What appears to have taken place is that the US, through its Ukrainian proxy, used the nuclear weapons treaty requirement that strategic nuclear bombers be kept in the open for monitoring purposes as it tried, but failed, to murder the President of Russia in a separate, but related, incident. Five or six strategic bombers out of forty are rumored to have been destroyed. Vladimir Putin lived.
How precisely not-constructive these actions have been is difficult to convey in words. The West’s pre-nuclear mindset, where nuclear weapons are just larger conventional weapons, now appears to represent the American view. They aren’t. They produce wildly different effects than conventional weapons do. Add to this the nuclear postures of the key players, and it is the psychology of nuclear escalation tied to their destructive power that makes nuclear weapons such a horrible idea.
One drawback to attacking airplanes that are housed in the open due to treaty requirements is that doing so incentivizes treaty participants to hide them going forward, to abrogate a key provision of the treaty. But the larger problem is that attacking nuclear assets signals to the Russians that their nuclear assets are being attacked. Similar actions might be taken were the West to launch a nuclear first-strike. (No such conclusion is known to have been drawn by the Russians).
The questions of 1) what Donald Trump knew about the attack and 2) when he knew it, are almost moot. This infantile daring-the-gods-to-destroy-us was a primary characteristic of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. Most Americans have no idea how close Biden’s foreign policy team brought the US to nuclear Armageddon in its final days. So, suicidal nuclear gamesmanship against Russia while committing genocide in Gaza? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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For skeptics of US involvement in the plot, the attacks appear to have required global satellite coordination which the Ukrainians do not possess. The aspirational date for Ukraine possessing satellites is 2030. From Adam Entous’ reporting in the New York Times, the CIA built facilities inside Ukraine for purposes like this. Additionally, per Entous, the war in Ukraine has been run from Wiesbaden, Germany by Americans and Europeans. The Ukrainians are the bodies that the West convinced to die in the conflict. Questions of Ukrainian agency are ignorant in this context.
As evidence emerges in coming weeks of CIA – MI6 ties to the attempt on Mr. Putin’s life, it will become clearer that1) the locus of power inside the US doesn’t reside in the Oval Office and 2) the CIA is now openly running US foreign policy. The plot on Mr. Putin’s life, if successful, would likely have brought Russian hardliners to power who would match Western bellicosity, but with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
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