Nuclear Brinkmanship: NATO’s Strategy in Ukraine War

The US military brass, through NATO’s integrated military command, exercises absolute control over Ukraine’s theater of proxy war. The Zelensky regime and its military commanders are merely expendable pawns beholden to military strategy as devised by master strategists of the Pentagon.

The foremost objective of the US military brass in Ukraine’s proxy war is to degrade Russia’s military capabilities, which alongside China, is deemed an existential threat to US security interests, for which Ukrainian troops and conscripts are being sacrificed as cannon fodder.

Although China, too, matches the conventional warfare capabilities of the Cold War-era arch-rivals, its relatively modest nuclear arsenal and delivery systems, long-range ballistic missile program, aren’t in the same “super power league” yet.

China could increase its nuclear stockpile to 1,500 by 2035, according to State Dept. report, but current estimates put China’s arsenal at about 500 warheads. In comparison, the US has 5,748 warheads, whereas Russia has 5,580 warheads. Russia has 1,549 nuclear warheads that are deployed, while the US has deployed 1,419. Because the New START treaty caps the deployment of warheads at 1,550.

Besides being the world’s leading nuclear power alongside the US, Russia also boasts cutting-edge delivery mechanisms that are enough to give goosebumps to envious adversaries plotting to degrade the Eurasian behemoth’s military capabilities.

Pioneering the hypersonic missile technology that can evade the most advanced missile defense systems, Russia has recently unveiled an array of state-of-the-art armaments that can make any military technology aficionado become an avid admirer of Russia’s techno-scientific expertise.

The Kinzhal, or The Dagger, is an air-launched ballistic missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers. Currently launched from a MiG-31 fighter, the missile accelerates to speeds between Mach 4 and Mach 10 while performing evasive maneuvers to circumvent air and missile defenses.

The Tsirkon, or Zircon, is a ship-launched hypersonic cruise missile capable of reaching Mach 9 speed to strike ground or naval targets at a range of approximately 1,000 kilometers. The Iskander is a mobile short-range ballistic missile system, traveling at a terminal hypersonic speed of 2,100–2,600 meters per second (Mach 6.2 – Mach 7.6) and can reach an altitude of 50 kilometers and has a range of up to 500 kilometers.

The most fearsome weapon in the Russian arsenal, though, is the doomsday intercontinental ballistic missile named The Sarmat and colloquially referred to as Satan II with an operational range of 18,000 km., and capable of carrying 16 thermonuclear multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) warheads.

At the height of the Cold War in the sixties, Russia exploded the world’s largest 50-megaton thermonuclear Tsar Bomba in October 1961. A Tupolev Tu-95V aircraft took off with the bomb weighing 27 tons. The bomb was attached to a large parachute, which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about 45 km away from ground zero, giving them a 50 percent chance of survival.

The bomb was released from a height of 10,500 meters on a test target at Sukhoy Nos cape in the Barents Sea. The bomb detonated at the height of 4,200 meters above ground. Still, the shock wave caught up with the Tu-95V at a distance of 115 km and the Tu-16 at 205 km. The Tu-95V dropped 1 kilometer in the air because of the shock wave but was able to recover and land safely.

The 8-km-wide fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 km away. The mushroom cloud was about 67 km high. A seismic wave in the earth’s crust, generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times. Glass shattered in windows 780 km from the explosion in a village on Dikson Island.

All buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and brick, located 55 km from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland.

Notwithstanding, in the heyday of the Cold War in the sixties when 400,000 US forces were deployed in Europe that were still outnumbered by Soviet troops, the Soviet leadership made repeated requests for signing a “no first use” nuclear treaty precluding the likelihood of pre-emptive nuclear strike, but the United States balked at the proposal due to conventional warfare superiority of the USSR in Europe.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev even unilaterally pledged against the first use of nuclear weapons in 1982, though Russia has since dropped the pledge in 1993 following the break-up of the Soviet Union and consequent tilting of balance of power in favor of the United States.

After European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War, NATO now holds conventional warfare superiority over Russia with a significantly larger number of ground troops and combat aircraft.

NATO’s central rationale in engaging Russia in a protracted war of attrition in Ukraine since the Maidan coup toppling Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 is to sufficiently degrade Russia’s conventional warfare capabilities in order to coerce Kremlin to abandon its formidable nuclear arsenal in return for economic inducements, as the transatlantic military alliance did to several East European client states following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the nineties by incorporating them into NATO and the European Union, in order to claim the crown of being world’s sole super power, worshipped by all and accountable to none.

