From “War in Ukraine”, Benjamin and Davies, 2022, pp 173-175 (Read this book!)
“Since the end of the Cold War many of the treaties developed to place limits on the nuclear arms race have been discarded, mostly by the United States, even as it has reignited the very Cold War tensions those treaties were designed to mitigate.
“The world is now more vulnerable than ever to the catastrophe of nuclear war. Along with the added dangers of climate change, this has led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the hands of its Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight change, closer to Doomsday than at even the worst moments of the original Cold War.
“As with this war (Ukraine) and the crisis that led up to it, Russia is responsible and accountable for its own actions which have violated the most fundamental principles of international law. But our leaders in the West are equally responsible for their actions they, too, have acted irresponsibly and dangerously.
“The United States rejected numerous opportunities to cooperate with Russia on nuclear weapons over the years, dating all the way back to the end of World War II, when President Truman rejected pleas to turn the bomb over to the United Nations under international supervision. ..(here follows a long list of U.S. actions, including: “President Trump placed a second missile base in Poland and pulled the US out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty” …)
And pp 181-182
This tragedy (Ukraine) was not driven by the desire of ordinary Russians to conquer Ukraine, nor any wish by ordinary Americans or Europeans to return to a world divided by a Cold War and an Iron Curtain.
It was driven by leaders on all sides who repeatedly sacrifice our hopes and dreams on the altar of their wars and imperial ambitions. This time around, they were wasting what may well be humanity’s last chance to save our climate, the creatures who inhabit this Earth, and our children’s future, in order to build more and more weapons and turn even more of our homes and communities into their battlefields….
The lesson of this war is the same one we have failed to learn from every other war: that the real monsters are war itself and the morally bankrupt leaders on all sides who keep feeding it with our resources and our bodies.
[I would also add that another monster is the profiteering of fossil fuel ie. Big Oil Corporations delighted that attention has been turned to war making that requires their product immediately and from the damage their product is doing to our climate. And, of course, all those who will lose fortunes should these Corporations operations be limited in the process of changing to a non-fossil fuel economy.–Bob Kinsey]
