a nuclear tsunami in a strike by Russia’s Poseidon underwater drone: 'Having passed over the British Isles, it will turn whatever might be left of them into a radioactive wasteland.’
Can they be serious? Are these war-crazed puppets genuinely preparing public opinion for a Russian nuclear strike? Or is this merely empty bluster, a desperate attempt to intimidate the West as Russia’s tanks stall in the spring mud? The chilling answer is that nobody really knows.
And while a surprise nuclear attack on Britain — or any major Western country — strikes me as very unlikely, many military analysts believe the Russians could be closer to breaking the nuclear taboo than at any time since the 1940s.
(…)
As early as 1954, when nuclear weapons were infinitely less destructive than they are today, the Ministry of Defence estimated that a single hydrogen bomb dropped on London would probably kill four million people.
A full-scale Soviet attack on Britain would kill nine million people straight away, and a further three million from short-term fallout. Four million more would be severely injured or disabled.
As the technology improved, the potential death toll rose. By 1983, a study by the British Medical Association suggested that a nuclear attack on Britain would kill about 33 million people. And they would be the lucky ones, since the survivors would be left to die slowly of starvation or radiation sickness in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
(…)
So when you read the National Archives’ declassified accounts of government war games from the early 1980s, it’s striking that they often end with the Red Army surging towards the Rhine and the British Cabinet authorising a strike on a communist satellite such as Poland or Bulgaria, in order to bring the Kremlin to the negotiating table.
That tells you something. Nuclear weapons are weapons of weakness.
The price for using them is so high — not least in risking massive retaliation and the potential destruction of your own civilisation — that no vaguely sane leader would consider it unless his country was facing utter disaster.
And that, of course, brings us to Vladimir Putin. For this is precisely where he finds himself.
Two months ago, he staked his personal credibility, the future of his regime and Russia’s place in the world on the success of his Ukrainian invasion, a gamble he may well be losing.
(…)
And once the taboo was broken, where would you stop? If Putin used more nuclear weapons, would U.S. President Joe Biden issue an ultimatum? Would he authorise a strike against Russia?
And if so, where would it end? With the stakes so high, how could such a war be contained?
(…)
The other possibility, which is even more frightening, is that an angry, ailing Putin might lash out against Nato itself. In recent days he and his puppets have issued furious denunciations against countries backing Ukraine.
So what if, staring defeat in the face, he authorised a strike against a military base in the Baltic, or a Polish transport depot handling supplies to Kyiv?
Would the West cave in and impose a negotiated peace? Would our leaders do nothing? Or would they feel the need to retaliate, as our Eastern European allies would surely demand?
The truth, I suspect, is that even a 'limited’ battlefield strike might set the world on a path towards total catastrophe, leaving hundreds of millions dead and the planet ravaged beyond recovery.
'I do not think there is any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon,’ the former U.S. Defense Secretary, General James Mattis, remarked four years ago.
'Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game-changer.’
Dreadful as it may be to admit it, Mattis is right. If Vladimir Putin were to approve a nuclear strike — however limited in theory — that moment could easily be the beginning of the end.
Few of us in the West would countenance appeasement, but that might leave escalation as the only alternative.
Who knows how Joe Biden would react? And who among us can confidently say how we would react in such a terrible scenario?
(…)
But it strikes me that ever since that first test in the New Mexico desert, mankind has been enormously, and perhaps undeservedly, lucky. As a species, we have been arrogant and reckless enough to build weapons that can destroy us many times over.
We have survived several near-misses, and every time we have congratulated ourselves on our good sense. And we have forgotten that it takes only one vicious, bitter, unpredictable man to set the world on a path to utter destruction.
I repeat: it may not happen. So far, to his credit, Mr Biden has handled the Ukrainian crisis with an admirable combination of firmness and restraint.
And even somebody as drunk on his own nationalist resentments as Vladimir Putin must realise that a nuclear war would mean the end of Russian civilisation — the end of Moscow, St Petersburg and everything he and his cronies claim to revere.
Yet, like all those people who lay awake during the Cuban Missile Crisis, wondering if they would ever see tomorrow, I can’t banish a sense of dread.
And I can’t help thinking of J. Robert Oppenheimer that morning in the New Mexico desert, and those words from the Hindu scriptures: 'I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds …”
“Why would Vladimir Putin use tactical nuclear weapons? Why would he make such a madman move?
To change the story. To shock and destabilize his adversaries. To scare the people of North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries so they’ll force their leaders to back away. To remind the world—and Russians—that he does have military power. To avoid a massive and public military defeat. To win.
Mr. Putin talks about nuclear weapons a lot. He did it again Wednesday: In a meeting with politicians in St. Petersburg, he said if anyone intervenes in Ukraine and “creates unacceptable threats for us that are strategic in nature,” the Russian response will be “lightning fast.” He said: “We have all the tools for this that no one else can boast of having. We won’t boast about it, we’ll use them, if needed.”
He’s talked like this since the invasion. It’s a tactic: He’s trying to scare everybody. That doesn’t mean the threat is empty.