Despite comparable nuclear deterrence, as succinctly explained in the foregoing paragraphs, NATO clearly has an advantage over Russia in terms of conventional warfare capabilities. Because defense production industries of heavily industrialized NATO member states, including the US, Britain, France, Germany and even Turkey, can produce infinite quantities of armaments and ammunition over the years, which would be donated free of cost to Ukrainian proxy, whereas Russia’s military-industrial complex obviously has limited capacity, particularly after exclusion of Russia from international financial system and the imposition of economic sanctions by neocolonial powers.

In addition to state-of-the-art weapons arsenal, manpower would also play a significant role in Ukraine’s protracted war of attrition. It’s noteworthy that Ukraine is simply the name of the battlefield, while the war is actually being fought between Russia, on the one hand, and NATO military alliance, on the other.

Western regimes treat Ukraine’s largely conscript army as merely cannon fodder. Besides, thousands of mercenaries on NATO’s payroll, particularly from Poland, Georgia and rest of impoverished East European states, have also been fighting for Ukraine for the last two years. Whereas Russian armed forces are comprised of citizens whose lives matter not only to their families but also to Russian state.

For these reasons, Machiavellian military strategists of NATO are resorting to nuclear brinkmanship. The US military brass, leading NATO’s integrated military command, would keep providing abundant quantities of conventional armaments to Ukrainian troops not only to battle Russian forces in Donbas but also to target Russia’s border regions, such as Kursk and Belgorod, while keeping the intensity of hostilities below the threshold where Russia might consider mounting a direct attack at NATO territory or deploying strategic nuclear weapons as a method of last resort.

Despite feigned rhetoric of pacifism and ostensibly being a “defensive alliance,” NATO has adopted a suicidally perilous and aggressive course in the Ukraine War. Because operational miscalculations could lead to the nightmare scenario of a nuclear war, which would be catastrophic not only for belligerents but for the rest of the world too.

Biden’s Lame Duck Presidency and Deep State Ascendancy

Top commander of the US Armed Forces Gen. Charles Q. Brown in his swashbuckling Air Force uniform appeared before Ukraine Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Joe Wilson at a hearing in April. In response to a polite query, Gen. Brown majestically replied: “As we bring on the F-16s, it’s not only the airplanes, but the training of the pilots, the training of the maintainers — but also making sure we have the weapons to go with it. That is the dialogue we’re having, not only to get the airplanes but to get them to full capability.”

On August 15, The Politico Magazine reported the Biden admin was “open to sending long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine.” The Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) has a range of over 230 miles and would become the longest-range weapon the US sends Ukraine, “if it goes ahead with the delivery,” which is a needless caveat as it is already a done deal.

On August 12, The New York Times revealed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in a recent phone call with Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant, had ordered the deployment of a nuclear submarine to the Middle East, following the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31 and consequent imminent threat of Iranian reprisal attack against Israel.

Early this month, on August 2, Lloyd Austin, in his capacity as the Secretary of Defense and the liaison between civilian administration and the US military brass, revoked plea deals agreed to the week before with the men accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accomplices, who are held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The prosecutor had earlier agreed to plea deals that the men would plead guilty in exchange for receiving a life sentence rather than the death penalty. In addition, Austin relieved Susan Escallier, who oversees the Pentagon's Guantanamo war court, of her authority to enter into pre-trial agreements in the case and took on the responsibility himself. "Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements," Austin wrote in a tersely worded memo.

Joe Biden’s ignominious fall from grace was unanticipated and abrupt. It all happened in early June after Russian President Putin made a surprise announcement that a Russian naval fleet would make a port call to Cuba amidst Ukraine’s proxy war as a show of force.

Putin’s hawkish maneuver precipitated a rift between the Biden admin and the deep state. The Pentagon’s military brass favored a forceful response to Russia’s provocation but Biden got cold feet because brinkmanship could have led to nuclear standoff with Russia in the election year.

Consequently, the Biden presidency has been reduced to the “lame duck” status and the rogue super power is being ruled directly by the deep state, at least in the domain of formulation of national security and defense policies, until the inauguration of the next president, as is evident from the foregoing instances of security establishment’s encroachment on the civilian administration’s domain.

