NATO and the increasing threat of nuclear war.
The dates on the graph above must be a mistake I thought.
Did someone at The Guardian screw up and posted a chart based on numbers from the height of the Cold War in the fifties?
Unfortunately, no.
It’s the fifties Cold War redux.
The threat of an arms race exploding into nuclear war is a very familiar one to this old guy and it couldn’t be more real.
I lived through the last one.
Living down wind from above ground nuclear bomb tests in the Nevada desert made us all real - not just potential - victims of the arms race.
The Guardian is reporting that The NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has indicated that the military alliance led by the United States is considering whether to increase the number of available nuclear weapons in the NATO arsenal.
Stoltenberg said that it may be necessary to increase the number of deployable warheads to deal with both Russia and China.
What does NATO have to do with China?
Apparently they have decided to openly expand their mission at the direction of the United States.
Stoltenberg said: “I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”
According to the Guardian Stoltenberg was echoing comments from the White House a week before, warning about a perceived need to respond to increases in warhead numbers from Russia and North Korea.
Last week’s congressional approval of the war budget made it the largest in American history.
It included automatic draft registration of all males turning 18.
This recent escalation of the arms race and Cold War rhetoric has happened under Joe Biden’s watch and nothing suggests a change in a second Biden administration.
A second Trump administration would only cause further instability and the threat of miscalculations.