Ever Closer to the Big One
    Let’s hope that Donald Trump’s regard  for Vladimir Putin is justified. That’s because Barack Obama has been busy testing Putin's sangfroid by making America's and the world's survival dependent on the good judgment of the Russian leader and the acuity of his radar operators.
    In the stupidest and most self-destructive strategic decision since Bush and Cheney declared endless war on the Middle East, Obama is marshaling missiles and troops on the borders of Russia in a reverse version of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that brought the world as close to nuclear armegeddon as it has ever come.
    Back then, the world was literally saved by a Soviet submarine commander named Vasili Arkhipov. The top three officers on board had agreed to require unanimity when it came to firing their nukes.  Arkhipov voted no and stuck to it. He’s why we’re all here today.
    That was a half century ago. Back then, Washington had a first strike nuclear policy. It still does.  The big difference then was that the speed and distance of our nuclear-tipped missiles gave Moscow 20 minutes to half an hour to decide on their response. Obama has cut that down to a couple of minutes.  He has literally put the fate of the globe in the hands of the Kremlin masters and their warning systems.
    If that’s not scary enough, Obama has ordered up a trillion dollar program to modernize our old nuclear weapons and build new ones along with new delivery means. Featured will be smaller tactical bombs and missiles, meaning there will be a greater likelihood of their being used.  In short, when it comes to blowing up the world, our Nobel Peace Prize winning president--and no doubt his successors--will be bringing us closer to doomsday than at any time since the Cold War.
    And for what?  The same old ludicrous claim that Russia, though now a plain old capitalist rather than a fervent communist country, wants to take over the world starting with, say, its erstwhile Latvian satellite. Or maybe we'll end the world in a beef with China over  some rocks sticking out of the South China Sea.
    What’s really happening is the American empire is up to its usual tricks.  It looks at the disintegrated Soviet empire with the same avid eyes with which it looked upon the collapsing Spanish empire in 1898. Washington sees the Ukraine and Crimea as new Cubas and Puerto Ricos to exploit, only bigger and richer. It's using its nukes to extort Russian and China, not to mention other disobedient nations.
    In the Cold War, there was the illusion that if a nuclear conflict broke out it would pit the forces of freedom against those of tyranny. If it happens now, it will be nothing more than a foreseeable and avoidable world-killing miscalculation in the
age old battle for plunder and power.