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.
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