Two weeks following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, a visibly anxious and panicked Biden tweeted on March 11, 2022: “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”

The string of rambling tweets betrayed the apprehensive mental state of a raving executive who was under tremendous pressure from “certain quarters” to significantly escalate the conflict with the arch-foe and wanted to console himself and the listeners that by not committing American ground and air forces to Ukraine, specifically for enforcing the no-fly zone, he was making the right decision.

Despite Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal, several Pentagon officials, full of hubris and evidently suffering from misplaced superiority complex, have recently made their misconceived institutional logic public that they no longer regard Russia as an equal military power, instead they contemptuously dubbed it “a second-rate regional power,” and if given an opportunity, they wouldn’t hesitate to take Russia head-on, even if the risk is as perilous as the conflict spiraling into a catastrophic nuclear war.

The Intercept reported in March 2022 that despite staging a massive military buildup along Russia’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, “Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack on February 24,” senior current and former US intelligence officials told the Intercept. “It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the US intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade,” the senior official added.

In April 2021, US intelligence first detected that “the Russian military was beginning to move large numbers of troops and equipment to the Ukrainian border.” Most of the Russian soldiers deployed to the border at that time were later “moved back to their bases,” but US intelligence determined that “some of the troops and materiel remained near the border.”

In June 2021, against the backdrop of rising tensions over Ukraine, Biden and Putin met at a summit in Geneva. The summer troop withdrawal brought a brief period of calm, but “the crisis began to build again in October and November,” when US intelligence watched as Russia once again “moved large numbers of troops back to its border with Ukraine.”

Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces along the western border before the summit in June 2021. Instead of returning the favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly world’s sole surviving super power turned down the hand of friendship and haughtily refused to concede reasonable security guarantees demanded by Russia at the summit that would certainly have averted the likelihood of the war.

Days before Biden’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2021, instigating Russian dissident and Putin’s deceased foe Alexei Navalny to return to Russia on January 17 from his sojourn in Germany for no apparent political advantage after being allegedly poisoned in August 2020 was clearly the job of the US deep state that plotted to sabotage newly inaugurated Biden admin’s relations with Russia and forestall the likelihood of rapprochement between the arch-rivals.

As previously mentioned that as a goodwill gesture before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva in June 2021, Russia significantly drawdown its troop build-up along Ukraine’s border. Ironically, reciprocating “the courtesy,” however, the ambience and body language of the summit, clearly choreographed by the US national security establishment, were kept as austere and unfriendly as possible.

No joint press conferences were held, as is customary after such momentous summits. The organizers of the farcical show strictly ordered “no breaking the bread” or refreshments during hours-long strenuous discussions. All blame games and tough talk. Even Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was held in a more cordial atmosphere than the bitter encounter between the leaders of the two global powers.

The civilian administrations of the United States, whether Republican or Democratic, are always inclined to have cordial relations with other major powers, including Russia and China, and prefer instead to focus on national economy to provide much-needed financial relief to the electorate. But the mindset and institutional logic of the US deep state has been frozen in the Cold War era, and it perceives any threat to its global military domination agenda with utmost suspicion and hostility.

Biden’s Fall from Grace and Ukraine War Escalation

On August 6, Ukrainian forces, numbering several thousand and backed by German Marder infantry fighting vehicles, advanced 10 km. across the border into Russia’s Kursk region. Previous incursions from Ukraine into Russia, near the city of Belgorod, were led by neo-Nazi militias and foreign mercenaries. But this time, the incursion was reportedly conducted by Ukrainian forces, using a combination of infantry, armor, drones, electronic warfare and air defense in the attack.

The main operational Russian gas pipeline into Europe runs near Sudzha, where a metering station – reportedly captured by Ukraine – monitors the reduced Russian supplies to countries such as Austria and Hungary. Russia has declared a state of emergency in Kursk and acting regional governor Aleksey Smirnov revealed on Monday, August 12, that over a hundred thousand civilians had been evacuated following an attack that has clearly caught Moscow off guard.

A visibly angry Vladimir Putin convened a televised meeting of Russia’s Security Council on August 7, in which the military’s chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, told him the advance had been halted and that the Kursk operation would be concluded by “reaching the Russian state border.”

Putin was exasperated for a reason, because only a week ago on August 1, he had displayed tremendous magnanimity and extended a goodwill gesture to the Biden admin by agreeing to a prisoner swap deal, but instead of rapprochement, Washington paid him back by instructing Ukrainian proxy forces to mount the Kursk incursion inside Russia.