There are signs the Russians are deliberately creating a historical paper trail, as if to say they warned us. On Monday Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the risk of nuclear conflict is “serious” and “should not be underestimated.” Earlier, Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, sent a formal diplomatic note to the U.S. saying it was inflaming the conflict. The Washington Post got a copy. It said shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict and could bring “unpredictable consequences.”
(…)
So let me make an argument for my anxieties: For this man, Russia can’t lose to the West. Ukraine isn’t the Mideast, a side show; it is the main event. I read him as someone who will do anything not to lose.
In October he will turn 70, and whatever his physical and mental health his life is in its fourth act. I am dubious that he will accept the idea that the signal fact of its end will be his defeat by the West. He can’t, his psychology will not allow it.
It seems to me he has become more careless, operating with a different historical consciousness. He launched a world-historic military invasion that, whatever his geostrategic aims, was shambolic—fully aggressive and confident, yet not realistically thought through. His army wasn’t up to the task. It seemed thrown together, almost haphazard, certainly not professional.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, often notes that Mr. Putin has killed all the institutions in his country, sucked the strength, independence and respectability from them, as dictators do. They take out power centers that might threaten them but might also warn them of weaknesses in their own governments. All dictatorships are ultimately self-weakening in that way. But this means Mr. Putin has no collective leadership in Russia. It’s all him. And he’s Vladimir Putin.
When I look at him I see a new nihilistic edge, not the calculating and somewhat reptilian person of the past.
(…)
No one since 1945, in spite of all the wars, has used nuclear weapons. We are in the habit, no matter what we acknowledge as a hypothetical possibility, of thinking: It still won’t happen, history will proceed as it has in the past.
But maybe not. History is full of swerves, of impossibilities that become inevitabilities.
(…)
Think more, talk less. And when you think, think dark.”
“War can be said to become ‘total’ in at least two main senses: on the one hand, in the sense most used by social scientists, that it more and more completely incorporates the whole of social life; and on the other, in the military (Clausewitzian) sense, that it increasingly becomes an ‘absolute’ struggle of life and death for states and peoples. In reality, these are but two sides of the same process. The political-economic totalisation of war both facilitates and requires the military-technological totalisation. This is why the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which obliterated a city and threatened an era of war as total annihilation, represents a logical conclusion to a century of industrialised warfare.” (page 38)
“A great deal has been written about the links between the post-war arms race and the economy. On the one hand, it has been suggested that the alliance of the military and the industrial sectors dependent on them constitutes a military industrial complex, which dominates and directs American society in particular. C. Wright Mills’s 1956 study of The Power Elite gave great weight to military-industrial linkages within a system of power which as a whole had increasingly been centralised by military conflict and nuclear technology. Thompson argues, even more radically, that modern societies ‘do not have military-industrial complexes - they are military-industrial complexes’. For him, ‘exterminism’ is the driving force of the entire social system. On the other hand, more specifically economic analyses were put forward to suggest that Western (and, by implication, Eastern) systems were ‘arms economies’ in which arms production provided the central dynamic of the economic system as a whole. Originally developed during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, especially Korea, as a theory of a Permanent War Economy, this was subsequently modified as it was recognised that nuclear weapons could inhibit major wars while stimulating military expenditure which had a fundamental economic effect. So the arms economy was presented as an explanation of the post-war boom.” (page 41)
“Total war becomes less total in the sense of direct social participation at the very point at which it becomes greatly more total, indeed potentially absolute, in the military sense. Thus while in one sense it is utterly correct to see the entire global social system as conditioned by total war - in exterminist terms - much of social reality apparently contradicts this insight. The economic, social, even political and ideological links between the arms race and most social life become less direct, the more sophisticated and lethally accurate nuclear weaponry becomes. The nuclear arms race has largely been conducted out of sight of society, with states deliberately eschewing even ideological, let alone practical, mobilisation. Even in the United States, by far the most obviously militarist of Western societies, militarism and related political and nationalist ideologies are far less unequivocally dominant than they were in the ‘Cold War’ of the first decade after 1945. This has a great deal to do with the fact that the function of actual war has radically altered. War cannot be recognised unequivocally even as a possible outcome of war preparation; and war, if it came, would not heighten social mobilisation as in all previous phases, but result in the most extreme demobilisation - physical destruction of the majority of society’s members.” (pages 44, 45)
“The reasons for the development of radical politics in the first two phases of total war were mainly to do with the contradictions of military participation. Both the First and Second World Wars involved total societal mobilisation. A nuclear war, however, will mobilise society as a whole only in the sense of Auschwitz, by delivering it to mass destruction. The mobilisation process proper is transferred back into the war-preparation stage: but, as we have seen, nuclear militarism is not mass militarism in the same sense. Small professional armed forces and technologically skilled work forces in the armaments industries ‘participate’ more or less directly; the mass of society participate mainly in the sense of ideological mobilisation. Even this ideological mobilisation, as an active process, is limited to periods of relative crisis in international relations and the arms race.” (page 103)