The United States and Russia completed their biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on August 1, with Moscow releasing journalist Evan Gershkovich and fellow American Paul Whelan, along with dissidents including Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a multinational deal that set two dozen people free. Releasing Western hostages was clearly an effort by Kremlin to appease Washington after the naval standoff in Cuba in June.

On June 12, a Russian naval fleet comprising a frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine Kazan, an oil tanker and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills in the Atlantic Ocean. The next day, on June 13, a U.S. Navy submarine arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a fleet of Russian warships gathered for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.

U.S. Southern Command announced the USS Helena, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, pulled into the waters near the U.S. base in Cuba. A Canadian Navy patrol ship also docked in Havana. Ottawa said the ship arrived on June 14 to signal the "capable and deployable" nature of the Canadian military.

The Russian naval fleet left Cuba on June 17 after a five-day stay but Putin’s hawkish maneuver precipitated a rift between the Biden admin and the deep state. The Pentagon’s military brass favored a much forceful response to Russia’s provocation amidst Ukraine’s proxy war but Biden got cold feet because brinkmanship could have led to a nuclear standoff with Russia in the election year.

Joe Biden’s ignominious fall from grace was unanticipated and abrupt. It seems quite “a coincidence” that only a day before Russian naval fleet made a port call to Havana and six weeks before Biden decided to drop out of the presidential race on July 21, his cocaine addicted son Hunter was found guilty by a Delaware jury on June 11 for owning a gun as a user of illegal drugs and lying on paperwork about his drug use when he bought the gun.

Hunter Biden faces a maximum prison sentence of 25 years but is likely to receive a lesser sentence. In addition, Hunter also faces federal criminal charges for failing to pay more than $1.4 million in taxes on time. A trial in that case is scheduled to begin in September in Los Angeles.

What’s even more surprising is the fact that Hunter Biden nearly avoided facing trials on both the gun charges and the tax charges. Last year, prosecutor’s office and Hunter Biden’s legal team struck a tentative plea deal in which Hunter would have pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and submitted to drug testing and other monitoring. Under the deal, prosecutors would have deferred the gun charges and eventually dropped them if Hunter had remained out of trouble.

But the deal “miraculously” fell apart in June after the deep state decided that Joe Biden had become a liability as president and needed to be replaced by a security establishment’s stooge, Kamala Harris. Thus, Joe Biden was literally blackmailed by the deep state to quit the presidential race in exchange for saving the life of his problem child.

Had Joe Biden decided not to quit the race, the security establishment threatened to open host of other criminal cases against Hunter Biden, including the notorious Burisma Holdings case in which Hunter Biden had received millions of dollars in illicit kickbacks from a Ukrainian energy firm from 2013 to 2018 while his father Joe Biden was Obama admin’s vice president.

On the other hand, security establishment through Democratic emissaries assured Joe Biden to use its influence with security agencies, bureaucracy and judiciary to drop all criminal cases against Hunter if Joe Biden agreed to quit the race and kept quiet afterwards.

Kamala Harris, being an Indian immigrant and lacking a significant political constituency in the United States, is an ideal presidential candidate from the perspective of security establishment. During her four-year unremarkable career as vice president and the way she cheered waving Ukrainian flag during President Zelensky’s address to the US Congress, she has proved that she would play into the hands of deep state like a servile puppet.

Furthermore, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, meant as a psy-ops tactic, served a two-fold objective. Firstly, it created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, restricted Trump’s movement during the election campaign, as he has since been advised by the Secret Service not to attend outdoor rallies and conveyed a message that red lines shouldn’t be crossed in political speeches. It should be noted, though, the assassination attempt was merely a shot across the bow, meant to petrify rather than kill Trump.

Secondly, the drastic measure also managed to send a spine-chilling warning to Trump’s political opponent Joe Biden that the deep state was willing to go to any extent to achieve its objectives, even if it had to assassinate sitting US presidents, such as the brutal murders of the Kennedy brothers following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Unsurprisingly, panic-stricken Joe Biden decided a week after Trump’s brush with death to leave the White House for his Delaware mansion instead of ending up in the morgue.

Since the World War II, the United States has been ruled by the top brass of the Pentagon while presidents have been reduced to the ceremonial role of being public relations’ representatives of the deep state, pontificating and sermonizing like priests to gullible audiences at home and abroad on the virtues of supposed American democracy, rule of law and civil liberties.

But in military oligarchy’s perpetual conflict with major world powers deemed existential threats to the US security interests, such as arch-rivals Russia and China, as in the Ukraine War, civilian presidents, whether Biden or Trump, don’t have the authority to overrule the global domination agenda of the Pentagon.

All the militaries of the 32 NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US European Command, and is subordinate to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The incumbent Godfather of the Cosa Nostra is Gen. Charles Q. Brown since October 2023 following the retirement of Gen. Mark Milley who completed his tenure of four tumultuous years, including the Ukraine War and the Capitol riots, in September as the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Thus, the Pentagon’s top brass, through NATO’s military command, exercises absolute control over Ukraine’s theater of proxy war. The Zelensky regime and its military commanders are merely servile stooges beholden to military strategy as devised by master strategists of the Pentagon. The foremost objective of the US military brass in Ukraine’s proxy war is to degrade Russia’s military capabilities, for which Ukrainian troops and conscripts are being used as cannon fodder.

In February, Ukrainian President Zelensky sacked Valery Zaluzhny as commander-in-chief of Ukrainian forces on the whim of US security establishment. As he was hesitant to commit more cannon fodder to breach Russia’s defensive lines in Donbas amid much-hyped albeit easily foiled Ukrainian counteroffensive lasting from June to December last year.

In fact, the planners of the thwarted counteroffensive themselves were well aware that it was a futile effort because Ukraine’s largely conscript army was simply not a match for Russia’s professional military and superior firepower. But they kept painting the rosy picture of the battlefield for public consumption in order to oblige the Biden admin to keep providing billions of dollars military assistance to Ukraine.

Similarly, the Kursk and previous Belgorod incursions, too, are simply morale-boosting stratagems meant to create a perception that Ukrainian conscripts are capable of fighting wars when, in fact, sleazy Ukrainian politicians and military commanders are squandering lavish military aid on buying opulent villas in southern France and spending the nights gambling away millions of dollars in swanky casinos of Monte Carlo.

Nonetheless, differences between Zelensky and Zaluzhny had been simmering for many months but appeared to grow wider towards the end of last year, after Zaluzhny said the war had reached a stalemate in a long essay and interview in The Economist magazine in November.

New commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi has been criticized for pursuing bloody and reckless military tactics which resulted in significant Ukrainian losses during the Battle of Bakhmut, and was nicknamed “General 200,” a reference to Cargo 200, a Soviet military code denoting military fatalities.

He would likely retain his job as long he uncritically obeys Washington’s dictates. But if he made the mistake of developing critical faculties, a cardinal sin in military command structure across the world, then he too would meet the same ignominious fate that befell his wretched predecessor.

The Kursk incursion is clearly the handiwork of Oleksandr Syrskyi, a reckless military commander beholden to American masters, because it serves no strategic objective, as even mainstream media reports have acknowledged that holding on to Russian territory is next to impossible.

The only plausible rationale that Syrskyi decided to place more Ukrainian “cannon fodder” in the line of fire was to pander to the dictates of Washington, which has been excoriating Ukraine’s military commanders to show tangible battlefield achievements since the much-hyped counteroffensive was easily thwarted last year in order to keep receiving billions of dollars in military assistance.

But Russian positions in heavily fortified Donbas region were so impregnable that Ukrainian troops couldn’t advance an inch further without taking significant casualties. Therefore, Syrskyi meticulously scanned the map to find an easy military target to assuage American masters. Invading even Belgorod region appeared a daunting task because Russians were prepared.

Russia shares a thousand miles border with Ukraine, and it could be breached anywhere with a surprise attack. Kremlin didn’t expect a Ukrainian military commander would be foolhardy enough to mount an incursion in poorly guarded Kursk region.

The only comprehensible objective of the Kursk incursion seems to gain international publicity for a few days before Russian reinforcements arrive and beat Ukrainian forces back across the border after taking significant casualty toll.

After the surprise Kursk incursion, even Belarus has beefed up security along Ukraine’s border because anything could be expected from Washington’s servile stooge, Gen. Syrskyi, who has scant regard for the lives of his own soldiers and clearly has careerist ambitions to go to any lengths to obey justifiable or unjustifiable orders of superiors.